Intractable Conflicts in Contemporary India

Narratives and Social Movements

Savyasaachi

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367734640
• eBook ISBN: 9781351057042
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book attempts a representation of society in contemporary India through an ethnography woven around long-standing intractable conflicts — of displacement and rehabilitation, patriarchy, insurgency and counter-insurgency operations, and climate change. Each chapter in this volume offers a critical transformative narrative in response to these conflicts. It asks how social justice and equality is to be constructed and provides a fresh perspective.

It is argued that social movements can no longer be concerned only with itemizing a checklist of demands; it is now necessary to be free of the hegemony of current frames, categories, concepts and principles, and to rethink the 'promise'. The volume maintains that this effort to step out of the 'endless waiting' for delivery of a 'promised value' draws out the labour of transformative action. A valuable contribution to understanding social movements in India, this work challenges the established discourses around grassroots politics, progressive policies and legislations as well as radical mass movements.

The book will interest students and researchers of social movements, conflict and peace studies, sociology and social anthropology, political science and development studies. It will also be useful to those working in the areas of human rights, social exclusion and inclusive policies.

1 Introduction

Transformative action, the promise and intractable conflicts

Savyasaachi

If one agrees that after all that is said and done there is more said than done, then what more needs to be done to build on the efforts made by a large number of people across the globe before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to create conditions for social justice and well-being for all?

Fukuyama writes in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall was demolished,

the struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the world wide ideological struggle that called for daring, courage, imagination and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of museum of history.

(Grumley 1995: 386)

In this passage Fukuyama argues that after the fall of the Berlin wall there is no room for any transformative action and there is no possibility of any agenda other than of pursuing economic calculation, solving technical problems, satisfying the sophisticated consumer, and caretaking of the museum of history.

Is this so?

Political Economy of Exhaustion

The most dramatic examples of economic calculations are development programs that are structured with enormous finances and diminutive human labor. These include large hydroelectric power plants, spacious special economic zones, construction of miles of complex road networks, making of strategic military positions, construction of mass scale manufacturing units, and so on. All this investment of enormous finances legitimizes the deployment of a combination of the forces (legislations, military, and paramilitary) used to displace a mass of people with the promise of resettlement and rehabilitation.

In India, Adivasi people are most affected by such calculations. They have been waiting for several decades for the promised rehabilitation. Disgruntled over the years, they have become insurgents and have constructed a red corridor, an area all along the east coast of India where these development programs cannot be undertaken. It has been argued that alienation from the benefits of mainstream development is responsible for the making of this corridor. In recent times progressive legislations such as the PESA 1996 and FRA 2006 have been positioned to end this alienation. The strength of these legislations is provision for customary rights.

Felix Padel highlights the endemic disillusionment here. He draws attention to the ‘reality gap between handsome promises and resettlement packages’. He argues that the resettlement and rehabilitation legislations destroy the customary rights. There is substance to this argument. To begin with, land promised by the legislation is less than what is in fact covered by customary rights. Further, those who are likely to benefit are not promised right to language, without which there are no customary rights, and, customary rights have no meaning for the millions of Adivasis who have been displaced from their home and land.

A close scrutiny shows these legislations undermine customary rights to clear the way for capital to spread to the Adivasi home and land. Historical experience shows that this takes away from the people their culture, exhausts life processes that are embedded in land, and depletes the labor power of the people. Hostilities are widespread in this economy of exhaustion – differences become the basis of conflicts; conflicts escalate into violence, war, and terrorism. All this is coterminous with the production of exchange value from use value exchange. One telling instance of this is the exchange of hostilities between the Maoist insurgency and State counter-insurgency forces.

Saima Saeed studies the exchange of hostiles in 2013 in Bastar Chattisgarh, as reported by the press. The report reads ‘Maoist perform dance with song after gunning Mahendra Karma, the founder Salwa Judum’. She argues that the frame of this news report captures the ‘spectacular’ dramatic sensational performance at the disjuncture between the reality and the norm. On account of this disjuncture there is no possibility for a public debate and discussion on the question of justness. She argues this frame is split, and for this reason it upholds the popular construction of justness.

This performance is in fact a mimesis of brutalities between insurgency and counter-insurgency operations.

Ritambhara Hebbar argues that this mimesis dis-associates, dis-embeds, and separates the Adivasi language, beliefs, names, and labor from the nourishing life-world of their habitat and of the legacy of struggles for self-rule. She argues that this closes the possibility of recognizing their contemporaneity, of their co-temporality. This is basic to integrating them into the mainstream economy. It perpetuates justness as an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

A closer look at the mimesis (exhibited in the exchange of hostilities) shows a mode of comparison that overlooks differences with the intention to not let the other be different and to foster resemblance. For instance, the mainstreaming of Adivasis makes it necessary that they begin to resemble the mainstream people either by living a lifestyle with all the goods and services provided by capital or by becoming members of insurgent political groups. They cannot be different, that is, live a life without capital goods and services and at a distance from insurgent political groups.

This exhausts the social imagination and critical thinking. For instance, the measure of this mainstreaming mode of comparison is ‘what works and nothing else’. Something or someone that is unique and different is an isolate, contrary to the norm that works. This frames the norm for the exercise of freedom of choice. People choose at large without adequate and appropriate knowledge of the deeper structures of what they chose. A complex network of legal, educational, social, economic, and political institutions work to determine and promote this norm.

The construction of the mega hydroelectric dam is an instance of this norm. Himanshu Upadhyaya points out that all along from the beginning in 1920 when the construction of the dam was envisioned no effort was made to listen to what people said. People are still mute, passive recipients, not knowing what constitutes development in post-independence India.

Today people only know that they have been displaced and will perhaps be resettled and rehabilitated. There is no information about where, when, how, and what the rehabilitation would look like. There is only an assurance, a promise that this will happen. This promise is the foundation of the norm. A network of institutions is expected to honor the promise through the instrumentality of an office of the State.

Anuradha Veeravalli argues that patriarchy deprives the office (of these institutions) of social cultural understandings that are sensitive to differences between people’s way of life. From this perspective, the exercise of freedom of choice, inside and outside the office, is deprived of social and cultural meanings on the one hand and adequate and appropriate information on the other. It is for this reason afflicted with cognitive deprivation, on account of which language and civil society suffers from malnutrition.

This is perhaps why not only progressive legislation, forward-looking policy (discussed earlier) but also radical Left mass social movements have not been able to persuade the ruling class, that is, the political party in power and the State machinery, to do whatever is necessary to honor this promise.

Krishna Swamy Dara discusses why the Left parties have failed the people. He focuses on the class formation within the Left parties working with and outside the frame of the parliamentary system. There is a ‘lower cadre’ he points to, with no space to articulate their views. There are instances of expulsion from the party for differing and not towing the party line. This is elitism. He draws attention to the contradiction: the party cannot ensure egalitarianism within, and professes to work for equality for the rest of the society. Further, he reports instances of lower-level cadre working hard protesting against a company or business to create pressure and the top level negotiates and compromises most of the time for individual personal benefit.

Juhi Tyagi’s research shows that most challenging for radical Left movements is working simultaneously underground (to fight the powerful) and over ground (to work within the electoral system). She points out that the over-ground activist is not immune to the grandiloquence of capital. Cadres begin to amass wealth and also fall prey into corruption. The question is, how long can the underground last under these circumstances? It is worth considering that the necessity for participating in the electoral process could be the fatigue and exhaustion from being in the ‘underground’.

How is this elitism and fatigue to be countered?

One step is to recognize that there are plural narratives of any social movement.

In this regard Archana Prasad presents narratives of three movements, namely, the Telangana movement in Andhra Pradesh, the Warli movement in Maharashtra, and the Tebhaga movement in Bengal. The authors of the narratives are leaders P. Sundarayya, Godavari Parulekar, and Abani Lahiri in 1972, 1975, and 1998, 2001, respectively. She argues that the nature of historical memory plays a significant role in determining the staying capacity of struggles. According to her, there were golden days of the radical Left (socialist and communist) politics in India.

Dinesh Abrol argues the importance of democratizing science for the social movement. This he argues entails the blending of local knowledge with modern scientific knowledge. There is promise in this. He describes how the people’s science movements (PSMs) attempted to go beyond language as a mere instrument of communication. This instrumentalist understanding of language, he suggests, has kept science out of the reach of people. It runs along the grain of the grandiloquence of capital, which renders the science into an insulated, antiseptic unit protected from ‘contamination’ from people and environment outside and makes science not receptive to people’s perceptions, observations, and concerns. Contrary to this, he suggests that democratization of science is concerned with teaching physics, chemistry, and biology in people’s language; seeing differences within science creatively; and learning from people’s perceptions and language.

Will this be sufficient to overcome elitism?

A test case for this is gender inclusion.

Anuradha argues that the feminist movement has not given sufficient attention to cultural differences. She argues the hub of this elitism is the ‘office’ of institutions in the democratic set-up. Here the office and institution designed for the empowerment of victims enforces likeness to the world of men and, determines the link between personal and the political by separating it from the cosmological. She draws attention to sense of empowerment that come from recognizing difference and uniqueness in the life and work of Florence Nightingale, Mira, Antigone, Gandhari. She argues that they represent a different and unique notion of office and institution, one that is simultaneously personal, political, and cosmological. It is inclusive of pain, of the labor to transcend it in order to foster the self in unity with the other. To see the significance of differences she argues that it is necessary to disassemble this ‘office’.

Sucharita Sengupta explores why there is an absence of social movements to address climate change in developing nations and why such movements are not so effective in advanced nations. She suggests that the categories that social movements work with are perhaps outdated. These are not attuned to the scale and depth of the phenomenon of ‘climate change’. Social movements have not yet taken a position with regards to the prevalent modes to redress of damages from climate change. The effort is to encourage carbon neutral technologies, and to reward those who regulate consumption and fine those who don’t. These have been fixed in the frame of a technological solution and economic incentives.

People at large see changes in climate across the year – they suffer the loss of crops and livelihood from untimely floods, rains, and drought . . . amongst other things. Seasons are becoming difficult to differentiate. Adivasi people observe there are only two seasons in the forest now, as compared to five in the near past. These changes affect everyone on multiple sites across world, time, and space. Everyone has a growing carbon footprint and can do very little about it. Every habit and disposition is under scrutiny for its contribution to this carbon footprint. This makes everyone a victim and a perpetrator. Every site and moment of social life is open for protest and dissent. The everyday is the arena for resistance and the language of everyday experience its vocabulary.

Soon everyone will need rehabilitation!!

At this point in our discussion it is necessary to dwell on Felix Padel’s observation of the gap between the promise and the reality of rehabilitation. He reports, Adivasi people say ‘we are flooded with money’.

For the Adivasi money denotes relentless profiteering!!

Is not the problem and questions of climate change most inclusive of such relentless profiteering?

The suggestion is that attempts to address climate change reinforce eternal deference to capital! This reinforces the value of the promise and strengthens relentless economic calculations.

Maybe this is an appropriate moment to pause and consider that perhaps elitism is now not just a top-down approach. The bottom-up approach only reinforces the value of the ‘top’. History shows that upward mobility does not undo the structures of the domination. The dynamic of moving ‘up’ is deeply embedded in learning to abide by the norm of ‘deference to the promise’. The process of democratization as we know of it today will not counter the elitism of the promise.

Perhaps what more needs to be done is to replace the promise of money with the promise of transformative action.

It is therefore necessary to know this promise.

The intractable promise.

A close look at money, the currency note shows an inscription. It reads as follows,

‘I promise to pay the bearer a value of . . .’

The promise here is to produce and deliver goods and services of value on the one hand and ensure social justice on the other.

A promise as we know of it is a sacrament of language, as it draws on the trustworthiness of words. However, when it is inscribed on a paper currency note it ceases to be a sacrament of language, for its trustworthiness does not come from the trustworthiness of words but ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: transformative action, the promise and intractable conflicts
• 2 ‘Flooding us out with money’: movements against displacement in central India
• 3 News frames, conflict and myth-making
• 4 Reframing the debate: the tribal question and contemporaneity
• 5 Large dams as ‘temples of modern India’? An obituary to Nehruvian techno-political dreams and a plea for Gandhian ethics
• 6 Why India failed the left? A relook at the politics within the mainstream left movement in India
• 7 Individual–territory–movement nexus in armed movement resilience: case of the Maoist movement in Warangal, Telangana
• 8 Making resistance: narratives of communist-led agrarian movements in contemporary India
• 9 Mobilizing for science democratizing movements: lessons from the experience of people’s science movements in India
• 10 The passion of woman: sisterhood in work, worship and the vernacular
• 11 The climate change discourse in India: is a social movement possible?