Vignettes

Learning through association

I knew CSDS mainly through my husband, Gorrepati Narendranath’s involvement in Lokayan. (Till then, the CSDS professors who came and taught us in the Sociology Department, Delhi University, though intellectually interesting, were rather remote and impersonal.) My only contribution to Lokayan, being a South Indian, was to pack lunches with some inevitable curd-rice. But I did try to make them as interesting as I could, truly because I had respect and affection for those guys there (there was no woman at that time except for Vandana Shiva; Rajni Bakshi and Medha Patkar’s brief stints came later, and Ritu Priya joined towards the end of the project, but continued to associate with Lokayan in its independent process phase). I was at the time juggling with my PhD, a baby and other family issues.

Vijay Pratap introduced us to Lokayan. Naren was a natural ally. He had decided to work with the State Bank of Hyderabad for only five years, and gave it up to do full time public work. At every opportunity in the bank, he took leave without pay in order to go around the country to interact with movements, political parties and political thinkers. Lokayan provided just the right platform and the transition time for him to hone his thinking and life plans.

Naren, within two years of his involvement in Lokayan, felt restless. He wanted to live the truths he had learnt – go and soil his hands at grassroots social mobilization. Hence we moved to Hyderabad and then on to Venkatramapuram, Chittoor district, Andhra Pradesh. However, he carried with him the profound ideas of those times: the importance of non-party political mobilization, the role of academic-activist collaboration in nation-building, the need for a serious understanding of environmental issues, of engagement with identity politics for social justice, respect for women’s issues, and so on. He continued to value the national platforms, the macro debates, as well as efforts at intellectual-activist partnership to help evolve a shared theoretical understanding of society, polity, culture and civilization. His subsequent activity in public life was informed by the above insights he gained from Lokayan.

Naren and Vijay Pratap, with the backing of Suresh Sharma, led a campaign to make Lokayan into an independent forum with no limits on it as an academic institution and eschewing any dependence on international funding. As a result Lokayan, which was initially a CSDS project funded by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, decided to prematurely terminate the relationship.

Naren continued to be in touch with Lokayan through Vijay Pratap till his end.

Uma Shankari

 

Rethinking democracy

Indira Gandhi’s return to power in 1980 felt like a betrayal of democracy.

I had been at Indraprastha College during the Emergency and thus lived through the fear and shame of those years – when a lecturer took me aside and quietly advised that it was not wise to be critical of the Emergency in classroom discussions.

Indira Gandhi’s defeat in the general elections of 1977 felt like a rebirth of both independence and democracy in India. Therefore, the rapid collapse of the Janata government and Indira’s return to power left me wondering how a truly representative government and freedom of thought and ideas would now thrive, or even survive, in India.

Within weeks of my joining The Indian Express as a reporter in 1981, I was sent to cover a spontaneous citizens’ protest – triggered by a suspension of water supply to an entire area of Mumbai. Soon the strike by Mumbai’s 2.5 lakh textile workers also started gathering momentum. In each of these cases, people were raging against the failure of both political parties and other established mechanisms of democratic governance.

So what will make democracy a reality for every citizen? This was the question I repeatedly discussed with my Editor, Darryl D’Monte. It was Darryl who guided me to Lokayan and CSDS. It was sometime in 1981 that I met Rajni Kothari and Vijay Pratap and thus wrote a lengthy article in the Indian Express (a full page, space that is now unimaginable for articles of this kind in most papers).

Lokayan exercised a magnetic pull because it was a space, a meeting ground for academics, activists and just ordinary folk who were troubled by that core question – whither democracy?

For the next eight years, I interacted with the Lokayan family at various levels and attended many of the meetings they convened in different parts of India. Lokayan thus became a gift of a multiplicity of experience and learning with a wide range of political activists; emerging protest movements; images and details of what people were struggling for and what they opposed; a critique of the dominant definition of ‘development’; and a perspective which located all of this and much more in a non-partisan frame that saw all these as civilizational challenges.

Looking back, Lokayan seems to have filled the phase between the decline, or withering away, of the JP movement and the rise of new formations and mobilizations. In the 1980s, there were few other places where academics and activists could meet for free and open discourses not inhibited or constrained by a ‘party line’.

My time at Lokayan as a full-time co-convenor and co-editor of the English Lokayan Bulletin, from mid-1989 to February 1991, coincided with the peak of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) and the escalation of communal tensions created through the Ramjanmabhoomi campaign. Apart from trying to enhance the debate on these critical issues through the Bulletin, most of us in Lokayan were also deeply involved in the NBA as well as in anti-communal efforts on the ground. Much that I learnt then, both as co-editor of the Bulletin and through participation in ground-level activist mobilization, still informs my understanding of politics and non-party activism.

The 1990s saw the emergence of many new forums or platforms and networks of activist groups. The NBA’s activities led to the birth of the Jan Vikas Andolan, the Bharat Jan Andolan and later the National Alliance of People’s Movements, among other such initiatives.

At the level of ideas, the critique of development, which had been voiced and thought through in Lokayan, moved out of the margins and became increasingly mainstream. Important landmarks in this were the Brundtland Report of 1989, which informed the Earth Summit at Rio in 1992 and made ‘sustainable development’ a globally accepted goal. It was also in the early 1990s that the United Nations came up with its Human Development Index.

Of course, the core challenges remain, but not in an ‘unchanged’ form. It is deeply significant that climate change is today seen as the greatest market failure in history. This positive trend must inform our struggle against the ‘negative’ trend – namely that the dominant discourse still aims to address climate change largely or entirely through mechanisms that are ‘market compatible’.

I believe that there is now even greater scope for dialogue and open disagreement across seemingly vast and even bitter differences of perspective. The memory of the Lokayan experiment and striving can enrich this, not in a literal manner but in spirit, as a set of values underlying our intellectual culture.

Rajni Bakshi

 

Reflections

AS a medical student at the beginning of the decade of the 1980s, I was deeply dissatisfied with our education and its relevance in the Indian context. In my attempts to explore the world outside the conventional medical realm, I found resonance in an initial interaction with various social movements and civil society groups. Beginning with my first contact in 1982, I received support from the Medico Friends Circle and from Lokayan, and they played a critical role in giving direction to my explorations. Both forums exposed me to a wide range of perspectives and experiments.

My first visit to a rural community health programme was with Smitu Kothari, co-convenor of Lokayan, who was part of the process of organizing a meeting at Deenabandhupuram in Tamil Nadu, where David Werner (author of Where There is No Doctor) and Mira Shiva left a distinct impression. The dialogues organized by Lokayan on issues other than those directly related to health sharpened my understanding of their relationship with health.They also gave me the intellectual confidence to articulate issues around the politics of knowledge within the sphere of health.

The year and a half I spent working with and visiting various rural health and development programmes as well as attending various dialogues/seminars organised by Lokayan and others that were part of its network, allowed me to document and analyze the civil society action in health – summarized in an article published in the Lokayan Bulletin. Volunteering with Lokayan in editing its Hindi journal, Lokayan Samvad evam Sameeksha, and sporadically writing review articles as well as an editorial with Vijay Pratap on the need for a dialogue network for health issues, a Swasthya Panchayat, for the English Lokayan Bulletin, gave space for thinking about furthering the perspectives of democratic development in public health. Moving to the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health at JNU provided a formal academic environment that facilitated further exploration in the same direction and honed my knowledge and analysis within the discipline of public health. The contributions that Lokayan had made held me in good stead even here.

Thirty years on, the entire policy environment has shifted and so has, in large measure, the academic pursuits in public health. The commodification of health and marketization of health care have acquired extremely unhealthy dimensions. One senses a TINA (there is no alternative) syndrome among both activists and academics, further bolstering the globalization of capital and its ramifications. The ‘rights approach’ seems to have displaced all other forms of progressive, pro-people, pro-poor action. The community perspective, people’s knowledge, and people’s agency rarely figure in much of the dissenting thinking and action. Bringing the politics of knowledge back into public discourse seems crucial at a stage where the gap between India and Bharat is getting dangerously wide, even while the economic and consumption aspirations seem to converge.

The lessons from Lokayan’s earlier role in creating a space for public articulation of democratic development need to be revived. As a teacher and research guide in public health, I notice that many young people today are questioning the present, but do not have any exposure of the kind a holistic social movement generates, something that Lokayan was able to nurture through its process of dialogues. Neither is there an academic environment that gives them the confidence to surmount the TINA barrier. How to rearticulate the ideas of democratic development in the academic sphere in ways that can concretely impact the approach to public policy is one challenge. How to generate a politics of holistic thinking that gives primacy to people’s health, wellbeing and happiness rather than to competitive economic growth alone is another. Public action that can create an environment which gives confidence to dissenting voices of Bharat, is an even bigger challenge. Initiatives by SADED (South Asian Dialogues on Ecological Democracy, another action research initiative located at CSDS since 2002) such as the Koi Bhookha Na Soye Samvad (that was envisaged to complement the Right to Food Campaign by re-emphasizing community responsibility and notions of sharing), explicating the links between sustainable food production, food security and nutrition, and organizing dialogues on ways to integrate traditional medicine into modern healthcare systems are all attempts in this direction. Lokayan or Lokayan-like initiatives are crucial, because the young are exploring, and we need to create the platform(s) to give space and courage for their flight of imagination.

Ritu Priya