Why Civil Society Action Is Indispensable For The Success of Democracy In India
The deepening conflict between Govt. of India and civil society is really a battle for primacy between the ‘rule’ of representative democracy and the imagination of a participatory democracy.
The tragic irony is
that civil society has been reduced to obsequious seekers of mercy and crumbs at
the doorstep of the Indian state and its rulers. While profit seekers have the
ears of the highest officials, non-profits are made to wait, chastised and
diminished.
Earlier this month,
while the UN Human Rights Council stated that giving ‘space to civil society is
not optional’, the Government of India warned that “civil society must operate within the
framework of domestic laws”. Renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz went so far as
to say that ‘India is looking bad’ for its crackdown on civil society voices.
How is representative
democracy different from participatory democracy?
In a representative
democracy, once elected, our representatives are vested with the power to
decide on our behalf without needing to go back to voters to seek their views. In
this sense, even though elected, governments are only marginally away from
being beset by a colonial, or feudal, mindset.
In sharp contrast,
civil society voices seek to intervene to create space for citizen
participation in decision-making and to minimise the distance between the
mai-baap government and the last person in the queue. In doing so, civil
society forces the vote seeking neta to seek the views of citizens, helping
turn a near feudal representative democracy into a participatory democracy. (And
yes, social media has the potential to further participatory democracy - which
is why it comes under threat every so often.)
Trademark image of the
pesky argumentative ‘jholawala’ aside, civil society is not a homogenous ‘sector’
or group. It is diverse, with significant variations in ideologies, governance
processes, intent and integrity. The
concept and roles of civil society are still evolving. So is its relationship with
elected govts - swinging from the collaborative to the adversarial to the
contractual - each trying to influence the other’s motives and methods.
The 1950s was a time
of silent and supportive civil society action. Soon after Independence, the
Gandhian view of doing ‘constructive’ work led many towards rural development
and community mobilisation. The focus
was on welfare and relief. Family planning, adult literacy, khadi and village
industries and training of extension workers – these were priority.
The 1960s and 70s saw
a shift – civil society was now asking itself and governments tougher questions
on the root causes of persistent poverty, questions about exploitation and
redistributive justice. 1970s saw a revival of the socialist movement led by
Jai Prakash Narayan. Some sections of civil society moved away from merely
providing welfare support. SEWA was the first women’s trade union to be set up,
bringing together the cooperative movement, the women’s rights movement and the
labour movement.
In the 1980s civil
society action became synonymous with NGOs, creating a fertile ground for the
germination of the processes of participatory democracy in India. The
disability and the dalit movements gained ground. Self help groups, spearheaded
by NGOs across rural India, became the buzz word. NGOs started getting
contracted and received govt. funds to ensure last mile delivery of services, a
practice common even today.
Post cold-war 1990s was
marked by important departures. With economic liberalisation in 1991, the
sector started receiving more funds both from within and outside India. The
1992 Rio Earth Summit and the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference and the 1995 Copenhagen
Summit for Social Development galvanised civil society action into two key
strands – women’s rights within the larger framework of human rights as well as
economic, social and environmental justice. Meanwhile, the 1992 demolition of
Babri Masjid ensured that civil society became deeply engaged on issues of
communalism in electoral politics.
The 1990s therefore
witnessed large sections of civil society fully own the processes and goals of
participatory democracy in India, assisted in part by the proliferation of
media. The Narmada Bachao Andolan grew
in this decade, making methods of Gandhian protestation common parlance among social
movements to follow. Democracy, accountability, and development was being
debated in the farms, riverbeds and forests of India. Public contestations on caste and communal
politics and the impact of globalization and liberalization policies became
common. The 1990s saw the immense mobilisation of community led organisations
on HIV prevention. After a near failed family planning campaign, the govt. had
almost no expertise to respond to the epidemic. Had it not been for civil
society, the response to HIV would have failed miserably. The campaign to
repeal Section 377 to decriminalise same sex behaviour and the openness on sexual
health and rights in general owes everything to this movement.
The turn of the
century saw a shift in state-NGO relationship. In 2002, the Vajpayee government held a national conference
to better understand the evolving role of civil society. This led to the
formulation of a national
policy on the voluntary sector which, as expected, is still waiting to be implemented.
In 2003, the Government ruled that
NGOs could only receive bilateral aid from six donor countries instead of the
earlier twenty-two. The
Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA), first passed in 1976, was revised
in 2010 making access to NGO funding harder. This was also the decade when the
internal civil society debate on NGOs vs people's movements started taking
shape.
Meanwhile, the
state’s failure to provide basic services to its citizens had civil society
stepping in once again to draft transformative legislations such as - the BioDiversity
Act (2002), Domestic Violence Act (2005), RTI (2005), NREGA (2005), Forest
Rights Act (2006), Unorganized Workers Social Security Act (2008), Right to
Education (2009), harsher punishments in the anti rape laws (2013), Right to
food (2013) and the Land acquisition Act (2013).
Interventions
on roti-kapda-makaan issues, civil society has sweated it to improve social cohesion
in India by improving citizen access to classical arts, theatre, regional
language literature and poetry, crafts and textiles and folk arts.
The otherwise diminutive and self-effacing
civil society is being pushed to the wall to assert that almost every lasting
transformative change in Indian society has been brought about by civil society
action and struggle for a more participatory democracy. This was bound to
happen - in the absence of administrative reforms, and a dying Panchayat system, the 185 lakh strong workforce of the Indian government spread across
central, state and local governments, is only a tool of representative
democracy, designed to enforce policies, laws and rules – not to listen to and
collaborate with its citizens in the spirit of participatory democracy.
India needs more civil
society action, not less. Civil society is not just ‘nice to have’, they are
plain indispensible to the success of democracy in India. This is 2016, and
India can no longer demand that civil society prove its legitimate contribution
to society. It is the turn of the state to prove that it isn’t a vestige of our
colonial past and isn’t inhabited by feudal babus.
A balance between
industrial modernity and a life of dignity for all – this is the call of people’s
movements and civil society action from across India. Only a mature democracy
can stomach this call. Government of India must act in
enlightened self-interest and redefine its relationship with civil society - from
suspicious, subliminal antagonism to a collaborative if not an affable one.
We need to give participatory democracy a
chance before we chase the chimera of becoming a super power.
First published on Huffington Post
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