Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

230 I Ramnath
and the virtual collapse of , government' in large parts of
rural India." \2
In Kothari's view, the nonparty organizations and
movements fo r regional autonomy and decentralisation
[were] intended to take the avenues of political
participation closer to the people, to be carried
out in an idiom and mode of communication :lI1d
around issues that intimately relate to them ....
TI1e "regional" phenomena in India, combining in
its fo rce a rejection of the authoritarianism of the
Centre ; the dominance ofthe metropoles (and
their imperial patrons), the cultural hegemony of
bourgeois cosmopolitanism and the political economy
of corruption ... the chauvinist drives of the
national elite, has to be understood as part of the
larger democratic struggle [that will] reorder the
distribution of power in favour of the lower reaches
of society.ol3
Kothari, however. then made :l ISO-degree recuperative
turn, apparently contradicting his own description.
Although the movements he has just portrayed so positively
'\vere to be seen as attempts to open alternative political
spaces outside the usual arenas of part}' and government;'
he then insisted that they were not really outside
the state, which he had just depicted so negatively. They
instead should be seen as potential "new forms of organisation
and struggle meant to rejuvenate the State and to make
it once again an instrument of liberation from exploitative