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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