Pre-History of Religious Conflict in India
According to the scholars of secular nationalist historiography, the British colonial rule, especially its ‘divide and rule’ policy, was responsible for Hindu-Muslim conflict and the breakdown of communal harmony in India. For example, Das (1990:22) has argued that communalism was first conceptualized by the British to secure allies. They raised Muslim communalism as a counter-weight to the emerging Indian nationalism. Hasan (1980: 1395) has noted that the roots communalism in India lies in ‘the Morley-Minto Reform [of 1909] which, by creating communal electorates, exacerbated Hindu-Muslim divisions and fostered the spirit of political exclusivism’.
Although such explanations are true, they provide only a partial understanding and ignore ‘the longue duree’ of the construction of communal identities in India (van der Veer 1994:30). Scholars like Christopher Bayly (1985), Peter van der Veer (1994) and others have stretched the discussion to pre-colonial period and have argued that religious and communal conflict had a pre-history in India even before the consolidation of the British rule. According to them ‘community-based state policies’, as followed by Aurangzeb (1618-1707) and Tipu Sultan (1750-1799) on the Muslim side and Jai Singh II of Jaipur (1688-1743) on the Hindu side, were responsible for communal conflict during the pre-colonial period (Bayly 1985:184-186; van der Veer 1994:32).
Such preferential exclusivist community-based policies were, however, continued by the British (e.g. through separate electorates for religious minorities), which resulted in large-scale ethno-religious violence in colonial India and ultimately culminated in its territorial division into the Islamic state of Pakistan and the Hindu dominated but secular India. Language, religion and ethnicity have, since then, been issues that keep challenging the democratic character of a pluralistic India.
Civil Society and Democratization in India
This chapter is an attempt to understand the emergence of civil society in India as a response to the rolling back of the state from social welfare. The chapter begins with an overview of the recent challenges before Indian democracy and moves on to discuss how civil society organizations used the various traditional media like folk dance, popular songs, street plays and other popular methods to spread awareness and to bring development through the empowerment of common people. It argues that the macro and mainstream universalistic media and communication was unable to capture the fragmented realities and social problems of the rural life for which civil society called for a micro and particularistic media to address the issues in rural society. Through the example of Mazdoor Kishan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in Rajasthan, the chapter also discusses the role of civil society organizations in enhancing democratization, especially the Right to Information Act in ensuring good governance in society.
Power and Contestation
Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam (2007) Power and Contestation: India since 1989, London: Zed Books.
Power and Contestation, written by two well-known political theorists-cum-activists in India, presents the most up-to-date and comprehensive chronicle of India’s political history since 1989. Combining post-nationalist, feminist and new left perspectives, the authors candidly illustrate how the power of capital and nation in post-1989 India has constantly been contested in public and political discourse.
Narrating the political transformations and changing state–society relations in India in the last two decades, the authors argue that India post-1989 has witnessed a significant departure from its foundational principles such as Nehruvian socialism, secular nationalism and the principles of non-alignment. Although global factors like the ‘end of the Cold War’ and neoliberal reforms have significantly influenced developments in India, the authors argue that it was primarily the ‘internal conflicts and logics’ that propelled these transformations in India (p. 2). With the decline of the Congress party and the regionalization of Indian politics, the issue of caste has re-emerged in the political sphere. The ‘mandalization of politics’ (p.16) and the increasing political mobilisation of the lower caste has not only challenged the hegemony of the upper castes but also significantly influenced the imperatives of electoral politics in India. Secularism, a key political principle which traditionally provided considerable psychological and political security to religious minorities, has been under vigorous attack with the rapid rise of Hindutva politics manifested in the demolition of Babri Mosque in 1992 and the ‘state-sponsored massacre of Muslims in Gujarat’ in 2002 (p. 51).
Globalisation and neoliberal economic reforms, as updated incarnations of the old idea of development and modernisation, have dispossessed people, disrupted communities and destroyed their cultures and livelihoods without offering them any viable or dignified alternatives. As a response, various non-party political formations and grass-roots movements or what the authors call ‘new left’ movements have emerged to contest the exclusive and exploitative logic of global capital and its local ally the nation/state. The conflicts in the north-east and Kashmir region have also challenged the ‘idea of India’. Although global capital has helped the Indian nation to secure a place in the world, the authors conclude that ‘in India, as elsewhere in the world, the contestations to the power of Capital and Nation are so many, so varied, and so relentless’ (p. 181).
Since the book is written from the ‘new left’ perspective, it captures only one aspect of India’s transformation since 1989. Despite this, the strength of the book is its numerous recent examples and candid analytic style, which make it an admiral contribution to the Zed Books series on ‘Global History of the Present’ and a rich resource for anyone working on India.
__________________________
@ Sarbeswar Sahoo, Political Studies Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 2009
Making Aid Work?
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee (2007) Making Aid Work. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 170pp, £9.95, 978 0 262 02615 4
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee’s Making Aid Work provides an excellent forum to discuss the problems engulfing international development aid. It argues that the ineffectiveness of foreign development aid is primarily due to “institutional laziness” (p.7). Banerjee argues that international donor agencies, NGOs and multilateral institutions do not pay much attention to the impact and “cost-effectiveness” (p.16) of a program and are often “unclear about what they should be pushing for” (p.21). Building on the drugs evaluation model, Banerjee argues that “randomized trials… are the simplest and best way of assessing the impact of a program” (p.10). Although “randomized trials are not perfect” (p.11), argues Banerjee, they provide “hard evidence” (p.113) and “spur[s] innovation by making it easy to see what works” (p.122).
The problems of foreign aid, as recognized by Banerjee, have been universally agreed upon by several economists and policy makers. However, his arguments on lazy thinking and randomized experiments have received skeptical responses. Many have rejected his accusations that the international donors are not pursuing impact evaluation and cost-benefit analysis. Banerjee’s argument is very limited and ambiguous. His academic training in economics influences much of his thinking on macro level quantitative experimentation, ignoring the dynamics of power relations at the grassroots level. He also fails to explain the idea of randomized experiment in a clear manner. His emphasis on laziness (not filling up a form) that is grounded on a particular example from Pakistan does not really apply to regular NGO functioning. As Mick Moore has rightly argued, development agencies are “staffed and run by expressive intellectuals” who are “skilled in performing the key functions of the contemporary aid business: producing position papers and strategy documents and managing inter-agency coordination meetings” (p.43).
By placing the emphasis on institutions, Banerjee has failed to address the “politics” of development and international aid, which often has created a “culture of dependency” at the grassroots level. Banerjee is also unable to understand that the problem of foreign aid is not primarily due to “institutional laziness” but the result of a rationalized and active institutional effort to depoliticize development and to create what James Ferguson (1990) has called an “anti-politics machine”. Nevertheless, Banerjee’s arguments have generated numerous pertinent issues and discussions related to the aid regime. His concluding essay has brilliantly addressed the machine like character of development policy making. The structure of the book is innovative, although the forum discussions are regrettably brief.
___________________
This review has been published by Sarbeswar Sahoo in Political Studies Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 2009
The Politics of Tribal Resistance in Orissa
Why does collective resistance occur where they do and how are the actions and options of social movement agents shaped by and also impact on social structures? What inspires and empowers people to resist and to reveal the character and spirit of the cultural expressions of resistance? In short, what is the ‘politics’ of (tribal) resistance in Orissa? Addressing these issues, the paper makes three basic arguments – Firstly, the ‘fear’ of the uncertain future, and the cultural meaning attached to the geographical notions of ‘place’ provide important perspectives in understanding the relations of power, domination and the politics of collective resistance. Secondly, the threat of material interest serves as an organizing principle in politicizing identity and interest groups against the outside authority. And finally, the magnitude of resistance intensifies when the grievances of the people are treated in an unresponsive and oppressive manner.
Seven Social Sins
For Gandhi, the seven social sins are:
Politics without principles.
Wealth without work
Commerce without morality
Education without character
Pleasure without conscience.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Individualism – Man’s Right to Exist for his Own Sake
Has man any right to exist if he refuses to serve society?
Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake, he taught his brothers to light. But he left them a gift they had not conceived. And he lifted darkness off the earth. Throughout the centuries, there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. The great creators, the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors stood alone against the men of their time. Every new thought was opposed; every new invention was denounced. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid, but they won. No creator was prompted by a desire to please his brothers. His brothers hated the gift he offered. His truth was his only motive. His work is his only goal. His work, not those who used it; his creation, not the benefits others derived from it; the creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men. He went ahead whether others agreed with him or not, with his integrity as his only banner. He served nothing and no one. He lived for himself, and only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.
Man cannot survive, except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon, but the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. The man who thinks must think and act on his own. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be subordinated to the needs, opinions or wishes of others. It is not an object of sacrifice. The creator stands on his own judgment. The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks; the parasite copies. The creator produces; the parasite loots. The creator’s concern is the conquest of nature. The parasites concern is the conquest of men. The creator requires independence. He neither serves nor rules. He deals with men by free exchange and voluntary choice. The parasite seeks power. He wants to bind all men together in common action and common slavery. He claims that man is only a tool for the use of others that he must think as they think, act as they act, and live in selfless, joyless servitude to any need but his own.
Look at history! Everything we have, every great achievement has come from the independent work of some independent mind. Every horror and destruction came from attempts to force men into a herd of brainless, soulless robots without personal rights, without personal ambition, without hope, or dignity. It is an ancient conflict. It has another name – the individual against the collective. Our country, the noblest country in the history of men was based on the principles of individualism – the principle of man’s inalienable rights. It was country where a man was free to seek his own happiness. To gain and produce, not to give up and renounce; to prosper, not to starve; to achieve, not to plunder; to hold his highest possession, a sense of his personal value and as his highest virtue his self-respect. Look at the results! That is what the collectivists are now asking you to destroy as much as the earth has been destroyed.
I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principle on which it is built. We are approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live. My ideas are my property. They were taken from me by force, by breach of contract. No appeal was left to me. It was believed that my work belonged to others to do with as they pleased. They had a claim upon me without my consent that it was my duty to serve them without choice or reward. Now you know why I dynamited Cortlandt. I designed Cortlandt, I made it possible, I destroyed it. I agreed to design it for the purpose of seeing it built as I wished. That was the price I set for my work. I was not paid. My building was disfigured at the whim of others who took all the benefits of my work and gave me nothing in return. I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine, no matter who makes the claim. It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. I came here to be heard in the name of every man of independence still left in the world. I wanted to state my terms. I do not care to work or live on any others. My terms are a man’s right to exist for his own sake.
__________________
@ This is translated from a video on “Fountain Head”.
Hindutva’s Violent History
ANGANA CHATTERJI
Anthropologist
Tehelka Magazine, Vol. 5, Issue . 36, Dated Sept 13, 2008;
HINDUTVA’S PRODUCTION of culture and nation is often marked by savagery. On 23 August 2008, Lakshmanananda Saraswati, Orissa’s Hindu nationalist icon, was murdered with four disciples in Jalespeta in Kandhamal district. State authorities alleged the attackers to be Maoists (and a group has subsequently claimed the murder). But the Sangh Parviar held the Christian community responsible, even though there is no evidence or history to suggest the armed mobilisation of Christian groups in Orissa.
After the murder, the All India Christian Council stated: “The Christian community in India abhors violence, condemns all acts of terrorism, and opposes groups of people taking the law into their own hands”. Gouri Prasad Rath, General Secretary, VHPOrissa, stated: “Christians have killed Swamiji. We will give a befitting reply. We would be forced to opt for violent protests if action is not taken against the killers”.
Following which, violence engulfed the district. Churches and Christian houses razed to the ground, frightened Christians hiding in the jungles or in relief camps. Officials record the death toll at 13, local leaders at 20, while the Asian Centre for Human Rights noted 50.
The Sangh’s history in postcolonial Orissa is long and violent. Virulent Hindutva campaigns against minority groups reverberated in Rourkela in 1964, Cuttack in 1968 and 1992, Bhadrak in 1986 and 1991, Soro in 1991. The Kandhamal riots were not unforeseen.
Since 2000, the Sangh has been strengthened by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s coalition government with the Biju Janata Dal. In October 2002, a Shiv Sena unit in Balasore district declared the formation of the first Hindu ‘suicide squad’. In March 2006, Rath stated that the “VHP believes that the security measures initiated by the Government [for protection of Hindus] are not adequate and hence Hindu society has taken the responsibility for it.”
The VHP has 1,25,000 primary workers in Orissa. The RSS operates 6,000 shakhas with a 1,50,000 plus cadre. The Bajrang Dal has 50,000 activists working in 200 akharas. BJP workers number above 4,50,000. BJP Mohila Morcha, Durga Vahini (7,000 outfits in 117 sites), and Rashtriya Sevika Samiti (80 centres) are three major Sangh women’s organisations. BJP Yuva Morcha, Youth Wing, Adivasi Morcha and Mohila Morcha have a prominent base. Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh manages 171 trade unions with a cadre of 1,82,000. The 30,000-strong Bharatiya Kisan Sangh functions in 100 blocks. The Sangh also operates various trusts and branches of national and international institutions to aid fundraising, including Friends of Tribal Society, Samarpan Charitable Trust, Sookruti, Yasodha Sadan, and Odisha International Centre. Sectarian development and education are carried out by Ekal Vidyalayas, Vanavasi Kalyan Ashrams/Parishads (VKAs), Vivekananda Kendras, Shiksha Vikas Samitis and Sewa Bharatis — cementing the brickwork for hate and civil polarisation.
This massive mobilisation has erupted in ugly incidents against both Christians and Muslims. In 1998, 5,000 Sangh activists allegedly attacked the Christian dominated Ramgiri-Udaygiri villages in Gajapati district, setting fire to 92 homes, a church, police station, and several government vehicles. Earlier, Sangh activists allegedly entered the local jail forcibly and burned two Christian prisoners to death. In 1999, Graham Staines, 58, an Australian missionary and his 10- and six-year-old sons were torched in Manoharpur village in Keonjhar. A Catholic nun, Jacqueline Mary was gangraped by men in Mayurbhanj and Arul Das, a Catholic priest, was murdered in Jamabani, Mayurbhanj, followed by the destruction of churches in Kandhamal. In 2002, the VHP converted 5,000 people to Hinduism. In 2003, the VKA organised a 15,000- member rally in Bhubaneswar, propagating that Adivasi (and Dalit) converts to Christianity be denied affirmative action. In 2004, seven women and a male pastor were forcibly tonsured in Kilipal, Jagatsinghpur district, and a social and economic boycott was imposed against them. A Catholic church was vandalised and the community targeted in Raikia.
Change the cast, the story is still the same. 1998: A truck transporting cattle owned by a Muslim was looted and burned, the driver’s aide beaten to death in Keonjhar district. 1999: Shiekh Rehman, a Muslim clothes merchant, was mutilated and burned to death in a public execution at the weekly market in Mayurbhanj. 2001: In Pitaipura village, Jagatsinghpur, Hindu communalists attempted to orchestrate a land-grab connected to a Muslim graveyard. On November 20, 2001, around 3,000 Hindu activists from nearby villages rioted. Muslim houses were torched, Muslim women were ill-treated, their property, including goats and other animals, stolen. 2005: In Kendrapara, a contractor was shot on Govari Embankment Road, supposedly by members of a Muslim gang. Sangh groups claimed the shooting was part of a gang war associated with Islamic extremism and called for a 12hour bandh. Hindu organisations are alleged to have looted and set Muslim shops on fire.
It is Saraswati who pioneered the Hinduisation of Kandhamal since 1969. Activists targeted Adivasis, Dalits, Christians and Muslims through socio-economic boycotts and forced conversions (named ‘re’conversion, presupposing Adivasis and Dalits as ‘originally’ Hindus).
Kandhamal first witnessed Hindutva violence in 1986. The VKAs, instated in 1987, worked to Hinduise Kondh and Kui Adivasis and polarise relations between them and Pana Dalit Christians. Kandhamal remains socio-economically vulnerable, a large percentage of its population living in poverty. Approximately 90 percent of Dalits are landless. A majority of Christians are landless or marginal landholders. Hindutva ideologues say Dalits have acquired economic benefits, augmented by Christianisation. This is not borne out in reality.
In October 2005, converting 200 Bonda Adivasi Christians to Hinduism in Malkangiri, Saraswati said: “How will we… make India a completely Hindu country? The feeling of Hindutva should come within the hearts and minds of all the people.” In April 2006, celebrating RSS architect Golwalkar’s centenary, Saraswati presided over seven yagnas attended by 30,000 Adivasis. In September 2007, supporting the VHP’s statewide road-rail blockade against the supposed destruction of the mythic ‘Ram Setu’, Saraswati conducted a Ram Dhanu Rath Yatra to mobilise Adivasis.
In 2008, Hindutva discourse named Christians as ‘conversion terrorists’. But the number of such conversions is highly inflated. They claim there are rampant and forced conversions in Phulbani-Kandhamal. But the Christian population in Kandhamal is 1,17,950 while Hindus number 5,27,757. Orissa Christians numbered 8,97,861 in the 2001 census — only 2.4 percent of the state’s population. Yet, Christian conversions are storied as debilitating to the majority status of Hindus while Muslims are seen as ‘infiltrating’ from Bangladesh, dislocating the ‘Oriya (and Indian) nation’.
The right to religious conversion is constitutionally authorised. Historically, conversions from Hinduism to Christianity or Islam have been a way to escape caste oppression and social stigma for Adivasis and Dalits. In February 2006, the VHP called for a law banning (non- Hindu) religious conversions. In June 2008, it urged that religious conversion be decreed a ‘heinous crime’ across India.
‘Reconversion’ strategies of the Sangh appear to be shifting in Orissa. The Sangh reportedly proposed to ‘reconvert’ 10,000 Christians in 2007. But fewer public conversion ceremonies were held in 2007 than in 2004- 2006. Converting politicised Adivasi and Dalit Christians to Hinduism is proving difficult. The Sangh has instead increased its emphasis on the Hinduisation of Adivasis through their participation in Hindu rituals, which, in effect, ‘convert’ Adivasis by assuming that they are Hindu.
The draconian Orissa Freedom of Religion Act (OFRA), 1967, must be repealed. There are enough provisions under the Indian Penal Code to prevent and prohibit conversions under duress. But consenting converts to Christianity are repeatedly charged under OFRA, while Hindutva perpetrators of forcible conversions are not. The Sangh contends that ‘reconversion’ to Hinduism through its ‘Ghar Vapasi’ (homecoming) campaign is not conversion but return to Hinduism, the ‘original’ faith. This allows them to dispense with the procedures under OFRA.
The Orissa Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act, 1960 should also be repealed. It is utilised to target livelihood practices of economically disenfranchised groups, Adivasis, Dalits, Muslims, who engage in cattle trade and cow slaughter.
In fact, a CBI investigation into the activities of the VHP, RSS and Bajrang Dal is crucial as per the provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. Groups such as the VHP and VKA are registered as cultural and charitable organisations but their work is political in nature. They should be audited and recognised as political organisations, and their charitable status and privileges reviewed.
The state and central government’s refusal to restrain Hindu militias evidences their linkage with Hindutva (BJP), soft Hindutva (Congress), and the capitulation of civil society to Hindu majoritarianism. How would the nation have reacted if groups with affiliation other than than militant Hinduism executed riot after riot: Calcutta 1946, Kota 1953, Rourkela 1964, Ranchi 1967, Ahmedabad 1969, Bhiwandi 1970, Aligarh 1978, Jamshedpur 1979, Moradabad 1980, Meerut 1982, Hyderabad 1983, Assam 1983, Delhi 1984, Bhagalpur 1989, Bhadrak 1991, Ayodhya 1992, Mumbai 1992, Gujarat 2002, Marad 2003, Jammu 2008?
The BJD-BJP government has repeatedly failed to honour the constitutional mandate separating religion from state. In 2005-06, Advocate Mihir Desai and I convened the Indian People’s Tribunal on Communalism in Orissa, led by Retired Kerala Chief Justice KK Usha. The Tribunal’s findings detailed the formidable mobilisation by majoritarian communalist organisations, including in Kandhamal, and the Sangh’s visible presence in 25 of 30 districts. The report did not invoke any response from the state or central government.
In January 2000, The Asian Age reported: “‘One village, one shakha’ is the new slogan of the RSS as it aims to saffronise the entire Gujarat state by 2005.” Then ensued the genocide of March 2002. In 2003, Subash Chouhan, then Bajrang Dal state convener, stated: “Orissa is the second Hindu Rajya (to Gujarat).”
We all know what has happened in Kandhamal December 2007, and again now. The communal situation in Orissa is dire. State and civil society resistance to Hindutva’s ritual and catalytic abuse cannot wait.
The writer is associate professor of anthropology at California Institute of Integral Studies and author of a forthcoming book:
Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India’s Present, Narratives from Orissa
Globalization, Social Welfare and Civil Society in India
Globalization is being understood differently by different people. Fukuyama (1992) has referred it as the “end of history”, which established democracy as “the only legitimate and viable alternative to an authoritarian regime of any kind” (Huntington, 1992, p. 58). Where as, political theorists like Ohmae (1995), considering the vulnerabilities of the nation-states, have pronounced the “end of the nation-state”. Though it remains as an empirical question to see whether nation-states have lost their significance or not, one thing is clear that the existing state-society relationship in developing countries have undergone metamorphosis due to the policies of liberalization, privatization and globalization.
Following a historical analysis of the state-society relationship in India, the paper seeks to analyze the effects of globalization on Indian civil society. It argues that civil society during the colonial and early post-colonial period remained confined to the English educated upper caste elites and the subaltern populations were excluded from the public sphere because of the virtues of modernity and the paternalistic policies of post-colonial state and ruling elites. The decline of the moderate state and the Congress system in mid-1970s and the policies of globalization and the rolling back of the welfare state in mid-1980s transformed the state-society relationship and brought incongruous implications for civil society in India. The apparatus of the state became pluralized and several non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and people’s movements emerged to take up issues affecting the lives of poor and marginalized.
The paper concludes that though globalization has radicalized civil society activism and expanded its sphere over the past few years, in the process, it has turned civil society into a site of increasing class war, widespread violence and growing unfreedom. If civil society has to achieve freedom, democracy and social justice, it needs to move beyond its middle class orientation and transform itself as a more inclusive and more right based sphere of political activism.
Why Civilizations cannot Climb Hills?
Prof. James C. Scott, a professor at Yale, was a visiting professor at the Institute of Development Studies in Roskilde University in Denmark. Presenting his research on Southeast Asia, he spoke about Why Civilizations cannot Climb Hills on 29 April 2008. He argued how states stop when they come to hills and presented the history of non-state spaces. According to him, the history of agriculture in Southeast Asia is of 8,000 years. The history of homo-sapiens is 200,000 years and the history of homo-sapiens in Southeast Asia is 50,000 years. He also argued that most of human experience has been state-less. Population and production in Southeast Asia was dispersed.
He distinguished between the Valley and the Hill and argued that the valley has always been the sites of states – taxes, Kings, sites of war and of hierarchy. The hill has no permanent states, no permanent Kings and taxation system. It is relatively egalitarian, although it is considered uncivilized, primitive and as barbarian periphery. Hill peoples are the past of the valley people. Hill peoples don’t share the religion of the valley. Mountains remain at the fringes of civilization. People run away from valleys to hills to evade state-making – taxation, mono-cropping, etc. of the state. Hills are not barbarian periphery but they are kind of political refugees. Hill peoples are considered as tribes and tribes were the creation of states and empires. They are the people who live in the fringes of the state. In Southeast Asia and South Asia, tribes were escaping state-building where as in Africa tribes were part of the state project. The idea of nation-state has been to control the periphery and to expand the state sovereignty till the border.
