Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

212 I Ramnath
neoliberal transformation of the Indian economy in the
early 1990s, the state reoriented itself toward global capital
along the tamiliar lines of the Washington Consensus,
abandoning the previous protectionist, redistributive model,
with the Indian capitalist class now aspiring to move
from being comprador junior partner to major economic
power in its own right. In the process, an unprecedented
middle class with first world consumerist aspirations was
spawned. The traditional Left, at the same time, was widely
seen as no longer viable, while new forms of political consciousness
were emerging on the basis of caste identity, a
potential demographic tidal wave oflong-submerged aspirations
and justified rage. The resulting cultural anxieties
and economic destabilizations fed the recmergence of
the far Right Hindutva movement politically marginalized
since the time of Gandhi's assassination by a right-wing
extremist in 1948.
After the 1980s, Menon reminds us, the axis of debate
among political scientists was not along a "simple
Liberal/Marxist divide" in which both tendencies "took
for granted the legitimacy of the nation-stare's prc-CmineJlL
role in setting the agenda for development and social transformation/
modernization." Now it was along the very
"conception of the nation-state-its role and its legitimacy."
Within this debate, those "who question 'the agendasetting
presuppositions and legitimizing myths of statedirected
development led by a 'rational; 'modern' elite;'
such as Chatterjee, Ashis Nandy, Guha, and in his later
phase, Rajni Kothari, were (negatively) characterized as intellectual
"anarcho-communitarians." India's contemporary