Noted political scientist and writer Rajni Kothari dies
Kothari's best-known work is 'Politics in India'
New Delhi: In 1965, when Ashis Nandy, sociologist and academician, appeared for an interview at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), he didn’t see the usual setting for an interview—chairs for interviewers on one side of a table, and one for the interviewee on the other.
“There were chairs arranged in a circle and I was to sit on one of them. All the fellows sat too, and in the interview, I was never asked what I have studied, what institutions I was in, not even my academic record. I was instead asked about my interests and there was a discussion of how their interests coincided with mine. The discussion lasted four to five hours."
At the end of the discussion, Nandy was approached by the director of the institute who asked him wait for a few minutes in an adjacent room. “He came in after five minutes and said ‘We have made a decision to hire you.... You can join from tomorrow. I was so impressed by the whole process—hiring on the basis of an intellectual debate which was rather aggressive at times."
The director was Rajni Kothari, who died on Monday, in his eighties. To understand politics in India, most people acknowledge, one has to read Kothari’s best-known work Politics in India. “Everything written on our country’s politics is nothing more than a footnote" to that work, says Yogendra Yadav, faculty at CSDS, political activist and now a member of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). “He was the one who argued that we need to understand politics on our own terms rather than viewing it from a western perspective."
“No course on political science taught in India is complete without his book," adds Shail Mayaram, a professor at CSDS.
Born in the 1930s, Kothari shot to prominence after he published a set of six essays, Form and Substance in Indian Politics in the Economic and Political Weekly, in the early 1960s. He was working as a lecturer at the Maharaja Sayajirao University (MSU) in Baroda at the time.
Kothari founded CSDS in 1963 at the age of 33 using a personal grant of ₹ 70,000. He quit as the head at 50 but continued as an honorary fellow. “It is very unusual because most people just sit over the institution they have built. He had a complete sense of detachment which meant that the institution could flourish," says Yadav. Kothari was also the co-founder of People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL).
He was also briefly a member of the erstwhile Planning Commission.
But it was in political analysis that he left his mark. “He spoke about democracy when none understood what it meant. He taught us that democracy is not an elite supported idea but a process involving the poorest and the weakest," says Mayaram.
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