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THE NON-PARTY POLITICAL PROCESS

Ranji Kothari
A sense of uncertainty seems to characterize both our approach to public
affairs and our modes of thinking about them. Underlying it is a growing
contradiction between expectations born out of a given ideology, or doctrine, or
theorythe Theory of Progress, the Theory of Development, the Theory of
Participationand what happens in reality. While all these are interrelated and
will be dealt with, the focus of this paper will be on the problem of participation,
its changing context and growing paradoxes, and the emerging possibilities and
thresholds of both theoretical concern and practical action. My analysis will be
based by and large on the Indian experience but is more widely applicable and
will be presented in general terms.
1. PARTICIPATION, DEVELOPMENT AND THE STATE
Participation is the crowning concept of the liberal paradigm of progress,
equality and democracy. It is shared by a variety of occidental schools of
thought, including those avowedly opposed to Liberalism. It is only with the
dawn of the age of mass politics, and still later with the entry into the global
political process of poor, backward, societies, that its innate paradoxes and
contradictions came out into the open. With the advent of development as a
doctrine of doing good to all, both academic and political interest in the value of
participation soared high. Until, by the end of the sixties, it became clear that to
participate in development was a prerogative (of some) although proclaimed as
a right (of all), and that it was in particular denied to the masses, the people,
the poorin whose name development took place.
The Myth of Participation
The myth still persistsabove all among the masses themselves. It has
been propelled by two powerful streams of thought, populist politics and
populist economics, one perfected as an art of arousing faith among the masses
in their benefactors and the other developed as an expertise in legitimizing such
a faith. Both have co-existed with popular misery, degradation and destitution.
Herein lies the central paradox: the greater the misery the greater the faith in
populism. And the key slogan of populismwhether of populist politics or of
populist economicshas been participation.1
The more the economics of development, and the politics of development,
are kept out of reach of the masses, the more the latter are asked to participate
in them. For, they are told, it is for them that development takes place. If
poverty still persists or at times gets worse (a fact that is smartly woven into the
rhetoric of populism), it is because of extraneous factors intervening. Like

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corruption (a global phenomenon), lack of adequate capital (deliberately

denied to us by world agencies), the price of oil and the world economic
recession, the arms race (again externally fanned) and of course the destabilizing policies of outside powers. All this makes the task more difficult. But the
ruling elite is, we are told, determined to stand up to the challenge, keep
pressing for more resources, more technology, more SDRs, both to stave off the
painful transition and to take the economy to a higher plateau of
performancein productivity, in availability of goods and services, and in the
well-being and prosperity of the masses. If only the opposition would let us
proceed, there would be fewer agitations and greater order. The politics are all
right, the basic model is right, all we need is peoples cooperation and obedience
to the law (participation) and less conflict. Some would say (especially the
economists): less politics.
Depoliticization
Here lies the second major paradox of this age of participation: an increase in
the intensity and volume of populist rhetoric which is, however, fashioned to
de-politicize, in an increasing manner, the people, the development process,
and indeed the operation of the political system itself, so that growing numbers
of a powerless populace become marginalized both from the organised economy
and from organised politics and become dependent on one or a few dominant
individuals and their authorized agentsthe techno-bureaucracy, the dadas,
the skilled experts in communication and mass media. (As I will argue a little
later, the opposition parties too are found to endorse the same political style: an
increase in populist appeal alongside a decline in the peoples role in politics.)
And yet the symbols of peoples participation are by no means given up;
they have only been reduced to rituals of a plebiscitary democracythe Leader
going out to the people at regular intervals, meeting them in the thousands,
becoming one with them and asking for their loyalty and their votes, not so
much through party organisations or other institutional linkages with the
people, but rather by personalised appeals and charismatic techniques instilling
in more and more people a sense of threat to community, religion or nation.
Here lies the third paradox of participation: the greater the withdrawal of power
from the people and from organizations representing them, the more direct the
relationship between those in power and those out of it; and the more isolated
and marginalized and oppressed a people, the more dependent they become on
the centre of power. Participation gets translated into clienthood, small crumbs
thrown off the national cake during (or just before) an election, and the
promise of more to come. Increasingly the poor and the helpless become
trapped in this closed pyramid of participation. With this, participationlike
developmentbecomes a legitimization of centralized governance, the dismantling of intermediate structures,2 a regime of law and order, and repression.
The Role of the State
These new mutations in meaning systems are directly related to the nature

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and role of the State in our times. Four interrelated processes are at work. First,
the conception of autonomy of the State that was viewed as an instrument of
transformation (both by the elite that came to power after Independence and by
radical groups) is under decline, in part simply due to the proven incapacity of
governments to perform, but in good part by deliberate design. The dominant
elite, having used State intervention in the economic and social spheres for a
quarter century after Independence and having developed a wide enough
production base for supporting their lifestyle and the surpluses needed for
political survival and manipulation, are seen to withdraw from an extended role
for the State precisely at a time when such a role would have had to become
more distributive and mass-oriented. Instead, the State is now perceived as an
agent of technological modernization, with a view to catching up with the
developed world and emerging on world and regional maps as a strong State
(hence the vast sums spent on armaments) rather than coping with the pressing,
often desperate, needs and demands of the poor.
Second, in respect of the relationship between the State and civil society one
finds that in a period of economic stagnation and political instability (the former
growing from the refusal of the ruling elite to expand the internal market which
would require redistributive policies, the latter from the consequences thereof,
resulting in mass discontent and turmoil) the coercive nature of the State
increases. There is a growing demand for unity and consensusnot in the form
of an organic expression of civil society, but in the form of compliance with
whatever happens to be the ruling orthodoxy, dissent against which is
considered illegitimate. And as this happens the political process becomes
limited to agents and emissaries who in the course of time become less
interested in playing mediative roles and more interested in becoming a law
unto themselves, with an increasing dependence on the police and paramilitary
forces on the one hand and local mafias and hired hoodlums on the other.
Third, even the bearers of State power, viz. those in control of government (as
distinct from the State), including the presumed supremos of power by virtue of
their charisma and wide popular appeal, seem to be losing out, wielding an
authority that is no longer based on their own power and volition, and
increasingly becoming pawns in the hands of forces beyond their control. In
large parts of rural India (as well as vast tracts of the growing cities and
industrial conglomerations) government is on the decline, its mediating and
ordering role being replaced by the direct rule of local landlords and
hegemonical castes, the growing penetration of commercial interests into rural
hinterlands and tribal habitats, the rise of ill-bred contractors to new managers
of money power and the still more spectacular ascendancy of the newest of the
nouveaux riches, the dealers in illicit liquor and gambling dens, all of this being
protected and endorsed by a new breed of corrupt local politicians (or their
henchmen), bureaucrats and policemen.
Fourth, such a sharp decline in the rule of law and the authority of the
governing elite has made secular power as such, and the State as its institutionalembodiment, vulnerable to new attacks from old forces that were thought to
have been put on the defensive. Among these are the new fundamentalisms of
religious sects giving rise to perversions of old civilizations such as the Vishwa

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Hindu Parishad, the newfound power of presumably cultural organizations

like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Jamaat-e-Islami, and the
growing communalism within secular politics3 thanks to the desperate struggle
for survival on the part of ruling individuals and cliques, all of this taking
attention away from the politics of socio-economic transformation and gravely
affecting both the institutional framework and the finer subtleties and decor of
the political process.
Alongside this backlash from the grassroots of society, as it were, are other
new forces at work which also serve to undermine the autonomous political role
of the State, or even its minimal role as mediator in social strife and convulsions,
for the sake of a larger cohesion. Thus beneath the outer veneer of planned
economic development there has emerged a new breed of highly connected
middlemen and professionals (in the guise of liaison officers and management
officials) who are contributing to the increasing alienation of public goods by
private individuals4 as well as to the growing lumpenization of the production
process under the impact of naked corruption and the open subversion of
prevailing mechanisms of administrative and judicial control and
accountability.5 Complementary to the massive increase in what is known as the
informal or unorganised sector of the economy there is taking place a very
rapid expansion of this criminal sector of the economy which is recording
probably the highest rate of growth with no holds barred. Together the two
processes have led to one consequence: alongside withdrawal from organised
politics there is also taking place a withdrawal from the organised economy.
While as a percentage of gross indicators this may not register in a big way
(though I have serious doubts regarding the coverage of economic activities
outside the formal sector in official statistics), its impact on the political process
and on the role of the State is quite serious. In turn, it accentuates the growing
vacuum in the structure of the State, reinforces the depoliticization of the
people, increases their sense of insecurity and isolation, and makes them
dependent on charismatic individuals (or causes them to look for a new
saviour).
With all this the role of the State in social transformation has become
undermined, development has led to a striking dualism of the social order,
and democracy has become the playground for growing corruption, criminalization, repression and intimidation for large masses of the people whose very
survival is made to depend on their staying out of the political process and
whose desperate economic state incapacitates them from entering the regular
economic process as well.
International Context
These developments receive sustenance and support from and are indeed
encouraged by the international system. All the pathologies touched upon
abovethe exclusion of millions of people from the organised economy and
their acceptance of their impoverishment and destitution as both natural and
inevitable, withdrawal of basic resources from the countryside, forcing those
who lived by them to migrate to cities already full of filth and squalor,

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depoilticization of the public realm and the rise of techno-bureaucracies, an

increase in both the range and intensity of coercion by the Stateare spurred
on by a new breed of entrepreneurs in the service of the global status quo which is
undermining the role of the State even as it was earlier conceived by the national
bourgeoisie. As the world capitalist system enters its terminal phase under the
twin pincers of an unprecedented arms race and the unsatiated monster of
technology bent on a new international division of labour that dispenses with an
organised proletariat, the struggle over lifestyles and resources is entering its
most desperate phase. Politically , this has led to the cooptation of Third World
regimes and to arming them with enough flow of capital, technology and
armaments to keep them and their modern middle-class base afloat and to
protect them from social turmoil and the demands of large hordes of the poor
and the destitute. In return, there is taking place a reverse transfer of natural
resources and raw materials, of foodstuffs as well as of manufactured consumer
goods that rely on labour-intensive and polluting technologies, all at continually
depressed prices. There is also a determination to order and discipline the
working classes in the Third World so that both the quantum and the structure
of production are regulated to suit the requirements of world capitalism. These
are the much denied conditionalities accompanying otherwise unjustified
loans from the IMF and the World Bank, loans that are basically meant to bail
out corrupt and incompetent regimes. The North-South rhetoric, the philosophy of self-reliance and de-linking, the resolutions on a new international order
have all been mastered by this universal union of elites and affluent classes,
cutting across nations and ideological pretences, and putting alternative
strategies of basic needs, national self-reliance, minimum standards of health
and nutrition for all, and increases in employment and participation in the
production process into cold storage.
2. THE STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL
The world scenario is beset by a gigantic battle for survivalsurvival of
achieved lifestyles versus survival of sheer life, survival of corporate (economic
and political) power structures versus survival of states and cultures in large
parts of the Third World, survival of peace and dignity for millions versus
survival of structures of dominance and monopoly for ruling elites. In such a
world, highly defensive and increasingly desperate at both ends of the power
rope, democratic politics must suffer a big dip, technocracy and the managers
of strife replace popular politicians and the bulk of the people everywhere are
asked to stay away from politics. It is in their own interest that they do so, they
are told. Provided they do so and are not carried away by radicals of all types,
their welfare and prosperity will be taken care of.
Turbulence
Are the people accepting such a withdrawal from the political process?
Fortunately not. All over the world there is evidence of a turbulent consciousness among large sections of the deprived who had for long believed in both the

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grace of God and the grace of Caesar but have for some time now realized that
there is no grace (or compassion or mercy) among the mighty and that only
through struggle against them can anything be expected. In India this is
particularly in evidence, arising partly out of the revolution in norms generated
over decades by the adoption of a formally democratic polity in a society based
for centuries on the principle of inequality, partly out of a shaken faith in the
theology of development that successfully made its way into the thinking and
belief systems of the people throughout the fifties and sixties, and partly out of
the sheer weight and crushing experience of indignities, violence and deceit
experienced by the poor and the dispossessed. All this was greatly reinforced by
disillusionment with successive governments belonging to different parties
throughout the seventies, in each of which a believing people had put its faith.
There is discontent and despair in the airstill highly diffuse, fragmented and
unorganised. But there is a growing awareness of rights, felt politically and
expressed politically, and by and large still aimed at the State. Whenever a
mechanism of mobilization has become available, this consciousness has found
expression, often against very heavy odds, against a constellation of interests
that are too powerful and complacent to shed (even share) the privileges. At
bottom it is a consciousness against a paradigm of society that rests on deliberate
indifference to the plight of the impoverished and destitute who are being
driven to the threshold of starvationby the logic of the paradigm itself.
Failure of the System
It is with respect to the latter that the failure not just of government but of
organised political parties, trade unions and other traditional forms of
opposition to the ruling elite lies. The crisis that we face in India is caused by the
failure and default of the system, not merely of its governing structure. It is a
system based on (a) a parliamentary democracy operating through party
competition that is getting increasingly desperate and violent, (b) a mixed
economy composed of a large state sector and a large corporate sector both of
which have failed to generate opportunities for the people and have instead
survived by draining resources from the countryside, (c) an agrarian and forest
economy that has ceased to produce more food and has instead become
pulverised by the onslaught of commercial interests and corrupt politics, and
(d) a science and technology establishment so devoid of internal dynamism and
so thoroughly dependent on imported ideas and technologies that even the
initial euphoria of self-reliance has given way to the rhetoric of interdependence. All this is further buttressed by a military establishment that apart from
making ever more new demands on the countrys resources is also increasingly
called upon to perform police functions (spelling terror in some parts of the
country). A press that is trying its best to intervene in a period of growing
repression of the poor, ethnic minorities, women, and social activists who
happen to be working among these strata, is in effect becoming a mechanism for
diffusing discontent and preventing confrontation.
It is a failure of the system in a much deeper way too. First, in the sense that
the established instruments of the systemParliament, the Planning Commis-

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sion, the executiveare simply unable to deal with a considerably changed

agenda of tasks, to respond to peoples expectations or cope with a scenario of
deepening conflict, violence and vandalism. Second, it is a failure that the
established opponents of the ruling eliteopposition parties, trade unions,
peasant organizations, left-wing intellectualscannot cope with. Third, it is a
failure from which very large numbers of the people stand to benefit. As argued
already, the middle class (which in absolute numbers is massive in India) has
succeeded in utilizing the State to provide itself with a production base that can
sustain its parasitic lifestyle; to this must be added the numerous lumpen
elements that are finding employment in the lower rungs of an ever growing
bureaucracy and in a political process that increasingly relies on mercenaries.
Crisis of Theory
Above all, the failure of the system is embedded in a crisis of theory. The
liberal conception of the market being the arbiter of interests broke down long
ago. The social democratic theory, based on the positive and benevolent role of
the State and on a conception of welfare equity, is also of not much value in the
absence of high growth rates and massive State surpluses (as well as of an honest
and efficient State apparatus). Nor does the more radical stream of socialist
thought, namely Marxism, provide a clear enough guide to action in a society
the cutting edge of which is not a growing working class but a combination of
stagnation in the rural economy and a technology that inhibits employment.
These two together lead to a phenomenal growth in populations living on the
margin, to a growth of civil strife and violence within the lower classes, and to an
ecological devastation resulting in a withdrawal of traditional sources of
sustenance and nutrition from the rural poor. Given the logic of depoliticization, local polarizations are prevented from aggregating into national and
international ones. Theoretical models and ideological doctrines forged in
another age and a different cultural location are of little use in a social and
political context where poverty takes totally new forms and where the linkage
between progress and poverty has become so organic and almost
irreversible. Hence also the total irrelevance of all theories of participation.
Indeed, as one reviews the overall scene one is struck by not only the steep
decline in leadership and moral values but also by this poverty of theory as a
guide to action. The result is an intellectual and moral vacuum which is then
filled by populist rhetoric on the one hand (taking the place of theory), and
coercion and corruption on the other (taking the place of politics). And
charisma covers up the two so that there is hardly any sense of failure or crisis, at
least among the ruling class.
3. THE POLITICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXT OF NON-PARTY
FORMATIONS
This is the larger context in which we can discuss the broad theme of peoples
movements and grassroots politics and, as a part thereof, the phenomenon of
non-party political formations. To recapitulate and enlarge upon the argument

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already made, it is a context in which the engines of growth are in decline, the
organised working class is not growing, the process of marginalization is
spreading, technology is turning anti-people, development has become an
instrument of the privileged class, and the State has lost its role as an agent of
transformation, or even as a mediator in the affairs of civil society. It is a context
of massive centralization of power and resources, centralization that does not
stop at the national centre either and makes the nation state itself an abject
onlooker and a client of a global world order.6
It is a context in which the party system (and the organised democratic
process) and the regular bureaucracy are in a state of decline and are being
replaced by a new set of actors and a new order. The new order is manned by a
class of professional managers and experts in the art of injecting corruption in
the organised sectors of the economy and the polity, on the one hand, and sets of
hoodlums and fixers at the lower reaches of the economy and the polity, on the
other. It is a context in which revolutionary parties too have been contained and
in part coopted (as have most of the unions), in which the traditional fronts of
radical actionthe working-class movement and the militant peasantry led by
left partiesare in deep crisis, in which there appears to be a growing hiatus
between these parties and the lower classes, especially the very poor and the
destitute who are not amenable to the received wisdom of left politics, and in
which on the other hand there is taking place a massive backlash from
established interests in the form of legislative measures aimed against the toiling
classes7 and a steep rise in repression and terror perpetrated both by the State
and by private vested interests.8
And all this takes place in the broader context of growing international
pressures and conditionalities that herald an end to self-reliance and seek, on
the one hand, to integrate the organised economy into the world market and, on
the other hand, to remove millions of people from the economy by throwing
them in the dustbins of historyimpoverished, destitute, drained of their own
resources9 and deprived of minimum requirements of health and nutrition,10
denied entitlement to food and water and shelter,11 in short an unwanted and
dispensable lot whose fate seems to be doomed.12 A veritable scenario of
Triage!
The Role of Grassroots Activism
It is with the plight of these rejects of society and of organised politics, as also
ironically of revolutionary theory and received doctrines of all schools of
thought, that the grassroots movements and non-party formations are
concerned. They have to be seen as part of the democratic struggle at various
levels, in a radically different social context than was posited both by the
incrementalists and by the revolutionaries, at a point of history when existing
institutions and the theoretical models on which they are based have run their
course, when there is a search for new instruments of political action (the
existing ones being in a state either of complacency or of weariness and
exhaustion) and when a large vacuum in political space is emerging thanks to
the decline in the role of the State and the virtual collapse of government in

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large parts of rural India. These grassroots movements are based on deep
stirrings of consciousness, of an awareness of crisis that could conceivably be
turned into a catalyst of new opportunities. They are to be seen as a response to
the incapacity of the State to hold its various constituents in a framework of
positive action, and as a response to the States growing refusal (not just
inability) to deliver the goods and its increasingly repressive character. They are
to be seen as attempts to open alternative political spaces outside the usual
arenas of party and government (though not outside the State), new forms of
organisation and struggle meant to rejuvenate the State and to make it once
again an instrument of liberation from exploitative structures (both traditional
and modern), in which the underprivileged and the poor are trapped. These
grassroot movements are really to be seen as part of an attempt at redefining
politics at a time of massive attempts at narrowing its range. Their sense of
politics is different from electoral and legislative politics, which has relegated
large sections of the people to being outside the process of power. They also
involve a different basic conception of political activity as not being confined to
capturing State power but being seen as a comprehensive process of intervening
in the historical process.
Redefining Politics
Grassroots activism is an attempt at a redefinition of politics in another sense
too, namely a redefinition of the content of politics. Issues and arenas of human
activity that have not until now been seen as amenable to political action
peoples health, rights over forests and community resources, even deeply
personal and primordial issues such as are involved in the struggle for womens
rightsare defined as political and provide arenas of struggle. In a number of
grassroots movements launched by the non-traditional LeftChipko, the
miners struggle in Chhattisgarh, the Ryot Coolie Sangham in Andhra Pradesh,
the Satyagraha led by the peasants movement in Kanakpura in Karnataka
against the mining and export of granite, the Jharkhand Mukti Morchathe
struggle is not limited to economic and political demands but is extended to
cover ecological, cultural and educational issues as well. Nor is it limited to the
external enemy, as it includes a sustained and drawn-out campaign against
more pervasive sources of economic and cultural ruin such as drunkenness,
despoliation of the environment and insanitary habits, reminding one of the
original conception of Swarajya as a struggle for liberation not just from alien
rule but also from internal decay.
In sum, the phenomenon of grassroots activism is to be seen as part of an
attempt to kindle faith and energy in anti-establishment forces in a variety of
settings at a time of general drift and loss of elan; also at a time when the
suffering masses are found to be scared of confrontation with the status quo and
are in fact likely to walk into the trap both of populist rhetoric in the modern
sector and of authoritarian patriarchy and patrimony in the traditional arena, at
a time of a need for people with will and creativity and a readiness to wage
sustained struggle not just against a particular local tyrant but against the larger
social system.

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New Roles
Not everyone involved in popular movements sees it in this manner. Many of
them are too preoccupied with immediate struggles to be able to think in wider
terms, others are suspicious of both abstractions and aggregates, and in any case
the conditions for concerted and consolidated action informed by an adequate
theory are just not there. And yet there is enough evidence to suggest that
underlying the micro movements is a search and restlessness for both a more
adequate understanding of the forces at work and a more adequate response to
them, a certain conviction that available ideologies are inadequate to provide
these, and enough experience to know that the existing instruments of formal
politicsparties, elections, even the Press and judiciarycannot be expected
to cope with the crisis they and those they work among are in. In one area after
another where we in Lokayan have had dialogues with activists working among
the dalits, the landless and bonded labour, the tribals and various other
segments of the rural, poor that have been uprooted and forced to migrate to the
cities, we found that none of the existing parties, including those that mouth
radical slogans, really cared for these inchoate and unorganised and on the
whole mute and suffering masses.13 Hence the need for a new genre of
organisation and a new conception of political roles.
It is to fill this need that the widespread phenomenon of non-party political
formations (as distinct from non-political voluntary agencies working on
various development schemes) has occurred. In part they are performing roles
previously performed by government or by opposition parties and their front
organizations (due largely to the abrogation of responsibility by the latter). In
part they are performing new roles that have emerged in the new context of the
human condition as described in this paper: a condition of profound
marginalization of millions of people and the social and moral vacuum created
by the indifference of the system to it. And in part they are providing new
linkages with segments of peoples lives that had hitherto remained isolated
and specializedculture, gender and age, technology, ecology, health and
nutrition, education and pedagogythus bringing into the political process
issues that were hitherto left out. Finally, some (so far only a few) of them are
also seeking to link experiments at micro and regional levels to the macro
political situation, partly by similar struggles at so many micro points and partly
by the sheer impact of example and will on wider public opinion. The more
organised effort of joining up horizontally and vertically and building towards a
more cohesive and comprehensive macro formation is, of course, not yet in
sight despite being widely recognized.
On the whole, though, it would be a mistake to think of these action groups,
either logically or empirically, as one has thought of political parties. As I see it,
their role is neither antagonistic nor complementary to the existing parties. It is
a role at once more limited (in space or expanse) and more radicalnoncompetitive with parties but taking up issues that parties have failed to or are
unwilling to take up, coping with a large diversity of situations that
governments and parties are unable to (or, again unwilling to) cope with,
encompassing issues that arise from not merely local and national but also

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international forces at work. The individual effort itself is by and large

expressed in micro terms but it deals with conditions that are caused by larger
macro structures. The non-party formations are thus to be viewed as part of a
larger movement for global transformation in which non-state actors on the one
hand and non-territorial crystallizations on the other are emerging and playing
new roles, taking up cudgels against imperialist forces (some of these too being
non-State, e.g., the TNCs) in their new backlash against the forces of change.
Global Struggle
Interestingly, this struggle against new forms of global hegemony and
exploitation is increasingly taking a back seat in the agenda of most
governments of the Third World, as also of most political parties, including the
parties of the Left (apart, of course, from passing resolutions). In point of fact,
at any rate in India, when it comes to issues of international and foreign policy,
these leftist parties have become extremely defensive and have in effect been
coopted by the ruling party (thanks largely to the increasingly antirevolutionary policies of the Soviet Union and China). This role of struggling
against global domination is performed less and less by governments and parties
(the various Internationals have long lost their elan) and more and more by
non-party, non-State actors, while the nation-states themselves are being
sucked into the global status quo, including the world marketdespite all the
rhetoric of a new international order.
This larger scenario of decline of the traditional arenas of progressive and
revolutionary actionwithin the State system on the one hand and individual
States on the otherprovides the most relevant reason for the activities and
organization of the non-party political process. There are signs of relenting and
holding back if not of giving up, of exhaustion and defensiveness, of so many
entities. Of States. Of parties. Of other party-like organisations. Of the
organised economy. Of leadership. Of democratic institutions. Of NGOs and
voluntary agencies operating outside the political process. And all this at a time
when new waves of fanaticism and primitivism are on the upswing, when there
is a basic crisis in the enterprise of knowledge, and the social sciences are in a
state of total irrelevance, when there may not be an end of ideology but there
looks like a stark vacuum of ideas among the traditional forums of intellectual
ferment.
The Challenge of Multidimensionality and Fragmentation
The diffusion and fragmentation are not all born out of conflicts of ideas and
personalities; they are in a way built into the very process of transformation.
The traditional institutions of State and parties and voluntary agencies are
unable to deal with it. Nor is there as yet great confidence that the non-party
formations will succeed where others have failed. The problem is how to inject
new energy and confidence in the very large array of the young and the
concerned, how to rekindle the creative impulse which is bound to be there in
an age of turmoil and stirred consciousness, with what vision and agenda to

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occupy the new spaces that are becoming available in this general state of
exhaustion and drift and defeatism, and, above all, how to come forward with a
new strategy of transformation at a time when it is clear that old-style
revolutions are not on the cards, when instead of the working classes of the
world uniting it is the world middle classes that are becoming conscious of their
interdependence, when the production process as traditionally known has
been almost wholly preempted by this class, and when the struggling masses are
not an organised working class but a disorganised and doomed non-class.
It has to be a strategy that builds from the here and now, empowers the
people and inspires new confidence among the activists all the way along, so
that they can discard old ideologies and work towards a new crystallization
through the very process of struggle and survival. Mere survival calls for
struggle. And any long drawn out and sustained struggle for a brighter future
entails survivalof the people at large, of activists,14 of democratic institutions. It is a struggle to which not merely immediate targets but the much larger
goal of sustaining and strengthening the democratic process and making it an
instrument of the poor and the destitute is hitched. On it also depends the
rejuvenation of mainstream structures, the transformation and politicization of
the State and its liberation from the stranglehold of imperialism and, through
all this, the realization of a truly indigenous and authentic culture that is rooted
in the people of India. As D.L. Sheth has said in a recent paper of his,15 there
was never any question of the grassroots character of the people; it is the
forces that are uprooting them that one has to contend with.
There is no ground for romanticism, or even for unguarded optimism in this
regard. No one with any sense of realism and any sensitivity to the colossal
power of the establishment can afford to be an optimist, either with regard to
these movements or for any other transformative process at work. And yet one
needs to recognize that something is going on, it is serious, it is genuine and it is
taking place at so many places. That it is weak, fragmented, lacking in resources
and infected by various kinds of personal, organizational and cognitive crises
must be recognized. And recognizing both the promise and the problems, there
is a need to recognize the important and urgent need to strengthen these and
other relevant levers of transformation and survival,16 or at least not to weaken
or dismiss them either out of ignorance and complacency or out of doctrinal
intransigence and narrow definitions of the historical process. For what is called
for, and is in some ways already underway, is a new genre of political activity
carried out at so many levels and in so many settings, transcending conventional
battle lines and firmly digging in, not fleeing from the scene of action as has
happened with the traditional political parties, and without at the same time
indulging in histrionics or waiting for charismatic messiahs (that are usually
short-lived and leave behind a lot of debris).
Other Formations
Occasionally this effort may involve a combination of non-party and
party-like organizations in dealing with a situation of growing despair and
disenchantment with the status quo. Thus the movements for regional

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autonomy and decentralization intended to take the avenues of political

participation closer to the people, to be carried out in an idiom and mode of
communication and around issues that intimately relate to them, have taken the
form of what are called regional parties which have dramatically emerged on
the Indian scene of late. While it is too early to assess their significance, they do
represent strong expressions of the will of the people and their rejection of the
ruling establishment (not just in the region but nationally). The regional
phenomena in India, combining in its force a rejection of the authoritariansim
of the Centre, the dominance of the metropoles (and their imperial patrons), the
cultural hegemony of bourgeois cosmopolitanism and the political economy of
corruption unleashed by an elite unsure of itself, as also (though this perception
is not yet there), the chauvinist drives of the dominant national elite, has to be
understood as part of the larger democratic struggle. By insisting on taking the
political fulcrum closer to the grassroots the regional formations have to be
seen as providing local responses to national crisesin a way not unrelated to
impulses that move the large variety of micro movements led by wholly
non-party groups.
The rationale and historical specificity of the non-party character of the latter
is of course clear. All the same, given the political nature of these formations
(unlike various development oriented voluntary bodies), they must take
cognizance of other large and powerful upsurges that give expression both to
mass discontent with the establishment and to a search for alternatives to it and,
to the extent that they are asking for a reordering of the distribution of power in
favour of the lower reaches of society, to the system as well. The upsurges in
Assam and Jharkhand and the tribal North-East, in Andhra Pradesh, even in
Kashmir (though of a different sort), and in states like West Bengal and
Karnataka where parties that are otherwise national have decided to join
forces in the demand for regional autonomy,17 all represent something that is
churning at the bottom of society in a territorial and nationality sense though
unfortunately still not in a social sense in any significant manner. The issues of
language and culture and dignity and self-esteem that they raise, the emphasis
on mass education, employment and ecology that they seem to place, above all
the desire to wage battle against the drainage of power and resources from the
localities to the centres that they representthese are too important happenings in an otherwise highly centralized and oppressive and corrupt State to be
ignored by the grassroots activists.
Furthermore, these newest types of upsurge and political formations (there is
considerable variety among them despite a common thrust) display two
characteristics that make them relevant to the non-party activists: they stride
across the party and non-party spaces, and thus provide a broader political
space to the struggle for transformation. And they operate at levels between the
actual grassroots and the national and international. It is the task of the
activists working among the very poor and deprived to instil a social purpose in
these new generation of party-like formations and to make them vehicles for
classes and categories of people who have been deserted by both the
government and the opposition. The key question of course is: Will the Telugu
Desam and the newly astir National Conference, the leaders of Assam and

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Jharkhand movements and other proponents of regionalism and decentralization pave the way for greater participation of the people and consequent
reversals of development policies and constitutional functioning, or will they
too, like opposition parties so far, rise on the crest of mass discontent and then
ignore them, or confine their efforts to merely forming united fronts of
disparate groups merely to oust the ruling party? On the answer to this question
will depend the response of non-party activists, though to an extent the answer
depends on the activists too, especially on their ability to link horizontally with
regional stirrings and to instill into them the need for fresh thinking on a series
of policies affecting the mass of the people.18
The Micro-Macro Dynamic
Global problems, local solutions is not a mere clich. We know enough
about the deep dualism of the world we live in to be able to say that there are no
global solutions to global problems. As lifeat personal, community and local
political (national, sub-regional) levelsbecomes uncertain, vulnerable and
dangerous under the impact of forces beyond ones control, the only
redemption that may still be available (though even this may not work) will be
to work out local solutions to global problems. And yet enough is said in
this paper to suggest that those who work for local solutions are not bereft of a
macro perspective, a global vision, and that the latter are by no means the
monopoly of either the global intellectuals or the global managers of power. In
fact, there is reason to think that the latter are becoming bereft of perspective
and vision.
Understood in this dynamic way, and in the specific cases of the politics of
transformation, macro and micro are only differential expressions of the
same process. Not polar opposites in some pyramidal structure but co-existing
contexts in a mesh of variations and diversity, each autonomous and all
interrelated. At what point in this vast space will the macro permutations take
off is difficult to say. It could conceivably be only through the capture of state
power, either by a smashing operation or by recourse to the ballot box. But
these are not the only forms of affecting state power. Indeed in a period when it
is sought to extend the arena of politics to ever new processes and contours, to
limit the range of politics to representative institutions and the capture of
state power (which in reality amounts to no more than succeeding one
overthrown regime by another) is also to contribute to depoliticization which
really means freezing the status quo, and unwillingly endorsing the growing
demand of the world middle class to banish politics from the world. For what is
involved is far more basica dogged confrontation between transformation
and backlash, between the scenario of destitution and brutalization and the rise
of new experiments, the sustained struggle for a better order and a gaining of
critical spaces in the expanding horizon of the role of politics.
It is a horizon that extends far and deep. All over the country there is a new
wave of energy providing powerful portrayals of the human condition in films
and theatre and art and literature, women everywhere taking up causes that are
not limited to their own struggle for equality, young school and college boys and

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girls (till recently finding themselves rootless and alienated) marching for the
rights of the tribals and the forest people. In all this, and a lot more, there is
material for creating a new society and polity out of the ruins of the old,
releasing new creative spaces for the people to come into their own and take
charge of their lives.
The challenge is how to sustain these new creative impulses and make them
the harbingers of revolutionary change. History suggests that it is precisely in
times when the struggling forces of change are pushed to the wall by the status
quo either out of panic or in sheer self-defense that the will and the desire for
change become heightened and the process of consciousness seeks organised
expression. As existing organizations disintegrate or lose relevance, the
self-activity of the people finds expression, spurred by new understandings of
the historical process and new visions provided by some intervening individuals, be they intellectuals or young activists or a new breed of politicians.
Such self-activity will start occurring essentially at local and regional sites and
from there, given will and effort, reverberate throughout the wider political
space.
Theoretically this will call for a review of ideological positions that continue
to locate vested interests in local situations and liberation from them in global
distant processesthe State, technology, revolutionary vanguards. The
relevant macro positions then would inhere in political entities that transcend
both the very micro and the very global. We do not yet know what these entities
will be, how far they will partake of State-like features and how far of new forms
and content and style. These are questions pertinent to the discussion of both
the non-party political formations and other emergent or likely forms; they are
equally pertinent to the discussion or alternative approaches to the contemporary human condition, and to a consideration of the relationship between forms
of organization and ideological content. A considerable agenda of theoretical
research appears to be on the cards.
NOTES
1

The latest catchword of populist economics in India has been the call for organising the
poor from the pulpit of the Planning Commission. The dominant slogan of populist politics
for about fifteen years now has been Banish Poverty (Garibi Hatao) for which a 20-point
programme was drawn up in 1971 which has now been formally adopted by the Planning
Commission, and all state governmentsCongress or otherwise.
2 I have for a long time now argued that the sine qua non of a democratic order is the availability
and spread of an intermediate structure between the government and the people. For a
systematic treatment of the theme, see my Politics in India (New Delhi and Boston, 1970)
where I develop the concept of intermediate aggregation as opposed to that of national
aggregation as found in the structural-functionalist school of political science. For more
recent treatments of this theme, see my Rebuilding the State, Seminar, Annual Number,
January 1981, and A Fragmented Nation, Seminar, Annual Number, January 1983.
3 The term communalism in India connotes not positive but negative overtones. It refers to
communal or religious bigotry and takes the form of extreme polarization, usually
accompanied by violence and frenzy, and by and large fanned by fanatics among otherwise
secular elements.

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5
6

10

11

12
13

14

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See my The Failure of a System: Politics as Private Enterprise, The Times of India, April
10, 1974; and Arun Shourie, Politics as Private Property, in his Years of Janata Rule (New
Delhi, 1980).
This latter point was forcefully brought out at the UNRISD-Lokayan Workshop,
December 1982, by Arvind Das.
For a description of the present world order as a composite corporate structure made of
TNCs on the one hand and the political structure of Trilateralism on the other, see my
Towards a Just World, Alternatives 5 No. 1 (June 1979).
The Government of India and various state governments have brought forward a series of
repressive measures. The National Security Act (NSA) is the most notorious of these but
there are many others: the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA) which seeks to ban
strikes in any industry or service that the Government declares as an essential service, the
various amendments to the Industrial Disputes Act all designed to curtail the bargaining
power of the working class, the Hospital and Other Institutions Act aimed at dissident
professionals, and a proposed Forest Bill aimed against the ordinary forest people in need of
firewood while not restricting commercial interests, and so on. Laws meant to curb and
intimidate journalists and practitioners of performing arts have also been brought forward,
e.g., in Binar and Tamilnadu, but have been momentarily withdrawn in the face of stiff
resistance.
For a detailed account of the repressive nature of the Indian State, see my Democracy and
Fascism in India, (Delhi, Lokayan, 1981) a somewhat truncated version of which was
published in Indian Express, November 29, 1981, under the title Where are We Heading?
This includes land alienation under the impact of large development projects, large-scale
felling of forests, the export of basic necessities for earning foreign exchange to pay for both
goods and technology needed to sustain middle-class life-styles.
See C. Gopalans inaugural speech delivered at the Annual Conference of the Indian
Association of Population Studies in January 1983 and republished in Seminar No. 282
(Februray 1983).
For a perceptive analysis of the absence of availability and entitlement to food resulting in
conditions of slow starvation and death, see Amartya Sen, Conflicts in Access to Food,
Twelfth Coromandal Lecture, New Delhi, December 13, 1982.
See Kishore Saint, The Plight of the Doomed and our Responsibility (Lokayan, 1983). See
also D.L. Sheth, Grassroots Initiatives in India, available from Lokayan.
One explanation of this could be that the organised left (viz. the communist parties) are still
operating on a scale of priorities that is lacking in a sense of history. Still clinging to a theory
of revolution based on the mobilization and consciousness of the organized working class, in
turn based on an analysis of capitalism that derives its motive force from certain key
industries that are capital-intensive and concentrated in urban areas, these parties have
shown themselves to be incapable of dealing with the phenomena of abject poverty and
extreme destitution in rural areas, the striking growth of the unorganised sector in the urban
areas and the struggle for sheer survival of the poorest of the poor. It is here that the radical
(non-party) action groups come in. Hence also the distrust and hostility of the parties
towards them.
Many of the activists operate under awesome conditions of not just political terror but even
physical health and well-being. They have lost immunity to the hazards of living in scarcity
ridden and disease-prone areas. To give only one example, in Bodh Gaya where the Chhatra
Yuva Sangharsha Vahini consisting of dedicated youth (all below 25) have launched a long
struggle against a local mahant-cum-landlord and have made common cause with the local
harijans, malnutrition is rampant and almost every year there are two to three casualities
among the activists.
D.L. Sheth, Grassroots Initiatives in India, op. cit.

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On the whole theme of the dialectic of survival and transformation at various levels of global
reality, see my Survival in an Age of Transformation, Conceptual Paper for the United
Nations University Programme on Peace and Global Transformation, 1981. The paper has
since been published in Gandhi Marg 4, Nos. 2 & 3 (May-June 1982); in Praxis International
2, No. 4 (January 1983); and (in an extended version) in Alternatives 9, No. 2 (March 1983).
17 The Congress (S) in Maharashtra is likely to follow suit. The more this happens and spreads
in different parts of the country, the greater the opportunities for grassroots politics to
influence the political process and the greater the likelihood of moving towards a federal
structure of democratic functioning, still within the system no doubt, but changing the rules
of the game in a manner that would enable actors below the State level to assert themselves.
As this happens the social sense may also begin to inform the political process. On the
argument for grassroots activists providing inputs into the mainstream political process,
see my Grassroots, Seminar, Silver Jubilee Number (January 1984).
18 Earlier experience of regional parties, like Charan Singhs party in U.P., the Ganatantra
Parishad in Orissa but above all the DMK phenomenon in Tamilnadu and later the
ALADMK with Mr. M. G. Ramachandran at the helm provides one with little confidence on
this score. It is not necessary of course that the present generation of regional upsurge should
turn out to be of the same type. This historical phase is quite different, in that the new
formations are a response to a national situation. And they are not just parties but (at least
some of them) movements. All the same, there is as yet no basis to say with any degree of
confidence that the new regional parties will in fact become vehicles of transformation. If
anything there is some evidence of the opposite kind. Thus Mr. N. T. Ramarao (NTR) of
Andhra Pradesh, like MGR before him, is showing authoritarian tendencies as, for example
(again reminiscent of MGR), in his recent call for stern action against so-called extremists
for which he has also asked for Central assistance in the form of two more batallions of
Central Reserve Police (CRP). There is an urgent need to instill new thinking and vision in
the regional parties and movements, at least among those that are not so vulnerable to
dominant patterns of thinking about politics and who are not prisoners of vested interests,
even if the process of doing so appears difficult and at times tortuous. See my Rethinking
Centre State Relations, Economic and Political Weekly, October 22, 1983, 1931-32.