CIVIL society is the realm where election promises are made and the imagery of voters harnessed. Nehru’s discourse of a secular and modern India, Indira’s promise of a poverty free (garibi hatao) India, BJP’s assurance of ushering in a Hindutva inspired social order and turning India into a superpower by 2020 are all invoked in civil society. Similarly, social reaction against caste oppression, elite-centric development and state violence is also articulated in civil society.

More important in the present context, is that the dominant discourse assigns a primacy to the institutions of civil society in planning, implementing and monitoring development. The proposition is that the entire range of the state’s function has either to be privatised or gradually transferred to civil society institutions (read NGOs) because the centralised states have become much too unwieldy, corrupt and unaccountable. The developmental initiatives routed through the institutions of the civil society promise to make the process more ‘inclusive’ and ‘empowering’.

The claim is that the gradual movement towards this model has helped the Indian economy achieve a shift from a ‘Hindu’ to ‘Hindutva’ rate of growth.¹ This rate of growth has, at best, put more shine in the India of the 8-10 per cent of the total population constituting ‘the great Indian middle class’. This class of people is usually well educated, generally located in urban areas, owns property or commands skills that have value in the market-driven economy and largely comes from the upper castes. The India of the 90%, when witnessed from the vantage point of the wage labour market, experience increasing job insecurity, casualisation of labour process and a near collapse of the collective bargaining strength of labour vis-à-vis capital.

Geographically, this has meant inter and intra regional disparities and a widening developmental chasm between urban and rural India.² Socially, it has led to greater inequality between and within social groups, insecurity for the minorities, a spurt in crime against women in the cities where the economic growth is most prominent, escalation of violent reaction of upper castes against the democratic demands of lower castes, and so on.

 

 

Most analysts concur that civil society comprises of diverse social collectives. It is an aspect of our social and political reality that provides a space between the family and the state/market³ for translating individual consciousness into collective consciousness. Most commentators locate civil society either as a necessary part of a democratic and secular state trying to protect the interests of the citizens/members or as standing against and outside the structures of state registering protest against wrong practices/policies of the latter.

Despite differences, both schools tend to treat civil society as an ideal type model. Hence they include certain social collectives in society and overlook the rest which may not make sense through the vantage point of their theoretical framework. Instead we argue that a specific interface between politics, society and economy generates issues of diverse nature, in turn giving birth to corresponding social collectives in the realm of civil society for taking up the cause and mediating between the family and the state/market. Crucially, not all of them may necessarily be open and secular in nature.

Further, the space in civil society is gradually being vacated by collectives rooted in social justice and equality and occupied by those whose capacity to pursue the same is restricted. Let us discuss the collectives that have lost their emancipatory sheen.

 

 

Trade unions (TUs) are an excellent platform for organising labour against capital on a secular and class identity. Initially in India, the capital-labour relationship was marked by a paternalistic attitude of the state (the state knew more about workers’ needs than workers themselves) which appropriated the ‘union voices’ for the purpose of rapid industrialization with minimum industrial strife. This led to labour attempting to recompose itself by breaking free from the dominant trade unions, particularly the Congress led Indian National Trade Union Congress. Two new trades unions – Bhartiya Mazdoor Sabha and the Centre of Indian Trade Unions – saw an appreciable increase in their members by focusing on growing unemployment and industrial stagnation often resulting in low wages and bonus cuts.

 

 

Capital as represented by the state chose to decompose the working class movement through imposing a national emergency and banning all strikes along with lowering the rate of bonus. The crisis in the economy deepened. The working class once again sought to recompose itself by aligning with several local ‘independent’ unions, particularly in western India, and new trade unions affiliated to regional parties. These unions strongly competed over enrolment with traditional party affiliated trade unions. Finally, the most significant assault of capital on the power of the working class was the adoption of IMF and World Bank inspired Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), ostensibly to overcome the immediate financial crisis and to restructure the state controlled regime which had apparently outlived its historical utility.⁴

The stabilization and structural adjustment programmes (SAP) led to demands for increased labour market flexibility, especially employment flexibility, resulting in mandatory provisions of voluntary retirement schemes, hire and fire polices or closure of loss-making industrial units. The recent 2nd National Labour Commission also endorsed this shift. Jan Breman’s recent work documents the demise of trade unions in the cotton textile mills of Ahmedabad which resulted in a loss of a platform for secular class mobilisation and created a fertile space for violent right-wing communal mobilisation.⁵

Instead of a state that once negotiated and composed/recomposed labour, now capital negotiates with the working class directly. The response to this shift, however, remains muted because of the functional weaknesses of TUs. Even in their heyday, the TUs restricted themselves to plant level demands and rarely addressed the larger issues pertaining to social relations of production. Further, their efforts were overwhelmingly concentrated in the organised sector of the economy comprising a mere 8% of the total workforce in the country.

 

 

Presently, the SAP state policy discourse is dwindling the membership base of TUs while leaving them politically impotent to oppose such policy discourse. Since states have to compete with each other to attract foreign investment, thereby requiring fulfilment of the neo-liberal conditions (SAP), trade unions affiliated to the ruling political parties are usually instructed to avoid launching any militant agitations.⁶ In the present political economic scenario, TUs are unwilling to organise workers in the informal sector and their presence in the organised sector of the economy is getting increasingly marginalized. This space in the unorganised sector is now increasingly being occupied by apolitical NGOs. Though there are a few independent unions working for the cause of unorganised labour.

 

 

The emergence of cooperatives in India can be located in the backdrop of democratic socialism and a welfare state. They emerged as a hybrid coalition of rich, middle and intermediary peasant castes, small landholders and agricultural labour in service of the welfare state. Cooperatives also facilitated the heralding of a ‘passive revolution’ (Gramsci’s notion interpreted for welfare state policies) in India presided over by the state. This coalition became powerful in the green revolution states during the 1960s and 1970s and later spread into other areas. Soon these institutions were taken over by the rich and entrenched, a natural outcome of a multi-class alliance devoid of a ‘political’ grounding. This inherent weakness in their structure resulted in a reproduction of the same social and economic relations.

The entrenched and dominant sections that controlled the cooperatives were also successful in obtaining dual and apparently contradictory benefits. They both wanted to trade and earn profit through the market as also wanted an increased surplus with the help of state subsides. In an attempt to acquire legitimacy for the latter they transformed themselves into a powerful political force by articulating a rural urban divide, contending that since rural India was ignored at the expense of urban India it was the moral duty of the state to subsidise ‘development’ in rural areas. Thus, cooperatives failed in catering to the universal interest. However, the present policy discourse has made their ideology of ‘passive revolution’ irrelevant and hence resulted in a loss of state patronage.

When people-centric demands were articulated through various social movements in the 1980s, there was a glimmer of hope for a vibrant civil society. These formations focusing on environment, livelihood, women’s issues and so on were regarded as harbingers of change. They sought to reorient state attitude, polices and programmes away from an elitist and gender-insensitive frame, to a people-centric and gender-responsive model. In the process, these movements also challenged the developmental ideology as conceived by the postcolonial Indian state.

However, in a few years these movements started losing their sheen. The most significant movement(s), namely the environment movements that have explicitly challenged the mainstream development framework, failed even during the height of the struggle to present an alternative development model. Their efforts were limited to working with people, understanding their problems and translating it into a Weberain language for policy intervention. Consequently, they were unable to develop requisite ideological clarity for resolving the class contradiction between the various stakeholders in the movement. This gradually resulted not only in a fragmentation of their support base but an acceptance of right-wing politics by their members. Finally, the movements were unable to develop leadership from within their stakeholders, the reliance on an external socially sensitive middle class gradually eroding their legitimacy.

 

 

The present development discourse of ‘good governance’ assigns a primary role to the institutions of civil society (read NGOs) in conceiving, planning and monitoring development. This has resulted in a proliferation of NGOs working on a wide range of developmental schemes. NGOs, however, have miserably failed to usher in a regime of empowered and inclusive development. The reasons are both structural as well as functional. The former entails that civil society institutions do not have to evolve as per the interaction of society, polity and economy but are artificially created from above. This in turn also implies that the state and its officials are corrupt, unresponsive and unaccountable and hence should transfer their duties to institutions, created by them yet outside their administrative control.

This structural lacuna converts most NGOs into extension agents of the government who have to work in a project and time-bound mode. Given the pressure of schedules, they are rarely in a position to tackle the structural factors responsible for marginalization. Consequently, they have become centres for the disbursement of funds received from various donors. The dependence on government for funds as also developmental intervention makes them ineffective in demanding state accountability. The silence of these civil society agents during the communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 is a case in point.

 

 

It has to be accepted, however grudgingly, that non-secular and exclusivist social collectives are equally part of civil society. Normally ignored by civil society theorists, they have of late attracted attention due to the failure of class politics, opportunism of caste and centrist politics and the failure of the masses to relate themselves with the symbols of ‘secular’ development (dams, modern education).

An important family of organisations in civil society has a single agenda of reorienting popular consciousness towards a right-wing cultural politics. In this age of neo-liberalism, it nurtures hundreds of organizations, many of which are registered as NGOs, working all over the country and promoting its ideology. These institutions try to construct a homogenous Hindu identity cutting across caste, class and gender, primarily by invoking cultural symbols and constructing an adversarial ‘other’ image of minorities. Their intervention, through education and other developmental schemes, is merely a cover for disciplining the popular consciousness towards its cultural and political ideology. The members of these collectives also serve as vote banks for capturing the state apparatus through elections and further push an exclusivist agenda. Therefore, civil society becomes a domain where a reactionary particularistic identity overwhelms a universal citizens’ identity.

 

 

Finally, we consider three types of advocacy groups. One, organisations which work towards protecting the civil liberties of the citizen. They came up because of the tendency of the state, in alignment with entrenched sections to indulge in violence against its citizen, especially the poor. They also document and publicise violation of civil liberties of vulnerable social groups by dominant social groups. These groups comprise of people with faith in a democratic left ideology. However, some tend to support revolutionary violence as a response to state violence even as others decry violence irrespective of its nature.

Two, new groups have emerged against the centralised, unaccountable, patriarchal and at times communal character of the state/society. They primarily draw on the legacy of new social movements. These groups focus on people-centric development, tribal self-rule, attempt to make the state and its institutions transparent and accountable, protest against ‘development’ induced displacement, patriarchal domination, caste oppression, and the communalisation of polity and society. The ideological proclivity of these groups varies, but all of them can be broadly classified as progressive and democratic in nature and most of them oppose the present form of globalisation.

Though these two types of advocacy groups are successful in articulating genuine demands of the people, they remain at the periphery. In most instances they operate within parameters set by the state, even if some of them do not believe in the institutions of the state. This makes them more reactive than pro-active. Another reason for their limited success is a lack of coverage by the popular print and electronic media that increasingly caters to only the tastes of the middle and upper middle classes.

 

 

The last in our series are caste-based advocacy groups. Initially, the upper castes formed social collectives in order to ‘protect’ their culture and maintain their social hegemony. The overlapping membership between such collectives and the state institutions helped them in their endeavour. Subsequently, social collectives of lower castes came up to claim their legitimate space in the public domain. Presently, the primary aim of all caste collectives is to protect, often through violent means, the social, political and economic interests of their members. Though part of civil society, their objective is to influence/manipulate the state apparatus for sectarian ends, an endeavour greatly helped by the ‘politicisation of castes’.

Overall, we see that a wide variety of social collectives have come up in post-colonial India depending upon the context-specific interaction of society, polity and economy. The collectives trying to articulate people’s agenda remain on the periphery while those with an exclusivist agenda have come to the fore. Their clout perhaps owes most to the ascendance of middle class politics. This class comprising not more than 8-10% of the population claims legitimacy to speak on behalf of the society. It has also given legitimacy to market friendly economic policies and right-wing politics, both united in the belief that one has to be satisfied with whatever endowment one originally had.

This can be better understood by dissecting the claim that the market creates equal opportunities for all, a claim hinging on the critical assumption that initial distribution of property is equal. The market not only excludes people as consumers if they lack income, it also excludes them as producers or sellers if they fall short of assets/capabilities.⁷ In the absence of equitable asset distribution, such pro-market economic policies can result in increasing inequality between and within social groups and widen inter and intra regional disparities. Similarly, the Hindutva ideology resents all types of democratic assertion. Any assertion by dalits is regarded as spoiling the social order, by women as destroying ‘peaceful’ family life and by labour as retarding the production process and efficiency.

The India of this minority, no doubt, shines, but at the expense of a dark and bleak India of the majority. In such a politico-economic milieu, the threat to cherished values of social equality and democratic welfare emanates from numerous institutions present in the civil society. There are several struggles against them but they continue to be rather localised. Unless they achieve an organic unity through dissolving political differences, the threat will always remain potent.

 

Footnotes:

1. One of the major planks of the ‘feel good’ campaign launched by the BJP is the apparent surge of economic growth that the country has witnessed under the NDA regime. The BJP newsletter describes it as ‘Hindu’ to ‘Hindutva’ rate of growth, apparently referring to slow rate of growth of 3.5% in earlier decades in comparison to the growth of 8.4% achieved in the second quarter of the current financial year (BJP Today, 1-15 February 2004, 13(3).

2. This lopsided growth itself perfectly fits into the phrase – Hindu to Hindutva rate of growth. The latter perhaps indicates a planned process that feeds into the reinvention of India into a hierarchical social and economic order as per the dictates of Vedic Brahmanism.

3. The commentators giving primacy to market forces consider it as the space between family and the market, whereas commentators giving primacy to the state treat it as a space between family and the state.

4. The validity of this is most eloquently contested by C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh, The Market That Failed (New Delhi, Left World, 2000), 31-40.

5. Jan Bremen, ‘Communal Upheaval as Resurgence of Social Darwinism’ , Economic and Political Weekly, 2002, 36(16), 1485-1488.

6. See Aseema Sinha, ‘Ideas, Interests and Institutions in Policy Change’ in Rob Jenkins (ed) Regional Reflections: Comparing Politics Across Indian States (New Delhi, OUP, 2004), 84-85.

7. Deepak Nayyar, ‘Economic Development and Political Democracy: Interaction of Economics and Politics in Independent India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 33(49), 3121-22.