Rajni Kothari’s Ideas of Freedom: ‘Rethinking’ State, Democracy, Development and ‘New’ Social Movements in India

Ideas of freedom have been an integral part of the discourses on nationalism and national movements in most of the post-colonial societies, including especially India. These ideas of freedom and anti-colonial movement in India can be looked at from diverse perspectives—it may be liberal, Marxist, neo-Marxist, revolutionaries and even pacifists like Gandhi. This article makes a modest attempt to understand Rajni Kothari’s ideas of freedom, essentially through the prisms of his critical reflections and intervention on state, democracy, development and ‘new’ social or grass-roots movements. Kothari argued that freedom meant both ‘autonomy of man’ as well as ‘autonomy of states’. Embedded in Kothari’s ideas of freedom was the idea of a strong, deep and decentralized democratic structure, politics as a form of social transformation and rather an indigenous, autonomous, self-reliant and an ‘alternative’ model of economic development. However, contemporary India represents and reflects none of these ideas of freedom, whether it will be individual freedom or community freedom. With the decline of the welfare state as an agency pursuing socio-economic development, Kothari invents a ‘new’ idea of freedom as articulated by the grass-roots or ‘new’ social movements, which are essentially ‘non-class’, ‘non-materialistic’, ‘humanist’ and ‘universalist’ in their outlook and approach.