Let us live in hope

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:

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