Democracy is a type of government, a political regime of laws and institutions. But its imaginative potency rests in its promise to bring alien and powerful machines like the state under the control of human will, to enable a community of political equals before the constitutional law to make their own history. Like those other great democratic experiments inaugurated in eighteenth-century America and France, India became a democracy without really knowing how, why, or what it meant to be one. Yet the democratic idea has penetrated the Indian political imagination and has begun to corrode the authority of the social order and of a paternalist state. Democracy as a manner of seeing and acting upon the world is changing the relation of Indians to themselves.

[Not] because India represents a replay of the western democratic revolutions or because democracy always tends towards the production of modern individuals and citizenship, as a more conventional Tocquevillean thesis would run. I would argue, quite the contrary, that the idea of a democratic revolution in India makes sense exactly because the trajectory of modernity and democracy in India demonstrates so clearly how democracy makes the political dimensions of society crucial, productive, and deeply problematic.