Reading For The New Year, Hindustan Times

Late last year, seeking to make sense of the conflict between the Anna Hazare movement and the Central Government, I turned to an essay by the Indian scholar I most admire, the sociologist André Béteille. Published some years ago in the Economic and Political Weekly, this set out a distinction between two forms of democratic functioning, which Béteille termed 'constitutional democracy' and 'populist democracy' respectively. As the sociologist put it:

'Constitutional democracy acts through a p...