South Africa and India. Michelle Williams M.

Socio-political comparisons

      Without losing the historical integrity of the specifics of each case, the chapters in this section search for common themes. Taking as their focal points different topics, they converge in showing the striking similarities and important differences between India and South Africa. The five chapters represent aspects of comparative work that can be explored in regional analyses. They range in topic from political parties and democracy to migrant histories, and in scope from the local to the national levels. All the chapters compare some facet of India and South Africa and in the process tell interesting and illuminating stories.

      Picking up on the legacies of Gandhian ideas on South Africa, Crain Soudien’s chapter asks how Gandhian ideas might be applied to current social theory on Africa. Soudien argues that current thinking on Africa is caught in one of two positions: either a reproduction of Western modernity or a wishful nativism that seeks to retrieve a pure Africanness apparently untouched by the ravages of colonialism and modernity. He asks how we can transcend the sterility of these two positions, which are characterised by envy or revenge. Highlighting two aspects of Gandhian thinking – a critique of ‘masculinised conceits of civilisation’ and their reliance on violence, and a non-teleological approach to the past that allows it to become a site of contingency and experimentation – Soudien argues that Gandhian thinking leads us beyond the ‘logic of dominance’

      Patrick Heller compares India and South Africa using the indices of democratic consolidation and democratic deepening as his central organising principles. He shows how both South Africa and India are relatively successful cases of democratic consolidation in terms of state capacity and the rule of law. However, Heller problematises these achievements by asking whether consolidating democratic institutions in India and South Africa has translated into democratic deepening in which citizens are able to meaningfully participate in political life. In this regard, South Africa and India have not fared very well. Citizens in both countries struggle to practise citizenship, because the effective points of interface with the state are limited and the nature of state-civil society relations has tended to favour state control. In addition to these vertical limitations between the state and civil society, Heller also points to horizontal limitations within civil society. By carefully examining South Africa and India, Heller shows how consolidating and deepening democracy require very different logics and very different configurations of the balance of power between the state and civil society.

      Claire Bénit-Gbaffou and Stéphanie Tawa Lama-Rewal explore a similar idea from a different perspective. Looking at the different experiences of decentralisation and local democracy in India and South Africa, they show a striking difference in the two experiences. In India, the focus has been on rural areas, with cities remaining almost invisible (at least in the literature), whereas South Africa has emphasised the metropolitan areas. They argue that ‘the idea that natural location of local democracy is in rural India has been extremely widespread, among politicians and scholars, at least until the 2000s’. This contrasts markedly with South Africa, where there has not been a rural bias, but rather a strong focus on the urban political field.

      In her chapter, Michelle Williams compares the ideological visions of the communist parties in South Africa and the Indian state of Kerala. In response to the rise of neoliberal globalisation and the failures of 20th-century socialism, during the 1990s the communist parties in South Africa and Kerala embarked on a journey of ideological renewal that highlights radically democratic egalitarian alternatives. Williams shows how both parties theorised remarkably similar visions of ‘socialist democracy’ around four common themes: participatory democracy, a new developmental state, the coexistence of capitalism and socialism, and the extension of civil society and the state in the economy. Their ideological renewal grew out of an appreciation that socialist alternatives could not be conceived as a predetermined model of social organisation, but rather had to be understood as a process of extending democratic practices of collective decision making and the progressive empowerment of subalterns to participate in the development of society.

      Phil Bonner’s chapter explores differences between the historiographies on migrancy in the two countries. Central to South Africa’s segregationist and then apartheid order has been a migrant labour system held in place by a raft of repressive measures: land dispossession, taxation, pass systems, compounds, segregation. In the South African historiography, migrancy is treated as synonymous with institutionalised compulsion and coercion. India has large-scale migrancy, but without this barrage of coercive interventions. Focussing on Bombay (now Mumbai) and Calcutta (now Kolkata), the chapter outlines how migrancy in the Indian case has been sustained by a series of factors across town and country that encouraged the maintenance of a rural base and discouraged the movement of families to towns, and kept oscillatory migrancy in place. Bonner also compares questions of generation, gender, race and social stability across the two historiographies. In South African migration, young men and women moved first, a ‘generationally skewed’ pattern that is as evident in the Indian case. In terms of gender, far more women moved in the South African context than in the Indian, raising the question of why and how the Indian working class became so overwhelmingly male. In South Africa, race became a critical issue as the power of white settler society came to define African urbanisation as pathological and as something that had to be reversed by a series of repressive state measures. In the South African case, migrancy produced ‘chronic family instability’ and high levels of juvenile delinquency, which were not evident to nearly the same degree in India. Comparing these historiographies shows up their aporias in productive ways.

      In his chapter, Eric Worby concludes the book by exploring the common preoccupation of all the authors with what he calls ‘civic virtue’ and ‘private ethics’. Using the example of cricket, he demonstrates how civic virtue and personal ethics dovetail in performance in the game. Worby shows how ‘in the transnational ethical field constituted by cricket, it is fairly easy to see how personal morality is persistently mapped into arguments about public values, as well as the political institutions and practices that sustain them’. It is this very same intermingling of personal morality, public values, and political institutions and practices that makes possible the conversations in this volume.

       Rethinking the South: Towards some conclusions

      For some commentators, we are beginning to move towards a ‘post-American world’ (Zakaria, 2008) in which the unilateral dominance of the United States will wane. The rise of India and China most powerfully signals this shift and raises pressing questions about the shape of such a ‘post-American’ world – and the Global South within it.

      Yet as we start to feel some of the changes precipitated by the rise of Asia, questions about the idea of the Global South move to the fore insistently. Can this category hold together as India and China strive for superpower status? What are the limits and possibilities of this concept as we move forward? Can the idea of the Global South with its roots in Third Worldist discourses speak to the ambiguities and complexities of a changing world order?

      The term itself has become common currency, but its genealogies and lineages are less clear. The term ‘South’ initially emerged in the 1980s from the Brandt Commission on international development, which popularised a North/South or rich/poor vocabulary (Dirlik, n.d.). The collapse of the Eastern bloc and Soviet Union in 1989 precipitated a shift from a Cold War three-worlds model towards a division of developed and developing nations, the ‘North’ and the ‘South’. In this context, the term ‘Global South’ came to stand in as a proxy for the term ‘Third World’. In a post-Cold War order, older ideas of the Third World and non-alignment appeared to have become redundant, but these nations continued to share strategic objectives and interests. In recognition of this imperative, the Non-Aligned Movement called its tenth summit in September 1992 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to discuss how the developing nations might regroup in the changed geopolitical order. The summit affirmed the importance of a North–South axis, as opposed to the East–West Cold War axis. Clovis Maksoud, the eminent diplomat and long-standing permanent observer of the League of Arab States at the United Nations, comments: ‘The Jakarta Declaration implicitly recognised the dawn of a new era, in which the terms “Third World” and “non-aligned” have been subsumed by the term “Global South”’ (Maksoud 1993:34). The persistence of the