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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Our Self-righteous Civil Society by Pranab Bardhan

Our Self-righteous Civil Society by Pranab Bardhan

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published Published on Jul 23, 2011   modified Modified on Jul 23, 2011


Over the last few decades thenon-party volunteer organisations have been much more effective in Indian public space and more articulate in policy debates than the traditional Left parties. This essay, while recognising the manifold achievements of these organisations, reflects on the serious limitations of the activities of the voluntary sector and argues that when they usurp certain roles they can become a threat to representative democracy.

[Pranab Bardhan (bardhan@econ.berkeley.edu) is at the University of California, Berkeley, United States.]

In “The Avoidable Tragedy of the Left in India-II” (EPW, 11 June 2011) I wrote on the structural and ideological impasse, various self-inflicted wounds and the organisational imperatives facing the Left parties in India. But over the last few decades in Indian public space the non-party volunteer organisations have been much more effective in social movements and more articulate in policy debates than the traditional Left parties. In this essay while recognising their manifold achievements I reflect on the serious limitations of the acti­vities of the voluntary sector, and emphasise why in spite of the latter’s prominence, the Left parties have an essential role to play which may otherwise go by default.

There are, of course, a large variety of voluntary organisations, some of them are explicitly or implicitly clubs of upper and middle class or sectarian interests (including many of the Residents’ Welfare Associations in metropolitan cities, and dominant caste associations in rural areas). In this essay I shall largely confine myself to those organisations which are dedicated to the cause of the poor or the victims of human rights abuse. Even among the ­latter I shall exclude some of the organisations clearly affiliated to different political parties (like the major trade unions and some womens’ organisations). [I shall mostly avoid the widely-used term, the non-governmental organisation or NGO, as the latter encompasses too many diverse types of organisations (after all, Al Qaida is among the most well-known NGO’s in the world today), and in India some of the NGO interests represented in the National Advisory Council (NAC) presided over by the Congress President are in some sense a more important part of the Government of India than many of the administrative departments in Delhi.]

Achievements

The voluntary sector activists in India have much to be proud of: landmark laws like the Right to Information Act, frequent calling of attention to human rights abuses, torture of prisoners, and police and army atrocities in different parts of India, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, associations to help self-employed workers and to monitor and coordinate community health and education services, forest rights for adivasis, mid-day meals for schoolchildren, and so on. Under their leadership the environmental movement against forest degradation, water and air pollution, and the like has been active, particularly in consciousness-raising on such vital issues. In a country where people easily despair of their government, these activists have shown that vigilance and struggles do yield some results in goading governments (including courts) to act, though often very slowly.

Even though no common ideology unites the various pro-poor groups in the voluntary sector, many are inspired by Gandhian or leftist or “green” (conservationist) ideas. On the three major coordination mechanisms in society – the state, market, and the community – they are usually anti-market, and sometimes anti-state, and almost i­nvariably in favour of community-level o­rganisations. Like most small-is-beautiful communitarians they often underplay the tyrannies of local communities in day-to-day life (even outside the dispensations of khap panchayats) and the ease with which local organisations are often captured by the elite and the powerful. It is also important to remember that Ambedkar, unlike Gandhi, had more trust in larger representative institutions and laws, away from the “cesspool” of village society. In economic matters, the small-scale of production in some lines of activity severely inhibits economies of scale and technological upgrading, and investment in high-return high-risk projects (which require risk-pooling with larger non-local entities), and this is ultimately inequitable as it keeps those small producers mired in low productivity and stagnation, as the large part of the vast informal sector in India is.

Against the Market

The social activists are often united with the traditional Left parties in opposing market liberalisation. They undervalue the important disciplining and coordinating functions of the market, and unwittingly strengthen the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who want to preserve their control over state monopoly, patronage distribution and corrupt income. S­ocially also the anonymity of the market may have liberating effects for the social downtrodden, as some dalit intellectuals have pointed out. How much of the unleashing of entrepreneurial energies in the last three decades of gradual market liberalisation and relatively high economic growth that economists usually refer to is linked up with the effects of the concomitant political rise of the hitherto subordinate social groups in roughly the same decades is an under-researched area in I­ndian economic sociology.

Single-Interest Lobbies

The social activists, even while drawing upon Gandhian “enlightened anarchism” (of Hind Swaraj) or the postmodernist critiques of the modernising state for their ideological sustenance, do not usually hesitate to turn to the state (including the judiciary) for relief and protection of the small people against large producers and developers, venal officials and marauding communal groups. In the government policy arena they often act as self-appointed lobbies for the poor and the oppressed. While this lobbying activity is at least as legitimate as that by trade unions, farmers’ a­ssociations or chambers of commerce, one should keep in mind that such non-party organisations cannot and should not replace the role of traditional party organisations, however much the latter are associated with corrupt politics in the eyes of activists. Voluntary groups, as single-interest advocacy lobbies, inherently lack the mechanism of transactional negotiations and give-and-take among diverse interest groups that large party organisations representing and encompassing those diverse interests could (and used to) facilitate.

Complex Trade-offs

This kind of give-and-take is particularly important when many controversial i­ssues of the day – large dams, land acquisition, extraction of minerals in tribal areas, h­abitat-displacing development projects – involve complex trade-offs and balancing of diverse interests which single-interest lobby groups necessarily slur over. Even those who speak in the name of the poor usually under-stress the diversity among the poor – a dam may benefit thousands of small farmers in hitherto dry land, while displacing thousands of others, a development project may displace some from ancestral land but provide jobs and new and more productive livelihoods for others, and so on. Each such case involves complex trade-offs and the need for negotiated compromises and compensations, both across groups and over time (short run vs long run). It is possible that after careful balancing of the gains and losses one may still conclude that the dam should not be constructed or the development project should not be undertaken. But this should be the outcome of a deliberative process within a party forum where diverse interests and stakeholders are represented, rather than a reaction simply to the shrillness and agitational or financial resources of any particular single-interest lobby. Of course, such deliberative processes are not always encouraged within the existing political parties, either because of the compulsions of raising election funds from vested interests or because most of the major political parties in India today have no inner-party democracy, with i­ssues and leaders even at the local level decided from above. But this is more a matter of restoring democracy within party organisations, instead of giving in to s­ingle-interest lobbies, however pious the intentions of the latter may be.

This is where the forum of Left parties has an important role to play, even though they have largely abdicated it, except in occasional rhetoric. If they can play an a­ctive role in organising the vast numbers of informal sector workers (the modes of organising them are quite different from those in the formal sector, as I indicated in my earlier article in EPW referred to at the beginning), then along with their current strength among workers in the formal sector they can provide a substantial countervailing power to the corporate oligarchy and corrupt politicians that dominate the Indian polity. As Left parties they should be more attuned to the debates on the historical role of capitalism (vis-à-vis forces of pre-capitalism). As Joan Robinson once said, what is worse than being “exploited” is not to be “exploited” at all.

While being sensitive to the struggles of the poor the Left parties, compared to some activist groups, are also more aware of the value Marx placed on technological progress and development of the “forces of production”, even when the latter inevitably cause community-wrenching displacement. Some of the conflicting interests among the poor and the trade-offs can be sorted out within a party if the d­eliberative process is transparent and a­ccountable, which in Leninist parties is currently blocked by the repressive bludgeon of “democratic centralism”.

An aside here on the professional role of economists. Of all the social scientists economists, by the nature of their disciplinary training, spend a great deal of their professional time and skills on thinking about complex trade-offs and appropriate methods of empirically evaluating the comparative costs and benefits which vary from case to case. While some of them may be “sold out” to vested interests, many of them are sincere in their on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand arguments when it comes to policy debates. It is not a coincidence that many single-interest social activist groups (who in their mind already know where truth lies) are irritated by such modes of open-minded argument and methods of experimental evaluation employed by economists. (In the current debates on the food security policy, for example, NAC and associated activists are vehemently opposed to some economists’ suggestions about trying out alternative cash-based transfers at least as pilot experiments in parts of the country in place of the highly wasteful and corrupt public distribution system. In general in policy debates they show much less concern for the colossal inefficiencies of government spending programmes.) Ardent belief or missionary zeal in a cause can sometimes be dismissive of complexity, and make one prone to think that those who argue for the need for scepticism and trial and error must be enemies to the cause. The same, of course, is the case with some market-fundamentalist or orthodox-Left economists.

Preoccupation with Redistribution

The social activists share with the Left parties a preoccupation with issues of redistribution, and they often resort to nothing more than hand-waving when it comes to complex issues of ensuring the sustained generation of a large enough surplus out of which the redistribution is to be done. Faced with those issues the Left usually refers to the great things the State can do, and the social activists will refer you to the great things small producers and community-based organisations can do. There are not too many systemic, large-scale, viable and incentive-compatible ­examples of these around to instil confidence in a sceptic’s mind. In their absence, the social activists as well as the Left are now mainly associated with populist causes, which in the long run are often wasteful and counterproductive.

Limits of Rights-Based Approach

While the Left emphasises worker rights, the social activists emphasise citizen’s rights (to food, education, information, jobs on public works, etc). The latter are more relevant to many informal workers. The activists’ rights-based approach has a lot to commend: it serves to raise consciousness among the poor and vulnerable informal workers about their entitlements to social protection, a sense that they are not mere supplicants to the politicians and bureaucrats. But one should not ignore the limitations of this approach. If the delivery structure for implementing some of these rights remains as weak and corrupt as it is now, mere promulgation of rights will remain hollow and will, after a point, generate only cynicism. The Indian public arena is already littered with hundreds of unenforced or spasmodically enforced court injunctions, some of them on the implementation of rights, and there is some danger that the proliferating judicial activism, egged on by the rights-based movement and the media, may end up, for all the good intentions, in undermining the credibility and legitimacy of the judiciary itself.

Finally, while our politicians and their hypocrisy and criminality often provide an unedifying spectacle, some civil society groups or unelected entities sympathetic with their cause, by their constant implicit or explicit disparagement of the institutions of representative government, unwittingly weaken the democratic process. In the history of Africa, Latin America, and in other parts of south Asia the widespread disparagement of representative institutions has made it easier for populist authoritarianism to get a grip and entrench itself. The politicians are at least subject to periodic electoral accountability, while their critics are the depository of all the right answers and largely unaccountable (or accountable only to the donors in the case of well-funded organisations). As it is, our influential middle classes who are often too impatient with the slow and dirty processes through which the numerical majority of the unwashed and the uneducated give their democratic verdict, are always on the lookout for short cuts to cleaner politics, national prestige and superpower status. They latch on to holy men that our civil society throws up from time to time, sanctimoniously offering us magic potions in Gandhi caps or red robes, cheered on by the sensation-seeking electronic media. Some of our h­olier-than-thou jholawalas who already know all the answers to complex questions are in some danger of joining that ragtag army of self-proclaimed do-gooders.

At the same time let me hasten to add that one should not detract the value of the large numbers of grass roots social workers India is fortunate to have, who spend less time on discrediting the political process and concentrate more on working at the local level for the cause of the deprived. They also work on increasing people’s awareness and information, catalysing their organisations in demanding the delivery of s­ocial services, participating in serious field experiments to find out the best ways of devising the delivery mechanisms, and acting as watchdogs against the abuses of state and corporate power – thereby immeasurably streng­thening the democratic process.

EPW, Vol XLVI No.29, 16 July, 2011, http://beta.epw.in/newsItem/comment/190156/

Tagged with: civil society



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