Depth Politics and Representative Government. Lessons from the Debate with the Indian Subaltern School

The Subaltern school in India has stressed the fact that during the colonial era, the forms of representative politics that took an increasing importance for the local elite were during decades unable to really move the mass of the people, especially in the countryside. Gandhi was the one who was able to bridge between elite politics and the masses, appealing to the emotion of the ordinary people, and to transform the nationalist movement into a mass movement. Replying to a Perry Anderson’s sharp critique of Gandhi, Subalternist and Marxist scholars have claimed that this capacity of developing a “depth politics” was historically far more important than the supposed philosophical weaknesses of the “Mahatma”. Political theory in the Global North has classically presented representative government as the best form of politics, nearly synonym with democracy. My claim is that the concept of depth politics is heuristic much beyond Gandhi case. Once carefully defined, this concept should be a crucial dimension of any definition of democracy, as it refers to the intensity of the communication between the elite and the people and the capacity of the people to mobilize for its own sake. One should test the following hypothesis: the “normal” forms of representative government tend to reduce politics to a game between elites. It is only in specific circumstances, such as the decades after World War II in the Global North (when the latter was the world center and when mass political parties could bridge the gap between the elite and the people), or when populist politics strongly mobilize the people, that “depth politics” can develop. This is why one should elaborate criteria to analyze when depth politics is normatively valuable or, on the contrary, a danger for democracy.