Civil Society and Indian Democracy

Spaces available for democratic expression need to be utilised with renewed creativity by those fighting for a more equal, less exploitative social order. There is a need to guard against both the despair of rejecting all civil society efforts as sham as well as of taking this democracy for granted. Can civil society organisations work for social transformation without veering towards these two extremes?

Establishing a democracy in a country with such massive poverty and profound social, economic and regional inequality has been an enormous challenge. As evidence of intensifying market and government failure accumulated in recent decades, civil society began playing an increasingly important role in India. This article seeks to answer the following questions.

Can civil society be seen as an agent of social transformation in India today? In what form and under what circumstances can the answer to this question be given in the affirmative? In order to answer these questions, this article attempts to: (1) Enunciate a theoretical framework within which we can understand the role of civil society and (2) carefully differentiate empirically the different strands within civil society in India today.
Theoretical Framework
The most important contemporary contribution to developing a conceptual framework for understanding civil society in India has been that of Partha Chatterjee. He speaks of civil society in contra-distinction to what he terms political society. Chatterjee distinguishes between:

a domain of properly constituted civil society and a more ill-defined and contingently activated domain of political society. Civil society in India today, peopled largely by the urban middle classes, is the sphere that seeks to be congruent with the normative models of bourgeois civil society and represents the domain of capitalist hegemony. But there is the other domain of political society which includes large sections of the rural population and the urban poor. These people do, of course, have the formal status of citizens and can exercise their franchise as an instrument of political bargaining. But they do not relate to the organs of the state in the same way that the middle classes do, nor do governmental agencies treat them as proper citizens belonging to civil society. Those in political society make their claims on government, and in turn are governed, not within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws, but rather through temporary, contextual and unstable arrangements arrived at through direct political negotiations…the bulk of the population in India lives outside the orderly zones of proper civil society.

Chatterjee believes that those belonging to what he calls political society, lacking an agency of their own, typically mobilise through powerful patrons and brokers. While some instances of this can be found, in the main, Chatterjee’s distinction does not appear to be of much value in understanding the dynamics of Indian society today. Chatterjee completely fails to see the massive mobilisation of marginalised sections, dalits, adivasis, women and the poor, which has happened very much “within the framework of stable constitutionally defined rights and laws” (ibid). Especially in the past decade, we have seen the enactment of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and most recently the Andhra Pradesh Scheduled Castes Sub-Plan and Tribal Sub-Plan (Planning, Allocation and Utilisation of Financial Resources) Act 2013, all of which are directed at the most marginalised sections of Indian society.¹ This is a new form of subaltern politics that increasingly characterises India today. We have also seen the rise of powerful adivasi women’s self-help group (SHG) federations, which are playing an increasingly important role in mobilising the voice of the poor as participants in extremely unfair and unequal, often oppressive markets. So we have a very new phenomenon of the disadvantaged segments of Indian society attempting to leverage spaces within the state to foster their own interests.
We will return to these themes in the second part of the article. We first need to complete the theoretical task that we set ourselves at the beginning. Here, we must recognise that our question has to be posed in the context of capitalist democracies, one of which is India today. For it is in this unique space and within this unique challenge, of a democracy which seeks to establish itself within a capitalist economy, that we must locate our inquiry. The logical starting point for us then has to be Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which was later built upon by de Tocqueville and Marx, albeit in two quite different directions. Having scanned the vast theoretical literature on civil society, we believe the most useful point of departure remains the way Antonio Gramsci built upon and transformed the Hegel-Marx framework in his celebrated Prison Notebooks. Ironically, our starting point is the distinction Gramsci makes between political society and civil society, which as we will see in a moment, is completely different from the twist Chatterjee gives to what Gramsci had originally proposed.
According to Gramsci, in a capitalist class society, dominance is maintained through a combination of strategies. On the one hand, there is political society, which is that part of the state where sheer force is deployed. But the other part of the state is civil society, where domination is legitimised and hegemony is exercised through the manufacturing of consent. In the First Notebook, Gramsci describes this as “government by consent of the governed, but an organised consent, not the vague and generic kind which is declared at the time of elections” (Gramsci 1992: 153). Political society refers to “the armed forces, police, law courts and prisons, together with all the administrative departments concerning taxation, finance, etc” (Simon 1990: 71). The role of political society, the “apparatus of state coercive power”, is to enforce “discipline on those groups who do not ‘consent’” (Gramsci 2003: 12). But this apparatus comes into play only when the effort at establishing legitimacy fails.
Establishing legitimacy is the domain of civil society. Instruments of legitimation and hegemony include social institutions of civil society: the church, the educational system, the media or to put it in the words of Gramsci’s Sixth Notebook “the ethical content of the state” (Gramsci 2007a: 20). Gramsci was, however, not merely concerned with the engendering of consent and the exercise of hegemony. He was much more interested in modes in which hegemony could be challenged. He called this “counter-hegemony”. In his Seventh Notebook, Gramsci clearly distinguished two ways of challenging hegemony – a “war of maneuver” or “frontal war”, which is different from a “war of position” (Gramsci 2007b: 168). In the Sixth Notebook, Gramsci expresses the view that the “transition from the war of maneuver to the war of position is the most important postwar problem of political theory” (Gramsci 2007a: 109). A war of manoeuvre involves physical overthrow of the coercive apparatus of the state. But Gramsci realised that in modern liberal democracies, direct confrontation through an armed uprising or a general strike will not threaten the dominant groups so long as their credibility and authority remains firmly rooted in civil society. As the leading Gramsci scholar of our time Joseph Buttigieg (2005:43) puts it,

What makes the modern liberal democratic State robust and resilient, in Gramsci’s view, is not the power of coercion that it can exercise through political society (the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, the police, etc) but, rather, the myriad ways in which the core elements of its self-definition and self-representation are internalised or, to some degree or another, freely endorsed by most of its citizens – including those who belong to social strata other than the ruling or privileged groups.

The Contest over Hegemony
Thus, a war of position is resistance to domination with culture, rather than physical might, as its foundation.² It is interesting to note that in the First Notebook, Gramsci says “Gandhi’s passive resistance is a war of position” (Gramsci 1992: 219). For Gramsci, issues of culture are what lie at the heart of any revolutionary project; culture is “how class is lived”, it shapes how people see their world and how they manoeuvre within it and, more importantly, “it shapes their ability to imagine how it might be changed, and whether they see such changes as feasible or desirable” (Crehan 2002: 71). Gramsci’s question was: “how might a more equitable and just order be brought about, and what is it about how people live and imagine their lives in particular times and places that advances or hampers progress to this more equitable and just order” (ibid: 71). Consequently, it was his view that “one should refrain from facile rhetoric about direct attacks against the State and concentrate instead on the difficult and immensely complicated tasks that a ‘war of position’ within civil society entails” (Buttigieg 2005: 41).
As Raymond Williams has argued, our account of hegemony must be a complex one which “allows for its elements of real and constant change. We have to emphasise that hegemony is not singular; that its own internal structures are highly complex, and have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended; and by the same token, that they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modified” (Williams 1973: 37-38). Gramsci thus rejects a major deterministic-reductionist trend within Marxism. Many Marxists tend to view civil society, purely in an instrumentalist manner, as the hand-maiden of the ruling classes, as the legitimiser of class divisions under capitalism. Especially over the last two decades, in the recent period of intensified globalisation of the Indian economy, this view has gained great strength within the left.³ But any historical account, which makes out that the course of history is completely determined by the will and stratagems of the ruling class, always leaves something to be desired. Unfortunately, this is characteristic of much of the history in the Marxist tradition, invariably laced also with heavy-handed certainties⁴. As Foucault has remarked, “the order imposed by such functionalist or systematising thought is designed to mask the ruptural effects of conflict and struggle” (Gordon 1980: 82). Our conception of the relationship of power needs to be “simultaneously anti-structuralist and anti-voluntarist (opposed to the assumption of a unitary, rational, free-willed, autonomous subject)” (Jessop 1982: 254). As Foucault says, “power relations are both intentional and non-subjective” (1978: 94). And their reproduction is never univocal for “they define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion” (Foucault 1977: 27). As Bourdieu (1977: 179) argues, it is imperative that “the analysis holds together what holds together in practice, the double reality of intrinsically equivocal, ambiguous conduct”. We entirely concur, therefore, with the critique Nicos Mouzelis (1980: 184) offers of reductionism in Marxist theory:

Insofar as they suggest that it is possible to systematically derive political practices and institutional structures from the “laws” or functional requirements of the capitalist mode of production or the machinations of an all powerful bourgeoisie, they discourage serious study of the complicated and more or less indirect linkages between the economic and the political instances. Moreover, in as far as they portray collective agents as omnipotent, anthropomorphic entities or, at the other extreme, as mere “effects” of structural determinations, they lead either to an ultra-voluntarism or to a structural determinism – both extremes emasculating Marxism’s dialectical character, i e, its portrayal of collective agents in a constantly changing relation with a social environment which both constructs actors and presents them with a more or less large number of alternatives.

Thus, we believe Gramsci’s is a powerful contribution to our understanding of capitalist democracies. For, it alerts us to the fact that the very attempt at reinforcing legitimacy opens up the possibility of its subversion. This is the constant tension of maintaining positions of power in an avowedly democratic class society. Our difference with Gramsci is in a fundamental disagreement with the Marxist notion of Revolution – the notion of insurrection or overthrow, as if what will emerge from the rubble, like magic, would be a transformed social order. We need to give up this antediluvian, unitary and insurrectionist conception of Revolution (with a capital R). For many reasons. The unique appeal of “scientific socialism” was its claim to have discovered the “laws of motion of society” that predicted the inexorable coming of a new dawn. This teleology has ended up becoming the chief weakness of Marxism. If change continues to be visualised in these terms, means-ends questions will be run roughshod over and horrors of the Stalinist kind will continue to be perpetrated. A one-track, single-event notion of revolution must also be discarded because it leads to the complete neglect of crucial nitty-gritty detail that forms the heart of the transformation we dream of. It is this dry spadework that also contains solutions to immediate distress. Running mid-day meals in schools under active supervision of mothers, local people managing sanitation and drinking water systems, social audits in vibrant gram sabhas, participatory planning for watershed works, women leading federations of SHGs and workers running industrially safe, non-polluting factories as participant shareholders – all these and many more are the immediate, unfinished, feasible tasks of an ongoing struggle for change.
Unfortunately, many activists typically push these questions into a hazy future, to be all answered after the revolution, so to speak. One of the greatest weaknesses of the socialist project in the 20th century was its failure to flesh out the details of possible alternatives to a capitalist society. These are difficult questions that necessitate intricate answers. And we need to begin looking for these here and now, in the living laboratories of learning of our farms and factories, villages and slums; not in some imaginary distant future after a fictitious insurrection. Thus, civil society need not be merely the site for the reproduction of relations of power as argued by the left; it could also well be the locus of serious challenges to the dominant discourse and practices, charting the pathway to an alternative world.
We asked two questions at the beginning of this article: Can civil society be seen as an agent of social transformation in India today? In what form, under what circumstances can the answer to this question be given in the affirmative? Having laid out a theoretical framework to answer these questions, before we go on to propose a typology of civil society action, we need to recognise the specific historical context within which we are located. Scholars have long recognised the tension between capitalism and democracy (Radford 2013; Varshney 2013a, 2013b). But there is something very specific about the Indian context of this tension. As Varshney has argued, universal franchise, the right to vote without any distinction of gender, race, ethnicity or income, “came to the West after the Industrial Revolution – that is, after incomes had reached a substantially high level. India was to practice it at a very low level of income” (Varshney 2013a: 3), immediately after independence from colonial rule. It is also true that although many postcolonial nations took the democratic pledge, a very large number had abandoned it already by the 1960s (Huntington 1991). Varshney does not exaggerate when he claims for India that it is “for the first time in human history, a poor nation has practiced universal franchise for so long” (op cit: 4). It is also a fact that unlike in the west, in India the poor vote more than the rich. Thus, the pressure on the democratic state to respond to the demands of those who may not automatically benefit from the growth process generated by the capitalist system, the imperatives of legitimation we alluded to earlier, have been even more acute in the Indian context, especially as the decades have rolled by after Independence. We need to bear this in mind as we examine the typology of civil society action offered below.
Empirical Strands within Civil Society in India
We propose to divide civil society action in India today into four broad types.⁵ Each of these types comes with their own distinct motivations, strategies and inclinations. And each, we believe, has very different implications for carrying forward an agenda of social transformation. Beyond the typology we propose there are, of course, also caste and religious associations, proselytising non-governmental organisations (NGOs) or specific interest groups like trade unions, industry lobbies such as the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) or the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), as also the media and academia. There are think tanks that are specifically dedicated to reinforcing or questioning the structures of power. Their role, in intellectual terms, is relatively straightforward to understand and these need not detain us here. We are leaving these out in our typology and will only concentrate upon those segments within civil society that claim to be acting in the larger public interest, as also those who seek to bring about social transformation. Many of these are relatively unacknowledged in the public imagination, as they operate away from the glare of media publicity, in spaces among the subalterns, which for Partha Chatterjee do not even constitute proper civil society, but for us offer the most powerful examples of the same.
Type A: Compassion and Charity: Within our typology, the oldest form of civil society action is the one that arises from the well-springs of compassion and charity. This is the kind of work done by organisations and individuals who distribute blankets to the homeless in winter, run open kitchens for the hungry, are devoted to prevention of cruelty to animals, look after the differently-abled and the elderly and devote themselves to the care of the terminally ill. The aim is to reach out and provide immediate relief and succour to those in distress. The idea is not to redress long-term causes of this suffering; it is only to provide pain amelioration.
Type B: Developmental NGOs: Our second type of civil society action tries to go a little further by recognising that much of this distress is a consequence of the twin failures of markets and government. In a society characterised by mass poverty and high inequality, market failure is rampant. Throughout the world, public goods like health, education and environment have been invariably provided for or protected by governments. Ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s, capitalist democracies have seen major investments by the state in the fundamental rights of its citizenry. Large investments in infrastructure have also been the domain of the public sector in newly independent countries. Unfortunately, however, in India, both the magnitude of this effort and its quality have left much to be desired. Thus, the suffering of our people is not just a tale of market failure, it is also a failure of governance.
Much civil society action in India can, thus, be seen as an effort to bridge the gap left by this dual failure of markets and government. Many large NGOs occupy this space. They run schools, hospitals, watershed programmes and are engaged in a wide range of basic service delivery. The difficulty here is that these NGOs seek almost to act as substitutes, parallel to the state (sometimes even referred to as chhoti sarkar), even as they generally remain confined to “oases of excellence”. Indeed, as they attempt to grow larger they become subject to phenomena similar to government failure, as scale becomes the enemy of quality. But, of course, the problem with such action is much deeper as it ultimately reinforces passive dependence of citizens upon the NGO, quite akin to what government welfare programmes have tended to do. Without, and this is most important, being subject to the accountability that an elected government has to face.
Type C: Rights-based Activism: Taking a much more critical view of the “system” is civil society action of the third type in our classification. This is work based on providing a critique of mainstream practices of governments and markets and generating wider awareness of this critical view. The aim often is empowerment of citizens by making them aware of their rights under the Constitution. In theoretical terms, a lot of this activity could be said to be inspired by Amartya Sen’s pioneering work on agency, rights and capabilities and in historical terms can be seen to date from the period Sen initiated this work across the globe (Nussbaum 1997).
While Type C civil society action is always interrogative and oppositional in nature, its more extreme form is animated at times by the conviction that the system is intrinsically irremediable and needs overthrow. This could be described as counter-hegemony in the classical Gramscian sense, based on an insurrectionist vision of social transformation and has a much older, radical Marxist legacy in India. This kind of action is inspired by the notion that it is the “false consciousness” of the masses that leads to their tolerance of what is dished out to them, when actually there is no hope for them within the system as it exists, with all its inequities and injustices. The risk for such groups has been that they end up remaining marginal voices on the fringe, which may or may not have an impact on the way the mainstream functions. There is a fundamentalism in the world view of their leaders that rejects any engagement with the system as an unacceptable compromise and any kind of relief (Type A) or developmental work (Type B) as something that “blunts the edge of class contradictions”. Invariably, therefore, the time frame that the leaders of this kind of action set for themselves is often at variance from that of those they lead, the ones who suffer most from the consequences of being at the receiving end of the injustices of the system. Even when such action is not motivated by insurrectionist zeal, it tends to be based on a fundamentalism of positions that is generally averse to compromise, whether on specific development projects or proposed legislations.
Type D: Engaging the State and Leveraging the Market: The most recent and, in our view, most creative and effective type of civil society action in India belongs to Type D. This kind of action accepts the critique proffered by Type C activists and fights for rights of citizens. But it believes that change is best fostered by deep engagement with the state in a constructive manner within time frames that are more sensitive to the needs of the people in whose name this action takes place. Thus, there is a basic difference in the attitude towards the state. It is recognised that, with all its flaws, the state in India remains potentially a protector of the marginalised. But for that the state needs to function in a much more accountable and transparent manner. The goal, therefore, is to suitably transform the state, its policies and its functioning in order that it can play this role.⁶ But the vision goes beyond viewing it as a welfare state. The goal is to enshrine rights that the state is obliged to fulfil and to compel it to do so and to also design more effective ways in which these rights can be realised on the ground. There is also less fundamentalism and more openness to compromise in recognition of the urgency for change. The “problematique of representation” is taken rather more seriously than in Type C.
The best example of Type D civil society action is provided by the work of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), which has over the past decade evolved from Type C to Type D.⁷ Having worked in the 1990s on the fringes in rural Rajasthan on the right to information and the rights of rural workers to basic entitlements, the MKSS moved into a radically more intense engagement with the state after the coming to power of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in 2004. This has not only meant actively working with the state to enact pro-poor legislations and programmes but even becoming part of the Directorate of Social Audit in the Government of Andhra Pradesh to ensure that what is enacted on paper is implemented effectively on the ground. It must be remembered that the UPA was unexpectedly voted into power after the people of the country resoundingly rejected the “India Shining” slogan of the ruling dispensation of the time. There was then intense pressure on the UPA to respond effectively to Verdict 2004. This opened up huge possibilities of civil society engagement with the state on issues of concern to the aam aadmi. This set the scene for the subsequent enactment of historic pieces of legislation such as the Right to Information Act,National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and FRA under UPA-I. It is widely acknowledged that inputs from civil society organisations such as MKSS, the Campaign for Survival and Dignity and many others played a major role in fleshing out these laws. Similarly, under UPA-II, the Right to Education (RTE) Act and the National Food Security Act (NFSA) have benefited from significant civil society inputs.
Type D action also includes those who pay attention to crafting alternatives to mainstream development (as in Type B) but this is sought to be done not in pristine NGO isolation but in deep engagement with the state and through leveraging the power of the market in a way that can benefit the marginalised. Organisations like the National Consortium of Civil Society Organisations on MGNREGA have involved themselves in developing partnerships with gram panchayats (GPs) and state and central governments to build state capacities for more effective implementation of the NREGA. Thus, unlike Type B civil society action, here the implementation remains firmly the responsibility of GPs and state governments but civil society plays a supportive capacity building and hand-holding role. Great hope is invested in the possibilities of genuine grass-roots democracy opened up by the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution and the potential empowerment of local self-government. The framework is one of partnerships, with each partner playing their designated role. The vision is also of “cascading redundancy” (SPS 2010), with civil society becoming gradually redundant in more and more respects, as GPs become stronger, capacities of frontline functionaries of the state expand and thousands of “barefoot” community resource persons get empowered. In her study of the work of Samaj Pragati Sahayog (SPS), Chhotray (2007) describes this stance as one of “working the state”. The possibilities of leveraging state resources have expanded in an unprecedented manner following the UPA’s rise to power. During the Eleventh Plan period, the UPA government spent upwards of Rs 7,00,000 crore on its major flagship programmes of social and economic inclusion. The corresponding annual figure in the Twelfth Plan is Rs 2,00,000 crore (Planning Commission 2012). The goal of Type D civil society action is to try and ensure that these massive outlays genuinely translate into enduring outcomes on the ground for the people for whom this money is meant. The overall perspective animating such action is that it is no longer useful, in the manner of the left, to merely keep reiterating the importance of the public sector in the Indian economy. Rather, it is regarded as much more urgent to work out ways in which the public sector, especially in its flagship programme avatar, could be reformed by making it much more accountable to and effective in meeting the needs of the most marginalised.
Finally, Type D civil society action has recently also included engagement with markets. The traditional Gandhian notion of independent, self-sufficient village communities is rejected as a romantic utopia. What is recognised, however, is that the participation of small and marginal farmers as isolated individuals in the marketplace has been a source of great exploitation and injustice for them. The idea, therefore, is to build powerful corporate institutions of the poor, led by women, who would be able to better compete in the market on the basis of their collective economic power. These include federations of women’s SHGs and producer companies. This kind of work, although still in its infancy, has already shown great promise in lifting the poorest people of our country out of poverty as they come to the market as both powerful producers and consumers. Banks in remote rural areas of India have begun to see their own enlightened self-interest in doing business with these strong institutions of the poor, who also are an effective check on the predatory activities of exploitative microfinance institutions. There are instances of balance sheets of loss-making banks being turned around, thanks to the impeccable repayment record of SHGs and their federations. Type D civil society action has pushed the government to make policy changes to facilitate and support the economic activities of such farmer producer organisations. There are also examples of these institutions of the poor providing a major check on corruption in government systems and ensuring greater accountability and better service delivery under government programmes through the pressure exerted by their collective action.⁸ Indeed, in our view, the very survival of Indian democracy, in the face of severe distress suffered by people over the last two decades, marked by farmers’ suicides and Maoist violence, could be said to owe in no small measure to Type D civil society action.
Conclusions
In order to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the people they govern, capitalist democracies are compelled to open up spaces that need to be utilised with a renewed creativity by those fighting for a more equal, less exploitative social order. We need courage and imagination to go beyond the stolid certainties of a teleological science of history. These spaces – such as the 73rd amendment empowering local bodies of self-governance or NREGA – provide glimmers of hope for a new participatory democracy. Of course, at the same time, it is also true that we cannot take the existence of a space for civil society action for granted. There are repeated instances of violence by powerful vested interests within society and of the state taking on a more draconian character and showing its repressive face. Whether it is RTI or NREGA social audit activists or those questioning destructive forms of development and/or asserting their right over natural resources, they all face a relentless barrage of violence.⁹ Therefore, it is imperative that we do not take this space for granted. We must also not become cynical and despair but both value this space and fight for it to remain and expand. And this demands a truly innovative brand of politics. Not one of mere challenge and confrontation; but one that includes nitty-gritty work to build fresh cadres and alternative institutions for a participatory social order. Where democracy, equality and development are not just demanded, they are also constructively built at the grass roots.
For civil society organisations to be a positive source of change in this direction they need to satisfy some basic pre-conditions in their own internal functioning. Apart from high degrees of competence and professionalism, they need to demonstrate inner democracy, transparency and external accountability in their functioning. For those holding up a mirror to state and society need to subject themselves to the very highest standards in each of these respects. They also need to engage in building partnerships of mutual respect, in humble acknowledgement of their own finitude, with local communities, PRIs, academia, media, markets and the state. And, above all, they also need a vision for their own future. And that future has to be one of “cascading redundancy”, where the idea is to make oneself redundant in more and more respects over time. The goal has to be one of people’s empowerment and building stronger institutions of participatory democracy at the grass roots. As these institutions gain in strength, the nature of civil society support changes, evolves and the need for it declines over time. Such civil society action, in our reckoning, would build a more inclusive society and a stronger Indian democracy. This is the kind of civil society action that has the potential to become a powerful force for social transformation in 21st century India.