Sunday, July 31, 2011
India's Growth Story
Friends, Participating in the NDTV programme on the India Growth story killed by corruption? in its We the People episode of 31st July2011, certain points arose which we would like to share with you. The India Growth Story is about India's engagement with modernity. Disputes can be there about how India has gone about this engagement on which the participants in the programme expressed their views. Here inevitably the civil society led anti corruption campaign came in to discussion. Ashutosh Varshney, an eminent scholar on the panel, was of of the view that corruption accompanied most societies(including U.S.) which made a transition from the agrarian stage to the industrial stage. Here he looked at the anti corruption campaign more as a middle class angst which should find a reflection in the political parties' concerns.Mr. Manish Tewary the Hon. MP from the Congress on the panel expressed concerns about how the anti corruption campaign was threatening the legislature and its law making concerns.It is for this reason perhaps the Congress has branded the anti corruption campaign sectarian. To us it is important in this context of debates on India's engagement with modernity that certain questions are not missed out. Importantly the passage to modernity involves a move towards the separation of political state and civil society.It is here Karl Marx an eminent thinker of the 19th century pointed out in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law that 'the question whether all should individually participate in deliberating and deciding on the general affairs of the state is a question which arises from the separation of the political state and civil society'. In a situation where this separation is in the process of happening within the precincts of the older political state where the political state and civil society are one there arise mass aspirations for as general a participation as possible in the legislative power(like the debates we witnessing on the Jan Lokpal Bill).This is what emerges as a striving for as general as possible a participation in the legislation making. It is here it is most important that the anti corruption campaign of the civil society be understood as a movement which is not sectarian or reduced to one estate or the other as both the scholar Ashutosh Varshney or the mainstream political parties tend to do.The mass support to the civil society's anti corruption campaign is significant in this regard. The recognition of this as a nonsectarian movement perhaps can help us in coming to grips with the India story.(SFC, PG IGNOU,with the help of Mr.Ajay Mahurkar and Dr. Dolly Mathew)
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I think that's a very important point that you have made. To engage with the India Growth story, its important to discuss the massive anti-corruption actions as well as one kind of response to the growth paradigm the country has followed. Secondly, I think the anti-corruption actions has a very large dimension, which unfortunately the urban based electronic media simply overlooks. Issues like state and civil unrest, state and policing, agriculture/agrarian relations and depressed peasant livelihood, massive scale of internal migrations...these are all issue which are connected to the India Growth story. But very curiously, rather than situating these issues along with Hazare type civil protest in the framework of social response to our Growth story, they are either treated as cases of specific problems only or come to be branded as sectarian or group action with vested interst only.
ReplyDeleteWe should try to sort this out Manjeet.The Hazare movement has a form.It is indeed a question that has arisen from the separation of the political state and civil society in the modern times. Here we see the wish of participation in deliberating and deciding of all as individuals in the law making process.This form belongs to 'that abstraction of the political state where the legislature is the totality of the political state'(Marx in the Contribution to the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law).Is it perhaps because of the undermining of the legislature by estates,corporations,castes and other identities etc.which derive their conceptions from some notions of a monarchical past that the legislature and the legislative power exist as a formation which is the totality of the political state rather than an outcome of the society? Has this led to this form of the wish of all to participate in the law making individually to emerge? In such a situation Marx in Contributions to Critique of Hegel's philosophy of law sketches the scenario that the 'the political state which confronts the civil society, can bear it(this participation) only in a form appropriate to the scale of the political state'Now these terms like 'the scale of the political state' or its capacity to 'bear' etc. have connotations of an organic/environmental conception of the state which Marx considered to be an advance in theorising of the state.Combine this with the understanding of Marx that the political state notes all the practical and theoretical struggles of mankind.So perhaps Marx would not rule out this movement(Hegel calls it stir) which comes out of the wish of all to participate as individuals in law making being incorporated on an appropriate all encompassing environmental scale by the political state.It is here Anna Hazare's movement can draw inspiration from his own transformative, constructive work in Ralegaon Siddhi and draw up a programme for similar environmental work in thousands of Indian localities waiting to be so transformed and perhaps in this way become participants in the deliberation and decision making of the law making process.Followers of Indian political parties can perhaps join this process.The tremendous participation in literacy movements of 1990s(where followers across political parties parties participated) shows enough scope for this to happen.Within the abstract political formalism of the existing political state the laws of this environmental path perhaps need to be discovered. Regarding Hazare movement as a movement can help here. We can later discuss the situating of the movements you mention. Do comment. Ajay Mahurkar.
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