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1.1 The research and the dialogues on the theme of autonomy while
investigating the constitutional, legal, financial, resource-centred,
administrative, gender-just, and other possible forms of autonomies,
repeatedly came up with the issue of governmentalised forms of autonomy as
against the demands and ideas of autonomies that sought to address the
incipient demands for justice. The research and dialogue reports and the
published volumes of this programme (The Politics of Autonomy,
Indian Autonomy – Keywords and Key Texts, and Autonomy – Beyond Kant
and Hermeneutics) have brought out the fundamental point that while
democracies treat autonomy as an exceptional principle (mostly for ethnic
minorities), which otherwise should not be at conflict with the supreme
principle of republican people-hood, autonomy has to be seen as an essential
democratic principle. It implies thus not one overarching model of autonomy,
or autonomy of one people constituting the nation, but re-imagining the
democratic space as the intersecting field of autonomies (hence, dialogic
relation between autonomies), as a fundamental conflict resolution mechanism
of the political society, as the field of accommodation. The research
programme brought out concrete case studies and resulted in formulations
towards improved or different policies, which attracted the notice of policy
makers and the academic community throughout the country.
1.2 The following research programme on social justice placed emphasis on
ethnographic and critical legal studies. There studies gained from the rich
collective inputs that CRG gained through consultations, workshops, and
dialogues this program entailed. To summarise the features of the second
programme – relevant for the genesis of this project – there were efforts to
identify various forms and notions of justice, such as revenge, instant,
restorative, gender justice, legal, moral, transitional, minimal, allocative,
justice as constitutive of rights, justice in form of the right to claim
making, justice as response to marginal situations, and finally justice as
the supplement of rights. In this research and dialogue programme, where
nearly one hundred and fifty people participated, and shared their views and
knowledge with the researchers, and in the ensuing reports on the state of
justice (and the four volume series) published by the CRG, once again the
issue came up – the interface of the opposing phenomena of popular notions
and governmental realities. The points emerging from the second study are:
(a) what constitutes the social of social justice; (b) what constitutes the
relation between marginalities and social justice; (c) what determines the
field of the interaction of command, order, law, and determination of the
just; (d) and the five dominant forms – justice as the supplement of law,
justice as the protection offered by the mighty, justice as order, justice
as the end of exploitation; and justice as that which begins as response to
injustice.
1.3. In short, these two programmes generated a deeper understanding of the
particularities of post-colonial democracy, as in India, and the realisation
that there is now a great need to study actual governmental processes as
these processes interact with popular notions, institutions, and desires,
and produce particular interface. Against this background of past two
research programs on post-colonial democracy, the study of governance is
proposed here in a very specific way – namely, studying the processes of
governing in Indian democracy in the current developmental context. It is a
logical follow up on the preceding two programmes. Taken these three studies
together, the policy implications of such a study will be deep.
2.1 The present project proposes to study governmental practices in the
context of a developmental democracy such as India. The study of
governmental processes in a developmental democracy means focusing on the
inter-relations between democracy, development, and governance. In the wake
of globalisation and globalisation-induced development the relation between
governance and democracy has become critical more than ever. Democratic
governance means governing a democracy, in particular governing the
tensions, conflicts, claims and collective claim makings that developmental
processes and a developmental regime provoke in a democracy. It also means
particular governing processes and structures. This research project
reflects all the three aspects of concern, namely, (a) the process of
governing a developmental democracy; (b) the relevant structures of
administering the task of governance, (c) and the popular response to the
agenda of developmental governance.
2.2 Against the backdrop of the first transition of democracy in India from
its origin in a colonial polity to the first phase of its independent life
after the promulgation of the Indian Constitution in 1950, the project seeks
to consider in details the interrelations between globalisation, development
and governance structures in the current context of what many may consider
to be the second transition of democracy – this time to a democracy in a
globalisation induced economy. It suggests that while this study has to
reflect on governance of transition, it has to reflect on how
democracy negotiates this transition. Yet we have to remember that the
changes have not been mostly drastic; there have been strong continuities;
and changes have gradually emerged, even though certain moments in the
evolution of governmental technologies can be considered as watersheds.
2.3 Two major things have happened in this scenario of continuity
and discontinuity: On one hand the welfare discourse changed to that of
rights and claims (due to popular politics, emergence of human rights
arguments, related developments in the juridical field, and above all
parliamentary democracy and therefore elections), with citizens no longer
accepting the legitimacy of governmental actions and consequences on the
given ground that these actions are motivated by developmental inspirations.
On the other hand, in the socio-economic field some major changes have taken
place. To put these changes very briefly: Foreign direct investment and the
Indian corporate sector has grown phenomenally; it is now greatly connected
with public relations, media, glitz, and the economy of conspicuous
consumption; while external investment of Indian big business in many
non-traditional sectors is increasing, there are growing World Bank-ADB-IMF-Japan-UK
linkages for almost all infrastructure development activities; at the same
time agriculture is moving slowly, some say it is in a crisis; labour force
in number is increasing, if at all, similarly very slowly, with the
unorganised sector’s condition remaining at a depressed level; farmers’
deaths/suicides epitomise the permanently depressed conditions of certain
areas of the country and among sections of the population; the developmental
projects are extracting heavy toll in the form of massive displacement in
different parts of the country, poverty reduction has not shown any
connectivity with global investments in the country; and finally while
expenditure is rising on issues of defence, security, science establishment,
intelligence, and crowd control, still Dalits, indigenous population,
minorities, and women form the core of the India’s working population as
well the most impoverished sections of this population.
2.4 The point is to note - once again at least prima facie - the impact of
these changes, of which we mention only the barest of the barest here, on
the working of the government/s. We can note at least the symptoms of
various impacts of these changes on the style and content of governance. For
instance, the ascendancy of the executive is overwhelming; The executive now
represents detailed governmental management of poverty, capital formation,
urban growth, development of infrastructure, social justice, communal
relations, and the gigantic and elaborate process of electoral democracy
(three times vote, parliament, electoral bureaucracy, etc.); at the same
time there is marked opposition to the organised consensus in official
politics about governmental ideas and policies on development– brought about
by the governmental management of economic policies. Governmental ideas of
development are countered by ideas of dignity and rights, which represent
deeper concerns about issues of justice. Thus today’s developmental
discourse has to contend with the movements of the indigenous people for
rights of land, forest, and minimum wage, demands of various Dalit groups
for justice and affirmative actions, also the demands of the minorities,
particularly the Muslims, for better survival means. All these indicate as
mentioned briefly earlier a strong presence of rights language in popular
reception of the governmental approaches to development.
2.6.Let us look little more clearly at the situation, marked as it is by
these questions. Looking at India, we can say that a distinct regime type is
emerging. It can be named as the regime of “developmental democracy”. Its
features prima facie consist of: new emphasis on development in place of
welfare and citizens’ participation, the diminishing capacity of the state
in terms of assuring basic economic, social, and civil rights of the people,
shrinking legislation and deliberation process while the executive is on the
ascendancy; in this background the emergence in various forms of the
principle of autonomy as the route for the people to claim agency for
participation in polity, and finally the landscape of social justice marked
by a varying combination of legalities and illegalities, lack of consensus
about what constitutes development, and fresh debates about the role of law
in redistributing and reconfiguring power and guaranteeing delivery
mechanisms of justice. Out of this interface we can note the phenomenon of a
rapid enunciation of policies by the Executive, aimed at increasing the
policy fund of the governing institutions – a phenomenon that can be termed
as “policy explosion” of the last decade (1997-2007).
2.7 Four features mark this complex scenario and these prompting this
research agenda:
(a) First, we must note the massive “securitisation” of governance in the
wake of developmental tasks. From taking over land to building oil and gas
pipelines, constructing airports to guarding railway tracks, cleaning cities
of lumpen elements, rioters, vagrants, suspected terrorists, militants, and
urban refugees – the developmental discourse is now mixed with the security
discourse. The aim of security administration is to provide cover for the
developmental activities (Gandhamardan, Singur, Nandigram, Kosi river bank
management, construction of pipelines, to mention a few instances), but more
important, the developmental agenda has to be governed in a war-like model –
regimented, disciplined, command structured, hierarchised, carefully
budgeted in terms of provisions – both hardware and software, and finally
recreating the difference between the military and the civilian now in form
of developed areas (IT cities for instance) and the back of beyond.
Guarding, maintaining, and protecting the circulation of life in form of
commodities, finance, information, and skill is the most significant task of
governance. If governance in this way produces “illiberalism” what should be
the democratic response?
(b) Second, governing in democracy has a fundamental tendency of dividing
up, rearranging, and reconfiguring the social and geographical space it is
governing. This has profound impact on the liberal traditions of freedom –
freedom to reside, move, visit, work in a particular area, etc.
Developmental agenda increases the governmental power to reconfigure the
space continually, and as the Indian experience also suggests democratic
governance introduces a new spatial divide between the spaces that are
‘sacred’ and hence are rendered as inaccessible to the many and the spaces
where hunger, famine and disease (like polio, malaria and AIDs) have
returned and are kept ‘isolated’ as ‘contagion’. The more we study conflicts
around the issue of displacement of massive groups of population in the wake
of riots, development, construction, militarisation etc., and consequent
loss of substantive citizenship, the more important it becomes to study the
relation between governance and space. One interesting aspect to investigate
would be the way administrative services and institutions are spatially
organised, and the Indian way in which federalism has been practised with
all its implications for the relations between the government and the
people.
(c) Third, the question of democratic governance acquires particular
relevance in the context of governing a wide variety of cultures. Nowhere is
this more aptly illustrated than in the case of governing the cultures of
the marginalized and the Dalits. Governing cultures has assumed myriad forms
ranging from fixing and freezing cultures, preserving, upgrading, plotting,
and marking these cultures in a whole hierarchy of cultures to make them
“acceptable” to an official policy of multiculturalism, once again crucial
for developmental agenda.
(d) Yet in discussing these, and this is the final point, we cannot forget
that the legitimacy of the government, more specifically government of
people’s conduct and lives, stems from the fact that this government claims
that it is the prime agency of people’s lives. The institutionalisation of a
strong patriarchal benevolent image is from the colonial time - not only the
huzur sarkar, but also mai bap raj. Does this image undergo
significant change with the assumption of the “historically given task” of
national development and of catching up with other countries and time? What
happens then to the governmental task of delivering justice, for which the
citizens look up to the government? Does the pattern or do the patterns of
government-people interface change significantly? Therefore one imaginative
research (combining two investigations) would be to (a) look into the
Administrative Commission Reports to find out the image/s in which the
institution of government has sought to see itself, and (b) conversely an
investigation into certain select movements that reflect the current pattern
of the government-people interface and thus show how the dualities of
service/servitude, development/control, order/democracy, regulation/freedom,
and finally rights/growth are playing themselves out, and how governments
while appearing as the engine of development project (themselves as) a
continuous order. Needless to say, such a two-fold inquiry will be of
enormous significance for developmental democracy.
2.8 In sum, we are asking: (a) If development has required an appropriate
administration and has signalled certain changes mentioned above, has it in
the same measure responded to the requirements of democracy? What has
developmental governance done to the quality of democracy? (b) What are the
characteristics of a developmental democracy? What are the major
institutional landmarks in promoting developmental democracy? These two
broad questions underpin the present project; their significance in the
framework of policy implications is enormous, and they are at the heart of
the following concrete research agenda. Indeed, from this discussion we can
visualise the agenda of the project.
Research
Agenda
The project seeks to address certain concrete research questions:
·
The study of some select institutions and
delivery mechanisms (for instance, related to education, knowledge, public
health, water and electricity supply, inputs supply for small producers) in
order to assess the impact of the shift from the dynamics of a welfare state
to that of a state oriented towards market-driven growth on ways of
governing;
·
The study of the impact of some of the Acts
and governmental measures for acceleration of development (such as the Land
Acquisition Act or the Special Economic Zones) on the concept of democratic
equality and citizenship;
·
An investigation of the process of
securitisation of the conditions of development, resulting in making
logistical considerations as the dominant priority for the government, with
several other social considerations now turning into minor matters, and
related population groups as minor peoples;
·
The study of certain policy formulation
processes and exercises (such as, R&R Policy, Right to Information, NREGA,
Forest Bill – all of which reflect the new ways of government-people
interface) in the context of the policy explosion in India in the last
decade (1997-2007) as a feature of modern developmental governance;
·
Study of the Administrative Commission
Reports reflecting the continuity/shift in the institutional grid of
developmental democracy;
·
An analysis of select popular responses
reflecting new forms of claim makings sparked off by developmental processes
posing new issues for developmental governance; this analysis will also
reflect on the ways in which different popular organisations are emerging
today to negotiate the changing relation between the government and the
people; and the ways in which these organisations are breaking the old
distinction between the civil society and politics;
·
Similarly an analysis of select cases of
political parties articulating ideas of developmental governance
particularly in their electoral manifestos, which would show another channel
of inputs in the policy formulation process;
·
Investigation into the dynamics and the
impact of the new digital culture (primarily e-governance and the new
electronic media) on developmental democracy characterised by digital
divide;
·
Finally, an inquiry into cases that reflect
on how the new emphasis in legal and governmental discourses from rights and
entitlements to growth, prosperity, security, and national prestige is
impacting on federal structure, constitutional forms of accommodation and
autonomy, and spatial distribution of developmental structures.
2.11 These inquiries are inter-related and the concerns overlap. The various
segments of the programme will be built around these questions and
concerns.
3. Proposed Activities and Organisation of the Program
Three Components
3.1 The project proposes to have three components –
·
Research
·
Organisation of dialogues, conference,
workshops, public forums, and public lectures (these are mainly in the
nature of outreach and dissemination activities, though they combine input
gathering purpose as well)
·
Organisation of web based material for wider
circulation, interaction, and web-based and print publications (these will
be mainly dissemination activities)
3.2 The research segment will cover the nine major concerns listed above and
will consist of specific and focused ten to twelve (10-12) research
monographs/papers.
3.3 The research segment will build primarily around case studies among
which five or six institutions will form the core of the subject of study.
The case studies will involve field work, analysis of governmental material,
extensive interviews, studies of select cases of policy formulation, study
of institutions of representation at select levels, reforms of welfare
administration, development, and information, and finally select studies of
popular responses. The actual cases (including topics of institutional
studies) will be decided in the first research workshop based on abstracts
to be discussed there.
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