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Book Review
Development activism — a case study
DEVELOPMENT HEGEMONY— NGOs and the State in India: Sangeeta Kamat; Oxford University Press, First Floor, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 495.
THE BOOK under review is a case study of development discourse and practice in the NGO sector in Maharashtra. The author tries, in this volume, to provide an understanding of development through civil-societal formations using the concept of hegemony. This Gramscian concept, which describes the political process of acquiring the right of political rule through interplay of coercion and consent, has been reshaped into a post-industrial formulation by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.
Kamat introduces her volume by describing how development discourse and practice depoliticise the beneficiaries of the Sansad and the Sanghatana. These two organisations form a ``dual-structure'' NGO in Maharashtra, since the Sansad undertakes a welfarist development activity on the one hand, while the Sanghatana, with more radical overtones, undertakes programmes of conscientisation on the other. The author suggests that such a dual functioning is rather common among the NGOs, which have arisen because of initiatives by Left radicals after the crackdown by the government on the Naxalite groups. The author then examines the contradictions that arise among these organisations, as a result of their reformist initiative to develop the beneficiaries.
The Sansad and the Sanghatana began to function in the dual structure described above as a result of Ajay and Sujata's initiative to end bonded labour among the Bhils of the region. This initiative began when their more innocuous attempts to set up clinics and other ``social services'' failed to address chronic problems, traceable to indebtedness and bondage of the tribals. The movement to stop bonded labour predictably resulted in the extreme oppression of the Bhils, who were boycotted by the upper caste landlords of the village. The shadow of starvation forces the activists to take up ``development projects'' from the government. One of the Sansad's development projects Kamat focuses on in her study is the dairy project, which tries to promote entrepreneurship among the beneficiaries through a market-oriented scheme.
Kamat's most interesting analysis probes the manner in which the relations of dairy production and its political economy are reduced to technical problems to be solved through the application of science and administration. There are several conflicts of perspective, which arise between the NGO activists and the beneficiaries, between the beneficiaries, and the State, which promotes these schemes, and between the NGO and the State. As if this were not enough, the State backtracks on its promises to provide a market for the milk, the activists succumb to the rhetoric of technicity in spite of their political training, and the beneficiaries begin to act ``quite contrary''. The tribals refuse to employ their traditional knowledge to nurture the recalcitrant milch animals because they are sarkari cows. Next, when they become unprofitable, the Bhils refuse the Sansad's advice to sell them to cut their losses, since the useless sarkari cows have now become family members who cannot be abandoned to the butcher. Through all this, Kamat tries to hold on to the thread of argument about the technicist ideology and development hegemony with limited success, as the hilarity of the tragedy is too delicious to ignore.
Kamat then proceeds with some greater control to examine contradictions in the Sanghatana's attempts at conscientisation among the people regarding the function of the State. Her main argument here is that while the process succeeds in making the Bhils look at the sarkar as a rational peace-keeper rather than an irrational despot, it does not question the structure of the State itself. Thus, she continues to argue through to her conclusion that the NGOs tend to reproduce the State's logic, and forges the Bhils' consent to bourgeois rule.
The book is an attempt to understand the politics of activism in (almost) post-liberalisation India. The empirical processes it describes and the complexities it unravels are valuable additions to the critical discourse on development.
There are some niggling problems in her appropriation of theoretical resources with little attention to their compatibility: Lukacs, Gramsci, Foucault, Laclau. While Laclau has attempted to synthesise Gramsci and Foucault, his attempt is exceptional and his work is not entirely unproblematic, especially in a non-Western context. Kamat's fluency is also hampered by a lack of systematic background in development theory in the field of economics, administration and politics, all of which have a history of problematising the field. Some of her criticisms of activism originate in what Marxian self-assurance had once uncharitably dubbed ``infantile leftism''.
However, the book's major difficulty is its ambiguous acceptance of the proposition that ``activism'', NGO or otherwise, is a necessary, and on the whole beneficial, arm of politics that begins with the late 20th century; and that many projects go astray is a matter of a ``wrong perspective'', rather than of an incorrigible essence. The primary question, which Kamat does not ask, of the bondage relief struggle is ``How did the activists even begin to dream that they had the capacity to lead a struggle to eliminate debt bondage?'' The issue here is not whether they could or not, or whether it was good or bad. How did they have such an overpassing confidence in their activity, perspective and being? What is the culture and history that nurtures such a monumental consciousness, in the Indian context? Does the socio-political structure of this self-assurance undermine its radicalism? A self-critical understanding of activism cannot be arrived at unless such questions are broached. One hopes that the author's future work will begin to address them.
R. SRIVATSAN
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