On New Social Movements and the Reinvention of India

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On New Social Movements and ‘TheReinvention of India’Alf Gunvald Nilsen aa Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice ,School of Politics and International Relations, University ofNottinghamPublished online: 28 Jan 2011.

To cite this article: Alf Gunvald Nilsen (2007) On New Social Movements and‘The Reinvention of India’, Forum for Development Studies, 34:2, 271-293, DOI:10.1080/08039410.2007.9666380

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Forum for Development Studies I No. 2-2007

On New Social Movements and 'The Reinvention of India'

Abstract The focal point of this article is the role of new social movements in the process which has been denoted as 'the reinvention of India', and in particular, the way in which the politics of these movements is analysed and represented in academic perspectives. Two areas form the focus of the discussion: firstly, the assertion that India's NSMs represent voices of 'otherness' emanating from beyond the postcolonial development project and articulating a rejection of this project, and secondly, the argument that NSMs in India are most likely to have a positive impact upon the situation of marginalised subaltern groups if they seek empowerment through the liberal democratic state. The discussion is camed out in the light of empirical data from the author's research on the movement against dam-building on the Narmada River.

Keywords: India, social movements, postcolonial development project, post-development, state power

Alf Gunvald Nilsen 1, lnf roducf ion RCUK Fellow at the Centre for On 26 January 2003, the National Alliance of People's Movements the Study of Social and Glo- (NAPM) - an India-wide network of social movements - launched bal lustice, School of Politics the Desh Bachao, Desh Banao Abhiyan (DBDBA, Save the Na- and International Relations, tion, Build the Nation Campaign) in Plachimada in Kerala. After University of Nottingharn a two-month long march, the campaign ended in Ayodhya in Ut-

tar Pradesh where a National People's Agenda was declared. The campaign - including the location of its beginning and conclusion and the agenda that was declared - is very telling in terms of the convulsions that are currently transforming Indian society. The National People's Agenda (NPA) starts as follows:

The Abhiyan was launched on January 26, 2003, from Plachimada (Dist. Palakkad) in Kerala, with a protest against the Coca-Cola fac- tory as a symbol of the struggle against Globalisation. For over two

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272 Alf Gunvald Nilsen

months, the Abhiyan traversed through 19 states, participating in over 350 large rallies and holding meetings and discussions with activists and organisations. It concluded at Ayodhya on March 30th 2003, with a call for religious tolerance, secularism, opposition to the political- economic policy which leads to the dominance of Global Capital as also a determination to strive for a just and sustainable alternative model of development (NAPM, 2003: 1).

Launching the DBDBA in Plachimada, Kerala, where Coca Cola's ravaging of ground water resources constitutes a grave testimony to the social consequences of neoliberal restructuring, and concluding in Ayodhya, the infamous site of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and consequent outbreaks of communal pogroms, is nothing short of an explicit symbolic positioning of the NAPM's struggle to 'save' and 'build7 the nation squarely at the centre of the transformative conjuncture which Corbridge and Harriss have referred to as 'the reinvention of India'.

India, write Corbridge and Harriss (2000: xvi), 'was the subject of a particular, very deliberate act of invention' in which a nation- building project was crafted for the soon-to-be sovereign and independent state by influential leaders of the nationalist movement.' This invention was characterised by the making of 'a template for the invention of modern India' which consisted of four 'mythologies of rule' - democracy, federalism, socialism, and secularism - which provided the national project of state-led capitalist development with ideological legitimacy (ibid. : 2 1-22; see also Corbridge, 1995). By the 1990s, the protracted unmaking of this project - stretching, according to Corbridge and Harriss (2000: Chapters 4 and 5), back to the mid-1960s - had engendered new and 'vigorous attempts to re-imagine the country, its economy and society' (ibid.: xviii). Unlike the invention of India on the eve of the Raj, this is not a 'considered process' but a process of 'struggle and negotiation' which has emerged from 'the failings of the modernising mission of the Nehruvian state' (ibid. : xviii), and which is characterised by a particular social field of force. On the one hand, there are the 'elite revolts' of neoliberal restructuring and Hindu communalism, both of which reflect and are vehicles for the interests and aspirations especially of the middle class and higher-caste Indians ( ibid. : xix). On the other hand, there are multiple forms of 'subaltern politics'

1 Indeed, Corbridge and Hamss (2000: xvii) are refemng directly to the 'group of domi- nantly upper-caste Indians, many of whom had been educated in English, most of them men' who constituted the Constituent Assembly of December 1946.

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On New Social Movements and 'The Reinvention of India' ( 273

which represent 'another long history, that of resistance to the established order by those who have been the objects of oppression' (ibid.: xix). The forms of subaltern politics that Corbridge and Hamss single out for scrutiny range from what they call 'empowerment from without' - that is, constitutional provisions for job reservations, reservations of educational places and seats in political assemblies, and generally the extension of the franchise to dalits (members of the formerly untouchables castes) and adivasis (indigenous people) - to 'empowerment from within' - that is, a range of new social movements (NSMs) and political parties that have recently emerged from these marginalised communities, and their increased participation in electoral politic^.^

The focal point of this article is precisely the role of NSMs in the 'reinvention of India', and in particular, the way in which their politics are analysed and represented in academic perspective^.^ I focus on two key areas: firstly, the assertion that India's NSMs represent voices of 'otherness' emanating from beyond the postcolonial development project and articulating a rejection of this project, and secondly, the argument that NSMs in India are most likely to have a positive impact upon the situation of marginalised subaltern groups if they seek empowerment through the liberal democratic state. The discussion is carried out in the light of empirical data from my own research on the character and trajectory of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA; Save the Narmada Movement), one of the most well-known and important social movements to emerge in India over the past two decades. The NBA emerged in opposition to the construction of a series of large dams on the Narmada River in central and western India. The dam projects will cause extensive submergence and displacement, and in the mid- 1980s social action groups working with dam-affected adivasi groups and gradually

-- - --

2 For related arguments, see Yadav (2000), Jaffrelot (2000, 2003), Corbridge (2000), Varshney (2000), Fuller and Harriss (2001), Frankel (2005), Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Veron (2005) and Kaviraj (2000).

3 I want to note from the outset that I use the expression 'new social movements' strictly in a temporal sense to refer to movements that emerged from the late 1960s onwards. Attempts to draw fine lines between old and new in social movement research is arguably a htile endeavour as in most cases the supposedly 'old' is present in the 'new' and the supposedly 'new' is present in the 'old' - whether it pertains to groups, issues, strategies, or ideologies (see for example Calhoun, 1993). Indeed, Shah's (1988) overview of grassroots mobilisations in India brings out the deep historical lineage of most of the movements that authors such as Omvedt, Vanaik and Basu designate as 'new'. Forest dwellers' struggles, for example, go back to the colonial era when forest legislation was introduced by the British, meaning that a movement such as Chipko had deep historical antecedents (see also Rangan, 2000). See Shah (1990,2002) and Rao (2000) for instructive overviews of Indian social movements.

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also in caste Hindu farming communities in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh started an intense questioning of the responsible authorities as to the prospects for fair and adequate resettlement and rehabilitation. By the late 1980s, several of these groups had merged into the pan-state organisation Narmada Bachao Andolan, which articulated a stance of total opposition to the kingpin in the project - the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP) - and which further embedded its campaign against the SSP in a trenchant critique of the dominant model of development in India (see Baviskar, 1995; Dwivedi, 2006; Nilsen, 2006 and forthcoming). I choose to frame my argument this way because the NBA is particularly relevant to the arguments developed in this article: its politics relate directly to the postcolonial development project - dams, as Nehru famously dubbed them, were posited as 'the temples of modern India' - and the Indian state - the NBA's strategy of resistance has sought to hold the state accountable to constitutional principles, legal codes, and norms and standards related to forced displacement. I start, however, with a brief overview of the emergence of NSMs in India since the 1970s.

2. India's New Social Movements from the 1970s to the 1990s: A Brief Overview The Nehruvian nation-building project can be said to have been underpinned by a truce line which ran between a 'developmental state which promised to end poverty and backwardness' (Chatterjee, 2004: 37) on the one hand and demobilised and co-opted popular classes on the other. Following the end of the Telangana uprising in 195 1, subaltern social movements by and large remained quiescent and ceded their autonomy to 'the strong hand of the Nehruvian state' (Katzenstein and Ray, 2005: 14). The acquiescence of social movements was in turn compounded by the fact that subaltern groups did not enjoy unmediated access to the state apparatus and the electoral process. Congress rule by and large left local power structures intact and poor social majorities thus remained dependent on local notables in accessing the state. The result was the failure to convert 'the superior numbers of the poor into a powerful political resource' (Frankel, 2005: 25).

However, the eruption of the Naxalite revolt in West Bengal in 1967 sounded the death knell of subaltern acquiescence and marked the onset of a decade in which India - much like the rest of the world in the aftermath of the global uprising of 1968 (see Watts, 2001)

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On New Social Movements and 'The Reinvention of India' 275

- witnessed the emergence of new social movements that subjected the exclusionary and exploitative dimensions of state-led capitalist development to substantial critique (Vanaik, 1990; Omvedt, 1993; Kamat, 2002; Ray and Katzenstein, 2005). During the early 1970s in India, there occurred 'a substantial radicalization of youth.. .outside the circles of the traditional left' (Vanaik, 1990: 195), which in turn resulted in the organisation of groups and mobilisation around issues that had been neglected by the mainstream left. Significant movements of the 1970s were the Chipko movement which championed the livelihoods of forest-dwelling communities in Uttarkhand (Guha, 1989; Basu, 1987), the Kerala Fishworkers' Forum which organised poor fisherfolk in Kerala against the depredations wrought on their livelihoods by mechanised trawling (Basu, 1987; Shah, 1988), and the Shramik Sangathana which organised Bhil adivasis in Mahar- ashtra around issues of agricultural wages, land control and forest rights (Basu, 1987; Shah, 1988; Upadhyaya, 1980). Moreover, the 1970s witnessed the mushrooming of various social action groups - a phenomenon that Kamat (2002: 10) refers to as 'the new grassroots movement' - which came to identify the dominant conception or ideology of development as the root cause of persistent poverty and increasing inequalities in Indian society. These groups particularly flourished in the wake of the Emergence, when the Janata government encouraged 'voluntary work and the formation of voluntary organizations in the countryside' (ibid. : 12).

From the middle of the 1980s, India's NSMs increasingly came to be involved in a search for perspectives and agendas that could serve as a unifying platform for the diverse struggles that had emerged during the previous one and a half decades. For some movements, such as the Kerala Fishworkers' Forum and the Shetkari Sangathana, this revolved around addressing gender relations and feminist politics; for others, such as the Chattisgarh Mukti Mor- cha, it revolved around developing a red-green politics - that is, a worker-peasant alliance around the politics of social justice and environmental sustainability (Omvedt, 1993 : 230-36). As Omvedt points out, the attempts to forge a common platform reached a high point with the National Rally Against Destructive Development in Harsud, Madhya Pradesh in September 1989, where between 25.000 and 50.000 activists from different social movements gathered to discuss an agenda which could unite different struggles against destructive development projects (ibid.: 259-60).

Another crucial process that unfolded towards the end of the 1980s was the increasing integration of the politics of the NSMs

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in a national field of force characterised by the onset of neoliberal restructuring and Hindu communalism. An important event in this process was the 'mandate of 89' - that is, the 1989 elections, which brought a new opposition force, the National Front coalition, to power. This government borrowed key themes from the social movements: decentralisation, social justice for backward castes, and promises of remunerative prices and debt relief for peasants dominated political manifestos (Omvedt, 1993: 273). The National Front government was thus a government 'elected on a mandate of change and with social movement backing' but it was also 'a fragile coalition government marked by factionalism' which lacked the capacity for concerted political action (ibid. : 274). This became obvious when Prime Minister V. P. Singh decided to implement the recommendations of the Mandal Commission on positive discrimination for lower caste groups in 1990; as Omvedt points out, this was 'the one social movement issue that did not require a major political reformulation of the process of development' (ibid.: 280). It did, nevertheless, turn out to be an explosive move: it triggered political protest by Hindu communalist forces across the country and eventually led to the downfall of the Singh government (see Frankel, 2005: 688-89). Simultaneously, the Indian economy was mired ever deeper in a crippling fiscal crisis. Thus, when Narasirnha Rao's Congress government assumed power in 199 1, the floodgates of neoliberal restructuring were opened once and for all (ibid. : 590).

For some commentators, for example Basu (1987), Vanaik (1 990) and Omvedt (1 993), the failure of India's NSMs to decisively advance their agenda in the late 1980s and early 1990s puts the stamp of defeat upon these movements. Yet movement struggles are still vigorous in India: indeed, as neoliberal restructuring picks up momentum, so too does popular mobilisation. Most recently this has been evidenced in the upshot of significant movements and networks of resistance to the introduction of Special Economic Zones in India. Surely, there is due reason for scholars to focus their gaze on the characteristics and dynamics of the movements of subaltern social groups as India enters the 21 st century, but this also raises questions about the aptness of the analytical perspectives we deploy. In the remainder of the article I hope to contribute to a debate about this through a critical discussion of academic perspectives on two aspects of NSMs in India - the relationship between social movements and the postcolonial development project, and the relationship between social movements and the state.

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3. Academic Perspectives on India's New Social Mo- vements: Some Critical Reflections

Beyond Development? NSMs and the Postcolonial Develop- ment Project For some time now it has been fashionable among critics from the quarters of poststructuralism and postcolonialism to posit India's NSMs as the bearers of an authentic and insurrectionary otherness that is mobilised in opposition and from a position of exteriority to the modern development project. These perspectives typically draw on Escobar's (1995: 13) argument that 'development' is a discourse which relies 'exclusively on one knowledge system, namely, the modern Western one' and thus dictates 'the marginalization and disqualification of non-Western knowledge systems', and that social movements in the global South do not articulate 'development alternatives' so much as 'alternatives to development, that is, the rejection of the entire paradigm altogether' (ibid. : 2 1 5)4. For instance, in his analysis of NSMs in India, Parajuli (1 99 1 : 182) argues that '[tlhe political significance of these struggles is that they challenge the notion of the integrationist and developmentalist Indian state'. They do this by opposing a 'counterdiscourse' of '[situated] knowledge that is locatable in time and space, embodied in struggle and par- ticipatory in process' to the 'unmarked, disembodied, unmediated, transcendent knowledge' of the developmentalist state (ibid. : 186, 185). Elsewhere he argues that 'the movements against big dams, collieries, and forest policies in Jharkhand and other parts of India are ...g aining conceptual maturity and confidence to challenge the whole edifice of modem resource management and development' as they 'renew and reassert subjugated traditions of knowledge in a new situation' (Parajuli, 1996: 32-33). Shiva and Mies have argued, of the women activists of the revered Chipko movement: '[Tlhey expect nothing from "development" or from the money economy. They want to preserve their autonomous control over their subsistence base, their common property resources: the land, water, forests, hills' (cited in Rangan, 2000: 34). Along similar lines, Kala (2001: 14) argues that through its resistance to big dams, the Nar-

4 The theoretical underpinnings, methodological strategies and substantive arguments of the post-development perspective have been substantively criticised (see, for example: Corbridge, 1998; Kiely, 1999; Niedeween Pieterse, 1998, 2000; Rangan, 1996, 2000; Moore, 1998,2000). I find myself in agreement with Hart (2001 : 654) when she argues that these criticisms have 'run their course' in terms of highlighting the shortcomings of post-development theory, and I will not reiterate them here.

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278 1 Alf Gunvald Nilsen

mada Bachao Andolan (see below) pits 'the lived space of adivasi and peasant communities' against 'a space of erasure' which is 'the abstract space of the state and of transnational corporations'.

However, fine-grained analyses of the cultural politics of resistance articulated by precisely those movements glorified as lodestars that will guide subalterns on their way beyond development suggest that these claims are erroneous. For instance, Rangan (1 996,2000) and Sinha (2004) have both carried out substantial research on popular mobilisation in the Tehri-Garwhal Himalayas -home of the Chipko movement in the 1970s - and both reach similar conclusions about the character of this mobilisation. Rangan (2000: 222) argues that movements in the region - and in India more generally - are most aptly understood as 'demanding their rights to greater access to a more generous idea of development'. Sinha (2004: 308) argues along similar lines when he suggests that social movements make recourse to the development project in articulating 'new political programs' and creating 'new bases for social and political life'. These are assertions that I find to be borne out by the character of the NBA's critique of the dominant direction and meaning of the postcolonial development project in India. What is so striking about this critique is that there is nothing in it to suggest a rejection of development and modernity as such. Rather, the idioms that gave meaning to the developmental rationale of modern India are used as a point of departure for a critique of the actual direction of development, which has exploited, excluded and marginalised popular classes. Let me illustrate with an observation from my fieldwork.

In conjunction with the monsoon Satyagrahas of 2000, the NBA staged a celebration of India's Independence Day on 15 August. In the adivasi village of Nimgavhan (Maharashtra), Independence Day began with the hoisting of both the Indian flag and the NBA's banner by a veteran Gandhian and respected freedom fighter, Sid- dharaj Dhadda. Following the flag hoisting, a confrontational event erupted. Two teachers were present at the ceremony. These teachers were employed at local state-run schools, but the reality was that their teaching was as absent as the schools they were supposed to be running. The teachers were confronted by agitated villagers and activists who argued that their vocation amounted to little more

5 In the NBA's repertoire of contention, the term Satyagraha is associated with the an- nual protest events that took place during the monsoon months (June, July, August, September) every year from 1991 until 2002. The Satyagraha revolved around braving the rising of the waters of the Narmada, which set in with the monsoon rains, and closing the floodgates of the SSP.

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than picking up their pay cheques. This dismal state of affairs was then thrown into sharp relief with the following point on the programme: the felicitation of young adivasis who had fared well in official schools after first having completed basic schooling in the Andolan's Jeevan Shalas - literally 'schools for life' built and run by the Andolan with a curriculum adapted to adivasi realities. Following this, the celebrations continued in the nearby village of Domkhedi with the inauguration of a micro-hydel project. A check-dam had been constructed on a small stream adjacent to Domkhedi, which, when combined with a pedal-powered generator, provided electricity to the village for the first time ever. Whereas the SSP threatened to displace the villagers from their lands and produce costly electricity that would only be available to affluent and predominantly urban consumers, here was a project control- led and executed at village level that actually had the potential of delivering a tangible improvement in people's lives.

Through the celebration of Independence Day, the NBA con- veyed a narrative about its political project. It was a narrative that recognised the freedom struggle and the attainment of Independence as fundamental events and achievements - the presence of freedom fighters, the unfolding and hoisting of the Indian flag, indeed the very celebration of Independence Day, all testified to this. However, at the same time it was a narrative of a national project profoundly out of kilter. The 'tryst with destiny', in this narrative, had gone awry; the promises of freedom and development have been hijacked by elite interests and thus betrayed, leaving large sections of the population by the wayside as outcasts. This betrayal was efficiently illustrated by the contrasts evoked in the celebrations: the putrid condition of state schooling versus the vivacity of the Jeevan Sha- las; the destruction wrought by the SSP versus the benefits brought to local communities by the micro-hydel project. Simultaneously, the focus on the NBA's constructive activities was expressive of a political project of alternative development, which resonated far beyond the Narmada Valley. The movement thus projected itself as an agent on a mission to reinvent the ideals of freedom and development. A subsequent NBA press release stated: 'Independence Day is so often a celebration of a country's victory over oppression, but in Nimgavhan, it had an additional meaning of the people's continued resistance against the injustice and exploitation within a nation' (NBA, 2000).

Now, I do not, of course, labour under the misconception that a closely orchestrated protest event such as this and the discourse

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of resistance that it conveys constitute a perfect reflection of a uni- form 'collective consciousness' that stretches out into every nook and cranny of the Andolan. It nonetheless testifies to and under- scores the essentially immanent character of movements such as the Andolan in that their oppositional projects (a) emerge from the internal contradictions of the postcolonial development project and (b) seek to address these contradictions through a critique which reclaims and reinvents its idioms of legitimacy. What is occurring, to paraphrase Marx's seminal passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, is very much a process in which the spirits of the past are conjured up and their names borrowed in an effort to create something that has never yet existed (Marx, 1984: 10). Indeed, drawing on Sinha (2004), I would argue that movements such as the NBA are best conceived of as subaltern appropriations of the postcolonial development project, which forge critiques of this project that are comprehensible on its own terms6. In this respect, then, I align my argument with that of Corbridge and Har- r i s ~ (2000: 239) when they argue about NSMs in the context of 'the reinvention of India', that in their attempts to reinvent India, subaltern social groups 'still have regard for the invention of India that was proposed in the Constituent Assembly'. However, claiming and appropriating the discourses and institutions of the hegemonic projects of dominant social groups in the articulation of oppositional projects will inevitably be an experience of both enablement and constraint, and it is precisely this that is at the core of the next set of reflections on the relationship between new social movements and the state in 'the reinvention of India'.

In and/or Against the State? NSMs and the Indian State In their discussion of subaltern politics in Reinventing India, Cor- bridge and Harriss (2000: 200-2) take their point of departure in a number of recent critiques of the ability of the democratic process in India to advance the interests of subaltern social groups. Whilst recognising that Indian democracy is marred by shortcomings, they nevertheless maintain its continued relevance for subaltern politics: 'it is misleading to assume that people are always empowered in

6 Indeed, the discourse of resistance articulated by movements such as the NBA can be said to be expressive of the 'paradoxical unity' in which 'development.. .and alternative development are dialectically organized oppositions within the history of modernity, to be seen less as mutually exclusive but as 'oppositions that contain the other.. .' (Watts, 2000: 46,60).

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opposition to the state, or that they fail to seek power from within state structures' (ibid.: 208). Corbridge and Harriss demonstrate the continued relevance of the state and the democratic process for subaltern politics via a multitude of examples. For dalits and adivasis, located at 'the bottom of the social pile in India' (ibid. : 208), advancement via the democratic process has taken the form of 'empowerment from without' (ibid. : 2 10) in the form of constitutional provisions for job reservations, reservations of educational places and seats in political assemblies, and more generally the extension of the franchise to these groups, secular education and laws aimed at the abolition of caste-based discrimination. Such measures, they argue, have not altered the lives and livelihoods of these groups in a major way, but they have still had a significant impact on 'the terms of engagement between India's Scheduled and non-Scheduled Communities' by buttressing an awareness of potential collective strength among the Scheduled communities and improving their bargaining position vis-a-vis dominant groups (ibid. : 2 10- 1 1).

Another process highlighted by Corbridge and Harriss is that of the 'empowerment from within' that has been brought about through dalit and adivasi movements that have 'sought power over the state rather than compensation from the state' (ibid. : 2 12). Most recently, such politics is evident in the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party - a mainly dalit- based party - to state power in Uttar Pradesh. Corbridge and Harriss stress that they do not equate the electoral success of the BSP 'with an improvement in the living standards of the poor' (ibid. : 2 15) in Uttar Pradesh but the very fact that it hap- pened nevertheless implies that important changes are afoot. More generally, this is evident in the 'second democratic upsurge' (ibid.: 221-2; Yadav, 2000) in which Scheduled and Backward caste and class groups are participating more actively in electoral politics in a way which bypasses the mediation of local elites and which thus makes them a force to be reckoned with for established political parties. They also call attention to how democracy is 'an ideal, which is approached more or less closely according to the balance of class forces in a society and the nature of the state system' and how 'India's states, all of which have formally democratic political systems, differ significantly in terms of the substance of their democracies - according to the balance of class power' (Corbridge and Harriss, 2000: 222). The argument, then, is that a political system characterised by stable political parties engaged in competition over the votes of subaltern social groups is more likely to further processes of empowerment of those groups. Indeed, in India, it is

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'those states in which the lower castes/classes are more strongly represented politically [that] have been the most successful in reduc- ing poverty' (ibid. : 223) -with the left-of-centre regimes of Kerala and West Bengal cited as cases in point (ibid.: 226-7).

Corbridge and Harriss's defence of the continued relevance of the democratic process and the state in turn has ramifications for their views on the role of social movements in the realm of subaltern politics. Significantly, they argue that 'it is misleading to suppose that citizens' movements, NGOs and community organizations.. .provide an alternative to the state' (Corbridge and Hamss, 2000: 203). Rather, the presence of such movements and organisations positively affect the balance of class forces so that democratic government works in favour of subaltern social groups: 'We contend that citizens' movements are most effective where they put pressure on the state to take the part of the poor, or to protect the poor from some of the abuses heaped upon them' (ibid. : 203). Now, what I seek to question in these perspectives is not the assertion that the Indian state and the democratic process constitute an enabling space for the struggles of subaltern groups. Certainly, the argument that 'the failings of Indian democracy.. .should not be taken as a sign of the absence of democracy, or of the failure of India's democracy to offer some forms of protection or advancement to the poor' (ibid. : 202) is an apposite one. A failure to take this into account would constitute a failure to recognise 'the power of democratic political institutions and their capacity to impose more egalitarian distributive regimes on societies against reluctant capitalist classes' (Kaviraj, 2000: 94) - a capacity which in turn flows from the relational and conjunctural character of state power as such. Still, relational and conjunctural do not equal infinitely malleable for all purposes and all social groups. The state is, in essence, an institutional congealment of the fundamental relations that underpin a determinate social formation, and its workings are geared towards the reproduction of those relations (Jessop, 1982). This entails that there are certain intrinsic limits to the extent to which the state and its structures of representation and intervention can be harnessed for the pursuit of oppositional projects and designs that run counter to the logic of systemic reproduction; in short, the state's structures of intervention and representation will inherently have 'unequal and asymmetrical effects on the ability of different social groups to realise their interests through political action' (ibid.: 224). These intrinsic limits arguably come into view in actual engagements between social movements and the state, and so I turn to the Narmada Valley once again.

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As I mentioned above, the trajectory of mobilisation and resistance in the Narmada Valley started with social action groups working on local development issues in the dam-affected adivasi communities in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra in the early and mid-1980s. One of organisations was the trade union Khedut Mazdoor Chetna Sangath (KMCS), which was based in the sub-district of Alirajpur in western Madhya Pradesh. The KMCS emerged through a process in which urban, educated activists joined hands with village communities in challenging a condition which I refer to as everyday tyranny - that is, a range of violent, coercive and extortive practices meted out by the local representatives of the state: the police, revenue officials and forest rangers (see Nilsen, 2006a: Chapter 8, 2006b; see also Baviskar, 1995). Everyday tyranny essentially revolved around local state officials exacting bribes - both in cash and in kind - from adivasis in order to turn a blind eye to their use of state-owned forests for cultivation, timber and fuel collection, and other related livelihood activities. Demands for bribes were in turn underpinned by a very real threat of violence; as one KMCS activist explained to me, if local police officers discovered a villager walking along the road carrying an axe or a sickle, they would often bring the person to the police outpost where he would be beaten up and then made to pay a bribe in order to avoid criminal charges. Everyday tyranny, then, was a local state-society relationship far removed from the liberal-democratic ideals of citizenship enshrined in the Indian constitution. Indeed, one could say that the local state in Alirajpur was not encountered as a set of agencies and functionaries that provided services to and were accountable to the citizens of a political community. On the contrary, adivasi 'sightings of the state' (Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and VCron, 2005: 5 ) were centred on seemingly all- powerful 'tyrants' who imposed a cruel regime of extortion upon their 'subjects' with a heavy hand, and who responded to defiance with violence and coercion.

Everyday tyranny, however, came to be challenged when urban, educated activists came into contact with the adivasi communities in the early 1980s. In a series of confrontations with local state officials, activists and villagers pointed out the illegality of coercion and extortion. Whereas the initial response was one of violence - several of the activists were beaten up severely - the mobilisation process gathered pace when activists and villagers staged a dharna (non-violent sit-in demonstration) in protest against the violent practices of the local representatives of the state outside the sub-

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district administrative headquarters in Alirajpur town. Local and state media picked up on the protest, and it quickly became news. As a response, the Chief Minister intervened and suspended several forest guards who were responsible for the beating of one of the activists. A further protest action in the state capital of Bhopal resulted in the Madhya Pradesh Forest Conservator being sent to Alirajpur to discuss the problems that villagers faced in their encounters with local forest rangers; in the meeting he stressed that forest rangers were not entitled to demand bribes, and that any further malpractice should be reported directly to him. In the context of widespread repression which reigned in Alirajpur, this of course constituted a major victory, and it became the basis for further mobilisation by the KMCS, in which the creation of an awareness in the adivasi communities that they were bearers of constitutional rights and as well as special entitlements vis-A-vis the Indian state was a central strategy and key achievement (see also Baviskar, 1995 : 195).

The result of the process, in turn, was a profound transforma- tion in the character of subaltern 'sightings of the state' in Aliraj- pur: where adivasis had once seen state officials as well-nigh all powerful figures, they came to see them as public servants whose powers were legally circumscribed and who were accountable to them as citizens; where the villagers had once seen a state apparatus whose activities centred on the forceful exaction of tribute, they came to see an institution that was supposed to provide services and safeguard rights, an institution upon which they could make rights-based claims and demands, and an institution which they could participate in the running of. It was, then, a process through which formerly subjugated communities emerged as agents who could and would, competently and assertively, 'seek to engage with the state as citizens, or as members of populations with legally defined or politically inspired expectations' (Corbridge et al., 2005: 13). The trajectory of the KMCS, then, is an apt example of the way in which social movements can effectively and successfully advance the empowerment of subaltern groups via the institutions and ideologies of the state.

So far, so good - but if we turn to the trajectory of the NBA's campaign against the Sardar Sarovar Project, we encounter a different scenario. In 1990, the Andolan put forth the demand that the Government of India should order an extensive review of the SSP, assessing its technical feasibility, cost-benefit equations, and its social and environmental impacts; during the course of the review, construction on the dam should be halted. If the project was found

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to be technically unfeasible or in violation of social and environmental regulations, the NBA demanded, it should be abandoned.' This, however, failed to happen. The trajectory of the demand for review exhibits a clear pattern: at state level, promises to implement a review were first made and then reneged on due to internal differences in the state government, or simply not followed up at all; at the federal level also, promises were made and reneged on, but here as a direct consequence of the pressure levelled by the Government of Gujarat. Indeed, even Prime Minister V. P. Singh, who arguably presided on a 'social movement mandate', shied away from implementing a review in the face of the counter-mobilisation staged by Chimanbhai Patel - Chief Minister of Gujarat and a lead- ing representative of the dominant Patidar landowning classes in the southern and central parts of the state. The process culminated in one of the NBA's most spectacular and dramatic protest actions: the Jan Vikas Sangharsh Yatra (March of Struggle for People's De- velopment) in DecemberIJanuary 199019 1 : 6,000 people marched from Badwani town in Madhya Pradesh towards the SSP dam site in Gujarat. The march was stopped at the border with Gujarat, and a protracted standoff unfolded where several activists went on a 21-day hunger strike. True enough, the central government an- nounced that a review would be carried out, and in 1993, following further dramatic actions by the NBA, a Five Member Group (FMG) was assigned the mission of reviewing the project, but its efforts were effectively undermined both by central politicians and the Government of Gujarat. The report of the FMG, which was made public in 1994 and lent credence to the NBA's case, was largely inconsequential. This occurred even in a context of fragmentation at the top as, in Gujarat, Chimanbhai Pate1 had passed away and, in Madhya Pradesh, the Congress and Digvijay Singh, brandishing a pro-civil society agenda and arguing for a reduction of the height of the SSP, had won the state elections. Throughout this trajectory,

7 The basic rationale for demanding a review seems to have been rooted in the knowledge that the movement had produced - its rich body of counter-expertise (see Nilsen, 2006b: Chapter 10) -about the project. It was clear to the Andolan that the weight of the evidence flatly contradicted the official claims that justified the dam. Furthermore, the evidence established that the project violated a wide array of domestic and international norms, rules, and procedures related to dam-building. This in turn suggested that a review of the project would in fact lead to its abandonment. As Dwivedi (1997) has pointed out, this is very much a form of 'jury politics' which presupposes an understanding of the state as a neutral arbiter which can assess and evaluate bodies of evidence against or in favour of a 'defendant' - in this case the SSP - in an independent and unbridled way and pass judgement on this 'defendant' solely on the basis of this evidence.

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it is quite possible to discern cracks and fissures in the state-system, but the significant dynamic is that of the closing of the ranks which occurred at every juncture where the push of the dominant proprietary classes and their representatives came to shove.

A similar pattern can be found in the NBA's engagement with the Supreme Court. In May 1994, the NBA submitted a case of public interest litigation (PIL) against the SSP to the Supreme Court, claiming that the execution of the project constituted a violation of people's basic right to life and livelihood. An important part of the rationale for doing so was the fact that India's Supreme Court had obtained a reputation for its pro-activist leanings8. And the initial experience with the NBA's case seemed to confirm this. The SC imposed a stay on the SSP in 1995, and when senior Members of Parliament expressed their dismay over the SC's meddling in inter- state affairs during hearings in 1997, the SC staunchly refused to lift the stay on the dam. Once again, then, a chasm can be identified in the state-system. However, this chasm was effectively brushed aside with the SC verdict of October 2000, which stated that the SSP should be completed as quickly as possible, and the clear state- ment accompanying the verdict that the Supreme Court was not to serve as an arena for contesting state development strategies. Once again, the ranks of the state-system - ironically enough with a clear reference to the separation of state powers - were closed, and the closure was in favour of dominant social groups.

In these two encounters with the state we have two very different outcomes to grapple with. The case of the KMCS certainly illustrates the potential for empowerment which resides in subaltern appropriations of what Abrams (1988: 82) calls the 'state-idea' -that is, the representation of the state as a coherent body external to society which neutrally arbitrates in conflicts between equals. It also demonstrates that the 'state-system' - that is, the 'palpable nexus of practice and institutional structure centred in government' (ibid. : 82) - is not a tightly sutured leviathan, and that it may well be 'made to do the bidding of India's lower orders' (Corbridge and Harriss, 2000: 239). In the case of the Andolan's struggle for review of the SSP and its turning to the SC, however, the state-system appears more as 'a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie', and the state-idea as an ideological veil which

8 However, as Upadhyay (2000) notes, the pro-activist profile is most clear in relation to cases of a strictly environmental character. Where PIL cases have been filed to challenge infrastructure projects, the SC's argument has consistently been that it cannot and should not interfere with such projects; the Narmada case, then, exemplifies a general trend.

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'contrives to deny the existence of connections which would if recognised be incompatible with the claimed autonomy and integration of the state' (Abrams, 1988: 77).

The explanation for these differential outcomes must be sought, I believe, in the differential character of the oppositional projects pursued by the KMCS and the NBA. The KMCS offensive against the everyday tyranny of the local state - significant though it was for the communities involved - was centred on a claim to which the higher echelons of the state-system could concede without undermining its authority and without going against the interests of extra-local proprietary elites. Indeed, ceding to the KMCS's demands can be seen as an exercise in bolstering the state-idea as such. The NBA's campaign against dam-building, however, was pitted directly against the vested interests of the proprietary elites of southern and central Gujarat, whose capacity to influence the workings of the state-system outshone that of the adivasis and petty-commodity producers mobilised by the NBA in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. This can of course be read as testimony to Corbridge and Harriss's argument that the extent to which subaltern groups can make claims on the state is subject to conjunctural fluctuations related to regional and state-specific balances of class power. However, I would argue that in the case of the NBA's anti- dam campaign it is also possible to detect constraints on subaltern claims-making on the state which are of a more structural character. This is so because the campaign was not only directed against one particular dam project. It was deeply embedded in a generic opposition to dam-building as a development strategy, as well as a critique of the wider model of development of which this strategy was a part and concerted attempts to constitute a nation-wide alliance of social movements around this critique -most clearly evident in the National Alliance of People's Movements. Thus, the NBA levelled a challenge against one of the chief modalities through which the Indian state has secured the constitution and reproduction of capital accumulation in postcolonial India, namely, as Chatterjee (1986, 1993) has argued, through a 'passive revolution' in which the key development strategies of the state have in effect concentrated productive resources in the hands of the country's dominant proprietary classes. In short, the oppositional project that crystallised in the practice of the NBA came with ramifications which defied 'the permanence of existing structures and relations' (Kamat, 2002: 158) and the fundamental centrality of state power in securing the reproduction of those structures and relations.

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Thus, what I argue is that whilst, on the one hand, it is indeed called for to acknowledge 'the possibilities for empowerment that might exist within India's polity' (Corbridge and Harriss, 2000: 238), it is, on the other hand, equally imperative to give serious thought to the limits that might exist to those possibilities and what this entails in practical and strategic terms for new social movements in contemporary India. Whereas a full engagement with these questions transcends the relatively limited parameters of this article, my immediate suggestion would be to steer a course between the ultimately state-centric view of Corbridge and Harriss and the anti- statism of post-development theory in terms of the strategic role of state power in social movement practice.

The basic argument against anti-statism would then be this: an awareness of the limits to the changes that can be achieved via the state-system and the state-idea does not in any way translate into a principled rejection of any engagement with the state. If social movements are seen as developing relationally and historically vis-a-vis the hegemonic projects of dominant social groups, and the state-system and the state-idea have figured so centrally in those hegemonic projects as is the case in postcolonial India, then the trajectory of those movements will naturally tend to involve some kind of recourse to state-centred practices, institutions and ideational representations. Given the conjunctural nature of state power, such recourse might also bear fruit. This, however, does not entail positing interaction and negotiation with the state as 'the be- all and end-all of movement activity' (Geoghegan and Cox, 2001 : 7). Rather, it entails the advocacy of a position which explicitly seeks to take account of both the potential and limits of political action within the state-system. This approach would assert that social movements do wisely to think carefully about which bets to place with the normal political process within an institutionalised social order and which to place elsewhere. In other words, it would advocate an instrumental rather than a committed engagement9 with the state-system and the state-idea - that is, an approach to interaction with the state based on limited expectations of what can be gained and a clear perception of what cannot be gained and what is risked in pursuing this avenue. It also entails an awareness that a challenge to the principles of power from above, on which the capitalist state rests, is - if it is to be pursued at all - most likely to succeed through the construction of a social movement project

9 I owe this distinction to Laurence Cox.

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which seeks to develop the collective skilled activity of subaltern groups to the point where it can successfully challenge extant power structures and their entrenched institutional manifestations.

4. Concluding Remarks In this article I have sought to contribute to a debate on academic representations and analyses of the character, role and strategies of new social movements in the wider context of thoroughgoing structural change in India's political economy.

I started with a critical interrogation of 'post-development' representations of the NSMs as bearers of otherness and harbingers of an era beyond development and modernity. Through a discussion of the character of the Narmada Bachao Andolan's critique of India's postcolonial development project I asserted that social movements should be viewed as fundamentally immanent forces in that they emanate from the internal contradictions of India's postcolonial development project and at the same time tend to articulate their critique of the direction and meaning of this project via its central idioms of legitimacy. I then moved on to a discussion of the relationship between India's NSMs and the state. In contrast to Corbridge and Harriss's advocacy of movement strategies that pursue empowerment and process claims and demands via the state, I argued for a more differenti- ated view of the enablements and constraints inherent in state power. I pursued this argument through an analysis of the trajectory of the NBA's struggle against dispossession. As much as the social action groups that preceded the mobilisation around dam-building registered considerable successes in their use of the state and its agencies against local forms of oppression, the attempts by the NBA to push the state to act as a neutral arbiter in the conflict have consistently failed - from the initial demands for a state-led review to the more recent attempts to secure a favourable judgement against the project from the Supreme Court. This testifies to the systemic character and limits of the Andolan's campaign against dam-building: it thrusts against a basal structure of proprietary power, and this structure in turn constitutes the limit to the possibility for movements of acting through the state and its agencies. For activists, this points in the direction of opting for an instrumental rather than a committed use of the state in the pursuit of emancipatory goals.

This is of course merely an initial contribution to a discussion, but it is imperative that this discussion takes place. I find it hard to agree with Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava and Veron when they

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posit that such struggles as those that have unfolded in the Narmada Valley are somehow less important than the everyday struggles in which 'men and women seek to engage with the state as citizens, or as members of populations with legally defined rights or politically inspired expectations'. With the intensification of neoliberal restructuring in India, conflicts over resource control are more than likely to proliferate. Indeed, this is nowhere more clearly evidenced than in the introduction of Special Economic Zones, which will entail the seizure of at least half a million hectares of land in a process which 'is nothing short of a crude form of primitive accumulation of capital' (Chandrasekhar, 2006). Moreover, dispossession seems to be increasingly underpinned by a readiness to resort to violent coercion. Recent examples include the shooting of 12 Munda adivasis who were protesting against their displacement due to the construction of a major steel plant at Kalinga Nagar in Orissa in January 2005, the killing of three people in Manipur on 14 De- cember 2005 when security forces opened fire on protestors raising demands for resettlement and rehabilitation for dam oustees, and, crucially, the killing of at least 14 people in March 2007 in Nandi- gram, West Bengal - a state held up by Corbridge and Harriss as an exemplar of how leftist political parties acting through the state can advance popular empowerment - in conjunction with popular protests against the acquisition of land for the establishment of a Special Economic Zone by the Indonesian Salim Group (Bannerjee, 2007). In this context, the 'responsible' scholarship that Corbridge et al. (2005: Chapter 9 ) call for cannot with legitimate reason and good conscience restrict the scope of its optic and the depth of its ambition to an endless multiplication of ethnographic and historical decipherings of the cultural politics of molecular reworkings of the postcolonial development project and encouragements of a sustained belief in acting through the state. It must, at the very least, consider the possibility that social movements are immanent forces with the potential to transcend and transform the social formation in which they have emerged through a definite subversion of the power relations that thwarted the capacity of the designs for modern India to deliver on the promises of progress for its social majorities.

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On New Social Movements and 'The Reinvention of India' I 291

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No. 2. Yadav, Y., 2000, 'Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge: Trends of Ba-

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On New Social Movements and the Reinvention of India

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