[IMC Bombay] Review

[Mangesh Kulkarni]

Hello,

Please find below the text of my review entitled 'The
Discrete Charm of the Adivasi' which recently appeared
in the EPW.

I would be glad to have your comments. As my VSNL
mailbox is blocked, please send your reply to the
Yahoo address.

Regards,

Mangesh
____________

The Discrete Charm of the Adivasi

Development Hegemony: NGOs and the State in India by
Sangeeta Kamat; Oxford University Press, New Delhi,
2002; pp xiii + 187, HB, Rs 495.

- Mangesh Kulkarni


And you are reduced to so much small change in her
hand.
– Arun Kolatkar (1978: 22)

The rise of radical grass roots organisations (GOs)
working among the subaltern strata has been one of the
widely debated features of the post-Nehruvian era in
Indian politics [vide Kulkarni 1996:43-47]. The book
under review–a revised version of a doctoral
dissertation submitted to an American university –
seeks to theorise the fast changing nature of such
organisations to discern the possibilities for a
comprehensive political movement projecting a utopian
vision of a new struggle. To this end, Sangeeta Kamat
uses a method involving a blend of post-structuralist
and political economic analysis focusing on the
language, practices and everyday political choices of
the GOs and the extent to which these challenge the
prevailing conceptions of development, capitalism and
neoliberalism.

Kamat’s entire argument is built around a critical
ethnographic account of a prominent GO that has been
working with adivasi communities in western India. As
the analysis is aimed at the extrication of structural
trends and not at any one particular organisation, the
GO and its personnel are given fictitious names. The
author’s central contention is that four discursive
moments play a significant role in structuring the
discourse of social transformation at the grass roots
in ways that align with the statist discourse of
development, modernisation and nationalism. These
moments are the separation of the economic from the
political, commodity fetishism, reification of the
state, and individualisation of social relations of
exploitation. Together they produce an ‘NGO-isation’
of grass roots politics nationally and worldwide. Each
of these moments is explicated through a detailed
examination of the relevant aspects of the GO under
scrutiny.

The introductory chapter deals with the debates on
development and the role of non-party political
formations (NPPFs). The author sees ‘development’ as
the religion of the epoch of post-colonialism and
continued imperialism. She views the post-1970
NPPFs/GOs as sites of resistance to the
macro-processes of domination coded as development,
which are also vulnerable to co-optation. They made an
attempt to politically interrogate and alter the
hegemonic development discourse on behalf of the poor
and the marginalised. The state sought to depoliticise
them by construing development as resource
mobilisation, while many international donors tried to
use them to remove the vestiges of feudal social
relations so as to facilitate the advance of
capitalism.

The second chapter surveys theories of state and civil
society. Kamat rejects the liberal understanding of
these categories and their interrelationship, instead
positing a theoretical framework akin to the one
developed by Mouffe and Laclau to analyse the new
social movements. The latter involves a mix of
Gramscian and Foucauldian perspectives. She treats
civil society and the state as coextensive.
Accordingly, GOs are seen not as an autonomous
tendency of civil society, but as articulated with the
consent and legitimation functions of the state. The
selected organisation is said to exemplify the
broadest possible tendency of NPPFs in India. Hence
its critique is expected to uncover processes that may
enable a general theoretical understanding of the role
and nature of GOs and of what is at stake for the Left
in formulating a radical political praxis.

The discourse of depoliticisation is analysed in the
third chapter. It focuses on the formative stage of
the selected GO during the early 1980s when the
activist couple that launched it discovered and
successfully fought against bonded labour. The
depoliticising intervention of the state is revealed
through the stand taken by CAPART (the central
government agency that aids GOs) which forbade the
militant (read political) mobilisation of adivasis,
compelling the activists to create a dual structure: a
suitably ‘non-political’ development organisation
eligible for government and donor support (the
Sansad), and a toilers’ union engaged in a battle for
justice and rights (the Sanghatana). In this context
the author highlights the contradictory role of the
law in reconciling legitimacy and development
imperatives, and of the state as guarantor of justice
and protector of an exploitative system.

Despite the activists’ radical perspective, the very
logic of the dual organisational structure drove a
wedge between the GO’s technocratically managed
economic/health programmes governed by the dictates of
the statist developmental agenda and its
democratically deployed political/pedagogic programmes
geared to social transformation. The fourth chapter
spells out the baleful consequences of the dichotomy
through an extended appraisal of the Sansad’s dairy
development project (1988-91). The project– granted by
the government as part of its donor-inspired,
long-standing and large scheme in this sector–involved
the allocation of hybrid cows to tribal beneficiaries.
It ended in a fiasco as the government reneged on its
commitment to supply the requisite feed and to buy
milk at a remunerative price. Further complications
resulted from an increasing discord between the
expectations/perceptions of the GO activists and the
intended beneficiaries. The deeper causes of the
failure lay in the faulty premises underlying the
development strategy of the GO’s leadership, which
entailed a reified conception of the economy stripped
of its socio-historical and political specificities, a
misplaced commodification of the cow, and a
fetishisation of the state as a benevolent source of
material and cognitive support.

The fifth chapter entitled ‘The Discreet Charm of the
Petit Bourgeoisie or the Translation of Coercion into
Consent’ discusses the ideological import of the
pedagogical programme of the Sanghatana and analyses
the social location of the personnel who typically
occupy leadership positions in GOs. A short
description of the deliberations at a learning camp
organised by the Sanghatana discloses a pedagogy
propagating notions of scientific temper and the rule
of law that seem devoid of a proper understanding of
the dynamics of tribal culture and of the structural
propensities of the state and the economy. The
individuals who function as mentors in GOs are seen to
hail from a certain stratum of the petit bourgeoisie
that lacks the resources required to capture the elite
positions in society. They turn to the voluntary
sector in pursuit of their political and career
aspirations. These individuals disseminate their
statist and scientistic worldview in the sector,
contributing to its deradicalisation.

In the concluding chapter the author defines NGOs as
“organisations that engender a corporatist identity
among their members, that work within the existing
political forms of the state, and do not facilitate a
reinterpretation of the material basis for a
collective identity” (p 161). She then expatiates on
the growing NGO-isation of grass roots politics, which
furthers the agenda of the increasingly intertwined
national and global ruling classes. Despite these
sombre forebodings, the book ends with the affirmation
that “the numerous grass roots struggles that attempt
to construct a new cultural politics that creatively
engages with the institutions and ideologies of
modernity belie the hegemony of development”. A
specific example of the kind of struggles invoked is
available in the Preface where the author pays tribute
to the Mexican Zapatista movement that began in 1994
as an authentically subaltern upsurge – “clear and
unambiguous in its denouncement of neoliberal economic
policies, and of parliamentary democracy as any path
toward a just and democratic world” (pp 6-7) – and an
emancipatory alternative to the plague of NGO-isation.


Unlike many commentaries on the subject, which tend to
be merely descriptive, hortatory or polemical, Kamat’s
study reveals an attempt to engage in a sustained
theoretical interrogation that ensues in a prima facie
potent and coherent critique of the ideology and
practice of grass roots politics. Unfortunately, her
theoretical framework seems to be anchored in a
romantic notion of the revolution that has little
practical purchase [cf JB 1999:97-106]. Consequently,
the concepts and categories derived from a congeries
of supposedly radical ‘post’-marked discourses and
continually implicated in her critique appear as so
many idées fixes. It must also be pointed out that the
author’s lame attempt to conceal the identity of the
GO constituting the axis of her study is quite
unjustifiable. As there is no reason to continue the
subterfuge, let it be said that the GO is none other
than the Vidhayak Sansad-Shramajeevi Sanghatana duo
founded by Vivek and Vidyullata Pandit in the Thane
district of Maharashtra.

The above-mentioned strategy of concealment emboldens
the author to offer a soi-disant ethnography without
providing a sufficiently detailed socio-cultural map
of the terrain being investigated. This is
particularly ironic considering how frequently she
harps on the political significance of culture.
Further, there is an inexplicable absence of an
adequate delineation of grass roots politics in
Maharashtra, which should have served as a background
to the case study. There are at best stray references
to key GOs that came to prominence in the 1970s like
the Bhoomi Sena and Shramik Sanghatana or to the
contemporary and coterminous Kashtakari Sanghatana and
Shramik Mukti Sanghatana. What is worse, the Index
lists references to the real-life Shramajeevi
Sanghatana under the misleading fictitious title
‘Shramik Sanghatana’.

The author’s selective amnesia enables her to
conveniently refrain from citing and evaluating the
literature directly bearing on the GO. Moreover, it
leads her to distort the trajectory of the
organisation. She attributes the setting up of the
Shramajeevi Sanghatana (SS) to the intervention of
CAPART. But the former was created in 1982, while the
latter came into existence only in 1986. Though the
failed dairy project of the Vidhayak Sansad is
discussed at great length, there is virtually no
mention of the significant struggles mounted by the SS
on the issue of minimum wages and the tribals’ access
to land and forests. It is also rather curious that
while revising her thesis for publication the author
has rested content with the data acquired during her
fieldwork a decade ago. She has not bothered to trace
the many significant initiatives launched by the
Pandits and their confreres since then. They include
Samarthan–a social advocacy network–and innovative
schools for the children of migrant workers [vide
Sommer 2001:21-39]. An assessment of these schemes
would have certainly supplied more grist to her mill.

Such errors of omission could perhaps be overlooked,
but the author is also guilty of serious sins of
commission. A blatant instance is her botched report
of the learning camp (pp 134-38) where she merrily
misdescribes the experiment presented by ‘Kulkarni
Sir’ (the real-life D G Prabhu, a senior activist
widely respected both for his transparent commitment
to the cause and for his erudition) and attributes to
him the ridiculous statement that ‘Galileo was put to
death for speaking the truth’. She objects to the
absence of discussion on questions of land, wage
labour and exploitation, which were in fact always a
part of the pedagogical exercises. There was no
wholesale condemnation of adivasi culture as
unscientific and their plight was not attributed to a
supposed lack of rationality; the socio-structural
causes of their misery were always emphasised.
Contrary to the author’s contention, Jotiba Phule was
not projected merely as a rationalist; his critique of
the brahmanical order was also underscored.

Not content with such misrepresentation, Kamat takes
it upon herself to inform us that Phule founded the
Poona Sarvajanik Sabha in Thane district (p 136). We
are further told that it played an important role in
publicising the 1945 Warli uprising in the district (p
148). The Sabha–a public association founded by G V
Joshi in Pune–was actually criticised by Phule as a
stronghold of brahmanism. A precursor of the Indian
National Congress, it was active in Maharashtra during
the late 19th century. If one were to continue in this
vein, a long list of similar egregious errors could be
compiled. The point to note, however, is that many of
them, once exposed, undermine the validity of her
critical stance.

It would be appropriate to end by responding to the
author’s fascination for the Zapatista movement of the
indigenous people in Mexico, which is redolent of a
New Age avatar of the failed Third Worldism of the
recent past. In this connection, she may want to
ponder over the following remarks offered by James
Overton (2001:150): "The view, that such movements are
not only following a progressive direction but are
also emancipatory…has to be offset against the fact
that, in case of Mexico, the protest involves identity
politics and operates within the context of the
existing class structure…when the political content of
these movements as distinct from their innovative form
is considered, what emerges is a traditional
discourse, and one which has been associated
historically in many different contexts with the
reactionary politics of the petty-bourgeoisie."

So much for the discrete charm of the adivasi!


References

JB (1999): 'Revisiting The Communist Manifesto', New
Quest, No 134.
Kolatkar, Arun (1978): Jejuri, Pras, Bombay.
Kulkarni, Mangesh (1996): 'Action Groups and the
State', Seminar, No 446.
Overton, James (2001): 'Peasants on the Internet?
Informalisation in a Global Economy', Journal of
Peasant Studies, 28(4).
Sommer, John (2001): Empowering the Oppressed:
Grassroots Advocacy Movements in India, Sage, New
Delhi.
______________
N.B.: For the hard copy version, see the Economic &
Political Weekly, Vol. XXXVIII No 29, July 19-25,
2003, pp. 3056-3057. The soft copy is available on the
journal’s website - <http://www.epw.org.in>.

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