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Amita Baviskar (amita.baviskar@gmail.com) is at the Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi, and Nandini Sundar (nandinisundar@yahoo.com) at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University.

Democracy versus Economic Transformation?

Amita Baviskar, Nandini Sundar

Chatterjee sets up a number of structural oppositions but a more insightful and productive understanding of ongoing change would not only dissolve some of these distinctions but also invert some of the attributes of both “civil” and “political” society.

On reading Partha Chatterjee’s marvellously synoptic and yet equally provocative article on

“Democracy and Economic Transforma-tion in India”, (19 April 2008) we were r eminded of an old joke involving the arch-villain of Hindi cinema, Ajit, and his side-kick Robert. Robert, having captured the hero, asks his boss for instructions. Ajit gives a diabo lical laugh and replies, Robert, tum ise l iquid oxygen mein daal do. Liquid ise jeene nahin dega, aur oxygen ise marne nahin dega (Put him in liquid oxy-gen. The liquid won’t let him live, and the oxygen won’t let him die). The same grue-some fate of being slowly killed while be-ing kept artificially alive seems to have befallen India’s peasantry. Substitute cor-porate capital for Robert, the Indian state for Ajit, and the Indian (especially rural) poor for the hero, and we have the gist of Chatterjee’s article. Even as primitive ac-cumulation – or the process of dispossess-ing the peasantry – gathers pace under the impetus of hegemonic corporate capital, the legitimacy of the government depends on the extent to which it can address the needs of those affected. The consequence is a set of ameliorative measures negotiat-ed “politically” (rather than through the proper rules and procedures characteristic of civil society) between India’s rulers and the amorphous masses. Unlike in the clas-sic model of industrialisation, however, where the peasantry gives way to an ur-banised proletariat, Chatterjee forecasts that the peasantry will remain but “under completely altered conditions”.

While we agree with many of Chatter-jee’s observations about contemporary In-dian political economy, in particular his recognition of the leading role of Indian corporate capital as it begins to undertake g lobal acquisitions (thus no longer capable of b eing simply termed comprador), the disdain of the middle classes for what they see as the unruly poor, and the desire of villagers and the urban poor to engage

with capitalist modernity, we have con-cerns about his overall analytical frame-work. Chatterjee sets up a number of structural oppositions: corporate versus non-corporate capital; civil society versus political society; both civil and political society together versus marginalised groups (outside any society); government (as an arena of negotiation) versus capital and market (impersonal, lacking ideology, interested only in accumulation); and fi-nally, dispossession as a characteristic of the modern economy balanced by welfare measures. The domains of corporate capi-tal and non-corporate capital, according to Chatterjee, map neatly onto civil society and political society respectively.

A more insightful and productive u nderstanding of ongoing social change, we argue, would not only dissolve some of the distinctions that Chatterjee sets up, but also invert some of the attributes of both civil and political society. We believe that this moment is particularly exciting for the future of Indian democracy p recisely because it is not only corporate capital which has a narrative of transition and a vision of the future (p 61), but be-cause the battle has been joined by alter-native narratives put forth by a multipli-city of groups in society, with often con-tending visions of democracy (from the Bajrang Dal to the Naxalites to the peas-ants of Singur). S adly, far from benignly intervening with ameliorative measures, the Indian state seems to be coming firm-ly down on one side of the scale, militaris-ing large swathes of the countryside, in-cluding Kashmir, the north-east and the Naxalite belt. Where welfare measures have been introduced, they have often been at the insistence of what Chatterjee would call “political society” or even non-society/marginal groups. Take the Na-tional Rural Employment Guarantee A ct, the Forest Rights Act, and the Right to In-formation Act – three pieces of landmark legislation, which owe as much to the c apacity of subaltern groups to wage sus-tained campaigns that range from rural India to the footpaths of Jantar Mantar, as to the prescience of the ruling class. And even as Indian electoral demo cracy is celebrated, deservedly in our opinion, there is increasingly an attempt to use p rocedural democracy and the existence

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of independent statutory institutions to s ubvert a more substantive democracy.1

Let us begin with the terminological op-positions that Chatterjee sets up. While reco gnising the need to signal the exist-ence of an overarching capitalist system (as against the semi-feudal, semi-capital-ist system beloved of an earlier generation of analysts), we fail to understand why he uses the term corporate and non-corporate as against simply capital and mercantile exchange. The classic definition of capital per se (and not just its corporate variety) is that it is driven by the logic of accumula-tion, as against subsistence or exchange. But more importantly, this distinction fails to capture the interlinked nature of much corporate and non-corporate capital in a world where flexible production connects multinational firms to domestic produc-tion, and rural livelihoods are falling apart under the onslaught of corporate capital, and where the moneylender also doubles up as the fertiliser and seed agent. In fact, a closer look at some of the “welfare pro-grammes” that Chatterjee describes as offsetting dispossession, actually serve as forms of “welfare colonialism” where ac-cess to micro-credit is premised on buying diesel pumps, fertiliser, etc, which actually tie peasants closer into a dependent m arket economy.2

Second, the idea that there is something new about measures like employment guarantees, subsidised food, and primary education, in response to a new phase of primitive accumulation, is debatable – the poor-house goes back to the days of the in-dustrial revolution. Even when exercising eminent domain, the colonial state, at least in principle, recognised that existing rights needed to be compensated. The dif-ference, if any, in people’s ability to de-mand rehabilitation today comes not from increased government recognition of the legitimacy of their demands, but their own degree of organisation and their increased ability to speak in terms of the very law that is used to dispossess them (but more of that in the next section). Indeed, the stop-go policy of the government between the preservation of the peasantry and the needs of capital that Chatterjee outlines are familiar from a 1980 article by David Washbrook, describing the colonial state. What is new now is that a paternalistic

discourse of welfare, whether state-led or in the form of corporate social responsibil-ity, has to contend with the counter-claims of subaltern rights and entitlements. Our main concern, however, is with Chatter-jee’s distinction between civil and political s ociety and it is to this that we now turn.

Civil Society and the ‘Rule of Law’

Chatterjee’s argument rests crucially on the distinction between civil and political society in India. The former coincides with corporate capital and is governed by the rule of law. Political society coincides with non-corporate capital and is marked by its inability to summon the legitimacy of law. In Chatterjee’s analysis, the present moment in Indian political economy is marked by the “ascendancy in the relative power of the corporate capitalist class as compared to the landed elites” (p 56). At the same time, “the urban middle class, which once played such a crucial role in producing and running the autonomous developmental state…, appears now to have largely come under the moral- political sway of the bourgeoisie” (p 57). These middle classes make up the domain of civil society in India; they are treated by the state as rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by the Constitution. How-ever, large sections of the rural population and the urban poor are excluded from civil society. They inhabit the domain that Chatterjee terms “political society” and “make their claims on government, and in turn are governed, not within the frame-work of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws, but rather through tem-porary, contextual and unstable arrange-ments arrived at through direct political negotiations...” (ibid). The claims of politi-cal society for governmental benefits al-ways remain illegitimate: “these cannot often be met by the standard application of rules and frequently require the decla-ration of an exception” (p 61). Members of civil society resent the “unruliness and cor-ruption of systems of popular political repre sentation” (p 62). The task of manag-ing these tensions between civil and politi-cal society is the “difficult and innovative process of politics” (ibid) in India today.

However, when we examine the work-ings of corporate capital and the urban middle classes in India, what is striking is

their manifest disdain for the Constitution and for the legal process. Marx did not de-scribe primitive accumulation as an order-ly, lawful process but noted that: “In actu-al history, it is a notorious fact that con-quest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part” (Marx 1990: 874). The description holds for In-dia today: the violent crushing of peasant opposition to land acquisition shows the collusion between corporate capital and the state, a compact that cannot be de-scribed as “civil” by any stretch of the im-agination.3 Equally notable are the ex-traordinary concessions granted to corpo-rate firms in the form of land for mining, ports, special economic zones, which set aside labour, environmental and proce-dural rules. Even the judiciary have been complicit in allowing “exceptions” when the defendants have been powerful enough. For instance, the Supreme Court condoned the well-connected Swami-narayan sect’s construction of the Ak-shardham religious theme park in Delhi on the Yamuna floodplain, encroaching on an area designated in the city master plan as an ecological zone. On the other hand, the eviction of poor squatters as well as l egal farmers living in the vicinity was e ndorsed by the court on the grounds that the law must be upheld. More recently, the Supreme Court glossed over the illegalities of the Vedanta Group by the simple expedient of giving its flagship com pany Sterlite a bauxite mining lease in Niyamgiri in Orissa, over riding strong ob-jections by the resident population.

Reversing the Facts

Chatterjee inverts what is actually the case: generally, it is members of the so-called civil society who break laws with impunity and who demand that the rules be waived for them, whereas members of political society strive to become legal, to gain recognition and entitlements from the state. The state’s differential treat-ment of these two classes is exemplified in the case of encroachments and irregular land use in Delhi. While the law was e nforced to demolish the settlements of working class squatters, penalising people who were victims of the state’s failure to build low-cost housing, it was amended to “regularise” the illegal construction and

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violation of zoning codes by well-to-do traders and homeowners. It was the poor ‘jhuggi’-dwellers who desperately dis-played their documented claims to citi-zenship – voter IDs, ration cards and t okens issued by the slum department. The rich encroachers simply demanded that their illegality be condoned and they succeeded in getting their way.

Civil society is thus not a domain of he-gemony as Chatterjee describes, but of domination. Its attempts to make eco-nomic liberalisation the common sense of our times are accompanied by brutal state repression and the anomalous exercise of law. At the same time, the category of po-litical society is inadequate for describing the variety of social formations that stand ranged against or in collusion with the corporate and urban middle classes. For example, the silence or tacit support given to Bajrang Dal activists to burn Christian homes in Orissa and Karnataka, or to self-styled custodians of culture to attack exhi-bitions, burn books, etc, suggests a grow-ing intolerance precisely in that sphere of civil society which Chatterjee claims lives by the rules, as well as a growing state un-willingness to curb this.

If one perceives peasants as political be-ings, and the state is perforce bound to do

so, a functionalist formula of preserva-tion-dissolution falls apart. Instead, at-tention must be focused on how the “great transformation” of our times (Polanyi 1944) – the attempt by the economy to dominate society – summons forth power-ful counter-movements that resist the commodification of land and labour, as well as groups that are set up precisely to divide society. The career of corporate capital in rural India is more complicated than Chatterjee allows; besides primitive accumulation it includes forays into the formal subsumption of labour to capital (e g, contract farming) as well as the real subsumption of labour to capital (e g, di-rect takeover of land for agroforestry). Most recently corporate capital has not been content with ruling behind the scenes, but its members have actually en-tered Parliament or state legislatures themselves. The counter-movements that resist corporate moves are also diverse and deploy a range of political resources that far exceed Chatterjee’s description. Categories such as civil society and politi-cal society fail to capture the character of domination in India today, thereby miss-ing the brutality and desperation and, de-spite these, the inherent dynamism and hope that still persists.

Notes

1 For example, the Bharatiya Janata Party used Modi’s electoral victory in 2002 to justify the genocide in Gujarat; the existence of institutions like the National Human Rights Commission is used to deflect attention from India’s human rights record; and even as the cash for votes deals in the 2008 trust vote became an “open secret”, they were subsumed within a framework of par-liamentary procedure.

2 This is brought out clearly in ongoing research by Malwa Muniswamy, a PhD student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, on the Velugu programme, a World Bank funded microcredit scheme in Andhra Pradesh.

3 See for instance, police firings at Maikanch village in Rayagada district, Orissa, in which three people were killed protesting against land acquisition for bauxite mining in 2001; at Tapkara in Ranchi dis-trict, Jharkhand in which nine were killed protest-ing against the Koel Karo dam in 2001; at the Khu-ga dam site in Churachandpur district, Manipur in which three were killed in 2005; at Kalingana-gar in Orissa, in which 12 were killed protesting against a Tata steel plant in 2006; at Nandigram in West Bengal where some 15 were killed in 2007 protesting against land acquisition for a special economic zone. This is by no means an exhaus-tive list of recent police violence related to land acquisition. Increasingly too, as in the Posco steel project in eastern Orissa, the Alcan bauxite project in Kashipur and the SEZ in Nandigram, armed gangs supported by the company and assisted by the local administration and police have been used to coerce villagers into parting with their land.

References

Marx, Karl (1990) (1867): Capital, Vol 1 (London: P enguin Classics).

Polanyi, Karl (1944): The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (B oston: Beacon Press).

Washbrook, David (1981): “Law, State and Agrarian Soci-ety in Colonial India”, Modern Asian Studies, 15 (3).

Partha Chatterjee (partha@cssscal.org) is with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences C alcutta and also with the Columbia University, New York

Classes, Capital and Indian Democracy

Partha Chatterjee

Partha Chatterjee responds to the three comments by Shah, John and Deshpande, and Baviskar and Sundar, on his essay “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India”.

It is immensely gratifying to be com-mented upon and even criticised by younger scholars whose work one has

greatly admired and whose views are a pointer to the direction that Indian social science will take in the years to come. I am thankful to Mary John and Satish Desh-pande, Mihir Shah, and Amita Baviskar and Nandini Sundar for the care and seriousness with which they have read my article “Democracy and Economic Transformation in India” (19 April 2008, hereafter DET). My response below is in the spirit of continuing the discussion.

John and Deshpande are right in s uggesting that in DET, I have tried to in-quire whether the apparently hegemonic position recently acquired by corporate capital in urban society in India also e xtends to the countryside. I have also tried to flesh out the dynamics of what I call “political s ociety”, earlier worked out for urban popu-lations, in the contemporary rural context. The route I have chosen in DET is to connect with an older Marxist discussion of transi-tion to capitalism, passive revolution of capital and the politics of the subaltern classes, and to ask if an adequate under-standing of our contemporary situation r equires a reconceptualisation of those old-er categories. This, of course, is only one possible trajectory to an under standing of the present and, needless to say, other ave-nues could be profitably explored.

Hence, if Mihir Shah is convinced that class analysis of the Marxist variety is