1

Introduction to

Gellner, D.N. (ed.) 2009. Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia

(Governance, Conflict, and Civic Action 2). Delhi: Sage, pp. 1-24

[p. 1:]

Chapter 1

Introduction:

How Civil are ‘Communal’ and Ethno-nationalist Movements?

DAVID N. GELLNER

The concept of civil society: History and coherence

Activism – the practice of campaigning to re-make the world in line with a consciously

articulated programme – is today a global phenomenon.1 It has taken various different

forms, some civic and associational, some violent and revolutionary, some nationalist,

some religious, and so on. Modern activism was taken up in India in the nineteenth

century and it arrived in Nepal only in the first half of the twentieth century, so that its

impact has been felt there within the lifetime of today’s older generation.2

‘Civil society’ is a term that, like the idea of social engineering, goes back to the

eighteenth century. However, until the 1980s it had fallen into disuse. Then, suddenly, it

was being discussed everywhere: it became a key part of the democratization movement

– the so-called third wave of democratization – from South America to East Asia, a

slogan in fact (E. Gellner, 1994). As such it combined, often uneasily, both description

and prescription. It aimed to denote what it was that liberal democracy had and that

dictatorships – whether the military juntas of South America or the communist regimes of

eastern Europe – lacked; and it was at the same time a label for what the peoples of those

countries were supposed to aspire to, as a means to establish a more liberal democratic

alternative.

[p.2]

1 I would like to thank R. Goodman, H. Gorringe, K. Hachhethu, J.A. Hall, G. Krauskopff, M. Lecomte-

Tilouine, D. Lewis, D.P. Martinez, J. Pfaff-Czarnecka, and S. Shneiderman for helpful comments on earlier

drafts of this introduction. 2 See Gellner and Karki (2007) for a preliminary statement on the Nepalese case. The historical literature

on India is very rich: O’Hanlon (1985) is on India’s first modern low-caste reformer, Jyotirao Phule (1827-

1890).

2

In its original eighteenth-century usage ‘civil society’ was what distinguished more

liberal and less authoritarian polities from absolutist monarchies on the one side and from

‘savages’ living in ‘a state of nature’ on the other. A thinker who saw the importance of

this history, long before it became fashionable, was Habermas in his The Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere (originally published in 1962 in German, but only

appearing in English in 1989). One might claim also that in South Asia, at least in India

where authoritarian rule was overtly attempted only for the two years of Indira Gandhi’s

Emergency and then only incompletely, a viable public sphere existed long before the

term ‘civil society’ was brought back into use by European and Anglophone political

thinkers.3

‘Civil society’ as a concept can be seen to be pretty much the same as the ‘third sector’,

even though the latter term has a different genealogy. According to Lewis (2007: 67-70),

Amitai Etzioni and Theodore Levitt independently came up with the key ideas on the

Third Sector in the late 1960s. Both thinkers saw that in each sphere different values and

modes of action were appropriate; in some ways the sectors or spheres are defined, and

define themselves, in stark opposition to each other, but in practice, of course, there are

many hybrid forms (NGOs that operate as businesses, for example).

The rediscovery of civil society and the conceptualization of the Third Sector in the late

1980s coincided with the rise of neoliberalism and the retreat of the welfare state in many

advanced capitalist societies. More and more governments were turning to non-

governmental agencies to provide services for which previously the state had taken

responsibility. Just as Northern governments sought to privatize previously state-run

agencies at home, so – in response to disappointing results from previous aid and

development projects– they increasingly aimed to encourage ‘good governance’ in the

South. Disillusioned with state action, there was, as Lewis writes, an “opportunistic sense

in which people concerned with official aid ‘discovered’ NGOs and then proceeded to

invest them with a set of roles within an agenda for improved aid effectiveness” (Lewis

2007: 39). This too was conceptualized largely in terms of ‘building civil society’,

encouraging the rule of law and democracy, and ‘downsizing’ the state.4 These trends

flowed together so that a flourishing ‘third sector’, i.e. strong and independent NGOs [p.

3:] and citizens’ movements, was seen as a precondition of ‘good governance’. It was

assumed, or sometimes just hoped, that it was also a precondition for establishing a

virtuous circle of economic development and deepening democracy. So successful was

donor encouragement of NGOs that in time donor agencies began to fear that their

support for civil society was undermining the state itself.

The rise of the ‘civil society’ concept was thus over-determined. Civil society was ‘civil’

as opposed to ‘military’ in the Americas (as well as in Bangladesh and Pakistan); it was

3 On the emergence of a public ‘arena’ or ‘sphere’ under the British Raj, and the ways in which

‘communal’ religion-based identities came to dominate it, see Freitag (1989) and van der Veer (1994). For

recent attempts to study ‘everyday’ (ordinary people’s) actual relationships to the state in India, see i.a.

Fuller and Beneï (2001) and Corbridge et al. (2005). 4 Successful ‘command’ economies in Asia were not immune. The 1990s saw the development of a much

more independent civil society than before and the ‘downsizing’ of the ‘construction state’ in Japan

(Kingston, 2004).

3

of the people, not the one-party state, in eastern Europe; it was independent of party bias

or office-seeking in Asia; everywhere it was ‘civilized’ in the sense that it stood for

public and democratic negotiation of disagreement and the rule of law. For those on the

left, the concept offered a model of change and progress based on pluralism and bottom-

up institution-building, an alternative to the authoritarianism of now-discredited Leninist

democratic centralism. For those pushing neoliberal economic reforms, the third sector

offered a safe, non-violent, and, ideally, uncorrupt counterweight to untrustworthy and

tainted politicians and state structures. Civil society was thus taken up enthusiastically by

the UN, by development agencies, by the World Social Forum, and all points in between.

As Fisher remarks in his survey that covers diverse academic literatures on the subject,

“At least since the Rio Conference of 1992… nothing short of miracles has been expected

from NGOs”.5

The early sceptics, such as Kumar, argued that the concept of civil society was

incoherent. It might make sense as part of the thought system of Hegel, Marx, or

Gramsci, but “Nothing but confusion can follow... from the attempt to bundle all these

uses together into some supposedly neutral social-scientific category for everyday

sociological analysis” (Kumar, 1993: 390). For Hann (1996), similarly, the term is so

loaded with the assumptions of Western liberal individualism as to be useless

analytically. In a more recent contribution, Hann allows the value of anthropological

investigations of actually existing practices of civil society, while still maintaining that it

not a valid analytic term: “a decade after the collapse of socialism... no academics in

Moscow took the notion of civil society seriously. It was simply a magical phrase that it

was always desirable to include in any foreign grant application...” (Hann, 2004: 47).

Others, while not disputing the term’s use, worry that “the concept of civil society may

have become flaccid through consensus” (Chandhoke, 2003a: 28).

[p. 4:]

However, such has been the success of the term, and such has been the growth of the

third sector that has claimed it as its own, that – whatever the sceptics may say – there is

a reality there to be investigated. As Dreano puts it (2004: 99), “An ‘actually existing’

civil society is on its way somewhere in the housing estates of Saint Denis, as

elsewhere.” Furthermore, though it is tempting to quip that some places have the thing

without the name (e.g. the USA) and others have the name without the thing (e.g. Russia)

– this is clearly an exaggeration6 – , many would now say that a global civil society along

with a variety of global third-sector movements, is coming into existence.7

5 Fisher (1997: 442). For further reflections on the polysemy of ‘civil society’ and the globalization of

activism, see Fisher (forthcoming). For a passionate critique of the way in which ‘social capital’ (often

identified with a vibrant civil society) has been lifted from the works of Robert Putnam and popularized by

the World Bank in order to formulate toothless policies for development that bracket as unmentionable

inequality, class, and politics, see Harriss (2001). The notions of civil society and social capital provide the

theoretical underpinning for the key notion of ‘empowerment’ that is so fashionable in the development

‘industry’. This has been attacked on grounds very similar to Harriss’s critique, e.g. by Henkel and Stirrat

(2001). 6 See Putnam (2000) on the supposed decline of civil society in the USA; on Russia, see Hemment (2004). 7 See, for example, UNESCO participation in the World Social Forum, numerous development

programmes that try to address ‘social exclusion’ by ‘building social capital’ and supporting ‘civil society

4

Furthermore, despite some important philosophical disagreements (Keane, 2003,

following Marx, would like to include economic activity), and despite the sceptics, there

is now a good deal of agreement over what the term covers: namely, associative (self-

chosen) action that is neither part of the state nor undertaken for economic reasons.8

Associative action is individually chosen and may be freely renounced: no one should be

forced to belong or act on the grounds of ascribed characteristics – that is the theory, in

any case.9 Varshney (2002: 42-3) is quite right to point out that modern ethnic

associations are in this sense voluntary. They are not like Ottoman millets or castes to

which one belongs by birth. As such, they too deserve to be included within the sphere of

civil society.

Thus, ‘civil society’ covers institutions ‘in between’. They are neither part of the state

apparatus, nor of businesses (corporations or otherwise), nor do they belong to the private

sphere of family and kinship. Positively, they include clubs, movements, charities,

pressure groups, and so on. Because the organizations that make up civil society are

neither overtly part of the state (supposedly – we are dealing here with a shared model or

ideal type), nor about pursuit of the profit motive, this sphere of activity is also known, as

noted above, as the Third Sector. Other popular labels are ‘the voluntary sector’ (UK),

the ‘non-profits’ (USA), and so on. Parekh concludes:

As an area of uncoerced associative life, civil society includes such

associations as the family, trade unions, universities, the press, professional

bodies, churches, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social

movements. It excludes the state... Political parties are also excluded,

largely because, although voluntary, their purpose is to capture the state and

use its coercive resources to realize their objectives. (Parekh, 2004: 19)

[p. 5:]

It is my contention that this definition errs by including the familial and by excluding

political parties. The sphere of kinship is precisely not meant to come in to civil society,

for all that in practice it frequently does. And political parties, and their associated

organizations, can and should, so long as they are not arms of the state as in one-party

systems, be regarded as associations forming part of the fabric of civil society. Some,

even quite small, social movements or activist networks occasionally turn themselves into

initiatives’, and the Global Civil Society Yearbooks (available at lse.ac.uk/Depts/global: Anheier et al.,

2001, is the first; these yearbooks also try to measure global civil society, and do at least establish its

spectacular growth since the 1990s). See also, i.a., Keck and Sikkink (1998), Keane (2003), and Kaldor

(2003). See Clark (2003) for a useful taxonomy of global civil society movements, according to (a) whether

control is kept by an international secretariat or by members, and (b) whether decisions are taken at local or

secretariat level. 8 Campaigning for fair trade – i.e. to regulate the market, or counteract its injustices – is clearly a different

matter than operating within the market. 9 This freely chosen associationalism, with the right of exit, is a key feature of modern civil society as

opposed to the intermediate institutions (guilds, kin networks, age cohorts, etc.) that characterize

premodern social forms. Ramble’s ethnography (2008) is a fascinating case of a premodern village civic

democracy where the right of exit could be exercised – but only once every twelve years, and the decision

taken then was irreversible for twelve years.

5

political parties, as discussed by Gorringe (ch. 6 below). It would be very arbitrary, and

constitute a naive acceptance of official categories, were one to refuse to continue to

regard them as a part of civil society once they had registered themselves as a party.

Seeking political power as a party should not be excluded from our consideration of this

sphere, any more than religious organizations with aims that may not be in line with

secular rationalist expectations should be excluded.10

It seems that this way of taking the term ‘civil society’ – excluding economic activity,

excluding the sphere of kinship and the family, and including political parties and other

organizations – is in line with the intuitions and arguments of many of those who have

studied the question in depth, whether practitioners (Deakin, 2001: 19) or political

philosophers.11 Of course, it remains true that many parties, especially long-established

ones, have close ties to the state and often play a mediating role that must be recognized.

One must also recognize that all social arrangements, including familial ones, have

political implications and that the state may attempt to co-opt civil society organizations,

just as NGOs may attempt to make use of the state. But such complexities – the

messiness of actual life – should not detract from the attempt to be clear about concepts.

Studying civil society by focusing on activists

Against the civil society sceptics, I have pointed out that an incoherent or meaningless

concept would hardly be unlikely to have had such a roaring success. But this much must

certainly be granted to their case: it would be very wrong to assume that the term is

understood or operationalized in the same way everywhere. As noted by Chandhoke [p.

6:] (2007: 2), “…we may well find a substantial gap between the theoretical assumptions of

the concept of civil society, and practices in actually existing civil societies.” A gap between

the ‘theoretical assumptions’ – in other words, the assumptions built in to the Euro-

american contexts in which the term was first used and popularized – and the ways in

which it has been taken up and institutionalized elsewhere, is exactly what

anthropologists would expect to find. Whether there is such a gap or not, how wide it is,

how it is bridged, and so on, are all matters for empirical investigation.12

Furthermore, in investigating the practices which instantiate a political notion of this sort,

one should look at the people who attempt to create civil society and try to find out what

10 On political parties as linkages between people and the state, see Lawson (1980). 11 For philosophers, see Cohen and Arato (1992) and Elliott (2003b: 7-8). Lewis (2004) agrees, while

pointing to the difficulties, both of enacting and of studying civil society where the state is weak. 12 For previous edited collections that have attempted to do the ethnography of civil society, see Hall

(1995), Hann (1996), Comaroff and Comaroff (1999), Elliott (2003a), and Glasius et al. (2004). On India

see Tandon and Mohanty (2004) and on Nepal, the articles of Heaton Shrestha (2002, 2006) and

Bhattachan et al. (2001). Varshney (2002) is an influential and impressive attempt to plot the density of

cross-community civil society in Indian societies, though many remain unconvinced by his hypothesis that

high cross-community involvement can be correlated with low rates of communal riots (e.g. Brass, 2003).

Despite all this work, the world of the Third Sector is still understudied and very undertheorized by

anthropologists. Lewis (2006) points out that Carrier’s (2005) otherwise comprehensive Handbook of

Economic Anthropology fails to mention it.

6

they think they are about. These people are activists with diverse intentions. Focusing on

these specialists does not mean adopting their point of view in every particular, any more

than an anthropologist studying astrologers is bound to accept everything that they are

told by the astrologer. But it does mean taking what they have to say, and what they are

trying to achieve, seriously.

In doing the ethnography of political concepts it is also crucial to hold in mind the

distinction between what Baumann (1996) calls the ‘official discourse’ and the ‘demotic

discourse’. All schemes for governing are, by their nature, simplified and necessarily

cannot grasp all the details and complexities of everyday life. The great virtue of

Baumann’s ethnography of the London suburb of Southall was to show that both kinds of

discourse are necessary, both feed off each other, and yet are inevitably in tension with

each other. In his case he was investigating the concept ‘community’ and the differing

ways it was used in local government and in more informal contexts. But exactly the

same can be said of ‘civil society’. On the one hand, there is a model that is shared but

contested, and in terms of which socio-political life is negotiated. On the other hand,

there is the messy ‘demotic’ discourse, which all are aware of, in which the cross-cutting

ties (of kinship, political affiliation, economic advantage, and so on) that disrupt the

model are acknowledged.

If the three spheres of the private/familial, the state, and the market are three points of a

triangle, then civil society occupies that public sphere of associative action in between

these three defining points, where people can come together for diverse and mixed

collective ends that can be anything other than seeking a profit. Not everyone will wish to

come together in this way, and some will wish to do so [p. 7:] only occasionally, or for

varying ends. Thus, there is always going to be a difference between those who

participate as a vocation, others who support, and those who really do behave as the

economists’ models predict, maximizing their own, or their household’s short-term

satisfactions. (Gorringe in chapter 6 helpfully distinguishes a spectrum running from

activists-as-believers, to activists-as-faddists, to sympathizers, and finally to ‘mere’

supporters.) These differences, between the activists and the people on whose behalf they

wish and/or claim to speak, are crucial, and it is very important for ethnographers not to

become simple apologists for the movement activists they happen to be studying.13

Critics of civil society in South Asia

Critics of the civil society concept have been many and varied. One important line of

criticism has noted that it is not just a coincidence that ‘civil society’ has arisen and

become popular at a time of economic neoliberalism and globalization. Inspired by

Foucaultian (not to mention classical Marxist) visions of malign power-knowledge

systems that induce people to be the agents of their own domination, the work of NGOs

is interpreted as doing the dirty work of turbo-powered capitalism and global elites:

saving governments money and buying off dissent. It cannot be denied that many

activists have worried whether this might not be the case.

13 See Gellner (2001) for a didactic statement.

7

There is also taking place a further work of ‘purification’, to use Latour’s word for the

messy, on-the-ground work of institutionalizing the key philosophical or analytical

distinctions that constitute modernity (Latour, 1991). This is the same process that

Weberian sociologists refer to as societalization (Vergesellschaftung): different spheres

emerging each with their own logic of development that is, to a degree, autonomous of

other spheres. It is certainly true that Western-inspired distinctions and institutional

boundaries between the political, the economic, and the religious have been spread

throughout the world to places where previously other, overlapping, or incommensurable

distinctions were made. The difference of opinion, alluded to above, about whether

political organizations should be considered a part of civil society is relevant here: there

is a strong current of modern opinion that would like to keep politics and charity, politics

and religion, politics and sport, etc. all separate. [p. 8:] When ‘civil society activists’ are

called to take up institutional positions, it is their distance from party politics and their

ability to stand outside or above it, that is being appealed to.

For a ‘third sector’ to exist, we have to know what the ‘first’ and ‘second’ sectors are.

The state (or politics) and the market have to be demarcated as separate and as having

some degree of autonomy. (It is always ‘some degree’: even arch-monetarists such as

Margaret Thatcher never acquiesced in the abandonment of all market regulation

altogether; ironically that seems to have been left to her successors, some of whom, in the

early flush of enthusiasm, themselves claimed to be following a ‘third way’.) However

successfully such distinctions are institutionalized and written into law, there will always

be links between the various spheres and the boundaries between them will always

generate contention and require policing. Furthermore, as Chandhoke (2003b) points out,

it is naive to suppose that political considerations can be, or ever are, absent from the

‘third sector’: all sorts of inequalities are present within it; the role of the state is crucial

in regulating and framing it; some actors are excluded from it; and the state may be

captured by forces (such as the BJP) that then seek to mould and control civil society in

their own image. Yet analytically a distinction between, say, politics and economics, or

religion and the secular, may need to be made. Institutionally and legally, the distinctions

continue to introduced, policed, enforced, and upheld, for all that they are continually

breached in everyday life.

Chatterjee (2001) argues for a clear distinction between civil and political society in the

Indian case: civil society refers to “those characteristic institutions of modern

associational life originating in Western societies which are based on equality, autonomy,

freedom of entry and exit, contract, deliberative procedures of decision-making,

recognized rights and duties of members, and other such principles” (2001: 172). This

kind of organization “must necessarily exclude from its scope the vast mass of the

population” (ibid.: 174). By contrast ‘political society’ refers to mass movements that (1)

break the law, (2) demand rights, (3) aim to speak on behalf of collective units, and (4)

are treated by the state as recipients of welfare (ibid.: 177). He foresees the possibility of

a radical clash between the two, and in a more recent statement of his position wishes to

maintain the distinction: “Civil society as an ideal continues to energize an interventionist

political project, but as an actually existing form it is [p. 9:] demographically limited”

8

(Chatterjee, 2004: 39; original emphasis). The material on Dalit movements presented by

Gorringe and Vasily in chapters 6 and 8 below would seem to support this distinction,

with many of the people they write about not having any meaningful, empowering access

to the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ of civil society.

In addition, there is the added complication of originally foreign provenance and the

‘emergent’ characteristics of the term. In most South Asian languages ‘civil society’ is

rendered nagarik samaj or some equivalent, which means ‘citizen society’ (with the

added hint that it is related to towns and cities, rather than the countryside – there are

echoes here of the German bürgerliche Gesellschaft or ‘bourgeois society/civil

society’).14 Perhaps because of this unwanted latter implication, the term in Bengali, in

current use in Bangladesh, is sushil samaj, literally ‘gentle/genteel society’.

As noted above, in ‘actually existing’ civil society it is always possible, and indeed may

be commonplace, that individual, kin, or economic interests intrude into daily practice.

Thus there is widespread cynicism about NGOs and civil society in many countries. In

Nepal there is the dismissive term ‘dollar kheti’ (dollar farming) to refer to the world of

NGOs in Kathmandu. Tamang’s (2003) critique echoes what many fear – namely that the

enormous quantity of donor money available in Kathmandu, and the relatively small

number of people able to monopolize most of it, means that shoddy definitions and half-

baked ideas are recycled simply in order to earn money. Meanwhile, the actual practice

that the donors’ money pays for is exclusive, patriarchal, hierarchical, and productive of

inequality, rather than the reverse. Tamang points out that “in general, NGOs in Nepal

are susceptible to authoritarian tendencies, with low potential for genuinely democratic

membership-participation”.15

In Sri Lanka, where ethnonationalist politicization has pervaded all aspects of public

opinion, NGOs with international links are very widely derided and distrusted, to a

degree that is surprising and even shocking to those coming from other South Asian

countries. One cannot deny that in actual practice NGOs may often display self-serving

hypocrisy, corruption, nepotism, use of foreign funds to create patron-client networks,

and so on.16 However, of itself this does not invalidate the ‘civil society idea’ – the ideal

of associative, sometimes selfless action for non-profit ends – any more than the ‘state

idea’ is invalidated by the existence of mafias or street gangs. [p. 10:] As Lewis (2007:

70) remarks of the notion of a ‘third sector’, civil society is best thought of as a guiding

metaphor or ideal type – a powerful one that does indeed guide action without, of course,

determining it.

14 Nagarik is the adjective from nagara, city. In contemporary German academic discourse, it is now

customary to speak of Zivilgesellschaft rather than bürgerliche Gesellschaft. 15 Tamang (2003). See also Dahal (2001) and Hachhethu (2006) for discussion of Nepal-based writings on

civil society. Some of the best ethnography of the NGO world in Nepal has been written by Heaton

Shrestha (2002, 2006, forthcoming). For a preliminary analysis of the degree of democracy in ethnic

organizations in Nepal, see Gellner and Karki (2008). 16 For a sober assessment, see Wickramsinghe (2001). She notes that “For the NGO staff the language of

partnership is irrelevant. What exists instead is a very definite power relationship between the funder and

the receiver…” (ibid.: 94).

9

Activism of the ethnonationalist or ‘communal’ sort

This volume brings together anthropological case studies from India and Nepal on

different forms of ethnic activism. A companion volume in the same series deals with

other types of activism. There is no way in which these two volumes can be

comprehensive or encyclopaedic in their coverage of a region as vast and heterogeneous

as South Asia; that was never the aim. Doubtless they will be criticized for paying

insufficient attention to India – but not giving the lion’s share of attention to India was a

deliberate choice: the aim was to counteract the unthinking ‘methodological nationalism’

(Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002) which so often is the background assumption of these

phenomena and to disrupt the way in which South Asian social realities are so often

equated with the view from Delhi, Mumbai, or Kolkata.

If we may be allowed, then, to treat ethnic activism in South Asia without placing

standard Indian cases at the centre of attention, the first question which may be asked is,

by what right are just these cases identified as ‘ethnic’? And how can they validly be

separated from other types of activism? Furthermore, having put these together, is there

really anything that Hindu nationalism, Dalit rights movements, and movements for

particular tribal groups have in common?

The connotations of the term ‘civil’ mean that the conjunction of this book’s title may

appear as a contradiction in terms. Ethnic movements, especially when they become

violent, may appear as the least ‘civil’ of civil society organizations. But as Chandhoke

(2003: 53) points out, the public sphere is a site of struggle, not cosy consensus. Kaldor

(2003: vii) notes wryly that, when the Helsinki Citizens Assembly tried to build a “pan-

European civil society... [w]e found that global civil society did not only include human

rights and peace groups like us but also new nationalist and fundamentalist groups and, as

the 1990s drew to a close, a new radical anti-capitalist movement as well.” The job of any

anthropology or sociology of [p. 11:] civil society is surely to study this emerging

phenomenon, warts and all, to analyse it and not to moralize about it. Anthropologists

have no monopoly of good ethnography, though, and some excellent ethnographic

monographs have in fact been produced by political scientists.17 One key distinction to

bear in mind in doing such ethnography is that already alluded to above, between

different types of discourse – the official and the ‘demotic’ or everyday – as well as

between what people say about their various identities and what they actually do, a

difference that can only really be captured by long-term ethnography based on deep

acquaintance with the various fields in which activists operate, as Shneiderman, for

example, clearly illustrates in chapter 5.

The contributions by Mio and Froerer confront the issue of civility directly. Mio looks at

young men’s organizations that organize religious festivals in Udaipur in north-western

India. It is my impression that Udaipur is typical in this respect of cities and small towns

across northern South Asia (including the Tarai plains belt of Nepal). For young men,

17 For example, James Scott’s classic Weapons of the Weak (1985) and Stephen Hopgood’s recent work on

Amnesty International (2006).

10

belonging to such organizations is attractive because it combines social service organized

on their own terms (i.e. not as part of some pre-existing structure within which deference

must be paid to elders) with public displays of masculinity. Not all of these organizations

start out aligned to political parties and some seek to avoid such connections, but in the

case of the young man he calls Kapil (see p. **f), local competition enables the national

organizations to insert themselves and acquire a local foothold.18 Such processes do not

augur well for the emergence of a politically neutral section of the public sphere.

Froerer’s ethnography, by contrast, starts from the position of the Hindutva-inspired

organizations and their attempts to missionize in tribal areas that are perceived to be

vulnerable to proselytization by other religions. Both Froerer’s and Mio’s contributions

suggest that building a public sphere is tied to forms of nationalism and that, for many

actors, social service for the public good is combined with active exclusion towards those

not defined as part of the public (in these cases, Muslims and Christians).

The next section with chapters by Gerharz and Shneiderman look at the transnational

connections that have become crucial to so many movements. Gerharz points to the ways

in which much activism follows the lines of kin links. Working in Jaffna, northern Sri

Lanka – open for researchers only for the short period of the [p. 12:] ceasefire (2002-06)

– was far from easy. Civil society activity is closely monitored by the LTTE so that

anyone openly opposed to them would not have dared, at that stage, to embark on activity

in the area. Shneiderman’s case is rather different, though she found similar cultural

clashes between groups who are supposed, according to the official discourse, to belong

to the same category. In both cases, the cultural contrast between the urban activist and

the rural ‘beneficiary’ often goes very deep – relating not just to modes of expression and

deportment, but to expectations about development and education and understandings of

culture.

The book’s third section brings together three papers on Dalit activism, two on Tamil

Nadu and one on Nepal. Dalit issues are usually treated under separate headings in the

analytical schemes of modernity deployed in South Asian countries. In India Dalits are

treated with parallel but separate legislation as Scheduled Castes, not Scheduled Tribes.

In Nepal Janajatis (who fill the ‘tribal slot’ there) are not to be found in the same

organizations as Dalits. Dalit movements are responding to classic, systematic

discrimination on the basis of birth. The main reason they are not conventionally treated

as an example of ethnonationalist movement is that they are scattered, without a

geographic ‘homeland’, and nowhere form a numerical majority (if they did so, they

would surely seek autonomy as ‘tribal’ movements do). None the less, they are a very

significant proportion of the population in many parts of Nepal and India. Treating them

separately from other identity-based movements makes no more sense than isolating the

history of the modernization of Islam and Hinduism in the subcontinent from each other.

Yet, such is the force of disciplinary specializations and conventional classification, that

this is precisely what usually happens until someone comes along and demonstrates how

history can be written otherwise (van der Veer, 1994).

18 See also Mio (2007) on this process in the same context.

11

In the case of Dalit movements, as elsewhere, international links and ideals of equality

brought from outside have had a very significant impact (Mosse, ch. 7). In their much-

cited book, Activists Beyond Borders, Keck and Sikkink (1998: 13) describe the

‘boomerang effect’, i.e. the attempt by local activists to appeal over the heads of those

who oppress them in the local arena, both to shame the local powerholders and to

mobilize international opinion and legal and political forces on their side.19 Shneiderman

in ch. 5 describes an interesting variant, whereby two sets of [p. 13:] activists in two

countries, one much more urban and educated than the other, influence each other. This

same creation of links can be seen within a single country as rural activists seek links to

urban ones in order to protect themselves from the locally powerful.20 Gorringe (p. ***

below) points out, however, that weak rural Dalit organizations are unable to maintain

these urban links and, where this is the case, rural Dalits who take up oppositional stances

get punished with impunity. The Dalit cases, and in particular chapters 6 by Gorringe and

8 by Vasily, highlight the sheer physical intimidation involved in maintaining hierarchy.

Moffatt’s classic study (1979) demonstrated intellectual domination, but in doing so may

have de-emphasized this key component of the rural social order in South Asia.

Virtually all the chapters bring out the way in which ethnic movements contest past

history, in order to claim a place for those without history, or with only a disparaged role

in history as told in dominant accounts. Earlier Dalit reform movements often took up

high-caste symbols and appropriated them. Now there is defiant assertion through

specifically Dalit practices: beating the drum, eating beef, and so on (Mosse, Gorringe).

In Shneiderman’s case this leads to eating a ‘mouse’, as a convenient differentiating

symbol in India, even though no one would see this as a specifically Thangmi practice in

their homeland in Nepal.

As Tamang points out in ch. 10, these re-writings of history have to be understood to be

about land, control, and colonization. In telling these new histories, moreover, there is

often violence done to traditional ways of relating to the land and to other groups. The

globally dominant discourse of indigeneity is parasitic on the nation-state discourses to

which it is tied and against which it defines itself. Indigenous groups are then forced into

a Procrustean bed, where attachment to a specific territory ‘since time immemorial’ is

taken for granted. In practice, as Krauskopff shows for the Tharu in ch. 9, this introduces

a radical reversal of their previous relationship to the land, which presupposed movement

that sometimes occurred even after only a few years in one place.21 In fact, the

modernistically inclined activists introduce a whole series of ruptures with previous ways

of thinking, as Lecomte-Tilouine shows (ch. 11), in attitudes to time, nature, religion,

history, reform, and ritual. Old hybrid attitudes – which are often strategies of survival

for the poor, as Shneiderman notes – are squeezed by the purism of official

classifications. And these official classifications are as much the work [p. 14:] of activists

as they are of governments, since it is the activists who pressure the government into

producing them and often sit on the committees charged with formulating them.

19 See Della Porta and Tarrow (2005) for a more recent treatment of this. 20 In the first book in this series, the same process is described for Dalits in Punjab by Jodhka (2008) and

for a woman village head in Himachal Pradesh by Strulik (2008). 21 For a similar analysis of tribals and indigeneity in Jharkhand, central India, see Shah (forthcoming).

12

There are enough cross-cutting themes in the present volume – assertion and masculinity,

re-writing history, revaluing subordinate symbols, the compromises that have to be made

when a movement of resistance engages in politics and deals with the state, the

importance of transnational links and support from abroad, and so on – to make the case

that these are similar kinds of movement. All of the activists described here make claims

on the public sphere, aim to enact their programmes within it, and make demands for

recognition and assistance from the state. Admittedly, the cultural specificities of South

Asia’s unique history have led to the emergence of separate categories – caste,

tribe/Janajati, Dalit – that do not have exact equivalents elsewhere, but the kinds of

collective movement that have emerged across these, and including the religious

categories Hindu and Muslim as well, are sufficiently similar and emerge in response to

sufficiently similar contexts to be worthy of being studied together. The fact that they are

ultimately the same kind of movement is recognized in the South Asian vernaculars and

in South Asian English in which there is a single word to describe them all, namely

sampradayik or ‘communal’.22

Differences in the institutionalization of ethnic movements in Nepal, India, and Sri

Lanka

Despite the commonalities of culture and history, Hinduism plays a very different role in

the three countries covered in this volume. In Sri Lanka it is the religion of the

threatening Other (the minority Tamils and the powerful neighbour). In Nepal Hinduism

was the official religion of the state until 2006; other religions were tolerated, but

conversion was not.23 Nationalism was conceived in an inclusive (but none the less,

resented) Hindu mode. Minority activists sought to escape from the label ‘Hindu’ and to

define their followers as animists, Buddhists, or shamanists. By contrast, in India, with its

officially secular state, ‘Hinduism’ (Hindutva) is a still-unfinished project. It is

something to be achieved, a form of nation-building espoused [p. 15:] by those of middle

and upper castes who resent the multicultural protections afforded to Muslims and others,

as well as the positive discrimination afforded to Dalits and tribals. It is, in short, the

project of ‘making India Hindu’ (Ludden, 1996).

The colonial history of India means that modern communal modes of organization and

relating to the state are much older than in Nepal. They have had a lot longer to bed down

and become established, so that caste identities dominate elections today, to an extent that

they did not immediately after 1947. In Nepal, by contrast, the shift from party-based

voting to caste-identity voting has happened in the short space of 15 years, from the early

1990s to 2008. And the shift has, if anything, been more dramatic and extreme, with the

introduction in 2008 of 60 per cent proportionality and the appearance of many purely

22 As Engineer (1997: 703) points out, there is a specifically South Asian usage of the term that is “negative

and condemnatory”. On communalism in Nepal, see Gellner et al. (1997). On communalism in India and

Sri Lanka, there are enormous literatures; some of the Indian literature has already been cited. On Sri

Lanka, see i.a. Spencer (1990). 23 On this see Gellner (2005).

13

‘communal’ parties with a realistic chance of obtaining representation in the national

legislature.

A key difference between India and Nepal is that in Nepal something over 40 per cent of

the population are claimed for the Janajati label, whereas in India as a whole Scheduled

Tribes make up only slightly over 8 per cent (this still amounts to 84 million people).

This difference means that what in India would be anti-brahman movements in Nepal

have coalesced into an anti-Hindu movement, where ‘Hinduism’ is identified with the

dominant Bahun-Chhetris who make up about 29 per cent of the population.24 Whereas

the Indian STs have used the label ‘Adivasi’ (‘original dweller’, i.e. indigenous) from at

least the 1930s, the Nepali Janajatis only gave prominence to the label ‘Adivasi’ rather

late in the day, when the UN announced its Year (later Decade) of Indigenous People in

1993.25 In both cases there has been somewhat muted contestation of the label. In India,

those (usually Hindu nationalists) who are not willing to concede any priority as

inhabitants to tribals prefer to call them Vanavasi (‘forest-dwellers’). In Nepal, open

opposition has mostly been from intellectual critics of the idea that some inhabitants of

the country are more indigenous than others (Pradhan, 1994).

In terms of the distribution of officially recognized tribals, within India there are very

marked variations between, for example, Mizoram in the north-east where 94.5 per cent

of the population are STs and, on the other hand, Uttar Pradesh where a mere 0.1 per cent

is ST. Similarly, in Nepal, there is marked variation in the density of Janajati settlement,

with relatively few in the far west, whereas some pockets in the centre and east having a

majority of Janajati inhabitants,[p. 16:] making the aim of ethnic federalism and devolved

government feasible in some degree.

Dalits, as noted above, form a scattered and divided population everywhere in South

Asia. There are not the massive variations that one finds with tribals, but there is none the

less a big difference between Punjab, where nearly 29 per cent of the population are SCs

and tribal states like Mizoram where there are virtually no Dalits. In Sri Lanka the tiny

numerical size both of the indigenous Veddas and of those castes who are equivalent of

the Dalits in India and Nepal, combined with the dominance of the Sinhala-Tamil issue,

means that they have little political clout and there are few Dalit or indigenous

movements or activists as there are elsewhere in South Asia.26

24 The reference here is to the national body, the Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN),

discussed in chapters 10 and 11 below. There is no comparable body bringing together all tribal groups in

India. 25 This is discussed in Gellner and Karki (2007); see also Onta (2006: 308f.), Gellner (2007), and Lecomte-

Tilouine (this volume). 26 A recent report notes that “There is more or less complete silence about caste on the part of the state,

political parties and even among civil society organizations. Only a few NGOs appear to be sensitive and

concerned about the issue” (Silva et al., 2008: 22)

14

Conclusion: Ethnic movements and civil society

Modern states and the forms of civil society that accompany them are, in almost all the

cases we know of, fundamentally nationalist in outlook.27 In some cases the nationalist

basis of political life is obvious, in others it remains well hidden. The modern promise of

equality for all only applies to those who are members or citizens of the polity. Just how

that boundary is drawn varies from state to state, but, with the exception of nations of

immigration, there is usually some kind of cultural or linguistic criterion of belonging. In

a paradigmatic society of immigration like the USA, the ‘culture wars’ and the

widespread hostility to the use of Spanish show that even there a strong value is put on

shared civic culture and language. The universalistic promises of the Enlightenment are

limited in every nation-state by some kind of particularistic definition of those to whom

those rights will be extended.

Ethnic movements often face the same kind of paradox, as is indicated in some of the

contributions below (see, e.g., Gorringe, ch. 6, and Krauskopff, ch. 9). Any movement

formed on the basis of class frequently finds itself pushed towards cultural and ethnic

bases, and then pushed towards emphasizing more particularistic claims. In the end, as

with the use of political modernist Buddhism by Dalit groups or (in Nepal) by Janajatis, a

universalist message in fact serves to define or advance the claims of a specific group.

[p. 17:]

Many have doubts whether such movements should be included in civil society, as

Froerer (ch. 3) discusses in detail. The development of a ‘vibrant’ movement can be

fuelled by transnational links and such a development can exacerbate ethnic tensions,

frequently with tragic results. Many organizations, such as the national NGO Federation

of Nepal, do not include ethnically based organizations (though it does have some Dalit

NGOs as members) possibly precisely because of fears about the ‘uncivil’ nature of some

ethnic organizations’ campaigns. Just as many civil society organizations (including the

ethnic ones) strive to remain free of specific attachments to political parties, so many

social and ethical NGOs strive to remain free of specific ethnic attachments, just as

‘Kapil’ strove to remain non-political in Mio’s case study. This is fine from an activist

perspective. But students of civil society must recognize that many different types of aim

can and are pursued in the public space of democratic societies. As Varshney (2002: 43)

remarks, “Taking pride in one’s ethnic group and working for the group does not, ipso

facto, make one ‘uncivil’” or as Oomen (2004: 114) puts it, “in heterogeneous,

hierarchical and plural societies identity groups too are legitimate inhabitants of civil

society.”

The problem is that some ethnic activists are quite explicit that they are willing to act

illegally and violently in pursuit of their aims, especially where that appears to be the

only option to obtain a hearing. (One need hardly add that this can be just as true of

straightforwardly political movements as of ethnic ones.) In so far as they wish to

participate in emergent global civil society, ethnic movements will feel some moral

27 Radcliffe et al. (2002) conclude from a discussion of indigenous movements in Ecuador and Bolivia that

their connections to international bodies, far from undermining the local state, lead them to work with it.

15

pressure to modify their means and compromise their ends. There can be no guarantees,

however, that history is necessarily moving in that direction. Cases like Sri Lanka show

how polarization can rapidly squeeze the possibility of neutrality or evenhandedness out

of the public sphere, like toothpaste from a tube. India, on the other hand, suggests,

despite the very mixed picture, that pluralism and democracy can permit some emergence

of an open civil society. Sixty years of democratic elections does embed the idea that

ordinary people’s participation matters (Banerjee, 2007). Chatterjee’s chasm between

civil and political society is sometimes bridged in famous cases like the Narmada

agitation. National and international pressure can make a difference. As Walzer notes

(1995: 25), the project of civil society “does not make for heroism. ‘Join the associations

of your choice’ [p. 18:] is not a slogan to rally political militants.” Liberal pluralism is on

the face of it more modest and is certainly less absolute than other more ideological

options (Walzer argues that it is also of a different order). Yet it is also truer to the

multiple discourses and complexities of everyday life. With Lipschutz (2004: 205) we

may conclude, “better politics than war or governmentality”.

16

[p. 20:]

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