Civil Society and Indian Democracy
Possibilities of Social Transformation
Spaces available for democratic expression need to be utilised with renewed creativity by those fighting for a more equal, less exploitative social order. There is a need to guard against both the despair of rejecting all civil society efforts as sham as well as of taking this democracy for granted. Can civil society organisations work for social transformation without veering towards these two extremes?
This article is a considerably modified version of three public lectures, the keynote address at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Policy Dialogue in August 2013, the Golden Jubilee Lecture delivered at CSDS in February 2013 and a lecture at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru in January 2013. I am grateful to various participants, especially Rajeev Bhargava, Arshima Dost, Ramaswamy Iyer, Mahadevan Ramaswamy and Yogendra Yadav for their comments and suggestions. I also wish to thank students in my classes at the Young India Fellowship and Samaj Pragati Sahayog, whose penetrating questions have forced me to articulate my ideas better. Finally, I acknowledge the very useful comments of Sanchita Bakshi and P S Vijayshankar on an earlier draft of this article.
Establishing a democracy in a country with such massive poverty and profound social, economic and regional inequality has been an enormous challenge. As evidence of intensifying market and government failure accumulated in recent decades, civil society began playing an increasingly important role in India. This article seeks to answer the following questions.
Can civil society be seen as an agent of social transformation in India today? In what form and under what circumstances can the answer to this question be given in the affirmative? In order to answer these questions, this article attempts to: (1) Enunciate a theoretical framework within which we can understand the role of civil society and (2) carefully differentiate empirically the different strands within civil society in India today.
Theoretical Framework
The most important contemporary contribution to developing a conceptual framework for understanding civil society in India has been that of Partha Chatterjee. He speaks of civil society in contra-distinction to what he terms political society. Chatterjee distinguishes between:
a domain of properly constituted civil society and a more ill-defined and contingently activated domain of political society. Civil society in India today, peopled largely by the urban middle classes, is the sphere that seeks to be congruent with the normative models of bourgeois civil society and represents the domain of capitalist hegemony. But there is the other domain of political society which includes large sections of the rural population and the urban poor. These people do, of course, have the formal status of citizens and can exercise their franchise as an instrument of political bargaining. But they do not relate to the organs of the state in the same way that the middle classes do, nor do governmental agencies treat them as proper citizens belonging to civil society. Those in political society make their claims on government, and in turn are governed, not within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws, but rather through temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations…the bulk of the population in India lives outside the orderly zones of proper civil society.
Chatterjee believes that those belonging to what he calls political society, lacking an agency of their own, typically mobilise through powerful patrons and brokers. While some instances of this can be found, in the main, Chatterjee’s distinction does not appear to be of much value in understanding the dynamics of Indian society today. Chatterjee completely fails to see the massive mobilisation of marginalised sections, dalits, adivasis, women and the poor, which has happened very much “within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws” (ibid). Especially in the past decade, we have seen the enactment of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and most recently the Andhra Pradesh Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan and Tribal Sub-Plan (Planning, Allocation and Utilisation of Financial Resources) Act 2013, all of which are directed at the most marginalised sections of Indian society.1 This is a new form of subaltern politics that increasingly characterises India today. We have also seen the rise of powerful adivasi women’s self-help group (SHG) federations, which are playing an increasingly important role in mobilising the voice of the poor as participants in extremely unfair and unequal, often oppressive markets. So we have a very new phenomenon of the disadvantaged segments of Indian society attempting to leverage spaces within the state to foster their own interests.
We will return to these themes in the second part of the article. We first need to complete the theoretical task that we set ourselves at the beginning. Here, we must recognise that our question has to be posed in the context of capitalist democracies, one of which is India today. For it is in this unique space and within this unique challenge, of a democracy which seeks to establish itself within a capitalist economy, that we must locate our inquiry. The logical starting point for us then has to be Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which was later built upon by de Tocqueville and Marx, albeit in two quite different directions. Having scanned the vast theoretical literature on civil society, we believe the most useful point of departure remains the way Antonio Gramsci built upon and transformed the Hegel-Marx framework in his celebrated Prison Notebooks. Ironically, our starting point is the distinction Gramsci makes between political society and civil society, which as we will see in a moment, is completely different from the twist Chatterjee gives to what Gramsci had originally proposed.
According to Gramsci, in a capitalist class society, dominance is maintained through a combination of strategies. On the one hand, there is political society, which is that part of the state where sheer force is deployed. But the other part of the state is civil society, where domination is legitimised and hegemony is exercised through the manufacturing of consent. In the First Notebook, Gramsci describes this as “government by consent of the governed, but an organised consent, not the vague and generic kind which is declared at the time of elections” (Gramsci 1992: 153). Political society refers to “the armed forces, police, law courts and prisons, together with all the administrative departments concerning taxation, finance, etc” (Simon 1990: 71). The role of political society, the “apparatus of state coercive power”, is to enforce “discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’” (Gramsci 2003: 12). But this apparatus comes into play only when the effort at establishing legitimacy fails.
Establishing legitimacy is the domain of civil society. Instruments of legitimation and hegemony include social institutions of civil society: the church, the educational system, the media or to put it in the words of Gramsci’s Sixth Notebook “the ethical content of the state” (Gramsci 2007a: 20). Gramsci was, however, not merely concerned with the engendering of consent and the exercise of hegemony. He was much more interested in modes in which hegemony could be challenged. He called this “counter-hegemony”. In his Seventh Notebook, Gramsci clearly distinguished two ways of challenging hegemony – a “war of maneuver” or “frontal war”, which is different from a “war of position” (Gramsci 2007b: 168). In the Sixth Notebook, Gramsci expresses the view that the “transition from the war of maneuver to the war of position is the most important postwar problem of political theory” (Gramsci 2007a: 109). A war of manoeuvre involves physical overthrow of the coercive apparatus of the state. But Gramsci realised that in modern liberal democracies, direct confrontation through an armed uprising or a general strike will not threaten the dominant groups so long as their credibility and authority remains firmly rooted in civil society. As the leading Gramsci scholar of our time Joseph Buttigieg (2005:43) puts it,
What makes the modern liberal democratic State robust and resilient, in Gramsci’s view, is not the power of coercion that it can exercise through political society (the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, the police, etc) but, rather, the myriad ways in which the core elements of its self-definition and self-representation are internalised or, to some degree or another, freely endorsed by most of its citizens – including those who belong to social strata other than the ruling or privileged groups.
The Contest over Hegemony
Thus, a war of position is resistance to domination with culture, rather than physical might, as its foundation.2 It is interesting to note that in the First Notebook, Gramsci says “Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position” (Gramsci 1992: 219). For Gramsci, issues of culture are what lie at the heart of any revolutionary project; culture is “how class is lived”, it shapes how people see their world and how they manoeuvre within it and, more importantly, “it shapes their ability to imagine how it might be changed, and whether they see such changes as feasible or desirable” (Crehan 2002: 71). Gramsci’s question was: “how might a more equitable and just order be brought about, and what is it about how people live and imagine their lives in particular times and places that advances or hampers progress to this more equitable and just order” (ibid: 71). Consequently, it was his view that “one should refrain from facile rhetoric about direct attacks against the State and concentrate instead on the difficult and immensely complicated tasks that a ‘war of position’ within civil society entails” (Buttigieg 2005: 41).
As Raymond Williams has argued, our account of hegemony must be a complex one which “allows for its elements of real and constant change. We have to emphasise that hegemony is not singular; that its own internal structures are highly complex, and have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended; and by the same token, that they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modified” (Williams 1973: 37-38). Gramsci thus rejects a major deterministic-reductionist trend within Marxism. Many Marxists tend to view civil society, purely in an instrumentalist manner, as the hand-maiden of the ruling classes, as the legitimiser of class divisions under capitalism. Especially over the last two decades, in the recent period of intensified globalisation of the Indian economy, this view has gained great strength within the left.3 But any historical account, which makes out that the course of history is completely determined by the will and stratagems of the ruling class, always leaves something to be desired. Unfortunately, this is characteristic of much of the history in the Marxist tradition, invariably laced also with heavy-handed certainties4. As Foucault has remarked, “the order imposed by such functionalist or systematising thought is designed to mask the ruptural effects of conflict and struggle” (Gordon 1980: 82). Our conception of the relationship of power needs to be “simultaneously anti-structuralist and anti-voluntarist (opposed to the assumption of a unitary, rational, free-willed, autonomous subject)” (Jessop 1982: 254). As Foucault says, “power relations are both intentional and non-subjective” (1978: 94). And their reproduction is never univocal for “they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion” (Foucault 1977: 27). As Bourdieu (1977: 179) argues, it is imperative that “the analysis holds together what holds together in practice, the double reality of intrinsically equivocal, ambiguous conduct”. We entirely concur, therefore, with the critique Nicos Mouzelis (1980: 184) offers of reductionism in Marxist theory:
Insofar as they suggest that it is possible to systematically derive political practices and institutional structures from the “laws” or functional requirements of the capitalist mode of production or the machinations of an all powerful bourgeoisie, they discourage serious study of the complicated and more or less indirect linkages between the economic and the political instances. Moreover, in as far as they portray collective agents as omnipotent, anthropomorphic entities or, at the other extreme, as mere “effects” of structural determinations, they lead either to an ultra-voluntarism or to a structural determinism – both extremes emasculating Marxism’s dialectical character, i e, its portrayal of collective agents in a constantly changing relation with a social environment which both constructs actors and presents them with a more or less large number of alternatives.
Thus, we believe Gramsci’s is a powerful contribution to our understanding of capitalist democracies. For, it alerts us to the fact that the very attempt at reinforcing legitimacy opens up the possibility of its subversion. This is the constant tension of maintaining positions of power in an avowedly democratic class society. Our difference with Gramsci is in a fundamental disagreement with the Marxist notion of Revolution – the notion of insurrection or overthrow, as if what will emerge from the rubble, like magic, would be a transformed social order. We need to give up this antediluvian, unitary and insurrectionist conception of Revolution (with a capital R). For many reasons. The unique appeal of “scientific socialism” was its claim to have discovered the “laws of motion of society” that predicted the inexorable coming of a new dawn. This teleology has ended up becoming the chief weakness of Marxism. If change continues to be visualised in these terms, means-ends questions will be run roughshod over and horrors of the Stalinist kind will continue to be perpetrated. A one-track, single-event notion of revolution must also be discarded because it leads to the complete neglect of crucial nitty-gritty detail that forms the heart of the transformation we dream of. It is this dry spadework that also contains solutions to immediate distress. Running mid-day meals in schools under active supervision of mothers, local people managing sanitation and drinking water systems, social audits in vibrant gram sabhas, participatory planning for watershed works, women leading federations of SHGs and workers running industrially safe, non-polluting factories as participant shareholders – all these and many more are the immediate, unfinished, feasible tasks of an ongoing struggle for change.
Unfortunately, many activists typically push these questions into a hazy future, to be all answered after the revolution, so to speak. One of the greatest weaknesses of the socialist project in the 20th century was its failure to flesh out the details of possible alternatives to a capitalist society. These are difficult questions that necessitate intricate answers. And we need to begin looking for these here and now, in the living laboratories of learning of our farms and factories, villages and slums; not in some imaginary distant future after a fictitious insurrection. Thus, civil society need not be merely the site for the reproduction of relations of power as argued by the left; it could also well be the locus of serious challenges to the dominant discourse and practices, charting the pathway to an alternative world.
We asked two questions at the beginning of this article: Can civil society be seen as an agent of social transformation in India today? In what form, under what circumstances can the answer to this question be given in the affirmative? Having laid out a theoretical framework to answer these questions, before we go on to propose a typology of civil society action, we need to recognise the specific historical context within which we are located. Scholars have long recognised the tension between capitalism and democracy (Radford 2013; Varshney 2013a, 2013b). But there is something very specific about the Indian context of this tension. As Varshney has argued, universal franchise, the right to vote without any distinction of gender, race, ethnicity or income, “came to the West after the Industrial Revolution – that is, after incomes had reached a substantially high level. India was to practice it at a very low level of income” (Varshney 2013a: 3), immediately after independence from colonial rule. It is also true that although many postcolonial nations took the democratic pledge, a very large number had abandoned it already by the 1960s (Huntington 1991). Varshney does not exaggerate when he claims for India that it is “for the first time in human history, a poor nation has practiced universal franchise for so long” (op cit: 4). It is also a fact that unlike in the west, in India the poor vote more than the rich. Thus, the pressure on the democratic state to respond to the demands of those who may not automatically benefit from the growth process generated by the capitalist system, the imperatives of legitimation we alluded to earlier, have been even more acute in the Indian context, especially as the decades have rolled by after Independence. We need to bear this in mind as we examine the typology of civil society action offered below.
Empirical Strands within Civil Society in India
We propose to divide civil society action in India today into four broad types.5 Each of these types comes with their own distinct motivations, strategies and inclinations. And each, we believe, has very different implications for carrying forward an agenda of social transformation. Beyond the typology we propose there are, of course, also caste and religious associations, proselytising non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or specific interest groups like trade unions, industry lobbies such as the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) or the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), as also the media and academia. There are think tanks that are specifically dedicated to reinforcing or questioning the structures of power. Their role, in intellectual terms, is relatively straightforward to understand and these need not detain us here. We are leaving these out in our typology and will only concentrate upon those segments within civil society that claim to be acting in the larger public interest, as also those who seek to bring about social transformation. Many of these are relatively unacknowledged in the public imagination, as they operate away from the glare of media publicity, in spaces among the subalterns, which for Partha Chatterjee do not even constitute proper civil society, but for us offer the most powerful examples of the same.
Type A: Compassion and Charity: Within our typology, the oldest form of civil society action is the one that arises from the well-springs of compassion and charity. This is the kind of work done by organisations and individuals who distribute blankets to the homeless in winter, run open kitchens for the hungry, are devoted to prevention of cruelty to animals, look after the differently-abled and the elderly and devote themselves to the care of the terminally ill. The aim is to reach out and provide immediate relief and succour to those in distress. The idea is not to redress long-term causes of this suffering; it is only to provide pain amelioration.
Type B: Developmental NGOs: Our second type of civil society action tries to go a little further by recognising that much of this distress is a consequence of the twin failures of markets and government. In a society characterised by mass poverty and high inequality, market failure is rampant. Throughout the world, public goods like health, education and environment have been invariably provided for or protected by governments. Ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, capitalist democracies have seen major investments by the state in the fundamental rights of its citizenry. Large investments in infrastructure have also been the domain of the public sector in newly independent countries. Unfortunately, however, in India, both the magnitude of this effort and its quality have left much to be desired. Thus, the suffering of our people is not just a tale of market failure, it is also a failure of governance.
Much civil society action in India can, thus, be seen as an effort to bridge the gap left by this dual failure of markets and government. Many large NGOs occupy this space. They run schools, hospitals, watershed programmes and are engaged in a wide range of basic service delivery. The difficulty here is that these NGOs seek almost to act as substitutes, parallel to the state (sometimes even referred to as chhoti sarkar), even as they generally remain confined to “oases of excellence”. Indeed, as they attempt to grow larger they become subject to phenomena similar to government failure, as scale becomes the enemy of quality. But, of course, the problem with such action is much deeper as it ultimately reinforces passive dependence of citizens upon the NGO, quite akin to what government welfare programmes have tended to do. Without, and this is most important, being subject to the accountability that an elected government has to face.
Type C: Rights-based Activism: Taking a much more critical view of the “system” is civil society action of the third type in our classification. This is work based on providing a critique of mainstream practices of governments and markets and generating wider awareness of this critical view. The aim often is empowerment of citizens by making them aware of their rights under the Constitution. In theoretical terms, a lot of this activity could be said to be inspired by Amartya Sen’s pioneering work on agency, rights and capabilities and in historical terms can be seen to date from the period Sen initiated this work across the globe (Nussbaum 1997).
While Type C civil society action is always interrogative and oppositional in nature, its more extreme form is animated at times by the conviction that the system is intrinsically irremediable and needs overthrow. This could be described as counter-hegemony in the classical Gramscian sense, based on an insurrectionist vision of social transformation and has a much older, radical Marxist legacy in India. This kind of action is inspired by the notion that it is the “false consciousness” of the masses that leads to their tolerance of what is dished out to them, when actually there is no hope for them within the system as it exists, with all its inequities and injustices. The risk for such groups has been that they end up remaining marginal voices on the fringe, which may or may not have an impact on the way the mainstream functions. There is a fundamentalism in the world view of their leaders that rejects any engagement with the system as an unacceptable compromise and any kind of relief (Type A) or developmental work (Type B) as something that “blunts the edge of class contradictions”. Invariably, therefore, the time frame that the leaders of this kind of action set for themselves is often at variance from that of those they lead, the ones who suffer most from the consequences of being at the receiving end of the injustices of the system. Even when such action is not motivated by insurrectionist zeal, it tends to be based on a fundamentalism of positions that is generally averse to compromise, whether on specific development projects or proposed legislations.
Type D: Engaging the State and Leveraging the Market: The most recent and, in our view, most creative and effective type of civil society action in India belongs to Type D. This kind of action accepts the critique proffered by Type C activists and fights for rights of citizens. But it believes that change is best fostered by deep engagement with the state in a constructive manner within time frames that are more sensitive to the needs of the people in whose name this action takes place. Thus, there is a basic difference in the attitude towards the state. It is recognised that, with all its flaws, the state in India remains potentially a protector of the marginalised. But for that the state needs to function in a much more accountable and transparent manner. The goal, therefore, is to suitably transform the state, its policies and its functioning in order that it can play this role.6 But the vision goes beyond viewing it as a welfare state. The goal is to enshrine rights that the state is obliged to fulfil and to compel it to do so and to also design more effective ways in which these rights can be realised on the ground. There is also less fundamentalism and more openness to compromise in recognition of the urgency for change. The “problematique of representation” is taken rather more seriously than in Type C.
The best example of Type D civil society action is provided by the work of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), which has over the past decade evolved from Type C to Type D.7 Having worked in the 1990s on the fringes in rural Rajasthan on the right to information and the rights of rural workers to basic entitlements, the MKSS moved into a radically more intense engagement with the state after the coming to power of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2004. This has not only meant actively working with the state to enact pro-poor legislations and programmes but even becoming part of the Directorate of Social Audit in the Government of Andhra Pradesh to ensure that what is enacted on paper is implemented effectively on the ground. It must be remembered that the UPA was unexpectedly voted into power after the people of the country resoundingly rejected the “India Shining” slogan of the ruling dispensation of the time. There was then intense pressure on the UPA to respond effectively to Verdict 2004. This opened up huge possibilities of civil society engagement with the state on issues of concern to the aam aadmi. This set the scene for the subsequent enactment of historic pieces of legislation such as the Right to Information Act,National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and FRA under UPA-I. It is widely acknowledged that inputs from civil society organisations such as MKSS, the Campaign for Survival and Dignity and many others played a major role in fleshing out these laws. Similarly, under UPA-II, the Right to Education (RTE) Act and the National Food Security Act (NFSA) have benefited from significant civil society inputs.
Type D action also includes those who pay attention to crafting alternatives to mainstream development (as in Type B) but this is sought to be done not in pristine NGO isolation but in deep engagement with the state and through leveraging the power of the market in a way that can benefit the marginalised. Organisations like the National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations on MGNREGA have involved themselves in developing partnerships with gram panchayats (GPs) and state and central governments to build state capacities for more effective implementation of the NREGA. Thus, unlike Type B civil society action, here the implementation remains firmly the responsibility of GPs and state governments but civil society plays a supportive capacity building and hand-holding role. Great hope is invested in the possibilities of genuine grass-roots democracy opened up by the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution and the potential empowerment of local self-government. The framework is one of partnerships, with each partner playing their designated role. The vision is also of “cascading redundancy” (SPS 2010), with civil society becoming gradually redundant in more and more respects, as GPs become stronger, capacities of frontline functionaries of the state expand and thousands of “barefoot” community resource persons get empowered. In her study of the work of Samaj Pragati Sahayog (SPS), Chhotray (2007) describes this stance as one of “working the state”. The possibilities of leveraging state resources have expanded in an unprecedented manner following the UPA’s rise to power. During the Eleventh Plan period, the UPA government spent upwards of Rs 7,00,000 crore on its major flagship programmes of social and economic inclusion. The corresponding annual figure in the Twelfth Plan is Rs 2,00,000 crore (Planning Commission 2012). The goal of Type D civil society action is to try and ensure that these massive outlays genuinely translate into enduring outcomes on the ground for the people for whom this money is meant. The overall perspective animating such action is that it is no longer useful, in the manner of the left, to merely keep reiterating the importance of the public sector in the Indian economy. Rather, it is regarded as much more urgent to work out ways in which the public sector, especially in its flagship programme avatar, could be reformed by making it much more accountable to and effective in meeting the needs of the most marginalised.
Finally, Type D civil society action has recently also included engagement with markets. The traditional Gandhian notion of independent, self-sufficient village communities is rejected as a romantic utopia. What is recognised, however, is that the participation of small and marginal farmers as isolated individuals in the marketplace has been a source of great exploitation and injustice for them. The idea, therefore, is to build powerful corporate institutions of the poor, led by women, who would be able to better compete in the market on the basis of their collective economic power. These include federations of women’s SHGs and producer companies. This kind of work, although still in its infancy, has already shown great promise in lifting the poorest people of our country out of poverty as they come to the market as both powerful producers and consumers. Banks in remote rural areas of India have begun to see their own enlightened self-interest in doing business with these strong institutions of the poor, who also are an effective check on the predatory activities of exploitative microfinance institutions. There are instances of balance sheets of loss-making banks being turned around, thanks to the impeccable repayment record of SHGs and their federations. Type D civil society action has pushed the government to make policy changes to facilitate and support the economic activities of such farmer producer organisations. There are also examples of these institutions of the poor providing a major check on corruption in government systems and ensuring greater accountability and better service delivery under government programmes through the pressure exerted by their collective action.8 Indeed, in our view, the very survival of Indian democracy, in the face of severe distress suffered by people over the last two decades, marked by farmers’ suicides and Maoist violence, could be said to owe in no small measure to Type D civil society action.
Conclusions
In order to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the people they govern, capitalist democracies are compelled to open up spaces that need to be utilised with a renewed creativity by those fighting for a more equal, less exploitative social order. We need courage and imagination to go beyond the stolid certainties of a teleological science of history. These spaces – such as the 73rd amendment empowering local bodies of self-governance or NREGA – provide glimmers of hope for a new participatory democracy. Of course, at the same time, it is also true that we cannot take the existence of a space for civil society action for granted. There are repeated instances of violence by powerful vested interests within society and of the state taking on a more draconian character and showing its repressive face. Whether it is RTI or NREGA social audit activists or those questioning destructive forms of development and/or asserting their right over natural resources, they all face a relentless barrage of violence.9 Therefore, it is imperative that we do not take this space for granted. We must also not become cynical and despair but both value this space and fight for it to remain and expand. And this demands a truly innovative brand of politics. Not one of mere challenge and confrontation; but one that includes nitty-gritty work to build fresh cadres and alternative institutions for a participatory social order. Where democracy, equality and development are not just demanded, they are also constructively built at the grass roots.
For civil society organisations to be a positive source of change in this direction they need to satisfy some basic pre-conditions in their own internal functioning. Apart from high degrees of competence and professionalism, they need to demonstrate inner democracy, transparency and external accountability in their functioning. For those holding up a mirror to state and society need to subject themselves to the very highest standards in each of these respects. They also need to engage in building partnerships of mutual respect, in humble acknowledgement of their own finitude, with local communities, PRIs, academia, media, markets and the state. And, above all, they also need a vision for their own future. And that future has to be one of “cascading redundancy”, where the idea is to make oneself redundant in more and more respects over time. The goal has to be one of people’s empowerment and building stronger institutions of participatory democracy at the grass roots. As these institutions gain in strength, the nature of civil society support changes, evolves and the need for it declines over time. Such civil society action, in our reckoning, would build a more inclusive society and a stronger Indian democracy. This is the kind of civil society action that has the potential to become a powerful force for social transformation in 21st century India.
Spaces available for democratic expression need to be utilised with renewed creativity by those fighting for a more equal, less exploitative social order. There is a need to guard against both the despair of rejecting all civil society efforts as sham as well as of taking this democracy for granted. Can civil society organisations work for social transformation without veering towards these two extremes?
This article is a considerably modified version of three public lectures, the keynote address at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Policy Dialogue in August 2013, the Golden Jubilee Lecture delivered at CSDS in February 2013 and a lecture at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru in January 2013. I am grateful to various participants, especially Rajeev Bhargava, Arshima Dost, Ramaswamy Iyer, Mahadevan Ramaswamy and Yogendra Yadav for their comments and suggestions. I also wish to thank students in my classes at the Young India Fellowship and Samaj Pragati Sahayog, whose penetrating questions have forced me to articulate my ideas better. Finally, I acknowledge the very useful comments of Sanchita Bakshi and P S Vijayshankar on an earlier draft of this article.
Establishing a democracy in a country with such massive poverty and profound social, economic and regional inequality has been an enormous challenge. As evidence of intensifying market and government failure accumulated in recent decades, civil society began playing an increasingly important role in India. This article seeks to answer the following questions.
Can civil society be seen as an agent of social transformation in India today? In what form and under what circumstances can the answer to this question be given in the affirmative? In order to answer these questions, this article attempts to: (1) Enunciate a theoretical framework within which we can understand the role of civil society and (2) carefully differentiate empirically the different strands within civil society in India today.
Theoretical Framework
The most important contemporary contribution to developing a conceptual framework for understanding civil society in India has been that of Partha Chatterjee. He speaks of civil society in contra-distinction to what he terms political society. Chatterjee distinguishes between:
a domain of properly constituted civil society and a more ill-defined and contingently activated domain of political society. Civil society in India today, peopled largely by the urban middle classes, is the sphere that seeks to be congruent with the normative models of bourgeois civil society and represents the domain of capitalist hegemony. But there is the other domain of political society which includes large sections of the rural population and the urban poor. These people do, of course, have the formal status of citizens and can exercise their franchise as an instrument of political bargaining. But they do not relate to the organs of the state in the same way that the middle classes do, nor do governmental agencies treat them as proper citizens belonging to civil society. Those in political society make their claims on government, and in turn are governed, not within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws, but rather through temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations…the bulk of the population in India lives outside the orderly zones of proper civil society.
Chatterjee believes that those belonging to what he calls political society, lacking an agency of their own, typically mobilise through powerful patrons and brokers. While some instances of this can be found, in the main, Chatterjee’s distinction does not appear to be of much value in understanding the dynamics of Indian society today. Chatterjee completely fails to see the massive mobilisation of marginalised sections, dalits, adivasis, women and the poor, which has happened very much “within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws” (ibid). Especially in the past decade, we have seen the enactment of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and most recently the Andhra Pradesh Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan and Tribal Sub-Plan (Planning, Allocation and Utilisation of Financial Resources) Act 2013, all of which are directed at the most marginalised sections of Indian society.1 This is a new form of subaltern politics that increasingly characterises India today. We have also seen the rise of powerful adivasi women’s self-help group (SHG) federations, which are playing an increasingly important role in mobilising the voice of the poor as participants in extremely unfair and unequal, often oppressive markets. So we have a very new phenomenon of the disadvantaged segments of Indian society attempting to leverage spaces within the state to foster their own interests.
We will return to these themes in the second part of the article. We first need to complete the theoretical task that we set ourselves at the beginning. Here, we must recognise that our question has to be posed in the context of capitalist democracies, one of which is India today. For it is in this unique space and within this unique challenge, of a democracy which seeks to establish itself within a capitalist economy, that we must locate our inquiry. The logical starting point for us then has to be Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which was later built upon by de Tocqueville and Marx, albeit in two quite different directions. Having scanned the vast theoretical literature on civil society, we believe the most useful point of departure remains the way Antonio Gramsci built upon and transformed the Hegel-Marx framework in his celebrated Prison Notebooks. Ironically, our starting point is the distinction Gramsci makes between political society and civil society, which as we will see in a moment, is completely different from the twist Chatterjee gives to what Gramsci had originally proposed.
According to Gramsci, in a capitalist class society, dominance is maintained through a combination of strategies. On the one hand, there is political society, which is that part of the state where sheer force is deployed. But the other part of the state is civil society, where domination is legitimised and hegemony is exercised through the manufacturing of consent. In the First Notebook, Gramsci describes this as “government by consent of the governed, but an organised consent, not the vague and generic kind which is declared at the time of elections” (Gramsci 1992: 153). Political society refers to “the armed forces, police, law courts and prisons, together with all the administrative departments concerning taxation, finance, etc” (Simon 1990: 71). The role of political society, the “apparatus of state coercive power”, is to enforce “discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’” (Gramsci 2003: 12). But this apparatus comes into play only when the effort at establishing legitimacy fails.
Establishing legitimacy is the domain of civil society. Instruments of legitimation and hegemony include social institutions of civil society: the church, the educational system, the media or to put it in the words of Gramsci’s Sixth Notebook “the ethical content of the state” (Gramsci 2007a: 20). Gramsci was, however, not merely concerned with the engendering of consent and the exercise of hegemony. He was much more interested in modes in which hegemony could be challenged. He called this “counter-hegemony”. In his Seventh Notebook, Gramsci clearly distinguished two ways of challenging hegemony – a “war of maneuver” or “frontal war”, which is different from a “war of position” (Gramsci 2007b: 168). In the Sixth Notebook, Gramsci expresses the view that the “transition from the war of maneuver to the war of position is the most important postwar problem of political theory” (Gramsci 2007a: 109). A war of manoeuvre involves physical overthrow of the coercive apparatus of the state. But Gramsci realised that in modern liberal democracies, direct confrontation through an armed uprising or a general strike will not threaten the dominant groups so long as their credibility and authority remains firmly rooted in civil society. As the leading Gramsci scholar of our time Joseph Buttigieg (2005:43) puts it,
What makes the modern liberal democratic State robust and resilient, in Gramsci’s view, is not the power of coercion that it can exercise through political society (the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, the police, etc) but, rather, the myriad ways in which the core elements of its self-definition and self-representation are internalised or, to some degree or another, freely endorsed by most of its citizens – including those who belong to social strata other than the ruling or privileged groups.
The Contest over Hegemony
Thus, a war of position is resistance to domination with culture, rather than physical might, as its foundation.2 It is interesting to note that in the First Notebook, Gramsci says “Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position” (Gramsci 1992: 219). For Gramsci, issues of culture are what lie at the heart of any revolutionary project; culture is “how class is lived”, it shapes how people see their world and how they manoeuvre within it and, more importantly, “it shapes their ability to imagine how it might be changed, and whether they see such changes as feasible or desirable” (Crehan 2002: 71). Gramsci’s question was: “how might a more equitable and just order be brought about, and what is it about how people live and imagine their lives in particular times and places that advances or hampers progress to this more equitable and just order” (ibid: 71). Consequently, it was his view that “one should refrain from facile rhetoric about direct attacks against the State and concentrate instead on the difficult and immensely complicated tasks that a ‘war of position’ within civil society entails” (Buttigieg 2005: 41).
As Raymond Williams has argued, our account of hegemony must be a complex one which “allows for its elements of real and constant change. We have to emphasise that hegemony is not singular; that its own internal structures are highly complex, and have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended; and by the same token, that they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modified” (Williams 1973: 37-38). Gramsci thus rejects a major deterministic-reductionist trend within Marxism. Many Marxists tend to view civil society, purely in an instrumentalist manner, as the hand-maiden of the ruling classes, as the legitimiser of class divisions under capitalism. Especially over the last two decades, in the recent period of intensified globalisation of the Indian economy, this view has gained great strength within the left.3 But any historical account, which makes out that the course of history is completely determined by the will and stratagems of the ruling class, always leaves something to be desired. Unfortunately, this is characteristic of much of the history in the Marxist tradition, invariably laced also with heavy-handed certainties4. As Foucault has remarked, “the order imposed by such functionalist or systematising thought is designed to mask the ruptural effects of conflict and struggle” (Gordon 1980: 82). Our conception of the relationship of power needs to be “simultaneously anti-structuralist and anti-voluntarist (opposed to the assumption of a unitary, rational, free-willed, autonomous subject)” (Jessop 1982: 254). As Foucault says, “power relations are both intentional and non-subjective” (1978: 94). And their reproduction is never univocal for “they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion” (Foucault 1977: 27). As Bourdieu (1977: 179) argues, it is imperative that “the analysis holds together what holds together in practice, the double reality of intrinsically equivocal, ambiguous conduct”. We entirely concur, therefore, with the critique Nicos Mouzelis (1980: 184) offers of reductionism in Marxist theory:
Insofar as they suggest that it is possible to systematically derive political practices and institutional structures from the “laws” or functional requirements of the capitalist mode of production or the machinations of an all powerful bourgeoisie, they discourage serious study of the complicated and more or less indirect linkages between the economic and the political instances. Moreover, in as far as they portray collective agents as omnipotent, anthropomorphic entities or, at the other extreme, as mere “effects” of structural determinations, they lead either to an ultra-voluntarism or to a structural determinism – both extremes emasculating Marxism’s dialectical character, i e, its portrayal of collective agents in a constantly changing relation with a social environment which both constructs actors and presents them with a more or less large number of alternatives.
Thus, we believe Gramsci’s is a powerful contribution to our understanding of capitalist democracies. For, it alerts us to the fact that the very attempt at reinforcing legitimacy opens up the possibility of its subversion. This is the constant tension of maintaining positions of power in an avowedly democratic class society. Our difference with Gramsci is in a fundamental disagreement with the Marxist notion of Revolution – the notion of insurrection or overthrow, as if what will emerge from the rubble, like magic, would be a transformed social order. We need to give up this antediluvian, unitary and insurrectionist conception of Revolution (with a capital R). For many reasons. The unique appeal of “scientific socialism” was its claim to have discovered the “laws of motion of society” that predicted the inexorable coming of a new dawn. This teleology has ended up becoming the chief weakness of Marxism. If change continues to be visualised in these terms, means-ends questions will be run roughshod over and horrors of the Stalinist kind will continue to be perpetrated. A one-track, single-event notion of revolution must also be discarded because it leads to the complete neglect of crucial nitty-gritty detail that forms the heart of the transformation we dream of. It is this dry spadework that also contains solutions to immediate distress. Running mid-day meals in schools under active supervision of mothers, local people managing sanitation and drinking water systems, social audits in vibrant gram sabhas, participatory planning for watershed works, women leading federations of SHGs and workers running industrially safe, non-polluting factories as participant shareholders – all these and many more are the immediate, unfinished, feasible tasks of an ongoing struggle for change.
Unfortunately, many activists typically push these questions into a hazy future, to be all answered after the revolution, so to speak. One of the greatest weaknesses of the socialist project in the 20th century was its failure to flesh out the details of possible alternatives to a capitalist society. These are difficult questions that necessitate intricate answers. And we need to begin looking for these here and now, in the living laboratories of learning of our farms and factories, villages and slums; not in some imaginary distant future after a fictitious insurrection. Thus, civil society need not be merely the site for the reproduction of relations of power as argued by the left; it could also well be the locus of serious challenges to the dominant discourse and practices, charting the pathway to an alternative world.
We asked two questions at the beginning of this article: Can civil society be seen as an agent of social transformation in India today? In what form, under what circumstances can the answer to this question be given in the affirmative? Having laid out a theoretical framework to answer these questions, before we go on to propose a typology of civil society action, we need to recognise the specific historical context within which we are located. Scholars have long recognised the tension between capitalism and democracy (Radford 2013; Varshney 2013a, 2013b). But there is something very specific about the Indian context of this tension. As Varshney has argued, universal franchise, the right to vote without any distinction of gender, race, ethnicity or income, “came to the West after the Industrial Revolution – that is, after incomes had reached a substantially high level. India was to practice it at a very low level of income” (Varshney 2013a: 3), immediately after independence from colonial rule. It is also true that although many postcolonial nations took the democratic pledge, a very large number had abandoned it already by the 1960s (Huntington 1991). Varshney does not exaggerate when he claims for India that it is “for the first time in human history, a poor nation has practiced universal franchise for so long” (op cit: 4). It is also a fact that unlike in the west, in India the poor vote more than the rich. Thus, the pressure on the democratic state to respond to the demands of those who may not automatically benefit from the growth process generated by the capitalist system, the imperatives of legitimation we alluded to earlier, have been even more acute in the Indian context, especially as the decades have rolled by after Independence. We need to bear this in mind as we examine the typology of civil society action offered below.
Empirical Strands within Civil Society in India
We propose to divide civil society action in India today into four broad types.5 Each of these types comes with their own distinct motivations, strategies and inclinations. And each, we believe, has very different implications for carrying forward an agenda of social transformation. Beyond the typology we propose there are, of course, also caste and religious associations, proselytising non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or specific interest groups like trade unions, industry lobbies such as the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) or the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), as also the media and academia. There are think tanks that are specifically dedicated to reinforcing or questioning the structures of power. Their role, in intellectual terms, is relatively straightforward to understand and these need not detain us here. We are leaving these out in our typology and will only concentrate upon those segments within civil society that claim to be acting in the larger public interest, as also those who seek to bring about social transformation. Many of these are relatively unacknowledged in the public imagination, as they operate away from the glare of media publicity, in spaces among the subalterns, which for Partha Chatterjee do not even constitute proper civil society, but for us offer the most powerful examples of the same.
Type A: Compassion and Charity: Within our typology, the oldest form of civil society action is the one that arises from the well-springs of compassion and charity. This is the kind of work done by organisations and individuals who distribute blankets to the homeless in winter, run open kitchens for the hungry, are devoted to prevention of cruelty to animals, look after the differently-abled and the elderly and devote themselves to the care of the terminally ill. The aim is to reach out and provide immediate relief and succour to those in distress. The idea is not to redress long-term causes of this suffering; it is only to provide pain amelioration.
Type B: Developmental NGOs: Our second type of civil society action tries to go a little further by recognising that much of this distress is a consequence of the twin failures of markets and government. In a society characterised by mass poverty and high inequality, market failure is rampant. Throughout the world, public goods like health, education and environment have been invariably provided for or protected by governments. Ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, capitalist democracies have seen major investments by the state in the fundamental rights of its citizenry. Large investments in infrastructure have also been the domain of the public sector in newly independent countries. Unfortunately, however, in India, both the magnitude of this effort and its quality have left much to be desired. Thus, the suffering of our people is not just a tale of market failure, it is also a failure of governance.
Much civil society action in India can, thus, be seen as an effort to bridge the gap left by this dual failure of markets and government. Many large NGOs occupy this space. They run schools, hospitals, watershed programmes and are engaged in a wide range of basic service delivery. The difficulty here is that these NGOs seek almost to act as substitutes, parallel to the state (sometimes even referred to as chhoti sarkar), even as they generally remain confined to “oases of excellence”. Indeed, as they attempt to grow larger they become subject to phenomena similar to government failure, as scale becomes the enemy of quality. But, of course, the problem with such action is much deeper as it ultimately reinforces passive dependence of citizens upon the NGO, quite akin to what government welfare programmes have tended to do. Without, and this is most important, being subject to the accountability that an elected government has to face.
Type C: Rights-based Activism: Taking a much more critical view of the “system” is civil society action of the third type in our classification. This is work based on providing a critique of mainstream practices of governments and markets and generating wider awareness of this critical view. The aim often is empowerment of citizens by making them aware of their rights under the Constitution. In theoretical terms, a lot of this activity could be said to be inspired by Amartya Sen’s pioneering work on agency, rights and capabilities and in historical terms can be seen to date from the period Sen initiated this work across the globe (Nussbaum 1997).
While Type C civil society action is always interrogative and oppositional in nature, its more extreme form is animated at times by the conviction that the system is intrinsically irremediable and needs overthrow. This could be described as counter-hegemony in the classical Gramscian sense, based on an insurrectionist vision of social transformation and has a much older, radical Marxist legacy in India. This kind of action is inspired by the notion that it is the “false consciousness” of the masses that leads to their tolerance of what is dished out to them, when actually there is no hope for them within the system as it exists, with all its inequities and injustices. The risk for such groups has been that they end up remaining marginal voices on the fringe, which may or may not have an impact on the way the mainstream functions. There is a fundamentalism in the world view of their leaders that rejects any engagement with the system as an unacceptable compromise and any kind of relief (Type A) or developmental work (Type B) as something that “blunts the edge of class contradictions”. Invariably, therefore, the time frame that the leaders of this kind of action set for themselves is often at variance from that of those they lead, the ones who suffer most from the consequences of being at the receiving end of the injustices of the system. Even when such action is not motivated by insurrectionist zeal, it tends to be based on a fundamentalism of positions that is generally averse to compromise, whether on specific development projects or proposed legislations.
Type D: Engaging the State and Leveraging the Market: The most recent and, in our view, most creative and effective type of civil society action in India belongs to Type D. This kind of action accepts the critique proffered by Type C activists and fights for rights of citizens. But it believes that change is best fostered by deep engagement with the state in a constructive manner within time frames that are more sensitive to the needs of the people in whose name this action takes place. Thus, there is a basic difference in the attitude towards the state. It is recognised that, with all its flaws, the state in India remains potentially a protector of the marginalised. But for that the state needs to function in a much more accountable and transparent manner. The goal, therefore, is to suitably transform the state, its policies and its functioning in order that it can play this role.6 But the vision goes beyond viewing it as a welfare state. The goal is to enshrine rights that the state is obliged to fulfil and to compel it to do so and to also design more effective ways in which these rights can be realised on the ground. There is also less fundamentalism and more openness to compromise in recognition of the urgency for change. The “problematique of representation” is taken rather more seriously than in Type C.
The best example of Type D civil society action is provided by the work of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), which has over the past decade evolved from Type C to Type D.7 Having worked in the 1990s on the fringes in rural Rajasthan on the right to information and the rights of rural workers to basic entitlements, the MKSS moved into a radically more intense engagement with the state after the coming to power of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2004. This has not only meant actively working with the state to enact pro-poor legislations and programmes but even becoming part of the Directorate of Social Audit in the Government of Andhra Pradesh to ensure that what is enacted on paper is implemented effectively on the ground. It must be remembered that the UPA was unexpectedly voted into power after the people of the country resoundingly rejected the “India Shining” slogan of the ruling dispensation of the time. There was then intense pressure on the UPA to respond effectively to Verdict 2004. This opened up huge possibilities of civil society engagement with the state on issues of concern to the aam aadmi. This set the scene for the subsequent enactment of historic pieces of legislation such as the Right to Information Act,National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and FRA under UPA-I. It is widely acknowledged that inputs from civil society organisations such as MKSS, the Campaign for Survival and Dignity and many others played a major role in fleshing out these laws. Similarly, under UPA-II, the Right to Education (RTE) Act and the National Food Security Act (NFSA) have benefited from significant civil society inputs.
Type D action also includes those who pay attention to crafting alternatives to mainstream development (as in Type B) but this is sought to be done not in pristine NGO isolation but in deep engagement with the state and through leveraging the power of the market in a way that can benefit the marginalised. Organisations like the National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations on MGNREGA have involved themselves in developing partnerships with gram panchayats (GPs) and state and central governments to build state capacities for more effective implementation of the NREGA. Thus, unlike Type B civil society action, here the implementation remains firmly the responsibility of GPs and state governments but civil society plays a supportive capacity building and hand-holding role. Great hope is invested in the possibilities of genuine grass-roots democracy opened up by the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution and the potential empowerment of local self-government. The framework is one of partnerships, with each partner playing their designated role. The vision is also of “cascading redundancy” (SPS 2010), with civil society becoming gradually redundant in more and more respects, as GPs become stronger, capacities of frontline functionaries of the state expand and thousands of “barefoot” community resource persons get empowered. In her study of the work of Samaj Pragati Sahayog (SPS), Chhotray (2007) describes this stance as one of “working the state”. The possibilities of leveraging state resources have expanded in an unprecedented manner following the UPA’s rise to power. During the Eleventh Plan period, the UPA government spent upwards of Rs 7,00,000 crore on its major flagship programmes of social and economic inclusion. The corresponding annual figure in the Twelfth Plan is Rs 2,00,000 crore (Planning Commission 2012). The goal of Type D civil society action is to try and ensure that these massive outlays genuinely translate into enduring outcomes on the ground for the people for whom this money is meant. The overall perspective animating such action is that it is no longer useful, in the manner of the left, to merely keep reiterating the importance of the public sector in the Indian economy. Rather, it is regarded as much more urgent to work out ways in which the public sector, especially in its flagship programme avatar, could be reformed by making it much more accountable to and effective in meeting the needs of the most marginalised.
Finally, Type D civil society action has recently also included engagement with markets. The traditional Gandhian notion of independent, self-sufficient village communities is rejected as a romantic utopia. What is recognised, however, is that the participation of small and marginal farmers as isolated individuals in the marketplace has been a source of great exploitation and injustice for them. The idea, therefore, is to build powerful corporate institutions of the poor, led by women, who would be able to better compete in the market on the basis of their collective economic power. These include federations of women’s SHGs and producer companies. This kind of work, although still in its infancy, has already shown great promise in lifting the poorest people of our country out of poverty as they come to the market as both powerful producers and consumers. Banks in remote rural areas of India have begun to see their own enlightened self-interest in doing business with these strong institutions of the poor, who also are an effective check on the predatory activities of exploitative microfinance institutions. There are instances of balance sheets of loss-making banks being turned around, thanks to the impeccable repayment record of SHGs and their federations. Type D civil society action has pushed the government to make policy changes to facilitate and support the economic activities of such farmer producer organisations. There are also examples of these institutions of the poor providing a major check on corruption in government systems and ensuring greater accountability and better service delivery under government programmes through the pressure exerted by their collective action.8 Indeed, in our view, the very survival of Indian democracy, in the face of severe distress suffered by people over the last two decades, marked by farmers’ suicides and Maoist violence, could be said to owe in no small measure to Type D civil society action.
Conclusions
In order to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the people they govern, capitalist democracies are compelled to open up spaces that need to be utilised with a renewed creativity by those fighting for a more equal, less exploitative social order. We need courage and imagination to go beyond the stolid certainties of a teleological science of history. These spaces – such as the 73rd amendment empowering local bodies of self-governance or NREGA – provide glimmers of hope for a new participatory democracy. Of course, at the same time, it is also true that we cannot take the existence of a space for civil society action for granted. There are repeated instances of violence by powerful vested interests within society and of the state taking on a more draconian character and showing its repressive face. Whether it is RTI or NREGA social audit activists or those questioning destructive forms of development and/or asserting their right over natural resources, they all face a relentless barrage of violence.9 Therefore, it is imperative that we do not take this space for granted. We must also not become cynical and despair but both value this space and fight for it to remain and expand. And this demands a truly innovative brand of politics. Not one of mere challenge and confrontation; but one that includes nitty-gritty work to build fresh cadres and alternative institutions for a participatory social order. Where democracy, equality and development are not just demanded, they are also constructively built at the grass roots.
For civil society organisations to be a positive source of change in this direction they need to satisfy some basic pre-conditions in their own internal functioning. Apart from high degrees of competence and professionalism, they need to demonstrate inner democracy, transparency and external accountability in their functioning. For those holding up a mirror to state and society need to subject themselves to the very highest standards in each of these respects. They also need to engage in building partnerships of mutual respect, in humble acknowledgement of their own finitude, with local communities, PRIs, academia, media, markets and the state. And, above all, they also need a vision for their own future. And that future has to be one of “cascading redundancy”, where the idea is to make oneself redundant in more and more respects over time. The goal has to be one of people’s empowerment and building stronger institutions of participatory democracy at the grass roots. As these institutions gain in strength, the nature of civil society support changes, evolves and the need for it declines over time. Such civil society action, in our reckoning, would build a more inclusive society and a stronger Indian democracy. This is the kind of civil society action that has the potential to become a powerful force for social transformation in 21st century India.
Can Civil Society Reorder Priorities in India?
The Indian state has responded to demands made by civil society campaigns that are sometimes supported and sometimes initiated by the Supreme Court. But we are definitely not in the midst of a social revolution. This, in large measure, is due to the nature of civil society interventions.
Actually existing democracies are imperfectly just, and institutionalised democracies inevitably fall well short of the idea of the concept. If this is the first lesson that we have learnt from history, the second is that the idea of democracy can be realised to an extent in and through political practices, more specifically through collective action initiated by trade unions, front organisations of political parties, social associations, professional groups, non-governmental organisations, and citizen activism in general. Think of women’s struggles in England in the early 20th century to expand the scope of a franchise labelled “keep out, men only”; or of workers’ struggles to emancipate the right to vote from property qualifications in most parts of Europe; or of Afro-American struggles to achieve racial parity in the United States; or of trade union struggles to make the workplace a more humane one across the world.
In India, where trade unions yoked to political parties and representing a very small percentage of the workforce have shown little interest in the welfare of non-members, and where political parties tend to think of social rights more as an electoral/populist ploy and less as a task that government has to shoulder with some seriousness, civil society activism has sharply foregrounded the responsibility of the state to its citizens. In a society where huge numbers of people are wracked by poverty, diminished by malnutrition, ill-health, illiteracy, and ill-being, and condemned to live their lives much below the level of what is considered human, civil society campaigns for the delivery of social goods have tried to bridge the sizeable lag between institutionalised political equality and social and economic inequality.
The Indian state has responded to the demands made by these campaigns, which are sometimes supported and sometimes initiated by the Supreme Court. But we are definitively not in the midst of a social revolution. This in large measure is due to the nature of civil society interventions. Civil society is politically significant insofar as it enables citizens to come together in all manners of projects, particularly those of monitoring the state, and engaging in collective action that strives to realise the idea of democracy.1 The irony is that the precondition of this particular project is a democratic state, which enables its own citizens to challenge institutionalised power through the grant of rights such as the right of freedom of expression, freedom to join associations, and the freedom to assemble peacefully and without arms. It follows that the practices of civil society, like other practices, unfold in an institutional context shaped largely by the state. Admittedly, civil society organisations enable the articulation of popular aspirations, but at the same time, these are necessarily restricted by notions of what is politically – and, more often than not, legally – permissible. There are, to put it bluntly, defined limits to civil society activism. The boundaries of the system can be pushed back by civil society activism, but to assume that these boundaries can be transcended or reworked is to expect too much of the concept and of its practices. For these reasons and more, civil society may not be the best way to tackle the ills of modern India, but in a post-revolutionary world, this is the best we have on offer. We simply have no choice. It is with this caveat that I begin to discuss the significance and drawbacks of collective action in India.
Democracy and Inequality in India
The Great Indian Poverty Debate, structured in the main around methodological disputes on how to measure poverty and the poor, has acquired highly technical overtones, and most of these subtleties tend to escape non-economists, or, more precisely, non-statisticians. But even a non-economist can figure out that there is something very specific about poverty in India. On balance, poverty entraps huge numbers of citizens.
Inequality has risen sharply in recent years in India. Brazil, Indonesia, and on some indicators Argentina, have recorded significant progress in reducing inequality over a period of 20 years, according to a 2011 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on inequalities in emerging economies. China, India, the Russia Federation, and South Africa have become less equal over time. India, in particular, has experienced a significant increase in earnings inequality. The ratio between the top and the bottom deciles of wage distribution has doubled since the early 1990s, with growth in wage inequalities between regular wage earners, that is, contractual employees. Income inequality in the casual wage sector, that is, workers employed on a day-to-day basis, has remained more stable. The doubling of income inequality over the past 20 years, continues the report, has made India one of the worst performers in the category of emerging economies. Of the 1.21 billion Indians, 42% live on less than $1.25 a day, and India has the highest number of poor in the world (OECD 2011).
Notably, poverty is concentrated mainly in two communities, the scheduled tribes (STs) and the scheduled castes (SCs), and some groups in the Other Backward Classes. The 2010 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report affirms that 81% of the STs, 66% of the SCs, and 58% of OBCs belong to the category of the multidimensionally poor (UNDP 2010: 99). A majority of the SCs and STs who live and work in backward regions of central and eastern India belong to the category of the absolutely poor, and are condemned to live a life much below the threshold of what we recognise as distinctively human (IAMR and Planning Commission 2011: 2). And they are so condemned because of a contingent and hence morally arbitrary factor – that of birth. People are not poor because they do not possess the basic skills that enable them to participate in profitable transactions; they are poor because they have been born into communities that have been historically stigmatised by the caste system as the (former) “untouchable”, the “polluting”, or as the outsider. The rigid caste system had historically banished the STs and the SCs to the spatial as well as social margins of society. Children born into these two groups have been handed down as their patrimony nothing but deprivation, social discrimination, rank indignities, and responsibilities for performing menial tasks. The relationship between lack of caste/social status and material deprivation is indisputably causal.
Let us now clarify the two counts on which Indian democracy can be categorised as deeply flawed. One, there exists a substantial gap between political equality and social and economic equality. Two, some groups have to shoulder more than their share of the burdens of society, and are barred from partaking in the benefits of this society because of morally irrelevant reasons such as caste or tribal affiliation.
The coexistence of political and civil freedom alongside social and economic unfreedom in India is cause for some degree of regret. The leaders of the freedom movement had understood as early as the 1920s that the task of attaining political freedom is necessarily hampered unless it is accompanied by social and economic freedom, and vice versa. Consequently, it had conceptualised an integrated agenda of political, civil, social, cultural, and economic rights in the 1928 Nehru Constitutional Draft, and in the Karachi Resolution on Fundamental Rights adopted by the Indian National Congress in 1931. This integrated agenda was, however, split into two units in the Constituent Assembly. Whereas the grant of political, civil and cultural rights in part three of the Constitution are backed by legal sanction, social and economic rights, which are placed in part IV under the title Directive Principles of State Policy, are not backed by such sanction. It is precisely this downgrading of social rights that civil society organisations took up at the turn of the 21st century, and inaugurated thereby a new phase of activism.
Notes on Collective Action
At the turn of the 21st century, the advent of campaigns that sought to upgrade the Directive Principles of State Policy to the status of fundamental rights marked a new phase in civil society in India. In 2001, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court on hunger and starvation in the country. This was at a time when the highest court in the land had succeeded in acquiring a distinctive reputation for upholding the cause of the poor, the illiterate, the hungry, and the shelterless. This was in direct contrast to the early years of post-Independence India, when the Court had privileged fundamental rights over the Directive Principles. In the 1970s, the judiciary was deeply complicit in the internal Emergency (1975-77) declared by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and the consequent suspension of civil liberties. Post-emergency, the Court, determined to reverse its image and acquire legitimacy in the public eye, began to concentrate on pro-people issues. Justice Bhagwati, in the Minerva Mills case, famously argued that social rights are substantive rights, and that a rule that imposed an obligation on the state or an entity was still a legal rule because it prescribed a norm of conduct to be followed by an authority, even if the rule was not enforceable in court (Shankar 2009: 127).
He stated,
Today a vast revolution is taking place in the judicial process; the theatre of the law is fast changing and the problems of the poor are coming to the forefront. The Court has to innovate new methods and devise new strategies for the purpose of providing access to justice to large masses of people who are denied their basic human rights and to whom freedom and liberty have no meaning. The only way in which this can be done is by entertaining writ petitions and even letters from public spirited individuals seeking judicial redress for the benefit of persons who have suffered a legal wrong or a legal injury or whose constitutional or legal right has been violated but who by reason of their poverty or socially or economically disadvantaged position are unable to approach the court for relief (ibid 2009: xiii).
In the 1980s and 1990s, Supreme Court pronouncements on a host of measures from health and education, to shelter and the environment, were specifically designed to ameliorate the condition of the poor.
In response to the PIL filed by the PUCL, the Court issued a number of strictures. It was of utmost importance, instructed the highest court in the land, that food should be provided to vulnerable sections.
In case of famine, there may be shortage of food … but here the situation is that amongst plenty there is scarcity… distribution of the same amongst the very poor and the destitute is scarce and non-existent leading to mal-nourishment, starvation and other related problems (Legal Action for the Right to Food 2004).
These censures bore some results, and the government responded by initiating a massive programme of employment generation via the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana, streamlining the public distribution system in foodgrain and mandating mid-day meals for school children. The campaign culminated in the National Food Security Act of 2013.
Despite all the caveats that have been entered regarding the Act, the right to food campaign has undeniably come a long way since 2001. Several achievements can be credited to it. In response to Court orders, most state governments proceeded to introduce mid-day meals in government and government-aided schools. The programme has been transferred to state governments, which are given an annual grant by the centre to run the programme. The Supreme Court has set in place mechanisms that monitor the implementation of various food and nutrition-related schemes of the Government of India, by appointing food commissioners who are responsible to the Court. On numerous occasions, the Court has pulled up both state governments and the central government on this front. The campaign for food rights holds public hearings in various areas, and highlights corruption and mismanagement in matters relating to the identification of below poverty line families, functioning of ration shops, and diversion of foodgrains to the open market, and establishes the complicity of local administrators, politicians, owners of ration shops, and contractors in denying poor people access to food. The Court has accorded legal backing to the right to food. And the campaign for food rights has led to the formulation of the right to work.
The campaign for the right to food realised fairly early that assured employment is an essential precondition for food security, simply because it liberates people from dependence on outside agencies for satisfaction of their basic needs. The demand for this right (distinct from the demand for food-for-work programmes) has not raised a new entitlement onto policy agendas. Several employment generation schemes were in existence in some form or the other. But when, in December 2005, the long-awaited National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, now MGNREGA – Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) was adopted by Parliament, new hope was infused into rural areas that have been stagnating in recent decades.
Evaluating Civil Society Activism I
Have these campaigns contributed to the development of transformative politics in India? One, have they managed to change the way in which the state conceptualises its responsibilities towards the citizens of India? Two, have they succeeded in prising open doors for future political interventions that can build on the successes of previous campaigns?
Certainly legislation on social issues that campaigns have raised marks a new phase in Indian democracy, that of paying attention to substantial zones of ill-being, the marginalised, and to the ordinary individual, or rather, the ordinary man. All four campaigns discussed have generated legislation and this has been, and indeed can be, seen as a civil society success story. Yet, in most of these cases legislation falls noticeably short of the demands, and of agendas. For instance, the right to education campaign had demanded that early childcare, which is of crucial importance in shaping the personalities of little children, be included in the right to education, and that the age bar should be raised so that girls who are forced to stay at home minding siblings while their mothers work can enter the educational system after the age of 14. This was simply not heeded, despite the fact that educationists had posted critical reservations on the website of the human resources ministry.
Moreover, there is little virtue in granting a constitutional right to education when schools set up by the government have gained notoriety for non-performance; a high degree of teacher absenteeism; involvement of teachers in other tasks set by the state – such as conducting census operations, election duty, and preparation of mid-day meals for the children – absence of infrastructure such as classrooms, blackboards, toilets, playgrounds, electricity and computers; lack of extracurricular activities; and general indifference towards teaching, or inculcating in the student a love of learning. The Right to Education Act had laid down an elaborate scheme to improve the state of primary education in the country by 31 March 2013. Little has been done on this front; allocations to the education sector have not exceeded 3.5% of the gross domestic product (GDP), even though the Common Minimum Programme of the coalition government at the centre had recommended at least 6% investment of the GDP in education.
The lag between demands and state action illustrates to a nicety a basic problem with the discourse of rights that civil society organisations have embraced with great fervour. A right is not just a right; it is a right to some good. It is the democratic state that is obliged to ensure that the good that the right is a right to is made available to the citizens. The provision of the good falls squarely within the provenance of the state. But the Indian state appears content with legislating a right and allocating funds, accompanied by media din and acclaim by civil society organisations. In the process, to continue with the example of education, the state seems to have absolved itself of the responsibility of ensuring the establishment of an educational system that can open doors to structures of opportunity for every child. No systematic attempt to streamline the system of education, and make it competitive with the expensive public school system, has been made to date. The lesson: civil society organisations can ensure the enactment of legislation, they can monitor the administration of these laws, but there is little they can do about deep-rooted flaws in the system.
Although legislation has been enacted on some social issues, that this amounts to a coherent and comprehensive social policy package is debatable. Much of the rhetoric of the political class amounts to political posturing, and the leadership seeks to glean every drop of political/electoral capital from centrally sponsored schemes in food, employment and education. Little attempt is made to systematically follow up legislative initiatives, or even the enactment of a constitutional right – the right to elementary education, for instance. Nor has a mechanism to enforce accountability or to redress grievances been established. Lack of attention to details of implementation and institutions to monitor the right reflects poorly on the way the state has responded to the discourse of rights.
It is also instructive to note that in India, most campaigns for the delivery of social goods have either originated from a Supreme Court decision, or succeeded in their objectives when the Court has intervened on their behalf. Although Court interventions have helped campaigns to achieve their goals, the need for the Court to intervene at all illustrates the paradox of civil society mobilisation. In much of the literature on civil society, it is assumed that civil society groups have the capacity to address the state, and to oblige the latter to heed demands made by these groups. However, the Indian state has proved more responsive to Court injunctions than to popular representations, compelling more and more groups to invoke judicial activism. On some occasions, the Court has acted on its own, notably in the case of the right to information and the right to education. In the case of the right to food, and later employment, the Court cracked the whip on the government when a group of activists filed a petition in the Court.
Much concern has been expressed about judicial activism because the judiciary is non-representative, and because it tends to tread on the toes of the executive and of elected members of Parliament (Mehta 2007; Rudolph and Rudolph 2008a, b). Some scholars even dismiss such activism as populism, and a mere attempt to refurbish the image of the Court after the Emergency, as Baxi (1985) does. Moreover, as Madhav Khosla (2010) points out, the Court pushes a model of conditional social rights insofar as it instructs the state to remedy a particular grievance, or remedy a particular lack: “The existence of a violation is conditional upon state action” (p 751). Unlike the South African Supreme Court, the Indian Court has not elaborated a doctrine of systemic social rights in the form of an entitlement for everyone.
In part, the Court has adopted a proactive stance because the agenda of contemporary civil society mobilisation is self-limiting. Social movements that demand a radical restructuring of power relations in the country have just not fetched the required response from the judiciary. This is most evident in the case of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Campaigns for the delivery of social goods have sparked off legislation and propelled judicial activism on this front, but whether these campaigns have transformed the state and tilted it towards the needs of the poor is debatable. Certainly a number of initiatives to remedy the sorry plight of the poor are on offer; for example, cash transfers. Most of these initiatives border on what, in political theory, has been termed sufficientarianism. This is certainly not what the Preamble of the Constitution promises Indian citizens – justice, not if we interpret justice as the equal right of every citizen to share in the benefits and burdens of a society.
It would of course be political foolhardiness to dismiss all government initiatives to improve the condition of the poor as meaningless. But structural barriers to well-being, and half-hearted attempts by the state to ensure minimal well-being, neutralise the full impact of the allocation of resources and enactment of legislation. What we see is minor tinkering with the symptoms, rather than with the cause of the malaise of ill-being in India. Civil society activism is self-limiting, and state response to these self-limiting demands is sadly deficient. Expectedly, poverty and inequality continue to plague the lives of millions of the poor in India.
Evaluating Civil Society Activism II
In the late 1990s, a number of civil society organisations perceptibly shifted their strategy: from opposing and critically engaging with the state, to advocacy, and to partnership with the state. The number as well as the influence of groups that have opted for this strategy has increased over time, and many of them advise political parties on the shape of their agenda; others are consulted by the government, and leaders of some campaigns have been incorporated into the National Advisory Council (NAC)headed by the president of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi. The NAC has proved instrumental in the passage of several laws, but such legislation from above breeds its own reverberations. For one, membership of the NAC has become a benchmark of success for civil society organisations. As one activist remarked ironically at a meeting, ever since the NAC was set up, all that civil society organisations dream of is drafting a law and getting it passed by Parliament. Two, the implications of either partnering the state or being a part of the state reverberate on how we conceptualise the tasks of civil society. One can hardly expect civil society to take on the state, when all that some organisations want is to be part of the decision-making institutions set up by the state, while others are dependent on the state for funding. That the system remains in place, and superficial remedies are evolved for the symptoms of a deeper malaise, is not surprising.
If partnership agreements with the state tend to blunt the edge of civil society activism, the strategy these campaigns adopt to further the objectives they have decided upon is hardly conducive to generating transformative politics. Expectedly, demands that stifling and oppressive social relationships grounded in unequal landholdings, and the monopoly of resources held by corporate houses be broken, have come from outside the frontiers of civil society – the Maoist movement. This is the irony of social mobilisation in India. Within civil society, organisations have been tamed by aligning them with the state. One can hardly expect them to critique the state when they are part of decision-making structures and beneficiaries of state largesse. And movements that have raised issues fundamental to democratic justice, notably that the benefits and burdens of society should be distributed as equally as possible, are banished to the space outside civil society, and outside the protection of the rule of law and fundamental rights.
Can this genre of collective action generate other forms of activism which build on the achievements of an earlier generation of activists and avoid the mistakes of early activists? It is precisely here that the distinction between campaigns and social movements emerges sharply. Take the women’s movement, which in the 1970s coalesced around protests against custodial rape and dowry deaths. Today the movement has been pluralised, with different sections taking on different tasks, from counselling and providing legal aid to victims of sexual abuse to struggles against liquor barons in some states, to making out a case for women’s right to property, for participation in decision-making in all forums, from the household to local self-government and the national government, to arguing for reservations for women in elected bodies, to defending gay, lesbian and transgender rights, to fighting against child sexual abuse, to arguing for women’s right to their own bodies, to reclaiming public spaces, to raising issues of domestic labour, to catapulting concern for the informal sector. In response to the challenges of religious and caste identities which have often divided the movement, feminism itself has been transformed. Deepa Reddy (2005) writes that feminists have fashioned a broad multicultural project in response to the rise of religious nationalism, which is responsive to the needs of local communities and draws upon global networks to facilitate grass-roots initiatives for social change. The plural, decentred, and often divided women’s movement has had a “spillover” effect, and has progressively widened the analysis of patriarchy and expanded the domain of struggles against this benighted system, even though it has suffered setbacks on a number of occasions.
Whether campaigns for the delivery of social goods will be able to generate transformative politics, or whether groups in the future will take up the issues raised, broaden them, and build on prior mobilisation, is debatable. No social movement dies out completely, memories of the successes or non-successes of the movement remain to be excavated and tapped by later generations of activists, who move in other directions to deal with the basic problems confronted by people. But that can happen only when the movement or the campaign catapults to the forefront of political consciousness the structural constraints and institutional contexts that have to be tackled for any meaningful change to come about in people’s lives. This current civil society mobilisation simply does not recognise this point. That is why civil society campaigns have never attained the status of social movements.
In a significant intervention in social movement literature three decades ago, Manuel Castells (1983) had argued that most urban-based social movements are not about restructuring the production relations that lie at the core of social relations. Urban social movements combine struggles over collective consumption with struggles for community culture and political self-determination. Although his analysis reflected the dynamics of urban movements in the 1960s and 1970s in South America – the Squatters movement for land, for instance – Castells’ analysis of the nature of contestation remains valid. Struggles for collective consumption are not over power relations in society, but about the capacity of the state to deliver social goods to the people, or the lack thereof. The state is not seen as a condensate of power that has to be battled, or as a necessary institution for the reproduction of an exploitative capitalism, but as a benign provider of social goods. And citizens become consumers. These social goods may not reach the constituency they are meant for, but that is generally attributed to a mega phenomenon termed corruption, a term that has been granted the status of an explanatory concept by civil society agents. That the fault may lie in the Indian state’s inability to conceive and administer a comprehensive programme to ensure well-being is not even called into question. Intrinsic to urban-based campaigns in civil society is a deep inability to deal with power relations or undermine social hierarchies. Leaders of these campaigns have become stakeholders in the system of power, and civil society has forgotten that it is supposed to critically engage with the state, hold it to its obligations, but desist from seeing the existing state as the prime remedy for the ills of the human condition.
Above all, the fact that the demands made by civil society organisations have been easily incorporated into the agenda of political parties, and even made the “unique selling point” of the Congress Party, should cause some disquiet. These organisations are consulted when parties draft their electoral agendas, and they are incorporated into the state structure if the party comes into power. This by itself is testimony to their non-threatening claims. Consider that groups that make claims that challenge the democratic credentials of the government in some way, that protest land acquisition in resource-rich tribal areas, for instance, are hardly likely to find representation in consultative or policymaking bodies established by the government.
The uncomfortable fact is that once civil society leaderships become partners in policymaking, their capacity to critically engage with the state, never too sharp at the best of times, is further blunted. The limits of current modes of civic engagement are sadly apparent. Civil society organisations, or, more specifically, non-government organisations, have been around for at least 25 years, and the problems of the poor in India continue to mount. All that the state has done is pacify the poor through a handout here and a handout there.
There was a time when social movements challenged the Indian state. There was a time when the relationship between this mode of politics, which concentrated on mobilising people, and the state was antagonistic and sharp. This was a time when the institutionalisation and professionalisation of civil society organisations was low, and emphasis was placed on the mobilisation and conceptualisation of alternatives. Today, the neo-liberal state pays attention to campaigns routed through the Court, its heart bleeds for the poor and the marginalised, it drafts strategies to incorporate civil society leaders and transform them into stakeholders of the system, and concentrates on social legislation from above. Opportunities for critical engagement with this mode of dealing with intractable political problems have weakened dramatically. The state now steers partnerships with the third sector to address poverty, and foster welfare dependency. Even as the discourse on poverty and sufficiency captures the attention of the media and of other civil society organisations, it is forgotten that it is not sufficiency but equality that lies at the heart of democracy. Whatever challenge civil society is capable of producing within the limits of what is politically permissible has been, in effect, further tamed.
Perhaps civil society campaigns are fated to disappear into the twilight of politics because parties have begun to pay attention to the concerns voiced by them. If not, what is the legacy that will be passed on to subsequent forms of social protest? The uncomfortable truth is that campaigns lose their identity and their critical edge the moment they become institutionalised, and are forced to bargain for piecemeal social reform within the existing political system, with its warts and its flaws left intact.
Conclusion
Liberal democratic theorists, always suspicious of the proclivities of the state to expand power at the expense of citizens’ freedom, and equally sceptical of the ability of political parties to represent the popular will, have argued that citizens must exercise constant vigilance. This is the basic precondition for a thriving democracy, because the best of democracies degenerate in the absence of participation and accountability. Moreover, the right to participation in public life is arguably a basic political right. In India, a number of campaigns in civil society have striven to raise the status of Directive Principles of State Policy to that of fundamental rights. In the process, however, both the state and civil society organisations have come to concentrate on the provision of minimal social measures, rather than take on inequality. It is little wonder that they lack what Amitabh Behar terms “a big idea”.
Notes
1 This article is part of a larger comparative project on the experiences of India and Scandinavian countries in the field of transformative politics. The results of the project are currently being written up under the joint co-authorship of Olle Tornquist, John Harriss and Fredrik Engelstadt.
2 Democracy is a protean concept and theorists tend to disagree on what the fundamental presuppositions of democracy are. Let us therefore take the mode in which democracy presents itself to the collective gaze: As embodying the principle of universal adult franchise as our conceptual anchor. And let us then interpret the principle of one-person-one-vote as a metaphor for a deeper concept that is the mainstay of democracy, that is, political equality. It follows that each person, irrespective of gender, caste, class, or ethnic origin, has to be treated equally by the state and, by implication, by society, the market, and the household, unless there is justifiable reason to treat her/him otherwise, historically handed down disadvantages, for instance. This is a negative right, the right not to be discriminated against. The positive avatar of this right can be read as follows: Each person has the right to participate in the multiple transactions of society – from voting in elections, to accessing structures of opportunity, to joining in a public debate, as an equal. It follows that background inequalities should be addressed by the democratic state with seriousness. The assumption is that the burdens and the advantages of society must be distributed as equally and as fairly as possible among citizens. This is a necessary precondition for realising the idea of democracy.
The Indian state has responded to demands made by civil society campaigns that are sometimes supported and sometimes initiated by the Supreme Court. But we are definitely not in the midst of a social revolution. This, in large measure, is due to the nature of civil society interventions.
Actually existing democracies are imperfectly just, and institutionalised democracies inevitably fall well short of the idea of the concept. If this is the first lesson that we have learnt from history, the second is that the idea of democracy can be realised to an extent in and through political practices, more specifically through collective action initiated by trade unions, front organisations of political parties, social associations, professional groups, non-governmental organisations, and citizen activism in general. Think of women’s struggles in England in the early 20th century to expand the scope of a franchise labelled “keep out, men only”; or of workers’ struggles to emancipate the right to vote from property qualifications in most parts of Europe; or of Afro-American struggles to achieve racial parity in the United States; or of trade union struggles to make the workplace a more humane one across the world.
In India, where trade unions yoked to political parties and representing a very small percentage of the workforce have shown little interest in the welfare of non-members, and where political parties tend to think of social rights more as an electoral/populist ploy and less as a task that government has to shoulder with some seriousness, civil society activism has sharply foregrounded the responsibility of the state to its citizens. In a society where huge numbers of people are wracked by poverty, diminished by malnutrition, ill-health, illiteracy, and ill-being, and condemned to live their lives much below the level of what is considered human, civil society campaigns for the delivery of social goods have tried to bridge the sizeable lag between institutionalised political equality and social and economic inequality.
The Indian state has responded to the demands made by these campaigns, which are sometimes supported and sometimes initiated by the Supreme Court. But we are definitively not in the midst of a social revolution. This in large measure is due to the nature of civil society interventions. Civil society is politically significant insofar as it enables citizens to come together in all manners of projects, particularly those of monitoring the state, and engaging in collective action that strives to realise the idea of democracy.1 The irony is that the precondition of this particular project is a democratic state, which enables its own citizens to challenge institutionalised power through the grant of rights such as the right of freedom of expression, freedom to join associations, and the freedom to assemble peacefully and without arms. It follows that the practices of civil society, like other practices, unfold in an institutional context shaped largely by the state. Admittedly, civil society organisations enable the articulation of popular aspirations, but at the same time, these are necessarily restricted by notions of what is politically – and, more often than not, legally – permissible. There are, to put it bluntly, defined limits to civil society activism. The boundaries of the system can be pushed back by civil society activism, but to assume that these boundaries can be transcended or reworked is to expect too much of the concept and of its practices. For these reasons and more, civil society may not be the best way to tackle the ills of modern India, but in a post-revolutionary world, this is the best we have on offer. We simply have no choice. It is with this caveat that I begin to discuss the significance and drawbacks of collective action in India.
Democracy and Inequality in India
The Great Indian Poverty Debate, structured in the main around methodological disputes on how to measure poverty and the poor, has acquired highly technical overtones, and most of these subtleties tend to escape non-economists, or, more precisely, non-statisticians. But even a non-economist can figure out that there is something very specific about poverty in India. On balance, poverty entraps huge numbers of citizens.
Inequality has risen sharply in recent years in India. Brazil, Indonesia, and on some indicators Argentina, have recorded significant progress in reducing inequality over a period of 20 years, according to a 2011 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on inequalities in emerging economies. China, India, the Russia Federation, and South Africa have become less equal over time. India, in particular, has experienced a significant increase in earnings inequality. The ratio between the top and the bottom deciles of wage distribution has doubled since the early 1990s, with growth in wage inequalities between regular wage earners, that is, contractual employees. Income inequality in the casual wage sector, that is, workers employed on a day-to-day basis, has remained more stable. The doubling of income inequality over the past 20 years, continues the report, has made India one of the worst performers in the category of emerging economies. Of the 1.21 billion Indians, 42% live on less than $1.25 a day, and India has the highest number of poor in the world (OECD 2011).
Notably, poverty is concentrated mainly in two communities, the scheduled tribes (STs) and the scheduled castes (SCs), and some groups in the Other Backward Classes. The 2010 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report affirms that 81% of the STs, 66% of the SCs, and 58% of OBCs belong to the category of the multidimensionally poor (UNDP 2010: 99). A majority of the SCs and STs who live and work in backward regions of central and eastern India belong to the category of the absolutely poor, and are condemned to live a life much below the threshold of what we recognise as distinctively human (IAMR and Planning Commission 2011: 2). And they are so condemned because of a contingent and hence morally arbitrary factor – that of birth. People are not poor because they do not possess the basic skills that enable them to participate in profitable transactions; they are poor because they have been born into communities that have been historically stigmatised by the caste system as the (former) “untouchable”, the “polluting”, or as the outsider. The rigid caste system had historically banished the STs and the SCs to the spatial as well as social margins of society. Children born into these two groups have been handed down as their patrimony nothing but deprivation, social discrimination, rank indignities, and responsibilities for performing menial tasks. The relationship between lack of caste/social status and material deprivation is indisputably causal.
Let us now clarify the two counts on which Indian democracy can be categorised as deeply flawed. One, there exists a substantial gap between political equality and social and economic equality. Two, some groups have to shoulder more than their share of the burdens of society, and are barred from partaking in the benefits of this society because of morally irrelevant reasons such as caste or tribal affiliation.
The coexistence of political and civil freedom alongside social and economic unfreedom in India is cause for some degree of regret. The leaders of the freedom movement had understood as early as the 1920s that the task of attaining political freedom is necessarily hampered unless it is accompanied by social and economic freedom, and vice versa. Consequently, it had conceptualised an integrated agenda of political, civil, social, cultural, and economic rights in the 1928 Nehru Constitutional Draft, and in the Karachi Resolution on Fundamental Rights adopted by the Indian National Congress in 1931. This integrated agenda was, however, split into two units in the Constituent Assembly. Whereas the grant of political, civil and cultural rights in part three of the Constitution are backed by legal sanction, social and economic rights, which are placed in part IV under the title Directive Principles of State Policy, are not backed by such sanction. It is precisely this downgrading of social rights that civil society organisations took up at the turn of the 21st century, and inaugurated thereby a new phase of activism.
Notes on Collective Action
At the turn of the 21st century, the advent of campaigns that sought to upgrade the Directive Principles of State Policy to the status of fundamental rights marked a new phase in civil society in India. In 2001, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) filed a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court on hunger and starvation in the country. This was at a time when the highest court in the land had succeeded in acquiring a distinctive reputation for upholding the cause of the poor, the illiterate, the hungry, and the shelterless. This was in direct contrast to the early years of post-Independence India, when the Court had privileged fundamental rights over the Directive Principles. In the 1970s, the judiciary was deeply complicit in the internal Emergency (1975-77) declared by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and the consequent suspension of civil liberties. Post-emergency, the Court, determined to reverse its image and acquire legitimacy in the public eye, began to concentrate on pro-people issues. Justice Bhagwati, in the Minerva Mills case, famously argued that social rights are substantive rights, and that a rule that imposed an obligation on the state or an entity was still a legal rule because it prescribed a norm of conduct to be followed by an authority, even if the rule was not enforceable in court (Shankar 2009: 127).
He stated,
Today a vast revolution is taking place in the judicial process; the theatre of the law is fast changing and the problems of the poor are coming to the forefront. The Court has to innovate new methods and devise new strategies for the purpose of providing access to justice to large masses of people who are denied their basic human rights and to whom freedom and liberty have no meaning. The only way in which this can be done is by entertaining writ petitions and even letters from public spirited individuals seeking judicial redress for the benefit of persons who have suffered a legal wrong or a legal injury or whose constitutional or legal right has been violated but who by reason of their poverty or socially or economically disadvantaged position are unable to approach the court for relief (ibid 2009: xiii).
In the 1980s and 1990s, Supreme Court pronouncements on a host of measures from health and education, to shelter and the environment, were specifically designed to ameliorate the condition of the poor.
In response to the PIL filed by the PUCL, the Court issued a number of strictures. It was of utmost importance, instructed the highest court in the land, that food should be provided to vulnerable sections.
In case of famine, there may be shortage of food … but here the situation is that amongst plenty there is scarcity… distribution of the same amongst the very poor and the destitute is scarce and non-existent leading to mal-nourishment, starvation and other related problems (Legal Action for the Right to Food 2004).
These censures bore some results, and the government responded by initiating a massive programme of employment generation via the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana, streamlining the public distribution system in foodgrain and mandating mid-day meals for school children. The campaign culminated in the National Food Security Act of 2013.
Despite all the caveats that have been entered regarding the Act, the right to food campaign has undeniably come a long way since 2001. Several achievements can be credited to it. In response to Court orders, most state governments proceeded to introduce mid-day meals in government and government-aided schools. The programme has been transferred to state governments, which are given an annual grant by the centre to run the programme. The Supreme Court has set in place mechanisms that monitor the implementation of various food and nutrition-related schemes of the Government of India, by appointing food commissioners who are responsible to the Court. On numerous occasions, the Court has pulled up both state governments and the central government on this front. The campaign for food rights holds public hearings in various areas, and highlights corruption and mismanagement in matters relating to the identification of below poverty line families, functioning of ration shops, and diversion of foodgrains to the open market, and establishes the complicity of local administrators, politicians, owners of ration shops, and contractors in denying poor people access to food. The Court has accorded legal backing to the right to food. And the campaign for food rights has led to the formulation of the right to work.
The campaign for the right to food realised fairly early that assured employment is an essential precondition for food security, simply because it liberates people from dependence on outside agencies for satisfaction of their basic needs. The demand for this right (distinct from the demand for food-for-work programmes) has not raised a new entitlement onto policy agendas. Several employment generation schemes were in existence in some form or the other. But when, in December 2005, the long-awaited National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, now MGNREGA – Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) was adopted by Parliament, new hope was infused into rural areas that have been stagnating in recent decades.
Evaluating Civil Society Activism I
Have these campaigns contributed to the development of transformative politics in India? One, have they managed to change the way in which the state conceptualises its responsibilities towards the citizens of India? Two, have they succeeded in prising open doors for future political interventions that can build on the successes of previous campaigns?
Certainly legislation on social issues that campaigns have raised marks a new phase in Indian democracy, that of paying attention to substantial zones of ill-being, the marginalised, and to the ordinary individual, or rather, the ordinary man. All four campaigns discussed have generated legislation and this has been, and indeed can be, seen as a civil society success story. Yet, in most of these cases legislation falls noticeably short of the demands, and of agendas. For instance, the right to education campaign had demanded that early childcare, which is of crucial importance in shaping the personalities of little children, be included in the right to education, and that the age bar should be raised so that girls who are forced to stay at home minding siblings while their mothers work can enter the educational system after the age of 14. This was simply not heeded, despite the fact that educationists had posted critical reservations on the website of the human resources ministry.
Moreover, there is little virtue in granting a constitutional right to education when schools set up by the government have gained notoriety for non-performance; a high degree of teacher absenteeism; involvement of teachers in other tasks set by the state – such as conducting census operations, election duty, and preparation of mid-day meals for the children – absence of infrastructure such as classrooms, blackboards, toilets, playgrounds, electricity and computers; lack of extracurricular activities; and general indifference towards teaching, or inculcating in the student a love of learning. The Right to Education Act had laid down an elaborate scheme to improve the state of primary education in the country by 31 March 2013. Little has been done on this front; allocations to the education sector have not exceeded 3.5% of the gross domestic product (GDP), even though the Common Minimum Programme of the coalition government at the centre had recommended at least 6% investment of the GDP in education.
The lag between demands and state action illustrates to a nicety a basic problem with the discourse of rights that civil society organisations have embraced with great fervour. A right is not just a right; it is a right to some good. It is the democratic state that is obliged to ensure that the good that the right is a right to is made available to the citizens. The provision of the good falls squarely within the provenance of the state. But the Indian state appears content with legislating a right and allocating funds, accompanied by media din and acclaim by civil society organisations. In the process, to continue with the example of education, the state seems to have absolved itself of the responsibility of ensuring the establishment of an educational system that can open doors to structures of opportunity for every child. No systematic attempt to streamline the system of education, and make it competitive with the expensive public school system, has been made to date. The lesson: civil society organisations can ensure the enactment of legislation, they can monitor the administration of these laws, but there is little they can do about deep-rooted flaws in the system.
Although legislation has been enacted on some social issues, that this amounts to a coherent and comprehensive social policy package is debatable. Much of the rhetoric of the political class amounts to political posturing, and the leadership seeks to glean every drop of political/electoral capital from centrally sponsored schemes in food, employment and education. Little attempt is made to systematically follow up legislative initiatives, or even the enactment of a constitutional right – the right to elementary education, for instance. Nor has a mechanism to enforce accountability or to redress grievances been established. Lack of attention to details of implementation and institutions to monitor the right reflects poorly on the way the state has responded to the discourse of rights.
It is also instructive to note that in India, most campaigns for the delivery of social goods have either originated from a Supreme Court decision, or succeeded in their objectives when the Court has intervened on their behalf. Although Court interventions have helped campaigns to achieve their goals, the need for the Court to intervene at all illustrates the paradox of civil society mobilisation. In much of the literature on civil society, it is assumed that civil society groups have the capacity to address the state, and to oblige the latter to heed demands made by these groups. However, the Indian state has proved more responsive to Court injunctions than to popular representations, compelling more and more groups to invoke judicial activism. On some occasions, the Court has acted on its own, notably in the case of the right to information and the right to education. In the case of the right to food, and later employment, the Court cracked the whip on the government when a group of activists filed a petition in the Court.
Much concern has been expressed about judicial activism because the judiciary is non-representative, and because it tends to tread on the toes of the executive and of elected members of Parliament (Mehta 2007; Rudolph and Rudolph 2008a, b). Some scholars even dismiss such activism as populism, and a mere attempt to refurbish the image of the Court after the Emergency, as Baxi (1985) does. Moreover, as Madhav Khosla (2010) points out, the Court pushes a model of conditional social rights insofar as it instructs the state to remedy a particular grievance, or remedy a particular lack: “The existence of a violation is conditional upon state action” (p 751). Unlike the South African Supreme Court, the Indian Court has not elaborated a doctrine of systemic social rights in the form of an entitlement for everyone.
In part, the Court has adopted a proactive stance because the agenda of contemporary civil society mobilisation is self-limiting. Social movements that demand a radical restructuring of power relations in the country have just not fetched the required response from the judiciary. This is most evident in the case of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Campaigns for the delivery of social goods have sparked off legislation and propelled judicial activism on this front, but whether these campaigns have transformed the state and tilted it towards the needs of the poor is debatable. Certainly a number of initiatives to remedy the sorry plight of the poor are on offer; for example, cash transfers. Most of these initiatives border on what, in political theory, has been termed sufficientarianism. This is certainly not what the Preamble of the Constitution promises Indian citizens – justice, not if we interpret justice as the equal right of every citizen to share in the benefits and burdens of a society.
It would of course be political foolhardiness to dismiss all government initiatives to improve the condition of the poor as meaningless. But structural barriers to well-being, and half-hearted attempts by the state to ensure minimal well-being, neutralise the full impact of the allocation of resources and enactment of legislation. What we see is minor tinkering with the symptoms, rather than with the cause of the malaise of ill-being in India. Civil society activism is self-limiting, and state response to these self-limiting demands is sadly deficient. Expectedly, poverty and inequality continue to plague the lives of millions of the poor in India.
Evaluating Civil Society Activism II
In the late 1990s, a number of civil society organisations perceptibly shifted their strategy: from opposing and critically engaging with the state, to advocacy, and to partnership with the state. The number as well as the influence of groups that have opted for this strategy has increased over time, and many of them advise political parties on the shape of their agenda; others are consulted by the government, and leaders of some campaigns have been incorporated into the National Advisory Council (NAC)headed by the president of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi. The NAC has proved instrumental in the passage of several laws, but such legislation from above breeds its own reverberations. For one, membership of the NAC has become a benchmark of success for civil society organisations. As one activist remarked ironically at a meeting, ever since the NAC was set up, all that civil society organisations dream of is drafting a law and getting it passed by Parliament. Two, the implications of either partnering the state or being a part of the state reverberate on how we conceptualise the tasks of civil society. One can hardly expect civil society to take on the state, when all that some organisations want is to be part of the decision-making institutions set up by the state, while others are dependent on the state for funding. That the system remains in place, and superficial remedies are evolved for the symptoms of a deeper malaise, is not surprising.
If partnership agreements with the state tend to blunt the edge of civil society activism, the strategy these campaigns adopt to further the objectives they have decided upon is hardly conducive to generating transformative politics. Expectedly, demands that stifling and oppressive social relationships grounded in unequal landholdings, and the monopoly of resources held by corporate houses be broken, have come from outside the frontiers of civil society – the Maoist movement. This is the irony of social mobilisation in India. Within civil society, organisations have been tamed by aligning them with the state. One can hardly expect them to critique the state when they are part of decision-making structures and beneficiaries of state largesse. And movements that have raised issues fundamental to democratic justice, notably that the benefits and burdens of society should be distributed as equally as possible, are banished to the space outside civil society, and outside the protection of the rule of law and fundamental rights.
Can this genre of collective action generate other forms of activism which build on the achievements of an earlier generation of activists and avoid the mistakes of early activists? It is precisely here that the distinction between campaigns and social movements emerges sharply. Take the women’s movement, which in the 1970s coalesced around protests against custodial rape and dowry deaths. Today the movement has been pluralised, with different sections taking on different tasks, from counselling and providing legal aid to victims of sexual abuse to struggles against liquor barons in some states, to making out a case for women’s right to property, for participation in decision-making in all forums, from the household to local self-government and the national government, to arguing for reservations for women in elected bodies, to defending gay, lesbian and transgender rights, to fighting against child sexual abuse, to arguing for women’s right to their own bodies, to reclaiming public spaces, to raising issues of domestic labour, to catapulting concern for the informal sector. In response to the challenges of religious and caste identities which have often divided the movement, feminism itself has been transformed. Deepa Reddy (2005) writes that feminists have fashioned a broad multicultural project in response to the rise of religious nationalism, which is responsive to the needs of local communities and draws upon global networks to facilitate grass-roots initiatives for social change. The plural, decentred, and often divided women’s movement has had a “spillover” effect, and has progressively widened the analysis of patriarchy and expanded the domain of struggles against this benighted system, even though it has suffered setbacks on a number of occasions.
Whether campaigns for the delivery of social goods will be able to generate transformative politics, or whether groups in the future will take up the issues raised, broaden them, and build on prior mobilisation, is debatable. No social movement dies out completely, memories of the successes or non-successes of the movement remain to be excavated and tapped by later generations of activists, who move in other directions to deal with the basic problems confronted by people. But that can happen only when the movement or the campaign catapults to the forefront of political consciousness the structural constraints and institutional contexts that have to be tackled for any meaningful change to come about in people’s lives. This current civil society mobilisation simply does not recognise this point. That is why civil society campaigns have never attained the status of social movements.
In a significant intervention in social movement literature three decades ago, Manuel Castells (1983) had argued that most urban-based social movements are not about restructuring the production relations that lie at the core of social relations. Urban social movements combine struggles over collective consumption with struggles for community culture and political self-determination. Although his analysis reflected the dynamics of urban movements in the 1960s and 1970s in South America – the Squatters movement for land, for instance – Castells’ analysis of the nature of contestation remains valid. Struggles for collective consumption are not over power relations in society, but about the capacity of the state to deliver social goods to the people, or the lack thereof. The state is not seen as a condensate of power that has to be battled, or as a necessary institution for the reproduction of an exploitative capitalism, but as a benign provider of social goods. And citizens become consumers. These social goods may not reach the constituency they are meant for, but that is generally attributed to a mega phenomenon termed corruption, a term that has been granted the status of an explanatory concept by civil society agents. That the fault may lie in the Indian state’s inability to conceive and administer a comprehensive programme to ensure well-being is not even called into question. Intrinsic to urban-based campaigns in civil society is a deep inability to deal with power relations or undermine social hierarchies. Leaders of these campaigns have become stakeholders in the system of power, and civil society has forgotten that it is supposed to critically engage with the state, hold it to its obligations, but desist from seeing the existing state as the prime remedy for the ills of the human condition.
Above all, the fact that the demands made by civil society organisations have been easily incorporated into the agenda of political parties, and even made the “unique selling point” of the Congress Party, should cause some disquiet. These organisations are consulted when parties draft their electoral agendas, and they are incorporated into the state structure if the party comes into power. This by itself is testimony to their non-threatening claims. Consider that groups that make claims that challenge the democratic credentials of the government in some way, that protest land acquisition in resource-rich tribal areas, for instance, are hardly likely to find representation in consultative or policymaking bodies established by the government.
The uncomfortable fact is that once civil society leaderships become partners in policymaking, their capacity to critically engage with the state, never too sharp at the best of times, is further blunted. The limits of current modes of civic engagement are sadly apparent. Civil society organisations, or, more specifically, non-government organisations, have been around for at least 25 years, and the problems of the poor in India continue to mount. All that the state has done is pacify the poor through a handout here and a handout there.
There was a time when social movements challenged the Indian state. There was a time when the relationship between this mode of politics, which concentrated on mobilising people, and the state was antagonistic and sharp. This was a time when the institutionalisation and professionalisation of civil society organisations was low, and emphasis was placed on the mobilisation and conceptualisation of alternatives. Today, the neo-liberal state pays attention to campaigns routed through the Court, its heart bleeds for the poor and the marginalised, it drafts strategies to incorporate civil society leaders and transform them into stakeholders of the system, and concentrates on social legislation from above. Opportunities for critical engagement with this mode of dealing with intractable political problems have weakened dramatically. The state now steers partnerships with the third sector to address poverty, and foster welfare dependency. Even as the discourse on poverty and sufficiency captures the attention of the media and of other civil society organisations, it is forgotten that it is not sufficiency but equality that lies at the heart of democracy. Whatever challenge civil society is capable of producing within the limits of what is politically permissible has been, in effect, further tamed.
Perhaps civil society campaigns are fated to disappear into the twilight of politics because parties have begun to pay attention to the concerns voiced by them. If not, what is the legacy that will be passed on to subsequent forms of social protest? The uncomfortable truth is that campaigns lose their identity and their critical edge the moment they become institutionalised, and are forced to bargain for piecemeal social reform within the existing political system, with its warts and its flaws left intact.
Conclusion
Liberal democratic theorists, always suspicious of the proclivities of the state to expand power at the expense of citizens’ freedom, and equally sceptical of the ability of political parties to represent the popular will, have argued that citizens must exercise constant vigilance. This is the basic precondition for a thriving democracy, because the best of democracies degenerate in the absence of participation and accountability. Moreover, the right to participation in public life is arguably a basic political right. In India, a number of campaigns in civil society have striven to raise the status of Directive Principles of State Policy to that of fundamental rights. In the process, however, both the state and civil society organisations have come to concentrate on the provision of minimal social measures, rather than take on inequality. It is little wonder that they lack what Amitabh Behar terms “a big idea”.
Notes
1 This article is part of a larger comparative project on the experiences of India and Scandinavian countries in the field of transformative politics. The results of the project are currently being written up under the joint co-authorship of Olle Tornquist, John Harriss and Fredrik Engelstadt.
2 Democracy is a protean concept and theorists tend to disagree on what the fundamental presuppositions of democracy are. Let us therefore take the mode in which democracy presents itself to the collective gaze: As embodying the principle of universal adult franchise as our conceptual anchor. And let us then interpret the principle of one-person-one-vote as a metaphor for a deeper concept that is the mainstay of democracy, that is, political equality. It follows that each person, irrespective of gender, caste, class, or ethnic origin, has to be treated equally by the state and, by implication, by society, the market, and the household, unless there is justifiable reason to treat her/him otherwise, historically handed down disadvantages, for instance. This is a negative right, the right not to be discriminated against. The positive avatar of this right can be read as follows: Each person has the right to participate in the multiple transactions of society – from voting in elections, to accessing structures of opportunity, to joining in a public debate, as an equal. It follows that background inequalities should be addressed by the democratic state with seriousness. The assumption is that the burdens and the advantages of society must be distributed as equally and as fairly as possible among citizens. This is a necessary precondition for realising the idea of democracy.
Greenpeace funds hit Home barrier
Ministry places curbs on each foreign donation
Following an Intelligence Bureau (IB) report that alleged foreign-funded NGOs were creating obstacles to India’s economic growth, the Home Ministry has clamped down on Greenpeace, an international campaign group present in 40 countries.
In a letter the Ministry has directed the Reserve Bank of India that all foreign contributions originating from Greenpeace International and Climate Works Foundation — two principal international contributors to Greenpeace India Society — must be kept on hold until individual clearances are obtained from the Ministry for each transaction.
The RBI has been asked to direct banks to this effect. The central bank has also been asked to report to the government if any government department or institution is receiving such funds.
Greenpeace was specifically targeted because the IB report had charged it with orchestrating “massive efforts to take down India’s coal-fired power projects and mining activity.”
According to the report, public protests in Madhya Pradesh’s Singrauli region — which produces 15,000 MW energy — were being engineered by Greenpeace, “actively aided and led by foreign activists.”
In its directive to the chief general manager, Department of Banking Operations and Development, RBI, the Ministry has invoked Section 46 of the Foreign Contributions (Regulations) Act, 2010, that says the “Central government may give such directions as it may deem necessary” for execution of the provisions of the Act.
The new directive will effectively bar the NGO from accepting foreign money, as it will require seeking case-by-case clearance for each contribution.
NGO funding needs more transparency, scrutiny
Under UPA-II, the Intelligence Bureau started investigating whether the activities of some of the foreign-funded non-governmental organisations were affecting economic development. One trigger was the agitation against the Kudankulam plant. Orchestrated opposition slowed down its commissioning.
The report, apparently leaked, supposedly said :
-the NGOs’ agenda was in line with the foreign funding agencies, and against national interest, causing a 2 to 3 per cent of loss in GDP, and
-that only a small percentage of NGOs receiving foreign funds were submitting annual returns as required by law.
-One NGO mentioned was Greenpeace India, a branch of Greenpeace International. About 40 per cent of its funds were received from the parent organisation, and the rest raised in India. Its website does not mention any donors.
-Then there was a strange case where six NGOs involved in agitations relating to nuclear power were sharing the same address.
-And some three NGOs in Ahmedabad, located in one building, received large donations from two or three donors in the U.S. and Germany. Surely such things raised suspicion.
Many countries — not just developing countries — have been concerned about NGOs’ activities and their agenda being driven by donors. Canada is investigating. Scientists in Europe are concerned about pressure from Greenpeace to stop research relating to GM crops.
NGOs, development and national interest
The defining feature of politics around the environment is the way experts frame the problem and shape the solutions
Photo: Hindustan Times
The Intelligence Bureau’s recent report on the impact of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on development, is about foreign influence detrimental to India’s national interest and not about stifling dissent. It points to three issues—levers for expanding strategic influence, geopolitics of energy, and failures of the state.
In the 1960s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) funding was involved in nearly half the grants of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations, mainly in the physical, life and social sciences. Of the 700 grants above $10,000 given by 164 other foundations during the period 1963-1966, at least 108 involved partial or complete CIA funding. CIA was also using several hundred US academics, sponsored over 1,000 books and had covert relationships with about 50 US journalists.
The nexus between climate change, energy, international cooperation and economic growth is certainly of strategic interest to the countries named in the report as multilateral negotiations on climate change are in their final stage, and lower emissions in one country allow for more in another. Interestingly enough Greenpeace supports the argument of the industrialized countries in seeking renewable energy to replace kerosene lamps with light bulbs in tribal areas instead of an adequate level of electricity comparable with urban areas through grid connection and electricity from coal, the most abundant and cheapest source of power in India.
The defining feature of politics around the environment is the way experts frame the problem and shape the solutions.
For large scale infrastructure projects in industrialized countries experts are no longer called upon to give their opinion on “what action can be taken given the risk” but rather on how to “maximize social and economic benefits with as little environmental harm as possible”.
The response of NGOs to the environmentally high-risk, extensive extraction of shale gas in the US and five new lignite mines in Germany displacing 3,000 people, is working with industry to incorporate adequate safeguards.
We continue with risk assessment based on the Environment Protection Act, 1986, designed for air and water pollution, providing an opening to courts and NGOs to question the activity itself.
Policy shifts in three other areas are also needed.
First, greater attention to concerns of the tribals in forest areas, where the delay in settling “community rights” deprives them of adequate resettlement packages when extensive mining takes place, providing another opening.
Second, in 2003 India announced that tied aid would not be accepted leading to a shift to funding NGOs and more recently to think tanks and states. The amendment to the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, in 2010, focused on disclosure norms for receipts but not expenditures. We should revive the earlier proposal to fully eliminate bilateral assistance, limit multilateral assistance to specific sectors such as transportation, urbanization and renewable energy, delink foreign funded think tanks and NGOs from government committees etc; and restrict funding of agitations while not curbing advocacy.
Third, the report of the Intelligence Bureau should be discussed with leaders of other parties and states to develop a national consensus on sustainable development rather than an environmental perspective to mining and infrastructure, climate change, rehabilitation as well as security implications of foreign funding.
No comments:
Post a Comment