On New Social Movements and the Reinvention of India

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ON NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND “THE REINVENTION OF INDIA”

Alf Gunvald Nilsen

Introduction

On January 26, 2003, the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) – an India-wide network of social movements - launched the Desh Bachao, Desh Banao Abhiyan (DBDBA, Save the Nation, Build the Nation Campaign) in Plachimada in Kerala. After a two-month long march, the campaign ended in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh where a National People’s Agenda was declared. The campaign – including the location of its beginning and conclusion and the agenda that was declared – is very telling in terms of the convulsions that are currently transforming Indian society. The National People’s Agenda (NPA) starts as follows:

The Abhiyan was launched on January 26, 2003, from Plachimada (Dist. Palakkad) in Kerala, with a protest against the Coca-Cola factory as a symbol of the struggle against Globalisation. For over two months, the Abhiyan traversed through 19 states, participating in over 350 large rallies and holding meetings and discussions with activists and organisations. It concluded at Ayodhya on March 30th 2003, with a call for religious tolerance, secularism, opposition to the political-economic policy which leads to the dominance of Global Capital as also a determination to strive for a just and sustainable alternative model of development (NAPM, 2003: 1).

Launching the DBDBA in Plachimada, Kerala, where Coca Cola’s ravaging of ground water resources constitutes a grave testimony to the social consequences of neoliberal restructuring and concluding in Ayodhya, the infamous site of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and consequent outbreaks of communal pogroms is nothing short of an explicit symbolic positioning of the NAPM’s struggle to “save” and “build” the nation squarely at the centre of the transformative conjuncture which Corbridge and Harriss have referred to as ‘the reinvention of India’.

India, write Corbridge and Harriss (2000: xvi), ‘was the subject of a particular, very deliberate act of invention’ in which a nation-building project was crafted for the soon-to-be sovereign and independent state by influential leaders of the nationalist movement[1]. This invention was characterized by the making of ‘a template for the invention of modern India’ which consisted of four ‘mythologies of rule’ – democracy, federalism, socialism, and secularism – which provided the national project of state-led capitalist development with ideological legitimacy (ibid: 21-22; see also Corbridge, 1995). By the 1990s, the protracted unmaking of this project – stretching, according to Corbridge and Harriss (2000: Chapters 4 and 5), back to the mid-1960s – had engendered new and ‘vigorous attempts to re-imagine the country, its economy and society’ (ibid: xviii). Unlike the invention of India on the eve of the Raj, this is not a ‘considered process’ but a process of ‘struggle and negotiation’ which has emerged from ‘the failings of the modernizing mission of the Nehruvian state’ (ibid. xviii), and which is characterised by a particular social field of force. On the one hand, there are the ‘elite revolts’ of neoliberal restructuring and Hindu communalism, both of which reflect and are vehicles for the interests and aspirations especially of the middle class and higher-caste Indians (ibid.: xix). On the other hand, there are multiple forms of ‘subaltern politics’ which represent ‘another long history, that of resistance to the established order by those who have been the objects of oppression’ (ibid: xix). The forms of subaltern politics that Corbridge and Harriss single out for scrutiny range from what they call ‘empowerment from without’ – i.e. constitutional provisions for job reservations, reservations of educational places and seats in political assemblies, and generally the extension of the franchise to dalits and adivasis –to ‘empowerment from within’ – i.e. a range of new social movements (NSMs) and political parties that have recently emerged from these marginalised communities, and their increased participation in electoral politics[2].

The focal point of this article is precisely the role of NSMs in the ‘reinvention of India’, and in particular, the way in which their politics are analyzed and represented in academic perspectives[3]. I focus on two key areas: firstly, the assertion that India’s NSMs represent voices of “otherness” emanating from beyond the postcolonial development project and articulating a rejection of this project, and secondly, the argument that NSMs in India are most likely to have a positive impact upon the situation of marginalised subaltern groups if they seek empowerment through the liberal democratic state. The discussion is carried out in light of empirical data from my own research on the character and trajectory of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save the Narmada Movement), one of the most well-known and important social movements to emerge in India over the past two decades. The NBA emerged in opposition to the construction of a series of large dams on the NarmadaRiver in central and Western India. The dam projects will cause extensive submergence and displacement, and in the mid-1980s social action groups working with dam-affected adivasi (indigenous) groups and gradually also in caste Hindu farming communities in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh started an intense questioning of the responsible authorities as to the prospects for fair and adequate resettlement and rehabilitation.By the late 1980s, several of these groups had merged into the pan-state organisation Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save the Narmada Movement) which articulated a stance of total opposition to the kingpin in the project – the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) – and which further embedded its campaign against the SSP in a trenchant critique of the dominant model of development in India (see Baviskar, 1995; Dwivedi, 2006; Nilsen, 2006 and forthcoming). I choose to frame my argument this way because the NBA is particularly relevant to the arguments developed in this article: its politics relate directly to the postcolonial development project – dams, as Nehru famously dubbed them, were posited as “the temples of modern India” – and the Indian state – the NBA’s strategy of resistance has sought to hold the state accountable to constitutional principles, legal codes, and norms and standards related to forced displacement. I start, however, with a brief overview of the emergence of NSMs in India since the 1970s.

India’s New Social Movements from the 1970s to the 1990s: A Brief Overview

The Nehruvian nation-building project can be said to have been underpinned by a truce line which ran between a ‘developmental state which promised to end poverty and backwardness’ (Chatterjee, 2004: 37) on the one hand and demobilised and co-opted popular classes on the other. Following the end of the Telangana uprising in 1951, subaltern social movements by and large remained quiescent and ceded their autonomy to ‘the strong hand of the Nehruvian state’ (Katzenstein and Ray, 2005: 14). The acquiescence of social movements was in turn compounded by the fact that subaltern groups did not enjoy unmediated access to the state apparatus and the electoral process. Congress rule by and large left local power structures intact and poor social majorities thus remained dependent upon local notables in accessing the state. The result was the failure to convert ‘the superior numbers of the poor into a powerful political resource’ (Frankel, 2005: 25).

However, the eruption of the Naxalite revolt in West Bengal in 1967 sounded the death knell of subaltern acquiescence and marked the onset of a decade in which India – much like the rest of the world in the aftermath of the global uprising of 1968 (see Watts, 2001) – witnessed the emergence of new social movements that subjected the exclusionary and exploitative dimensions of state-led capitalist development to substantial critique (Vanaik, 1990; Omvedt, 1993; Kamat, 2002; Ray and Katzenstein, 2005).During the early 1970s in India, there occurred ‘a substantial radicalization of youth … outside the circles of the traditional left’ (Vanaik, 1990: 195), which in turn resulted in the organisation of groups and mobilisation around issues that had been neglected by the mainstream left. Significant movements of the 1970s were the Chipko movement which championed the livelihoods of forest-dwelling communities in Uttarkhand (Guha 1989; Basu 1987), the Kerala Fishworkers’ Forum which organized poor fisherfolk in Kerala against the depredations wrought on their livelihoods by mechanized trawling (Basu, 1987; Shah, 1988), and the Shramik Sangathana which organized Bhil adivasis in Maharashtra around issues of agricultural wages, land control and forest rights (Basu 1987; Shah 1988; Upadhyaya, 1980). Moreover, the 1970s witnessed the mushrooming of various social action groups – a phenomenon that Kamat (2002: 10) refers to as ‘the new grassroots movement’ – which came to identify the dominant conception or ideology of development as the root cause of persistent poverty and increasing inequalities in Indian society. These groups particularly flourished in the wake of the Emergence, when the Janata government encouraged ‘voluntary work and the formation of voluntary organizations in the countryside’ (ibid.: 12).

From the middle of the 1980s, India’s NSMs increasingly came to be involved in a search for perspectives and agendas that could serve as a unifying platform for the diverse struggles that had emerged during the previous one and a half decades. For some movements – like the Kerala Fishworkers’ Forum and the Shetkari Sangathana – this revolved around addressing gender relations and feminist politics; for others – like the Chattisgarh Mukti Morcha – it revolved around developing a red-green politics, i.e. a worker-peasant alliance around the politics of social justice and environmental sustainability (Omvedt, 1993: 230-36). As Omvedt points out, the attempts to forge a common platform reached a high point with the National Rally Against Destructive Development in Harsud, Madhya Pradesh in September 1989, where between 25.000 and 50.000 activists from different social movements gathered to discuss an agenda which could unite different struggles against destructive development projects (ibid: 269-60).

Another crucial process that unfolded towards the end of the 1980s was the increasing integration of the politics of the NSMs in a national field of force characterised by the onset of neoliberal restructuring and Hindu communalism. An important event in this process was the “mandate of 89” – i.e. the 1989 elections that sent a new opposition force, the National Front coalition to power. This government borrowed key themes from the social movements: decentralisation, social justice for backward castes, and promises of remunerative prices and debt relief for peasants dominated political manifestos (Omvedt 1993: 273). The National Front government was thus a government ‘elected on a mandate of change and with social movement backing’ but it was also ‘a fragile coalition government marked by factionalism’ which lacked the capacity for concerted political action (ibid: 274). This became obvious when Prime Minister V. P. Singh decided to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission on positive discrimination for lower caste groups in 1990; as Omvedt points out, this was ‘the one social movement issue that did not require a major political reformulation of the process of development’ (ibid: 280). It did,nevertheless, turn out to be an explosive move: it triggered political protest by Hindu communalist forces across the country and eventually led to the downfall of the Singh government(see Frankel 2005: 688-9).Simultaneously, the Indian economy was mired ever-deeper in a crippling fiscal crisis. Thus, when Narasimha Rao’s Congress government assumed power in 1991, the floodgates of neoliberal restructuring were opened once and for all (ibid.: 590).

For some commentators, for example Basu (1987), Vanaik (1990) and Omvedt (1993),the failure of India’s NSMs to decisively advance their agenda in the late 1980s and early 1990s puts the stamp of defeat upon these movements. Yet movement struggles are still vigorous in India; indeed, as neoliberal restructuring picks up momentum, so too does popular mobilisation. Most recently this has been evidenced in the upshot of significant movements and networks of resistance to the introduction of Special Economic Zones in India. Surely, there is due reason for scholars to focus their gaze on the characteristics and dynamics of the movements of subaltern social groups as India enters the twenty-first century, but this also raises questions about the aptness of the analytical perspectives we deploy. In the remainder of the article I hope to contribute to a debate about this through a critical discussion of academic perspectives on two aspects of NSMs in India – the relationship between social movements and the postcolonial development project, and the relationship between social movements and the state.

Academic Perspectives on India’s New Social Movements: Some Critical Reflections

Beyond Development? NSMs and thePostcolonial Development Project

For some time now it has been fashionable among critics from the quarters of poststructuralism and postcolonialism to posit India’s NSMs as the bearers of an authentic and insurrectionary otherness that is mobilized in opposition and from a position of exteriority to the modern development project.These perspectives typically draw on Escobar’s (1995: 13) argument that “development” is a discourse which relies ‘exclusively on one knowledge system, namely, the modern Western one’ and thus dictates ‘the marginalization and disqualification of non-Western knowledge systems’, and that social movements in the global South do not articulate ‘development alternatives’ so much as ‘alternatives to development, that is, the rejection of the entire paradigm altogether’ (ibid: 215)[4]. For instance, in his analysis of NSMs in India, Parajuli (1991: 182) argues that ‘[t]he political significance of these struggles is that they challenge the notion of the integrationist and developmentalist Indian state’. They do this by opposing a ‘counterdiscourse’ of ‘[situated] knowledge that is locatable in time and space, embodied in struggle and participatory in process’ to the ‘unmarked, disembodied, unmediated, transcendent knowledge’ of the developmentalist state (ibid: 186, 185). Elsewhere he argues that ‘the movements against big dams, collieries, and forest policies in Jharkhand and other parts of India are … gaining conceptual maturity and confidence to challenge the whole edifice of modern resource management and development’ as they ‘renew and reassert subjugated traditions of knowledge in a new situation’ (Parajuli, 1996: 32-3). Shiva and Mies have argued about the women activists of the revered Chipko movement that ‘they expect nothing from “development” or from the money economy. They want to preserve their autonomous control over their subsistence base, their common property resources: the land, water, forests, hills’ (cited in Rangan, 2000: 34). Along similar lines, Kala (2001: 14), argues that through its resistance to big dams, the Narmada Bachao Andolan (see below) pits ‘the lived space of adivasi and peasant communities’ against ‘a space of erasure’ which is ‘the abstract space of the state and of transnational corporations’.

However, fine-grained analyses of the cultural politics of resistance articulated by precisely those movements glorified as lodestars that will guide subalterns on their way beyond development suggest that these claims are erroneous. For instance, Rangan (1996, 2000) and Sinha (2004) have both carried out substantial research on popular mobilization in the Tehri-Garwhal Himalayas – home of the Chipko movement in the 1970s – and both reach similar conclusions about the character of this mobilization. Rangan (2000: 222)argues that movements in the region – and in India more generally - are most aptly understood as ‘demanding their rights to greater access to a more generous idea of development’. Sinha (2004: 308) argues along similar lines when he suggests that social movements make recourse to the development project in articulating ‘new political programs’ and creating ‘new bases for social and political life’. These are assertions that I find to be borne out by the character of the NBA’s critique of the dominant direction and meaning of the postcolonial development project in India. What is so striking about this critique is that there is nothing in it to suggest a rejection of development and modernity as such. Rather, the idioms that gave meaning to the developmental rationale of modern India are used as a point of departure for a critique of the actual direction of development, which has exploited, excluded, and marginalised popular classes. Let me illustrate with an observation from my fieldwork.

In conjunction with the monsoon Satyagraha[5] of 2000, the NBA staged a celebration of India’s Independence Day on August 15. In the adivasi village of Nimgavhan (Maharashtra), Independence Day began with the hoisting of both the Indian flag and the NBA’s banner by a veteran Gandhian and respected freedom fighter, Siddharaj Dhadda. Following the flag hoisting, a confrontational event erupted. Two teachers were present at the ceremony. These teachers were employed at local state-run schools, but the reality was that their teaching was as absent as the schools they were supposed to be running. The teachers were confronted by agitated villagers and activists who argued that their vocation amounted to little more than picking up their paycheques. This dismal state of affairs was then thrown into sharp relief with the following point on the programme: the felicitation of young adivasis who had fared well in official schools after first having completed basic schooling in the Andolan’s Jeevan Shalas – literally “schools for life” built and run by the Andolan with a curriculum adapted to adivasi realities. Following this, the celebrations continued in the nearby village of Domkhedi with the inauguration of a micro-hydel project. A check-dam had been constructed on a small stream adjacent to Domkhedi, which, when combined with a pedal-powered generator, provided electricity to the village for the first time ever. Whereas the SSP threatened to displace the villagers from their lands and produce costly electricity that would only be available to affluent and predominantly urban consumers, here was a project controlled and executed at village level that actually had the potential of delivering a tangible improvement in people’s lives.