Abstract
When studying Indian political and economic development, we are provided with a good deal of revolutions with diverse epithets. Thus we can hear of Green Revolution, White Revolution, Silent Revolution or Total Revolution.
No attribute, however, has been found for the system change coinciding with the fall of the Soviet Bloc in early 1990s. Opening up of formerly state-controlled sectors to private capital has led to transformation of the framework of class dominance, replacing the earlier dominance of a few "monopoly" houses by a broader capitalist class.
This dynamics, accompanied with emancipation of the backward classes and castes, alters the relation between the domains of civil and political societies in India. On the other hand, we can trace a sort of a distinctive class culture among the urban middle classes, with an anti-corruption emphasis and seemingly paradoxical alliance between economic neo-liberalism and religious and cultural nationalism, articulated in the recent electoral successes of Narendra Modi's BJP.
With regards to these conditions, can we revive the Gramscian concept of passive revolution, scrapped by Sudipta Kaviraj in his classic essay almost thirty years ago?