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Gyan Prakash, Srirupa Roy. The Political Outsider: Indian Democracy and the Lineages of Populism., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 413–414, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae489
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Extract
In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of populism across the world. Whether it is Donald Trump in the United States, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Narendra Modi in India, populist leaders everywhere have followed a familiar script. They conjure up a division between a victimized “people” and the elite, and project themselves as political outsiders who alone are able to right the wrongs done to the powerless citizens. There is a burgeoning literature on the subject, analyzing populism and offering explanations. Srirupa Roy’s The Political Outsider acknowledges this literature but finds it inadequate, deeming it presentist and electoralist, and insufficiently attentive to the broader range of politics and history within which populism is embedded.
Focusing on populism in India, the book argues that populism is a “project of democratic reform fueled by an imagination of democracy’s repairable lapses” (6). It relies on diagnosing what ails the political system, and its core mission is to cure and restore a flawed and diseased democracy. Populism is remedial rather than revolutionary. Unlike left-wing movements, populists do not try to overturn the unequal sociological and economic order, but only attempt to “cure” the political system of its disease, to restore its health. Such a project of restoration throws up political outsiders whose purported exteriority to the normal system of electoral representation allows them to cleanse it of its distortion and corruption. Roy elaborates this argument by her study of populism in India, which, she suggests, is part of an older and ongoing program of curative democracy that took shape in the long 1970s and gave rise to “outsider politics,” both of which can be witnessed in the present.
