Posted by Ravi Kumar August 24, 2008 at 1:33 am in India
One can have criticisms of the way Indian Left has not defended the cause of the working class. But such a criticism could come only from someone committed to the working class struggle. However, there are many other forms of criticisms too. One such criticism has recently been forwarded by Ramachandra Guha, a respected intellectual.
A self besotted concluding line that “I run the risk of being labelled a CIA agent” demonstrates how Ramachandra Guha, in an Independence Day special issue of the magazine Outlook, operates within the discourse of labelling and counter-labelling. In the whole article he has not posed anything beyond the commonsensical right-to-centre arguments against the communist left, which we heard during the recent parliamentary discussions on the “Confidence Motion” - because the left and the right were opposing the same motion, hence they are the same.
Critiquing the politics of the Left after understanding its sources – the material conditions which gives rise to a certain form of politics – is another thing and making superficial and immature remarks is something else. His ‘analysis’ finds similarity with the superfluous analysis that we come across in favour of market, and the ideology that sustains and perpetuates the domination of market. He picks up statements and incidences and does a hasty analysis of the ‘apparent’.
In this piece what Guha does is that he makes far-reaching comments on the Indian Left as well as the Right. Often he equates the two by showing them as ultimately sharing similar understanding about the West or on issues such as culture.
He finds the Right and the Left talking in the same language and sums it up by saying that “There are statements issued by the Swadeshi Jagran Manch that could have come straight from the pages of People’s Democracy” (p.64). While commonality of opposition to liberalisation is understood, but one needs to understand the vantage point from which both the political forces approach the issue of liberalisation of Indian economy.
A general comment often made is that Indian left unreasonably attacks the West and it has been seen once again in the recent opposition to the nuclear deal. Guha advances such an argument when he conclusively points out that: “At any rate, the thinkers and activist of the Hindu Right and the Communist Left are united in thinking that the bulk of India’s problems were created or caused by the West”. Once again he fails to locate the analysis put forth by the Left in its opposition to imperialism or rampage by neoliberal capital. He forgets that its opposition, in most of the cases, have emerged against capitalist expansionism.
He tells us that the “for the Left, their political models too are wholly western – Marx and Engels and Lenin were as European as they come. Besides, their political practice has often been tailored to the needs of foreign (if not necessarily western) powers…” One cannot restrain oneself from calling this a slogan-mongering very similar to that of the rabid Right against the “Un-Indian” communist left.
The arguments of Guha emanate from the same place as the justifications for sustaining and expanding the rule of capital. He celebrates the spirit of individualism and fractures the system to pick up analytical categories that would further the idea that it is not the current order of things and its inherent character that creates problems but rather some components of the system. Hence, neoliberal capitalism never becomes responsible for growing inequality or widening income disparity, or it is not the global capitalism’s dynamics operationalised through its various agencies that sustain inequities and design ways and means to sustain capitalism in his argument. Flaws are attributed to individual Indians, individual ministers etc., who are not seen as influenced by others but rather seen as autonomous agents, who carry out actions on their own.
In fact his elitist (school-boyish) trivialization of arguments against neoliberal commodification is very typical - he opposed the Miss World contest because “cricket-illiterate young women” were seen in his favourite cricket ground. Further, “Indian classical music is now more popular than it was before liberalisation. The arrival of kfc has been contemporaneous with a rise in demand for tandoori chicken.” And Guha is satisfied.
Ultimately, Ramachandra Guha runs the risk of being labelled one among many trivial red-baiters, not a CIA agent. But we know he hardly cares…
Posted by Ravi Kumar July 25, 2008 at 2:49 am in Agrarian Question, Economy, India, Politics
Ravi Kumar
[Government of India (2008, April) Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas, Report of an expert group to Planning commission, Planning Commission, Government of India, New Delhi]
It may seem surprising that the Indian state and its ruling political elite constituted a committee to study the radical left movement in the country. However, beyond this apparent incongruity, it is essentially a stocktaking exercise in order to design the initiatives for undermining class politics and mass upsurge against the free rule of capital unleashed under neoliberalism.
It is no longer a surprise that we have today a ‘powerful’ voice in the country, categorised as ‘democratic’, ‘pro-people’, ‘progressive’, and ‘secular’, but certainly not pro-working class, which has substituted the class based analysis. The report, which is being discussed here in brief, is also an addition to that burgeoning non-class, pro-people, humane capitalism framework of analysis. In this sense, one may read the report not only in terms of a response to radical left politics, but to any political movement which demands an alternative to capitalism.
The Common Minimum Programme of the United Progressive Alliance, when it came to power in the year 2004 made an effort to portray itself as ‘sympathetic’ to the radical left movement when it expressed its concern for the “the growth of extremist violence and other forms of terrorist activity in different states” and stressed that it was “not merely a law-and-order problem, but a far deeper socio-economic issue” (see the Common Minimum Programme of the United progressive Alliance).
But in due course, as the government supported by the dominant Left steered itself through years, a marked change in the approach of the Indian state was seen. Different agents of capital, such as the Prime Minister of India, belonging to the Congress Party, as well as leader of the right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), started rejecting radical left politics quite unequivocally as the most significant security problem. L.K. Advani of the BJP said in 2006 that the “communist extremism not only endangers India’s national security and our democratic system, but also our precious cultural and spiritual heritage. The rabidly anti-Hindu propaganda of naxalites must be noted in this context”. The Prime Minister, in 2007, was concerned with the threat to spiritual and cultural heritage from communists but categorised the “Left Wing Extremism” as “probably single biggest security challenge to the Indian state. It continues to be so and we cannot rest in peace until we have eliminated this virus”. He appealed for a well-concerted response to this ‘virus’. He asserted, “we need to cripple the hold of naxalite forces with all the means at our command. This requires improved intelligence gathering capabilities, improved policing capabilities, better coordination between the Centre and the States and better coordination between States and most important, better leadership and firmer resolve. Improving policing capabilities requires better police infrastructure, better training facilities, better equipment and resources and dedicated forces”.
In the background of such a vocal and militant stance of the ruling class against the issue of radical left politics the constitution of committee acquires more interest. In the month of April 2008 a group of “experts” comprising of retired bureaucrats, intellectuals, and “activists”, brought together by the Government of India as an “expert group”, submitted a report to the Planning Commission entitled “Development Challenges in Extremist Affected Areas”. Those who participated are recognised as belonging to the ‘progressive’ fraternity, which possesses a great deal of concern about the issues confronting the Indian masses. And the writers of the report have made at least one significant contribution by suggesting that “…the governments have in practice treated unrest merely as a law and order problem” (p.30) and that it should not be treated as such.
But the report has to deal with this dilemma of being an Expert Group constituted by an oppressive state (which remains silent on the issue of organisation and state patronage to private militias against the left) while ironically the members are also conscious of their ‘progressive tags’. It is from this dilemma the rejection of the political demand of the radical left emerges in the report. It says that “it has to be recognised, however, that no State could agree to a situation of seizure of power through violence when the Constitution provides for change of government through electoral process” (p. 59). Thus, without making an analysis of the politico-ideological basis of the support of such forces the report not only denies such ideologies a legitimate place but also assures the state that there is no alternative to it except that some improvements would make the world a better place. Due to such an orientation the report also fails to reflect on the character of the state as it has been in those areas where the movements are very strong. Its ‘coercive’ form (in Gramscian sense) or the extensive use of the Repressive State Apparatuses (in Althusserian sense) does not figure with prominence.
Rather the report proceeds further with its allegiance to capital, when it writes that “strengthening and reorientation of the law enforcement apparatus is a necessity to ensure justice and peace for the tribal…. The law enforcement machinery in the affected areas would need to be strengthened” and among the many measures they suggest setting up of “additional police stations / outposts in the affected areas; filling up the police vacancies and improving the police-people ratio”; and “sophisticated weapons for the police” (p. 59).
If one looks at the content of the report, it has nothing new to offer in terms of analysis or information. Its ‘sympathetic’ content has already been a part of the public discourse in the country. For instance, it tries to tell us with the help of government statistics and with the help of other works by intellectuals working on Dalits that the condition of Dalits (or Scheduled Castes) and the Scheduled Tribes has been quite dismal. They are poor, socially discriminated and politically powerless. It highlights the issue of displacement due to development projects as well. And the report attributes this to the poor governance among other things. But where is the newness in this, except that it is coming from a Planning Commission report? It is only in this context that the report deserves some amount of commendation.
Reiterating what has already been said by many social scientists the report recognises that “the inequalities between classes, between town and country, and between the upper castes and the underprivileged communities are increasing. That this has potential for tremendous unrest is recognized by all. But somehow policy prescriptions presume otherwise. As the responsibility of the State for providing equal social rights recedes in the sphere of policymaking, we have two worlds of education, two worlds of health, two worlds of transport and two worlds of housing, with a gaping divide in between” (p. 1).
When it comes to talking about the causes of discontent, the report fails to get into the actual reasons or analyses of those causes. By not getting into why inequities become part of a social and economic system, and hence, political as well as cultural systems, the report overall makes an extremely superficial analysis of the situation. Inequity or discrimination that emerges is innate to the order of things in capitalism or where the motivation of the system/capital is towards maximisation of surplus through whatever possible means. Such a system by its very nature would pave way for discontentment of this kind and mobilisation of people in different forms. And that’s why the politico-ideological aim of the movements cannot be rejected flimsily and need to be seen as an intrinsic and indispensable part of the movements. By denying the movements their agency, by stripping them of their political understanding and goals what the report does is that it works towards delegitimising the actual ideological and political aims of an anti-systemic movement.
Nobody disagrees with its arguments such as “the genesis of discontent among Dalits lies in the age-old caste-based social order, which condemns them to a life of deprivation, servility, and indignity” (p.7) or that issues of land and wage are significant determinants which generate frustration and hence motivate people to organise. But it fails to get beyond these obvious reasons and also tends to make generalised and quite isolated conclusions, such as in the context of tribes it says that “apart from poverty and deprivation in general, the causes of the tribal movements are many: the most important among them are absence of self governance, forest policy, excise policy, land related issues, multifaceted forms of exploitation, cultural humiliation and political marginalisation. Land alienation, forced evictions from land, and displacement also added to unrest. Failure to implement protective regulations in Scheduled Areas, absence of credit mechanism leading to dependence on money lenders and consequent loss of land and often even violence by the State functionaries added to the problem” (p. 9). Nobody disagrees with these reasons but there are larger questions which any dialectician would raise such as how far is it possible to remain isolated, insulated, or without any exploitation when the present avatar of capital (i.e., neoliberalism), which determines the development and the character of the system, remains in command of governance. It is not the tragedy of such discourses that they mistakenly do such an analysis forgetting the interrelatedness of things, but it is the ploy of the dominant discourse to further such arguments. And the report quite successfully does so.
At one level, no one doubts its statements that emergence of militant movements “is linked to lack of access to basic resources to sustain livelihood” (p.11). Neither does one discount its argument that “the politics has also been aligned with” the dominant social segment “which constitutes the power structure in rural and urban areas since colonial times. It is this coalition of interests and social background that deeply affect governance at all levels” (p.22). It also rightly argues that “the benefits of this paradigm of development have been disproportionately cornered by the dominant sections at the expense of the poor, who have borne most of the costs” (p.29). But the report pretends innocence when it talks about how the dominant sections of society, i.e., the ruling class, cornered the benefits of the development paradigm. I call it pretentious ‘innocence’ because an analysis of the origins and then the trajectory of development paradigms in India would reveal how, as in other capitalist nations, such paradigms are intrinsically suited to the interests of the ruling classes and capital. The very notion of development is never class neutral, hence the way the benefits of development are “cornered” by certain sections is built-in the very design of the paradigm of development. There is nothing to be shocked about how it operates and what consequences it produces. It is a natural outcome of the rule of capital. The only way out is to oppose it and lay threadbare its dynamics, which the welfarist pangs of the report fails to achieve.
At a more fundamental level, the report seems ill-equipped to even examine the land relations in rural India that have conditioned the nature of rural struggles (including the element of violence). Sitting in the high towers of the state sponsored machinery and seeing the issues and the politics of people through administrative eyes, the bureaucrats and state-aligned intellectuals cannot go beyond perceiving resistances as effects of some laxity in social engineering. They can only lament for the “excesses” and call for playing by the rules. In statements like the following they demonstrate their ignorance of the political economic dynamics of rural society and ensuing conflicts, which could never be bound within the legal administrative framework imposed by the Indian state -
“Equity and law require that all lands of the owners having less than ceiling should be handed back to the owners subject to prevailing laws. Excesses of the Naxalites in this regard are not only unjustified but deserve utmost censure” (p.46).
Let’s look at a scenario in the violence affected Central Bihar’s Arwal district, where the “marginal/small farmers” (characterised by the size of landholdings rather than by land relations) from the Bhumihar caste were among the most vocal members of the militia of the landed, i.e., Ranvir Sena. In such a situation, how does one address the issue of class-ification and hence, drawing of the battle lines. It is not a question of whether the report is right or wrong in making such appeals but it is about the caution that one needs to exercise when analysing movements, which base themselves on class terms and call for radical political transformation.
The report paints a different picture of movements which are overtly political and which demand a change of political power as the only way of weeding out poverty, discrimination and exploitation. It seeks to deny them their actual aims and deprive them of their political orientation. Not only this but what it does is to make suggestions which can minimise the political influence of the radical left in the country through cosmetic humanisation of capitalism. Hence, one need not be surprised when the writers of the report say that “it is evident from the report that, excluding ideological goal of capturing State power through violence, the basic programmes of the Extremists relate to elimination of poverty, deprivation and alienation of the poor and the landless (p. 70). The understanding of class and the role of state as the agent of capital, intrinsic to the left movement (with different shades of debate around the mode of production), has been ignored and hence, capitalism as the enemy escapes our attention as responsible for large scale displacement, deprivation, exploitation and deaths. Inbuilt in this whole exercise is an effort to delegitimise politics of the left as a whole. Like any other safety valve mechanism, it is ultimately an attempt of capitalism in moulding, manipulating and destroying praxis of resistance.
Posted by Ravi Kumar December 12, 2007 at 9:22 am in Education, India
Ravi Kumar**
Policies and programmes are not constituted outside the governing principles of the system, which in today’s case is mindless urge for profit seeking. For instance, it cannot be denied how committedly the Indian state pursues the agenda of private capital. The ’social sector’ is the most grievously hurt victim of this onslaught. The recent debates and policies in favour of privatisation of higher education and the emphasis of the Planning Commission or the United Progressive Alliance Chairperson (the ruling alliance) on the need to encourage participation of private sector in education are some of the most recent and vital contexts within which any decision of the state in education needs to be read.
While reading the context what also becomes necessary is the need to unravel the farcical employment of certain concepts such as ’social justice’ by the state. It has been amply clarified by the Government of India statistics itself that over 70% of Indians live on Rs.20 or below per day. This reflects in a certain sense the condition of the Indian masses and the debate on justice needs to consider this as a constituting variable of its understanding. Hence, the government would argue that precisely because of such profound marginalisation, apart from those based on caste, etc., that ’schemes’ to uplift the downtrodden masses are required. But then, and quite ironically, it also pursues a relentless agenda of privatisation, which inevitably converts education into a commodity as any other in the market and creates a situation of exclusivity for some and denial for millions. The social justice remains only rhetoric. Then, the big question remains whether the majority of Indians can purchase this commodity of education? Answer will be negative. Therefore, if social justice means making education accessible to all or if it means equipping everyone to compete in market then it has to be seen as something contesting marketisation of education.
Another aspect of this context is the absence of democratisation. Dialogue is one of the vital constituents of democracy and it can be identified at two levels – horizontal as well as vertical. Despite all rhetoric of participation and decentralisation, the way things happen in India it can be identified only with vertical dialogue. The Government one day feels that the curriculum should be revised, so it begins a process, which involves the ‘intellectuals’ concentrated in and around the power centre. The school curriculum as well as higher education curriculum is transformed in the similar manner. In the name of dialogue, seminars in various cities are organised and thereby a ‘consensus’ is reached. Would these ‘dialogues’ would have same responses if debated across over 500 DIETs (District Institute of Educational Training) or across as many Village/Block Education Committees (VEC, BEC)? It still remains something that the ‘intellectual-administrators’ need to work upon. Such a process would have not only generated a horizontal dialogue but also a process of ‘conscientisation’ on some of the most vital issues including religious sectarianism. The horizontal dialogue would have allowed withering of notions such as someone from the metropolitan centre of Delhi is necessarily better equipped to understand the educational deprivation of Dalits in a Bihar village through the active participation of the local VEC or BEC members on these issues. It is about ending hierarchies, including the thoughts of those who are intentionally kept out of policy making and implementation. But we tend to avoid debates and critical gestures made at our thoughts and actions because it does not serve ‘our purpose’. If the common man is included in these dialogic processes s/he may start questioning the schools trying to introduce courses on BPO trainings or universities having courses on ’stock’ or ‘tourism’ or why fundamental research is relegated to second plane. One needs to build upon these contexts if one wants to truly grasp the recent development in higher education.
The recent decision of UGC (See “To bring in Uniformity, UPA orders university curriculum upgrade”, The Indian Express, December 6, 2007) to bring ‘uniformity’ in education not only raises serious pedagogical issues but also has ramifications for the liberal ethos of higher education. These ramifications will be primarily in form of curtailing the creative potential of teachers and students, mechanising the process of teaching-learning as well as, ultimately, making the system subservient to the needs of the market.
Traditionally universities have represented a kind of dichotomy. While they have worked within the framework of state, they have also been centres of dissent and rebellion. Whether it was the students’ movement of 1968, the students’ upheaval of 1970s in India, or later on many issues, universities have time and again demonstrated their vibrant democratic ethos. The recent decision of the Government demolishes this foundational ethos of higher education. It is already playing pranks with the Indian population by putting forth rhetorics of social justice along with large scale privatisation of higher education, thereby taking education out of reach of most of Indians.
By not consulting the higher education institutions on such an issue the Government has persisted with its practice of top-down mechanism in policy making and implementation. Such a practice diminishes possibilities of dialogue, which can be one of the true instruments against undemocratic socio-political tendencies. Rather such instances become precedences to institutionalise sectarianism in education system.
The initial reports indicate towards the danger of making courses subservient to market in name of linking the life inside and outside the college. However, the danger, as indicated by recent trends in school education, is that in the name of making courses ‘relevant’ and ‘professional’ they are modified or deleted to suit the needs of market. The element of critical inquiry, identifying, for instance, the relationship between such courses and the interests of capital also constitute an aim of higher education. Are we going to emphasise on such as aspects as well in our revision of courses? Secondly, are we not deliberately fostering a hierarchisation of courses in this process on basis of certain criteria such as its job prospects etc.? The creative potential of the student as well as the teacher takes a backseat in these exercises.
Every region has a distinct socio-economic and cultural ethos which demands specific curriculum and pedagogy. Will a student coming out of a private schooling system or from the metropolis require similar curriculum and pedagogic methods as a student of a village government school from a backward region to get integrated with the global economy? Perhaps, no. Such initiatives and the people attached with them need to rethink and reflect on the aims of higher education. And, lastly, how they reconcile the requirements of the private capital with the aims of higher education to infuse a sense of criticality and creativity will remain a major challenge.
**Teaches sociology at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
*This is an expanded version of a response published in The Economic Times, 12th December 2007
