Friday, August 19, 2011

A New Role of NGO

An organic unity of the mainstream Left and the new social movements alone can help build resistance to the Right.

A CLOSE look at the movements based on the mobilisation of people in the period after the Emergency in India reveals two distinct patterns insofar as their ideological positions are concerned. While the forces of status quo represented by the BJP with its pronounced right-wing ideology — both in the political and economic sense — seem to have succeeded in a big way, another stream of popular mobilisation that emerged around the same time — institutions and groups that could be classified as `new social movements' (NGOs in other words) — too has managed to strike roots among a cross-section of the people and also been able to shape the organisational set-up across the country.
Over the past few years, resistance to the rightward shift in the political discourse as well as in economic policy has been pronounced in several cases where these outfits have been in the forefront. Medha Patkar and the Narmada Bachao Andolan (as well as several such resistance movements to displacement) had managed to build a popular movement involving several thousand ordinary people at a time when even the Left parties (with their strong and well-knit trade union organisation) have been forced to restrict their agenda to mere symbolic actions against the establishment.
Such movements, be they the resistance to displacement in the Narmada Valley or the struggle against the mining activities in Jaduguda or against the setting up of production units that are bound to affect the environment adversely in many parts of the country, are, however, finding it difficult to take on the mighty establishment. The forces of status quo, after all, are not restricted to one political party or combine but are spread across civil society.
The status quoists have even managed to distort the agenda of some such groups (particularly where the NGOs concerned are unapologetic about their source of funds) in such a manner that even sections that mean well turn out to be articulate apologists of the development paradigm opted for by the establishment. These NGOs, which merely serve as centres for disbursement of funds from the international institutions and donor agencies from the West and also provide attractive employment opportunities to the elite, do not fit into the category of new social movement in any sense.
The new social movements were the response of a whole generation of young men and women, whose transition from adolescence to youth happened to take shape when political parties and platforms were being reduced to mere instruments of self-preservation by their leaders, and, even where the distortions were not as bad — the mainstream Left for instance — the leaders were united in resisting any critical evaluation and free thinking. This was true not just in India but across the world.
In India, the new social movements came from the spark from Naxalbari in 1967 followed by the anti-establishment protests across university campuses in the Nav-nirman Andolan in Gujarat or the call for Total Revolution by Jayaprakash Narayan and in the symbolic but determined acts of protest by youth and students immediately after Indira Gandhi announced suspension of democratic rights on June 25, 1975. A new generation that was coming of age in the universities, exposed as it was to Sartre, Camus and such other existentialist thinkers, was drawn into a mould where it considered the question of development not just as a statistical concern but as linked to human rights and the right to livelihood.
The new generation refused to accept the stated positions of the political parties as the truth and instead held human development and the right to life and livelihood as ethical concerns. Democracy was not just a political formulation for them and it was this attitude that laid the foundations for the new social movements of the early 1980s. This, after all, was also when the anti-establishment parties — the socialists and the communists — had shown their inability to match practice with precepts while the Jana Sangh had rechristened itself as the BJP.
The Janata experiment had revealed the proclivity of several socialists to turn apologists of the status quo leaving the youth who were mobilised as part of the JP movement to create a space outside. This was true of a whole lot of young men and women galvanised into the political space by Naxalbari. This was the context in which the new social movements emerged in India. But then, a characteristic feature of these movements was that they were driven by the idea that they must also be kept away from the most critical aspect of the political process — the electoral arena.
While those at the core of the new social movements were themselves the associates (in their past) of one or another radical political platform of the times — predominantly of the Gandhian socialist or the communist kind — they had committed themselves, in the 1980s, to steer the new social movements clear of parties. The parties, after all, were not able to internalise such concerns as environment, sustainable development and such other aspects on to their agendas as the ethical questions they were for the new social movements.
The strength of the new social movements in India was that they did not have any ideological baggage. The mainstream Left, for instance, was caught in celebrating technology as long as it came from the Soviet Union. It could not oppose the concept of huge industrial establishments or big dams for the Soviet Union too celebrated this as development. But then, such an autonomy as well as the distinct advantage the new social movements had of not having to explain their movements from within the confines of stated positions did have its weakness too. By deliberately alienating themselves from the electoral arena, these movements also left themselves to be weakened significantly. In other words, the forces of status quo have occupied the institutions of political democracy — ruling as well as the Opposition — and the new social movements are having to stay out of the policy-making process.
The fallout of this can be seen not just in the manner in which development is sought to be defined by the establishment but also in the manner in which the political discourse is being dragged towards the Right. Despite having mobilised large sections against the BJP's political agenda in several corners across the tribal regions, these movements have hardly been able to convert this into a vote against the BJP. That is because those political platforms that are unambiguous when it comes to their opposition to mobilisation on communal and majoritarian slogans and the new social movements remain mutually suspicious of each other.
This need no longer remain so. While the ideological baggage of having to hold a brief for the Soviet Union (whether it be on technology-driven development or on the question of nuclear weapons or power) should no longer be a constraint for the mainstream Left, those still committed to the ideals that guided the new social movements too should agree that the challenge to democracy and its critical elements — the right to life and livelihood — is no longer localised.
Instead, the threat to these cherished values has emerged in the form of a well-knit organisation that commands unlimited resources as well as cultural notions that legitimise a further shift to the Right on both economic and political issues. The response to such a challenge, hence, cannot remain localised. An organic unity of the mainstream Left and the new social movements alone can help build resistance to the Right. This, indeed, is possible only when the two sides agree to go beyond their stated positions on critical issues.

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