1
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 Indiawide 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 30 th 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
movement1. This invention was characterized by the making of ‘a template for the
invention of modern India’ which consisted of four ‘mythologies of rule’ – democracy,
1
Indeed, Corbridge and Harriss (2000: xvii) are referring directly to the ’group of dominantly upper-caste
Indians, many of whom had been educated in English, most of them men’ who constituted the Constituent
Assembly of December 1946.
2
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 perspectives3. 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
2
For related arguments, see Yadav (2000), Jaffrelot (2000, 2003), Corbridge (2000), Varshney (2000), Fuller
and Harriss (2001), Frankel (2005), Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Veron (2005) and Kaviraj (2000).
3
I want to note from the outset that I use the term new social movements strictly in a temporal sense to refer
to movements that emerged from the late 1960s onwards. Attempts to draw fine lines between old and new in
social movement research is arguably a futile endeavour as in most cases the supposedly “old” is present in the
“new” and the supposedly “new” is present in the “old” – whether it pertains to groups, issues, strategies, or
ideologies (see for example Calhoun 1993). Indeed, Shah’s (1988) overview of grassroots mobilizations in India
brings out the deep historical lineage of most of the movements that authors such as Omvedt, Vanaik and Basu
designate as “new”. Forest dwellers’ struggles, for example, go back to the colonial era when forest legislation
was introduced by the British, meaning that a movement such as Chipko had deep historical antecedents (see
also Rangan, 2000). See Shah (1990, 2002) and Rao (2000) for instructive overviews of Indian social
movements.
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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 Narmada River 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).
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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
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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 the Postcolonial 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
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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
4
The theoretical underpinnings, methodological strategies and substantive arguments of the post-development
perspective have been substantively criticized (see e.g. Corbridge, 1998; Kiely, 1999; Niederveen Pieterse,
1998, 2000; Rangan, 1996, 2000; Moore, 1998, 2000). I find myself in agreement with Hart (2001: 654) when
she argues that these criticisms have ‘run their course’ in terms of highlighting the shortcomings of postdevelopment theory, and I will not reiterate them here.
7
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 Satyagraha5 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.
Through the celebration of Independence Day, the NBA conveyed a narrative
about its political project. It was a narrative, which recognised the freedom struggle and
the attainment of Independence as fundamental events and achievements – the presence
5
In the NBA’s repertoire of contention, the term Satyagraha is associated the annual protest events that took
place during the monsoon months (June, July, August, September) every year from 1991 onwards until 2002.
The Satyagraha revolved around was a braving of the rising of the waters of the Narmada which set in with the
monsoon rains and the closing of the floodgates of the SSP.
8
of freedom fighters, the unfolding and hoisting of the Indian flag, indeed, the very
celebration of Independence Day testified to this. However, at the same time it was a
narrative of a national project profoundly out of kilter. The “tryst with destiny”, in this
narrative, had gone awry; the promises of freedom and development have been hijacked
by elite interests and thus betrayed, leaving large sections of the population by the
wayside as outcasts. This betrayal was efficiently illustrated by the contrasts evoked in
the celebrations: the putrid condition of state schooling versus the vivacity of the Jeevan
Shalas; the destruction wrought by the SSP versus the benefits brought to local
communities by the micro-hydel project. Simultaneously, the focus on the NBA’s
constructive activities was expressive of a political project of alternative development,
which resonated far beyond the Narmada Valley. The movement thus projected itself as
an agent on a mission to reinvent the ideals of freedom and development. A subsequent
NBA press release stated: ‘Independence Day is so often a celebration of a country’s
victory over oppression, but in Nimgavhan, it had an additional meaning of the people’s
continued resistance against the injustice and exploitation within a nation’ (NBA, 2000).
Now, I do not, of course, labour under the misconception that a closely
orchestrated protest event such as this and the discourse of resistance that it conveys
constitutes a perfect reflection of a uniform “collective consciousness” that stretches out
into every nook and cranny of the Andolan. However, it nonetheless testifies to and
underscores the essentially immanent character of movements such as the Andolan in
that their oppositional projects (a) emerge from the internal contradictions of the
postcolonial development project and (b) seek to address these contradictions through a
critique which reclaims and reinvents its idioms of legitimacy. What is occurring, to
paraphrase Marx’s seminal passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, is
very much a process in which the spirits of the past are conjured up and their names
borrowed in an effort to create something that has never yet existed (Marx, 1984: 10).
Indeed, drawing on Sinha (2004), I would argue that movements such as the NBA are
best conceived of as subaltern appropriations of the postcolonial development project
which forge critiques of this project that are comprehensible on its own terms 6. In this
respect, then, I align my argument with that of Corbridge and Harriss (2000: 239) when
they argue about NSMs in the context of ‘the reinvention of India’ that in their attempts
to reinvent India, subaltern social groups ‘still have regard for the invention of India that
was proposed in the Constituent Assembly’. However, claiming and appropriating the
6
Indeed, the discourse of resistance articulated by movements such as the NBA can be said to be expressive of
the ‘paradoxical unity’ in which ‘development … and alternative development are dialectically organized
oppositions within the history of modernity, to be seen less as mutually exclusive but as ‘oppositions that
contain the other …’ (Watts, 2000: 46, 60).
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discourses and institutions of the hegemonic projects of dominant social groups in the
articulation of oppositional projects will inevitably be an experience of both enablement
and constraint, and it is precisely this which is at the core of the next set of reflections on
the relationship between new social movements and the state in ‘the reinvention of
India’.
In and/or Against the State? NSMs and the Indian State
In their discussion of subaltern politics in Reinventing India, Corbridge and Harriss
(2000: 200-2) take their point of departure in a number of recent critiques of the ability
of the democratic process in India to advance the interests of subaltern social groups.
Whilst recognizing that Indian democracy is marred by shortcomings, they nevertheless
maintain its continued relevance for subaltern politics: ‘it is misleading to assume that
people are always empowered in opposition to the state, or that they fail to seek power
from within state structures’ (ibid: 208). Corbridge and Harriss demonstrate the
continued relevance of the state and the democratic process for subaltern politics via a
multitude of examples. For dalits and adivasis, located at ‘the bottom of the social pile in
India’ (ibid.: 208), advancement via the democratic process has taken the form of
‘empowerment from without’ (ibid.: 210) in the form of constitutional provisions for job
reservations, reservations of educational places and seats in political assemblies, and
more generally the extension of the franchise to these groups, secular education and
laws aimed at the abolition of caste-based discrimination. Such measures, they argue,
have not altered the lives and livelihoods of these groups in a major way, but they have
still had a significant impact on ‘the terms of engagement between India’s scheduled and
non-Scheduled Communities’ by buttressing an awareness of potential collective strength
among the Scheduled communities and improving their bargaining position vis-à-vis
dominant groups (ibid: 210-11).
Another process highlighted by Corbridge and Harriss is that of the ‘empowerment
from within’ that has been brought about through dalit and adivasi movements that have
‘sought power over the state rather than compensation from the state’ (ibid: 212). Most
recently, such politics is evident in the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party – a mainly dalit
based party – to state power in Uttar Pradesh. Corbridge and Harriss stress that they do
not equate the electoral success of the BSP ‘with an improvement in the living standards
of the poor’ (ibid: 215) in U.P. but the very fact that it happened nevertheless implies
that important changes are afoot. More generally, this is evident in the ‘second
democratic upsurge’ (ibid: 221-2; Yadav, 2000) in which Scheduled and Backward caste
and class groups are participating more actively in electoral politics in a way which
bypasses the meditation of local elites and which thus makes them a force to be
10
reckoned with for established political parties. They also call attention to how democracy
is ‘an ideal, which is approached more or less closely according to the balance of class
forces in a society and the nature of the state system’ and how ‘India’s states, all of
which have formally democratic political systems, differ significantly in terms of the
substance of their democracies – according to the balance of class power’ (Corbridge and
Harriss, 2000: 222). The argument, then, is that a political system characterized by
stable political parties engaged in competition over the votes of subaltern social groups
are more likely to further processes of empowerment of those groups. Indeed, in India, it
is ‘those states in which the lower castes/classes are more strongly represented
politically [that] have been the most successful in reducing poverty’ (ibid: 223) – with
the left-of-centre regimes of Kerala and West Bengal cited as cases in point (ibid: 2267).
Corbridge and Harriss’s defence of the continued relevance of the democratic
process and the state in turn has ramifications for their views on the role of social
movements in the realm of subaltern politics. Significantly, they argue that ‘it is
misleading to suppose that citizens’ movements, NGOs and community organizations …
provide an alternative to the state’ (Corbridge and Harriss, 2000: 203). Rather, the
presence of such movements and organisations positively affect the balance of class
forces so that democratic government works in favour of subaltern social groups: ‘We
contend that citizens’ movements are most effective where they put pressure on the
state to take the part of the poor, or to protect the poor from some of the abuses heaped
upon them’ (ibid.: 203). Now, what I seek to question in these perspectives is not the
assertion that the Indian state and the democratic process constitute an enabling space
for the struggles of subaltern groups. Certainly, the argument that ‘the failings of Indian
democracy … should not be taken as a sign of the absence of democracy, or of the failure
of India’s democracy to offer some forms of protection or advancement to the poor’
(ibid.: 202) is an apposite one. A failure to take this into account would constitute a
failure to recognize ‘the power of democratic political institutions and their capacity to
impose more egalitarian distributive regimes on societies against reluctant capitalist
classes’ (Kaviraj, 2000: 94) – a capacity which in turn flows from the relational and
conjunctural character of state power as such. Still, relational and conjunctural does not
equal infinitely malleable for all purposes and all social groups. The state is, in essence,
an institutional congealment of the fundamental relations that underpin a determinate
social formation, and its workings are geared towards the reproduction of those relations
(Jessop, 1982). This entails that there are certain intrinsic limits to the extent to which
the state and its structures of representation and intervention can be harnessed for the
pursuit of oppositional projects and designs that run counter to the logic of systemic
reproduction; in short, the state’s structures of intervention and representation will
11
inherently have ‘unequal and asymmetrical effects on the ability of different social groups
to realise their interests through political action’ (ibid: 224). These intrinsic limits
arguably come into view in actual engagements between social movements and the
state, and so I turn to the Narmada Valley once again.
As I mentioned above, the trajectory of mobilization and resistance in the
Narmada Valley started with social action groups working on local development issues in
the dam-affected adivasi communities in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra in
the early and mid-1980s. One of organisations was the trade union Khedut Mazdoor
Chetna Sangath (KMCS), which was based in the sub-district of Alirajpur in western
Madhya Pradesh. The KMCS emerged through a process in which urban educated
activists joined hands with village communities in challenging a condition which I refer to
as everyday tyranny – that is, a range of violent, coercive, and extortive practices meted
out by the local representatives of the state, i.e. the police, revenue officials, and forest
rangers (see Nilsen, 2006a: Chapter 8, 2006b; see also Baviskar, 1995). Everyday
tyranny essentially revolved around local state officials exacting bribes – both in cash and
in kind – from adivasis in order to turn a blind eye to their use of state-owned forests for
cultivation, timber and fuel collection, and other related livelihood activities. Demands for
bribes were in turn underpinned by a very real threat of violence; as one KMCS activist
explained to me, if local police officers discovered a villager walking along the road
carrying an axe or a sickle, they would often bring the person to the police outpost where
he would be beaten up and then made to pay a bribe in order to avoid criminal charges.
Everyday tyranny, then, was a local state-society relationship far removed from the
liberal-democratic ideals of citizenship enshrined in the Indian constitution. Indeed, one
could say that the local state in Alirajpur was not encountered as a set of agencies and
functionaries that provided services to and were accountable to the citizens of a political
community. On the contrary, adivasi ‘sightings of the state’ (Corbridge, Williams,
Srivastava and Véron, 2005: 5) were centred on seemingly all-powerful “tyrants” who
imposed a cruel regime of extortion upon their “subjects” with a heavy hand, and who
responded to defiance with violence and coercion.
Everyday tyranny, however, came to be challenged when urban, educated
activists came into contact with the adivasi communities in the early 1980s. In a series of
confrontations with local state officials, activists and villagers pointed out the illegality of
coercion and extortion. Whereas the initial response was one of violence – several of the
activists were beaten up severely – the mobilisation process gathered pace when
activists and villagers staged a dharna in protest against the violent practices of the local
representatives of the state outside the sub-district administrative headquarters in
Alirajpur town. Local and state media picked up on the protest, and it quickly became
news. As a response, the Chief Minister intervened and suspended several forest guards
12
who were responsible for the beating of one of the activists. A further protest action in
the state capital of Bhopal resulted in the Madhya Pradesh Forest Conservator being sent
to Alirajpur to discuss the problems that villagers faced in their encounters with local
forest rangers; in the meeting he stressed that forest rangers were not entitled to
demand bribes, and that any further malpractice should be reported directly to him. In
the context of widespread repression which reigned in Alirajpur, this of course constituted
a major victory, and it became the basis for further mobilization by the KMCS, in which
the creation of an awareness in the adivasi communities that they were bearers of
constitutional rights and as well as special entitlements vis-à-vis the Indian state was a
central strategy and key achievement (see also Baviskar, 1995: 195).
The result of the process, in turn, was a profound transformation in the character
of subaltern ‘sightings of the state’ in Alirajpur: where adivasis had once seen state
officials as well-nigh all powerful figures, they came to see public servants whose powers
were legally circumscribed and who were accountable to them as citizens; where the
villagers had once seen a state apparatus whose activities centred on the forceful
exaction of tribute, they came to see an institution that was supposed to provide services
and safeguard rights, an institution upon which they could make rights-based claims and
demands, and an institution which they could participate in the running of. It was, then,
a process through which formerly subjugated communities emerged as agents who could
and would, competently and assertively, ‘seek to engage with the state as citizens, or as
members of populations with legally defined or politically inspired expectations’
(Corbridge et. al., 2005: 13). The trajectory of the KMCS, then, is an apt example of the
way
in
which
social
movements
can
effectively
and
successfully
advance
the
empowerment of subaltern groups via the institutions and ideologies of the state.
So far, so good – but if we turn to the trajectory of the NBA’s campaign against
the Sardar Sarovar Project, we encounter a different scenario. In 1990, the Andolan put
forth the demand that the Government of India should order an extensive review of the
SSP, assessing its technical feasibility, cost-benefit equations, and its social and
environmental impacts; during the course of the review, construction on the dam should
be halted. If the project was found to be technically unfeasible or in violation of social
and environmental regulations, the NBA demanded, it should be abandoned7. This,
7
The basic rationale for demanding a review seems to have been rooted in the knowledge that the movement
had produced – its rich body of counter-expertise (see Nilsen, 2006b: chapter 10) – about the project. It was
clear to the Andolan that the weight of the evidence flatly contradicted the official claims that justified the dam.
Furthermore, the evidence established that the project violated a wide array of domestic and international
norms, rules, and procedures related to dam building. This in turn suggested that a review of the project would
in fact lead to its abandonment. As Dwivedi (1997) has pointed out, this is very much a form of ‘jury politics’
which presupposes an understanding of the state as a neutral arbiter which can assess and evaluate bodies of
13
however, failed to happen. The trajectory of the demand for review exhibits a clear
pattern: at state level, promises to implement a review were first made and then
reneged on due to internal differences in the state government, or simply not followed up
at all; at the federal level also, promises were made and reneged on, but here as a direct
consequence of the pressure levelled by the Government of Gujarat. Indeed, even Prime
Minister V. P. Singh, who arguably presided on a “social movement mandate”, shied
away from implementing a review in the face of the counter-mobilization staged by
Chimanbhai Patel – Chief Minister of Gujarat and a leading representative of the
dominant Patidar landowning classes in the southern and central parts of the state. The
process culminated in one of the NBA’s most spectacular and dramatic protest actions:
the Jan Vikas Sangharsh Yatra (March of Struggle for People’s Development) in
December/January 1990/91: six thousand people marched from Badwani town in Madhya
Pradesh towards the SSP dam-site in Gujarat. The march was stopped at the border to
Gujarat, and a protracted standoff unfolded where several activists went on a 21 day
hunger strike. True enough, the central government announced that a review would be
carried out, and in 1993, following further dramatic actions by the NBA, a Five Member
Group (FMG) was assigned the mission of reviewing the project in 1993, but its efforts
were effectively undermined both by central politicians and the Government of Gujarat.
The report of the FMG, which was made public in 1994 and lent credence to the NBA’s
case, was largely inconsequential. This occurred even in a context of fragmentation at
the top as, in Gujarat, Chimanbhai Patel had passed away and, in MP the Congress and
Digvijay Singh, brandishing a pro-civil society agenda and arguing for a reduction of the
height of the SSP, had won the state elections. Throughout this trajectory, it is quite
possible to tease out cracks and fissures in the state-system, but the significant dynamic
is that of the closing of the ranks which occurred at every juncture where the push of the
dominant proprietary classes and their representatives came to shove.
A similar pattern can be found in the NBA’s engagement with the Supreme Court.
In May 1994, the NBA submitted a case of public interest litigation against the SSP to the
Supreme Court, claiming that the execution of the project constituted a violation of
people’s basic right to life and livelihood. An important part of the rationale for doing so
was the fact that India’s SC had obtained a reputation for its pro-activist leanings8. And
the initial experience with the NBA’s case seemed to confirm this. The SC imposed a stay
on the SSP in 1995, and when senior Members of Parliament expressed their dismay over
evidence against or in favour of a “defendant” – in this case the SSP – in an independent and unbridled way
and pass judgement on this “defendant” solely on the basis of this evidence.
8
However, as Upadhyay (2000) notes, the pro-activist profile is most clear in relation to cases of a strictly
environmental character. In cases where PIL have been filed to challenge infrastructure projects, the SC has
consistently been that it cannot and should not interfere with such projects; the Narmada case, then,
exemplifies a general trend.
14
the SC’s meddling in inter-state affairs during hearings in 1997, the SC staunchly refused
to lift the stay on the dam. Once again, then, a chasm can be identified in the statesystem. However, this chasm was effectively brushed aside with the SC verdict of
October 2000, which stated that the SSP should be completed as quickly as possible, and
the clear statement accompanying the verdict that the Supreme Court was not to serve
as an arena for contesting state development strategies. Once again, the ranks of the
state-system – ironically enough with a clear reference to the separation of state powers
– were closed, and the closure was in favour of dominant social groups.
In these two encounters with the state we have two very different outcomes to
grapple with. The case of the KMCS certainly illustrates the potential for empowerment
which resides in subaltern appropriations of what Abrams (1988: 82) calls the ‘state-idea’
– i.e. the representation of the state as a coherent body external to society which
neutrally arbitrates in conflicts between equals. It also demonstrates that the ‘statesystem’ – i.e. the ‘palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure centred in
government’ (ibid: 82) – is not a tightly sutured leviathan, and that it may well be ‘made
to do the bidding of India’s lower orders’ (Corbridge and Harriss, 2000: 239). In the case
of the Andolan’s struggle for review of the SSP and its turn to the SC, however, the
state-system appears more as “a committee for managing the common affairs of the
bourgeoisie”, and the state-idea as an ideological veil which ‘contrives to deny the
existence of connections which would if recognised be incompatible with the claimed
autonomy and integration of the state’ (Abrams, 1988: 77).
The explanation for these differential outcomes must be sought, I believe, in the
differential character of the oppositional projects pursued by the KMCS and the NBA. The
KMCS offensive against the everyday tyranny of the local state – significant though it was
for the communities involved – was centred on a claim to which the higher echelons of
the state-system could concede without undermining its own authority and without going
against the interests of extra-local proprietary elites. Indeed, ceding to the KMCS’
demands can be seen as an exercise in bolstering the state-idea as such. The NBA’s
campaign against dam-building, however, was pitted directly against the vested interests
of the proprietary elites of South and Central Gujarat, whose capacity to influence the
workings of the state-system outshone that of the adivasis and petty-commodity
producers mobilized by the NBA in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. This can of course
be read as testimony to Corbridge and Harriss’s argument that the extent to which
subaltern groups can make claims on the state is subject to conjunctural fluctuations
related to regional and state-specific balances of class power. However, I would argue
that in the case of the NBA’s anti-dam campaign it is also possible to detect constraints
to subaltern claims-making on the state which are of a more structural character. This is
so because the campaign was not only directed against one particular dam-project. It
15
was deeply embedded in a generic opposition to dam-building as a development
strategy, as well as a critique of the wider model of development of which this strategy
was a part and concerted attempts to constitute a nation-wide alliance of social
movements around this critique – most clearly evident in the National Alliance of People’s
Movements. Thus, the NBA levelled a challenge against one of the chief modalities
through which the Indian state has secured the constitution and reproduction of capital
accumulation in postcolonial India, namely, as Chatterjee (1986, 1993) has argued,
through a ‘passive revolution’ in which the key development strategies of the state have
in effect concentrated productive resources in the hands of the country’s dominant
proprietary classes. In short, the oppositional project that crystallized in the practice of
the NBA came with ramifications which defied ‘the permanence of existing structures and
relations’ (Kamat, 2002: 158) and the fundamental centrality of state power in securing
the reproduction of those structures and relations.
Thus, what I argue for is that whilst, on the one hand, it is indeed called for to
acknowledge ‘the possibilities for empowerment that might exist within India’s polity’
(Corbridge and Harriss, 2000: 238), it is, on the other hand, equally imperative to give
serious thought to the limits that might exist to those possibilities and what this entails in
practical and strategic terms for new social movements in contemporary India. Whereas
a full engagement with these questions transcends the relatively limited parameters of
this article, my immediate suggestion would be to steer a course between the ultimately
state-centric view of Corbridge and Harriss and the anti-statism of post-development
theory in terms of the strategic role of state power in social movement practice.
The basic argument against anti-statism would then be this: an awareness of the
limits to the changes that can be achieved via the state-system and the state-idea does
not in any way translate into a principled rejection of any engagement with the state. If
social movements are seen as developing relationally and historically vis-à-vis the
hegemonic projects of social movements from above, and the state-system and the
state-idea have figured so centrally in those hegemonic projects as is the case in
postcolonial India, then the trajectory of those movements will naturally tend to involve
some
kind
of
recourse
to
state-centred
practices,
institutions
and
ideational
representations. Given the conjunctural nature of state power, such recourse might also
bear fruits. This, however, does not entail positing interaction and negotiation with the
state as ‘the be-all and end-all of movement activity’ (Geoghegan and Cox, 2001: 7).
Rather, it entails the advocacy of a position which explicitly seeks to take account of both
the potential and limits of political action within the state-system. This approach would
assert that social movements do wisely in thinking carefully about which bets to hedge
on the normal political process within an institutionalised social order and which to place
elsewhere. In other words, it would advocate an instrumental rather than a committed
16
engagement9 with the state-system and the state-idea – i.e. an approach to interaction
with the state based on limited expectations of what can be gained and a clear
perception of what cannot be gained and what is risked in pursuing this avenue. It also
entails an awareness that a challenge to the principles of power from above on which the
capitalist state rests – if it is to be pursued at all – is a bet best hedged on the
construction of a social movement project which seeks to develop the collective skilled
activity of subaltern groups to the point where it can successfully challenge extant power
structures and their entrenched institutional manifestations.
Concluding Remarks
In this paper I have sought to contribute to a debate on academic representations and
analyses of the character, role and strategies of new social movements in the wider
context of thoroughgoing structural change in India’s political economy.
I started with a critical interrogation of ‘post-development’ representations of the
NSMs as bearers of otherness and harbingers of an era beyond development and
modernity. Through a discussion of the character of the Narmada Bachao Andolan’s
critique of India’s postcolonial development project I asserted that social movements
should be viewed as fundamentally immanent forces in that they emanate from the
internal contradictions of India’s postcolonial development project and at the same time
tend to articulate their critique of the direction and meaning of this project via its central
idioms of legitimacy. I then moved on to a discussion of the relationship between India’s
NSMs and the state. In contrast to Corbridge and Harriss’s advocacy of movement
strategies that pursue empowerment and process claims and demands via the state, I
argued for a more differentiated view of the enablements and constraints inherent to
state power. I pursued this argument through an analysis of the trajectory of the NBA’s
struggle against dispossession. As much as the social action groups that preceded the
mobilization around dam building registered considerable successes in their use of the
state and its agencies against local forms of oppression, the attempts by the NBA to push
the state to act as a neutral arbiter in the conflict have consistently failed – from the
initial demands for a state-led review to the more recent attempts to secure a favourable
judgement against the project from the Supreme Court. This testifies to the systemic
character and limits of the Andolan’s campaign against dam-building: it thrusts against a
basal structure of proprietary power, and this structure in turn constitutes the limit to the
possibility for movements of acting through the state and its agencies. For activists, this
points in the direction of opting for an instrumental rather than a committed use of the
state in the pursuit of emancipatory goals.
9
I owe this distinction to Laurence Cox.
17
This is of course merely an initial contribution to a discussion, but it is imperative
that this discussion takes place. I find it hard to agree with Corbridge, Williams,
Srivastava and Veron when they posit such struggles as that which have unfolded in the
Narmada Valley as somehow less important than the everyday struggles in which ‘men
and women seek to engage with the state as citizens, or as members of populations with
legally defined rights or politically inspired expectations’. With the intensification of
neoliberal restructuring in India, conflicts over resource control are more than likely to
proliferate. Indeed, this is nowhere more clearly evidenced than in the introduction of
Special Economic Zones, which will entail the seizure of at least half a million hectares of
land in a process which ‘is nothing short of a crude form of primitive accumulation of
capital’ (Chandrasekhar, 2006). Moreover, dispossession seems to be increasingly
underpinned by a readiness to resort to violent coercion. Recent examples include the
shooting of 12 Munda adivasis who were protesting their displacement due to the
construction of a major steel plant at Kalinga Nagar in Orissa in January 2005, the killing
of three people in Manipur on December 14 2005 as security forces opened fire on
protestors raising demands for resettlement and rehabilitation for dam oustees, and,
crucially, the killing of at least 14 people in March 2007 in Nandigram, West Bengal – a
state held up by Corbridge and Harriss as an exemplar of how left political parties acting
through the state can advance popular empowerment – in conjunction with popular
protests against the acquisition of land for the establishment of a Special Economic Zone
by the Indonesian Salim Group (Bannerjee, 2007). In this context, the “responsible”
scholarship that Corbridge et. al. (2005: Chapter 9) call for cannot with legitimate reason
and good conscience restrict the scope of its optic and the depth of its ambition to an
endless multiplication of ethnographic and historical decipherings of the cultural politics
of molecular reworkings of the postcolonial development project and encouragements of
a sustained belief in acting through the state. It must, at the very least, consider the
possibility that social movements are immanent forces with the potential to transcend
and transform the social formation in which they have emerged through a definite
subversion of the power relations that thwarted the capacity of the designs for modern
India to deliver on the promises of progress for its social majorities.
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