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Literary Review
The nation as contested space
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Written with lucidity, rigour and elegance, Reinventing India by Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss brings a sense of balance to discussions of contentious issues like cultural and economic determinism. And in Depolitizing Development, Harriss combines readability with a devastating critique of the kind of politics that informs the discourse on development emerging from the World Bank. A review by NEERA CHANDHOKE.
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IF scholars in India and on India ever had any vanity that they would be able to analyse with some coherence where we have come from, and where we are going, this vanity has been rudely punctured by events that have overtaken the country since the latter half of the 1980s. These events mounted with such swiftness, they catapulted issues onto the centre-stage of politics with such force and such velocity, that scholars were left frankly bemused. Who would have thought that the pillars of India's experiment with democracy — socialism and secularism — would collapse so suddenly, within a matter of a decade in fact? Even as India was deluged by the politics of majoritarianism, a politics that brought such violence, such rancour, and such communalism that it reduced entire neighbourhoods to rubble, the country opened its doors to liberalisation and globalisation with a vengeance. India had turned inwards at approximately the same time that it had turned outwards. And we, living and working in the country and on the country, were left, theoretically speaking, somewhat rudderless, with nothing to hold on to, with no ways of conceptualising why what had happened had happened so suddenly, and why it had brought such turmoil with it. For, Indian politics, at least as most of us had come to know the species in the three and a half decades that followed independence, has been turned on its head.
That is why Reinventing India by Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss is invaluable. For one, written as it is with a fair amount of lucidity, rigour and elegance, the work charts out the recent history of India with broad brush strokes that tell us of roads taken and roads not taken, of historical possibilities partly fulfilled and historical possibilities completely unfulfilled. Secondly, it requires some courage and considerable imagination to grapple with a whole we call India. For, as all of us know, Bihar has little in common with Kerala, and the lives of celebrities that are chronicled on page three of daily newspapers have nothing to do with reports of starvation deaths and distress sale of children in Orissa. The two authors have, however, managed to grapple with the whole we call India. What is more commendable is that even as they focus on the expansive patterns of the wood, they also focus on the trees that make up the wood. Thirdly, they draw upon an entire range of writing on India in order to stake out their own position. They engage with both economic determinism and cultural determinism, both attacks on development and defences of development, both romantic environmentalism and planned resource development, both orientalism and anti-orientalism, both anti-secularists and pro-secularists, both anti-state and pro-state theorists, and both subaltern theories and elite theories. Every single scholar who has written on India finds place in this book, even as the two authors carve out a space between rival and polemic writings. In this space they position themselves.
Certainly, this kind of careful positioning carries its own hazards, for continuous and repeated referral to different works in the same paragraph, or even in the same argument, takes away somewhat from the continuity of the argument staked out by Corbridge and Harriss. It is simply too distracting. It also problematises issues of method and approaches. For many of the approaches and conclusions drawn upon extensively by the authors belong to different theoretical and political universes altogether. After all, theoretical purists reject the idea that we should lump different and incommensurable arguments into one broad sweep.
Yet, despite these shortcomings, it must be said that the authors weave their path through the literary and conceptual maze of Indian studies with some dexterity. Consequently, if there is one feature of the book that is somewhat striking, it lies in the sense of balance that informs discussions of vital and often contentious issues, even though the ground that the authors tread is already well trodden. For instance, the dismissal of the suggestion that we can read Indian history only in terms of essentialist categories such as modernity is more than welcome. It simply restores the idea that we find in our society people who "live more comfortably on the borders between rural and urban worlds, `western' and `eastern' worlds, modern and pre-modern worlds, than some prophets or critics of high modernism allow" (p.32). After all, it is this precise idea: the idea that India and Indians straddle different moments in time, which needs to be reiterated, particularly if we want to avoid essentialism of the kind that the Hindutva brigade has set out for us. It also aids us in defying the kind of totalising projects that this brigade has sketched out for us. But that is another story requiring another kind of narrativisation.
There are five arguments in the work that are of special importance simply because they help us to understand the labyrinth of Indian politics. The first argument stresses the inability of the first generation leadership to institute genuine structures of participative democracy. This lack, suggest the authors, was due to a variety of factors, the elite domination of the freedom struggle, the non-representative character of the Constituent Assembly, and the reluctance of the conservatives to acquiesce in Nehru's plans for a modern, socialist, and democratic republic. The path that may have led to a genuine transformative politics was simply littered with too many obstacles. The second component of the set of arguments is that both the politics as well as the political vocabularies of India underwent a massive transformation as the social base of the state shifted with the emergence of a new class of the agrarian rich. The process was not uncontested, for, at the same time, we were to see an upsurge of the dalits and of the intermediate classes, which increasingly sought an active share in political power. One particular side effect of the rise of the new agrarian rich is that it is precisely this class that has resisted the extension of liberalisation to the countryside. This explains the uneven nature of what are euphemistically termed "economic reforms". The process of liberalisation is uneven and contested suggest Corbridge and Harriss, mainly because it is driven at once by a revolt of the elites as well as constrained by some sections of the industrial bourgeoisie and the agrarian bourgeoisie. The latter have particularly resisted the idea of an agenda that will do away with rural subsidies.
Thirdly, the authors argue that Indian politics is far too intricate and convoluted to be understood in watery [my words] and one-dimensional terms, such as the politics of the "westernised elite" versus the politics of the "vernacular", or in terms of the "secular" versus the religious. For, all these elements combine as well as battle each other in complex patterns of affirmation as well as contestation. There are no mutual exclusivities in the India of today; there are only interactions. And it is the dynamics of these interactions that constitutes the stuff of Indian politics.
The fourth argument is that despite all the understandings of anti-modern theorists, who see the state as nothing but a site of violence, the state continues to occupy a central place in the imagination of the deprived sections of society. And it is this very class that continues to repose hope in the ability of the state to deliver. "The legacy of the Nehru years is more durable than some commentators have allowed, and the working out of this legacy...continues to inform the contested reinvention of India nearly forty years after his death" (p.237). In other words, the authors conclude that the state continues to engage political visions, even as struggles zero onto the state and its power. The poor in fact have demanded and can continue to demand a place in the sun through the state. "The state in India might indeed be increasingly rotten, but it is not accurate to say that ordinary men and women have lost faith entirely in the idea of the state" (p.2-3).
And the fifth strand of the complex of arguments in this book is the following. Despite the triumph of the right wing forces in the country, the mobilisation of the so-called lower castes and classes may provide an important counterpoint to dreams of a majoritarian India. In sum, the process of politics — contested and uneven, fractured and segmented, divided and atomised between a number of different class, caste, and other social constellations — may just serve to prevent the emergence of one idea of India. India will continue to be imagined over and over again in and through processes of struggle.
And this is a good thing, for, after all imagination cannot be bound within accepted and limited meanings. Imagination and invention inescapably involve the unimagined and the non-invented (I am using imagination in the sense of conceiving or making an object of thought). Therefore, imagination allows the possibility of transcendence, of remaking the real world. It can subvert the best-laid plans of "mice and men"; it can subvert the very object of its evaluation. And it is this that is needed in the India of today, an India which many people in power imagine in rather perverse ways — pace Narendra Modi.
The second work under review that is authored by John Harriss is delightful inasmuch as it combines readability with a devastating critique of the kind of politics that has overwhelmed the discourse on development emerging from the World Bank. The discourse on development, suggests Harriss, has in recent times come to be increasingly preoccupied with concepts of social capital, which has been made fashionable by the Harvard professor Robert Putnam. Now there is nothing wrong with wanting social capital for a society or discovering it in a society. People after all, in and through the processes of living together, develop a set of resources that enables them to just get along with their lives. In order to live they have to simply trust each other. The resources of trust, which breed social capital, aid other projects as well. Putnam for instance, had suggested that there is a deep relationship between the existence of multiple associations in civil society, civic engagement, and democracy. But all this carries its own hazards, for, notions of social capital and trust, suggests Harriss, obscure power, class, and conflict, which are, after all, essential features of any given society. They also happen to provide "new weapons in the armoury of `the anti-politics' machine that is constituted by the practices of "international development'" (p.2).
The problem with the social capital argument is simply that it shifts the onus for acts of omission and commission from the state to civil society. Correspondingly, civil society, which in classical theory has been seen as the site of contestation, has now acquired a new face; it is now simply the arena of associational life. The problem is that many of these associations that we find in civil society are not citizen bodies or voluntary associations, they are more often than not NGOs, which do not, strictly speaking, represent the body of citizens. Neither are the NGOs accountable to the people for that is simply not their business. Therefore, the idea that relations of mutual trust and reciprocity should be built up by the NGO sector, strips politics and civil society of what Harriss calls "the inconveniences of contestational politics and the conflicts of values and ideas, which are a necessary part of democratic politics. The `anti-politics machine' sits in the wings" (p.9).
It follows that if the World Bank has adapted theories of social capital, and identified social capital as the "missing link in development"; development strategies emanating from that particular forum must also have been depoliticised. After all, the concept of social capital, which is the product of every day interactions, does not tell us whether relationships between people in a particular locality are equal or whether they are highly exploitative and oppressive. Harriss's argument follows other critiques of social capital, that properties of social capital and trust require as a precondition some measure of equality. And that equality is missing in those very countries, which are the recipients of development policies forged by multilateral agencies and by donor groups, is more than evident. Regardless of this somewhat major empirical detail, social capital has come to be perceived as the essential pre-requisite for development. To put it differently [my words], the argument is almost teleological, countries that possess or which can evolve social capital will have development, countries that do not have it are condemned to under-development. The role of the State in delivering development or in not delivering development is in the process completely obscured.
Neither are social and economic contexts within which social capital works, taken into account by the economists of the World Bank. Harriss, working through a whole host of literature on specific case studies, shows how in many instances the idea of social capital acts as a blind to obfuscate political struggles, the non-performing state, and policies of liberalisation and globalisation that have torn apart societies. Ideas of social capital, trust, and civil society that litter contemporary debates on development, concludes the author, are deceptive. They are deceptive, "because they are used to veil the nature and the effects of power, and ... they hold out prospects of democracy (in civil society) without the inconveniences of contestational politics and of the conflict of ideas and interests that are an essential part of democracy" (p.120). Harriss ends his work by arguing that instead of looking for social capital in the most unlikely of places, we should focus instead on the possibilities that collective political action holds for our societies and polities.
Just one suggestion to the author of Depoliticizing Development. Notions of social capital and trust neatly negotiate a particular dilemma that has preoccupied theorists of the market for some time, since the time of Adam Smith in fact. The dilemma is the following. On the one hand, the operations of the market breed a high degree of interdependence among individuals. On the other hand, people who are forced into dependence on strangers, have no access to any resource — such as shared understandings — that allows them to trust their partners in transactions. How on earth do people deal with each other in the arid spaces of civil society, stripped as these are of any shared history or language? One answer had been provided by Thomas Hobbes — that of the contract, which becomes the prime metaphor of transactions in market societies. But the metaphorical contract, apart from the fact that it cannot assure us of any meaningful human interaction but only of cold, hard, and sterile legal obligations that protect the contractee from harm, suffers from a basic drawback — it provides little security for the participants. What is to ensure that strangers who enter the contract can be depended upon to honour their obligations except the reach of the law? Obviously, participants in the complex economic sphere of capitalism need other reassurances that their partners will not retract from the contract. To put it bluntly, market transactions have to be embedded in non-market relations in order to function with some measure of success.
But not any kind of non-market relations, let me hasten to add, will do. Market transactions need disciplined, predictable, and socialised behaviour as a pre-requisite for their successful functioning. Hobbes, recognising precisely this predicament, sets up the Leviathan to enforce compliance. But not all theorists had a taste for strong governments and constant monitoring by state authorities. If Adam Smith was to put forth his theory of moral sentiments to discipline civil society, contemporary theorists such as Francis Fukuyama accept that capitalist accumulation needs the presence of what he calls trust, much as Putnam speaks of social capital as the glue that holds society [and the economy] together. And James Coleman has suggested that social norms that guarantee expectation need to underlie economic transactions if the domain has to expand. These soft norms, which set in place informal modes of social co-ordination and trust, constitute the social preconditions of capitalist accumulation. Perhaps social capital and trust are needed not so much to provide development as to facilitate the transactions of the market. And it is precisely the expansion of these transactions that the World Bank by definition is committed to.
Reinventing India: Liberalisation, Hindu Nationalism, and Popular Democracy, Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss, Oxford University Press, 2000, p.313, Rs. 595.
Depoliticizing Development: The World Bank and Social Capital, John Harriss, Leftword Books, 2001, p.145, Rs. 250.
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