It is slightly paradoxical for me, a pupil of Justin Rosenberg, to write about the future of political science. In his 2016 research article International Relations in the Prison of Political Science, Rosenberg had exhorted the students of International Relations to break free from the ‘prison’ i.e., the designation of IR as a sub-field of political science.

He wrote, ‘‘for IR should be re-grounded in its own disciplinary problematique: the consequences of (societal) multiplicity.’’ Rosenberg’s call beckoned to only a few prisoners (myself included). The message barely reached India, or for that matter South Asia. In the United States, I am yet to hear of a department of ‘International Relations’ breaking free from the jail of Political Science. Be that as it may,

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I will try to focus my discussion on the state of Political Science in India, a country that I know best. From within the social sciences, India has had the distinction of producing stellar economists (two of whom, Amartya Sen and Abhijit Banerjee, have also won the Nobel award), historians and sociologists. No such name comes to mind whilst one thinks of political science. The question is baffling.

It has no readymade answers. The first Department of Political Science was established at the University of Lucknow, (Uttar Pradesh) in 1922. The first issue of the still continuing Indian Journal of Political Science (IJPS) came out in 1939. Despite all this, political science, intellectually speaking, remains in an impoverished state.

The only political science scholar who had received a modicum of international repute was the legendary professor of Delhi University, Randhir Singh. His book Reason, Revolution and Political Theory (1967) was touted as the best Marxist take down of the conservative political theorist Michael Oakeshott. His last book Crisis of Socialism: Notes in Defense of a Commitment (2006) running over 1,000 pages was considered to be a landmark achievement by most political scientists/theorists on the Left.

His death in 2016 garnered an obituary in the Londonbased newspaper Guardian. After independence, foreign affairs and international relations came under the tutelage of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Big institutions such as the Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) and the Indian School of International Studies (which was later merged with the Jawaharlal Nehru University) were established by the government.

These attempts were directed to know the world through an Indian lens. Nehru’s participation in the Bandung Conference, his convening of the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi, the inauguration of the Non-Aligned Movement, India’s diplomatic involvement in the Korean War and the decision to chart an ‘independent, postimperial foreign policy’ led to an unintended, yet consequential, focus on international relations and area studies. Political Science, on the other hand, did not have any immediate national purpose to serve.

The burning questions of caste and other forms of social stratification were taken care by sociologists. Political scientists also lost ground to legal scholars on matters such as human rights, constitutional laws, federalism, and state-civil society. Legal luminaries such as Prof. Upendra Baxi and Durga Das Basu became the household names on such matters. The post-Emergency subaltern studies movement in history further caused a lot of young and bright scholars to gravitate away from political science.

The one area where political scientists tasted both international and national success was the study of secularism. In the aftermath of the Babri Mosque demolition, Prof. Rajeev Bhargava’s book Secularism and Its Critics, (OUP, 1998) became the ‘go-to’ reference to understand Indian secularism. Later on, Achin Vanaik’s book The Furies of Indian Communalism and its sequel Hindutva Rising (Verso and Tulika, India 2017) marked a huge (left-wing) advance on secularism studies.

Another major problem plaguing Indian political science is a lack of theory and method. IR in India commands a Talmudist like adherence of Realism and Neo-realism. Political Science lacks such a theoretical spine and therefore fails to stand erect. My own experience of studying political science in one the most premier institutions of India, St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta revealed that the course was a medley of subjects ranging from IR, Theory, federalism and Comparative Politics without a theoretical anchorage.

Everything was taught to me, yet all seemed to be lost because the syllabi lacked an overarching theoretical coherence. The benefit of hindsight reveals the miasma. Out of 60 students, only two of us have pursued a career in political science. On the question of method: there was no module on research methodology at the undergraduate level. Political Science, like other social sciences, has now become a ticket for a cushy career in the civil services. All the major cities of India have seen a mushrooming of private and money mooching civil services examination preparation centers.

Students with a masters or a doctoral degree in political science are attracted towards these abattoirs of knowledge for quick and easy money. Since 2014, big business has also focused on the funding of mostly right-wing foreign policy thinks tanks. The Observer Research Foundation (ORF), currently India’s biggest and richest foreign policy think-tank, had its roots in Dhirubhai Ambani’s (father of India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani) attempt to control the media space through his newspaper

The Observer. With annual financial inflows over Rs. 35 crore, ORF has become an epistemic behemoth that pales all university IR departments, not to speak of political science, into insignificance. Far from a critical evaluation of the polity, such centres set-up annual jamborees, such as the Raisina Dialogue, touting India’s ostensible rise.

India’s constant slippage on the Global Hunger Index (107th out of 121), and the Press Freedom Index (160th out of 180) are hardly debated or discussed. ORF’s constant fixation with ‘geo-economic’ and ‘geopolitical’ aims to depoliticize debate reflects the actual state of affairs within India. It seems that the English lexicon has no other suffix compared to ‘geo’ when it comes to political sanitization of debate.

With the current assaults on India’s polity, it must be the duty of young and aspiring political scientists to take up the gauntlet. If this does not happen, both the discipline and the people of India, are doomed.

(The writer is a PhD candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, USA)