96 SOCIAL SCIENTIST of the Left Government to create and channelize public opinion is not only due to its party structure which has helped it to mediate challenges, it is the result of land reforms, of economic restructuring, of the commitment of the leadership to respond to felt needs. If efficient institutions to manage political turmoil is the only requirement an efficient polity needs, then authoritarian states are the best forms of conflict management is the somewhat uncomfortable implication. Finally the crisis of governability to the author, is not that the Indian state has proved to be incapable to grant to its people the minimum standard of livelihood, that it has failed to move the people to come together in a concentrated and collective effort to work for themselves, that the majority of people have lost faith in the political will of the elites, that the political vacuum that has been created in civil society is being filled in by the most vicious of creeds such as communalism and casteism, it has everything to do with the loss of manageability. This is traced to the breakdown of the Congress system and the inability of any other party to take its place. Crises of governability are fundamentally related to the perceptions of the people that the governments of any hue are incapable of delivering the goods, India's crisis is constituted by the fact that governments are there for the spoils, whether it is a VP Singh or a Chandrashekhar or a Narasimha Rao, governments have lost their legitimacy. Political vacuums are caused not only by an absence of leadership structures but in the loss of legitimacy of all leaders, in the profound disenchantment with all leaders unless they prove their commitments. This is proved by the grass roots struggles many of which have charted out their own paths whether in the construction of small dams or in the take over of land or in the mobilization against the caste system. People will follow their own methods of dealing with a system where they have been increasingly been marginalized either by opting out or by gaining knowledge of hov/ to work the system. I agree with the author that the danger is that in the absence of an integral principle to unite and channelize these politics the dangers are immense but these politics have to be heard and not merely channelized. There is a saying in West Africa that where the states hear the wails and not the whispers political catastrophe will follow, this hearing of whispers is what is required but this requires a different kind of politics not a strengthening of existing institutions. Kohli's book is eminently readable, it is ambitious but not pretentious and this is its strength. The author is also to be congratulated for the kind of meticulous empirical research he has done, seldom is this kind of research to be found in the authoritative works on India. His diagnosis and the remedies suggested have to be taken seriously. The problem as I have tried to show is that a statist perspective is a top down one and has to be tempered by a recognition of the perspectives and the solutions offered by the people. Their