A MONTH back we were in a second-class sleeper travelling from Wardha to New Delhi. Any illusions we may have entertained about likely beneficiaries from India’s entry into the ‘new world’ of globalization were soon dispelled. Apart from the unarguable benefits to those who occupied the upper classes in the train, it was clear that many of these benefits had percolated down to the second-class compartments also. Our fellow travellers, most of them salaried or small traders, purchased Coke, Pepsi and Uncles Chips not just for their children smitten by the advertisements of such products, but for themselves too. No longer was there any compunction about paying rupees ten for a litre of drinking water. And they all bought newspapers and newsmagazines which they read with avid interest.

But there was clearly something selective in their absorption of the news. Newspapers in Wardha had recently reported the beginning of farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra – even in villages surrounding Wardha. This found no mention in their conversation despite the fact that farmer suicides had toppled the Chandrababu Naidu regime in neighbouring Andhra. Nor did they seem to be perturbed by the others who came in.

 

 

There were women with children, people with physical deformities, children who were playing adult roles – singing, performing with vacant eyes – leaving no doubt about the state of the last person in the economic hierarchy. It is perhaps this most acute experience of economic hardship of unemployment, hunger and the rising costs of privatization of essential services that has made the poor realize that they can no longer afford the luxury of a myopic local interest in democracy. The unexpected verdict of the ordinary people in the Lok Sabha elections may have once again created an opening to bring common sense back to politics and democratic practice in India.

The crisis that the poor face in India is obviously not new. It was a similar crisis that impelled many of us to join efforts at forming organizations of the poor with an objective of changing their circumstances of collective marginalization. There is a recognition that the decision-making process, while paying lip service to their concerns from time to time, now seeks to marginalize such voices even more. There is a growing understanding of the impact of such decision-making on their lives. No longer are the poor being left to fend for themselves on the margins, but decisions are being taken that are an assault on the little they have. And it is this recognition that has brought organizations such as ours to the doorstep of the power centres where such decisions are being taken.

The shift is that they no longer come to knock on the doors to protest, but to remove the doors so that they can exercise their democratic rights to be a part of the decision-making process, with the respect and legitimacy they deserve. In terms of a journey of a struggle for change, this represents a new resting place. We need to reflect not only on what brought us here, but also to sharply focus on what we need to do. For, despite the growing assault on the poor and marginalized, many of their organizations have paradoxically gained popular support and legitimacy.

 

 

The poor are caught in a bind between the non-functioning institutions set up by the state, and the oft-repeated argument for privatization as a cure to this malaise. The growth of private institutions in education and health spell a new exclusion for poor and all those who cannot pay. Unfortunately, while the poor want an accountable state, the state in turn is busy trying to offload its primary responsibilities to unaccountable private institutions.

At an individual level the situation may appear too overwhelming to do anything other than spend time and effort in a struggle for survival. However, even those among them who are looking for a collective to join remain disappointed, because the available political formations rarely focus on their issues. The divisive forces of religion and caste have served to splinter them and cut through the few fragile attempts at electoral collectivism. The state has used economic liberalization and the god of profit to indiscriminately and irresponsibly unleash forces which, with their enormous money and brute power, encroach on land, natural resources and all services. Corruption and private greed has made matters worse.

The Common Minimum Programme of the UPA government can, hopefully, be interpreted as a beginning to take stock of some of the issues facing the poor, the proviso being that it can be taken seriously only if there are concrete benefits – from legislation to implementation. It needs underscoring that where the poor have managed some control over governance, it is primarily through issue-based mobilization and that too sectorally. This is reflected in the work of the movements that India has seen grow in the last couple of decades. This sectoral engagement has now widened to impact democratic decision-making, ‘engaging with electoral politics’ and, in some cases, even become a direct player. This journey is also important.

 

 

An engagement with the state has always been an important part of the movement discourse. But of late the urgency to make governments and their action accountable has forced the non-party political groupings to take fresh stock of democratic governments and once again reflect on the nature of their engagement with the state.

The continuing colonial system of governance had made many of us view the government as an alien institution and suspect any identification with the act of governance. It is instructive that even as each social movement group saw individuals within the structure, including politicians and civil servants, as useful, the government itself continued to be seen as ‘the other’. It hardly helped that the government often validated the worst fears of its critics, that it was anti-people in its policy, programmes and implementation.

Let us briefly look at some of the traditional ways in which such engagement has so far taken place. There is the conventional Marxist understanding that sets itself the goal to capture ‘state power’ – an either or framework, fighting the state or capturing it. In the Gandhian tradition, the state is viewed with ambivalence. Cooperation with the state and working in tandem with it is an accepted position, but there is no clear ownership of the state. Government money is seen as ‘tainted’ and demanding work from government is pitted against the notion of self-reliance. At best there is an uneasy truce.

 

 

Then there is the so-called ‘civil society’; the definition itself limited by the nature of class and caste divisions in India. Non-state by definition, there is little participation in democratic action, apart from the act of casting the vote. This helps breed cynicism and a desire to wish away the state, highlighting its constricted character and critiquing the need for its intervention in economic and social issues. Further, even as this approach blames governments for not adhering to rules and violating ethics, it remains indifferent to its own non-participation in processes of corrective action. In many cases this emerging view ends up advocating a sub-contracting of governance responsibilities, often to itself. Fortunately, in contrast to this understanding, a few movement groups have begun to lay claim to a share of governance by theoretically owning the state, linking livelihood questions to the democratic decision-making process and demanding a responsible and accountable state.

Every government that assumes office with the peoples’ mandate to govern for general welfare of its people has to both deliver and be answerable. The demand for accountability equally imposes on the people the duty to oversee and monitor the functioning of the government. This demands that we move away from our colonial inheritance and mindset – not merely in terms of bureaucratic governance, but by struggling against the innate conditioning that we, the people, have accepted as our fate.

Most social movements treat the government as a power structure to be manipulated. Equations are therefore established with the civil service and the politicians with a mix of obsequiousness and contempt. The more radical groupings continue to perceive the government as untouchable and berate any attempt to claim ownership as betrayal, only permitting dialogue necessary for survival within restricted modes. Meanwhile, the fundamentalist stream in electoral politics has come to occupy large chunks of democratic and social space and become the mainstream. It has moulded the character of ‘civil society’ and through the electoral process received the mandate to govern.

 

 

The peoples’ movements and those who form political formations outside of this ‘mainstream’ have lost basic democratic space and find themselves on the fringe of both the electoral battles and civil society debates. The discourse is now firmly in the hands of people who, while working within the limited perspective of acquiring electoral power, have set the paradigm for national debates and engineered consent, in the process jeopardizing the basic tenets of the Constitution and the principles of democracy. This entire process became starkly visible in the tragedy of the Gujarat genocide.

Most movements who have been working with peoples’ politics have, in the last two decades, learnt to swing between struggle and advocacy. But even as this has become an accepted method of functioning, there is no clear understanding about the interface with processes of governance and the formation of alternative politics, including the engagement with electoral politics.

There is now a growing collective reflective process recognizing the need to redefine our roles, establish newer and more creative identities and break existing paradigms, even accepting the necessity to engage with electoral politics. However, questions about our own roles too have to be asked, as greater tolerance towards each other emerges as a result of battles we now fight against liberalization, which pit us against not only national governments but also international institutions.

 

 

The ‘success’ of the World Social Forum has made us accept the necessity, at least among ourselves, to establish the minimum agenda for consent and collective action. These processes, however, follow their own organic logic. Fortunately, the earlier obsessive concern about participation of funded organizations, political formations, progressive political parties, direct actors/interveners in the electoral process, implementers of government sponsored programmes and concerned citizens has shifted away from the infructuous debate on purity to the need to define the minimum non-negotiable agenda. The global questioning of the prescription for economic well-being, enshrined in the writ of the WTO and the USA, has served to strengthen the politics of an alternative collective debate for the poor.

From this hopefully will emerge a clearer recognition that for effective politics, peoples’ movements, rights-based groups, peace movements, human rights formations, alternative electoral processes and individuals – each will have to evolve a new paradigm, adversarial yet engaging with governance. Exclusivist and purist positions will have to be jettisoned to redefine the nature of inclusion and understand the need for plurality and scale to impact primary issues.

As the boundaries of all our self-defined paradigms become smudged, we have all been forced to re-evaluate the way we perceive power and use it. We know that the inequality in the distribution of power arises from a set of preconditions in which the manipulation of conventional democratic processes, primarily now of electoral politics and institutions, has further undermined the development debates and marginalized real issues and the needs of a large section of the Indian population. The people with their separate identities are confused by the overlap of poverty, caste, religion and ideology. The overriding power of religion and caste in vote politics and political decision-making, has added to the fear of the basic issues of poverty, tolerance and non-participation in economic processes being sidelined. This in turn has raised levels of intolerance.

 

 

Elections are a process in which the marginalized and the poor feel a short-lived sense of power. There is, however, a growing feeling that there is rarely a real choice at the time of casting the vote. People also realize that they themselves are invariably reduced to their caste, ‘bhai ka saval’, at the time of the elections, knowing fully well that after the election all relationships dissolve into personal aggrandizement and the ‘bhai’ disappears behind the ‘sahib’.

A realization that political power is generated not only through elections and that there is interconnectedness between asserting the right to food, employment, and livelihood issues and the outcome of an election, marks both those affected by it and those others who imagine political power only within narrow confines. Democratic, economic and social rights combine to define political rights. This is where the Right to Information campaign has helped; the interconnectedness of learning politics by doing has brought home the lesson forcefully to a range of actors.

 

 

In demanding transparency the people ask for the right to know what is happening with their money and the right to monitor the working of government servants, a reversal of the traditional pattern where the people are expected to plead before the government. In the simple act of asking questions, the poor change the power equation more basically than by any other demands they may have made. Unable to deny and unwilling to provide, the system is caught in its own web of deceit and duplicity. The politicians/officials too are trapped in their own hypocritical but constitutional commitment to answer the questions asked of them. This process helps cut at the root of the feudal suppressive norms, which discourage public questioning.

Once we assert the right for being an integral part of decision-making, we simultaneously assume responsibility for becoming a more active set of players. This activism begins with a set of questions that are dependent on breaking the ‘culture of secrecy and silence’ and replacing it with a ‘culture of transparency’.

Both transparency and accountability are, however, much used and abused terms. Lessons from the Right to Information movement in India underscore that ‘who’ asks the question determines much of what follows. It is up to the movement groups to ensure a mechanism for participation for direct democracy to gain ground. A strong and effective right to information law is obviously one facilitating step, more so since all demands for the implementation of laws are routinely stonewalled by an officialdom hidden behind barriers of exclusive control and secrecy, all in a democratic framework.

It was the same democratic framework that gave people in rural Rajasthan the inspiration and legitimacy to launch their movement, which now contains a paradigm for change. In a set of simple and basic formulations, the MKSS has begun to redefine its relationship with the state.

In the past, government mismanagement of development funds evoked a standard, cynical response, ‘Sarkar ka paisa hai, jo hota hai hone do’ (It is the government’s money, let it be wasted). This changed as questions of accountability began to be framed. An early slogan was, ‘Yeh paisa hamara-aap ka, nahin kisike baap ka.’ (This is our money, not someone’s private treasury). A later slogan that captures the new relationship with the state, and through it the new priorities, is – ‘Yeh sarkar hamari-aap ki, nahin kisike baap ki’ (This government is ours, not someone’s fiefdom).

 

 

This perspective has pushed us into searching for platforms where peoples’ voices can be articulated and heard. It has meant asserting the right to ask questions and demand answers. It has meant demanding the right not just to be consulted but be made part of the decision-making process, at all levels.

Slowly but surely those involved in the campaign are recognizing the power of the process. Those who terrorize and deny cannot in a democratic framework refuse to publicly dialogue with people who put them in power. Both the bureaucrat and the politician – whether reactive, embarrassed and fearful, manipulative and disruptive, or courageous and frank – cannot evade their obligation to be present at most public hearings held by the right to information campaign, where evidence from public records exposes their doings and those of the government.

In the ten-year struggle for the right to information we have learnt that merely asking for implementation of programmes will not suffice. Every question that the campaign has raised in its interface with government, whether of the panchayat or any other body, has been a demand for accountability. This cannot and does not stop with the mere provision of information. The real demand underlying every question is for the essential obligation for the process of governance to share and accept peoples’ participation in decision-making. We have to be part of the policy-making and of national debates, whether on food security or the right to work. Pared of all rhetoric, our demand is for a share in governance, a rightful share of the sovereignty vested constitutionally in the people.

In fact, more than combating corruption, the RTI campaign can serve as an effective tool to control the arbitrary use of power, and combat the failure of regulatory mechanisms in maintaining the rule of law. In all arenas – whether in economic policy or human rights – the need to make the matter public can act as a constraint on misgovernance.

In this framework, the right to information is both a basic principle and a tool to enhance the political participation of ordinary citizens, where ethics and accountability work both ways – for the government to inform and people themselves to be more ethical in public life. By reinserting public ethics into our political discourse, it reinforces a position that no real alternative politics is possible without firmly establishing public ethics.