Reflections on the FDRI-Berkeley Conference
Last week the Foundation for Democratic Reforms in India (FDRI) in collaboration with the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS) Berkeley, organized a two-day conference on Indian Democracy: Local Governance and Empowerment. The purpose of the conference was to bring together people from politics, academics and civil society and to enable them to engage with one another on a common platform. Not only is such an effort problematic by definition because of the variety of lexicons employed by the various speakers, but also the manner in which each frames the problem is substantially different. What results is a deep-seated disappointment with the people who run the country and those who purport to frame the problems for the wider public.
The conference engaged a host of speakers to make sense of the issue of local governance. However, it was the framing of the problems that deserves some attention. In particular, I take issue with the framing of two sets of problems:
1. The women’s question
2. The poverty issue
The very first panel headed by Pranab Bardhan and Thomas Isaac (Finance Minister of Kerala) was able to place Indian democracy and development in a larger framework. Mr. Isaac’s commentary on decentralization in Kerala coupled with Prof. Bardhan’s narrative about poverty and the crisis of development in India was a great start to the program. However, our enthusiasm waned subsequently when the second panel headed by Mani Shankar Aiyar, Vijendra Rao (IBRD) and Anirudh Krishna came on.
The first problem with framing the issue was made apparent in this panel.
Aiyar gave the audience a welcome reality check. While Panchayati Raj/local governance was a great idea, it was going to take a lot of time for any of the plans to work. While some of us in the back seats wondered why there was a Union Minister for Panchayati Raj, Aiyar happily went on to refer to Muslim women’s burqas as ‘tents’, not once but twice in his anecdotal speech. “There was a Muslim woman standing next to me in her ‘tent’”, he said. I double-checked this with several members of the audience who were all equally bewildered at his deployment of the word to refer to a specific form of dress.
Aiyar also mentioned some facts and figures. There are more elected representatives in India (3 million) than there are people in Norway. Out of these about 1.2 million are female elected representatives. Of course, we thought, how odd that out of so many elected women not one made it to the FDRI/Berkeley conference on local governance. How very odd indeed!
Aiyar also went on to talk about various incidents where he had been impressed with female Sarpanches in villages. What he seemed to be saying, and which other panelists including Digvijay Singh echoed, was that women weren’t as badly treated in Panchayats as was often understood. In presenting their anecdotal evidence, Aiyar and his cohort valorized certain women and made them represent the pool of women in elected posts in India. Of course, in doing so they suppressed alternative narratives which prevail in many parts of the country where women are still judged by caste panchayats, men still rule panchayats by proxy, women do not take independent voting decisions and are still made to suffer humiliation at the hands of men from higher castes.
This first problematic framing of the women’s condition was in danger of going virtually unnoticed had not Rajeev Dhawan stepped in and demolished this myth in the final panel. Mr. Dhawan chose to recount incidents of women’s oppression in panchayats and before them and in doing so was able to shift the framing of the women’s question to a slightly more realistic position.
Mr. Digvijay Singh also took recourse to anecdotal evidence to mention his own efforts in addressing the women’s issue. An SC woman-Sarpanch in a village in MP had not been permitted to unfurl the national flag on a particular event. Mr. Singh as CM had the woman brought before the district and she was asked to unfurl the flag on 15th August. While his efforts were no doubt sincere and welcome, they did not challenge the power structure that was obviously dominant in the woman’s village. I am not sure if it matters that she unfurled the flag with the CM by her side. What matters is that even the CM was not able to direct the social notables of the village to let her unfurl the flag on her turf.
Perhaps the oddest thing I heard in the two days was the suggestion that those who chose to believe in the murkier side of India did so to validate certain ideological positions.
The second problematic framing was on the issue of poverty.
Poverty, announced Anirudh Krishna, could be understood by using the metaphor of a bathtub. The water in the tub represented the mass of poverty stricken people. However, this was not to be mistaken as a constant mass. Some people slipped into poverty as represented by the running tap and some slipped out of poverty, as in the water that flows out from the bottom of the tub. In this analogy, which I think can best be described as ‘curious’, Krishna did not consider the possibility that the mass of poor could actually increase with the rate of addition to the tub (mass of poverty) exceeding the rate of run off.
Krishna, who has conducted extensive fieldwork in rural India, was able to tell us that the reason people in rural India seemed to prefer a teaching job in a government school, the police or the army was because they lacked ‘aspiration’. So in village X only one person had become a software engineer, while most others languished in what he termed the ‘rupee economy’. As I sat thinking about how the person who became a software engineer probably did so because of affirmative action and the point system for backward areas, Krishna announced he did not believe in and didn’t think reservations were a good idea.
I was gobsmacked!! Doubly so when Rao from the World Bank proudly announced that they ran a regression which showed them that the street in front of the Sarpanch’s house was better maintained than streets elsewhere in the village Y. As my friend M- said, “They needed a regression to tell them that?”.
Missing in Krishna and Rao’s explanation of poverty was the manner in which local economies are captured by locally dominant castes or guilds, how the lack of land reforms feeds into the narrative of poverty and how government policies (affirmative action) do offer many SC’s and tribals a way out. Krishna made a distinction between the dollar economy (*hurrahs*) and the rupee economy (*wails*). The object of poverty eradication, or so it seemed to me, was to make sure people could enter the dollar economy. His charts equated low paying teachers’ jobs as being a part of the rupee economy. And of course, the reason people opted to become teachers, jawans and havaldars was because they lacked aspiration.
Fieldwork conducted in 2002 by my cohort at JNU revealed that in UP and Rajasthan people opted for a ‘sarkari naukri’ for themselves and their children for a number of reasons including – job security, pensions and access to the state. But most importantly because employment data that I collected last year from the Ministry of Labor shows that in many states like UP and Rajasthan the government is the largest provider of jobs. So technically, it is not a lack of aspiration so much as a lack of any other kind of job in a separate sector that leads to people in rural areas opting for government jobs. Besides, how does one operationalize ‘lack of aspiration’, anyway?
On the second day, the panel on urban governance including John Hariss, Arvind Kejriwal (Parivartan) and Ramesh Ramanathan (Janagraha) commented on how it was urban areas as well that required more decentralization. Kejriwal’s work in Delhi and Ramanathan’s work in Bangalore outlined the manner in which development was being scuttled by inefficiencies stemming from poorly outlined administrative boundaries (Bangalore) or a corrupt and insensitive MCD (Delhi). Both Kejriwal and Ramanathan talked about the Right to Information and Public Disclosure as a means of holding governments and their local bodies accountable.
The second panel of the day on media and its role in empowerment included Kalpana Sharma (The Hindu) and Chandan Mitra (Pioneer, Rajya Sabha). The panel did a good job of problematizing the media and its capture by consumers. Sharma, who ran her own press and newspaper during the Emergency, commented on how stories were dictated by consumer demand rather than by ethics or necessity. The casualty of the commoditization of news was developmental stories. Of course, what I would have liked to see more in the panel was how the media chose to represent certain issues. In a lecture at Berkeley late last year, Yogendra Yadav had mentioned how the media treated poverty as an ‘incident’ not as a process. The result of such a treatment was that stories about poverty were reported and forgotten and the media undertook no sustained investigation into the causes and consequences of such poverty.
Conclusion
The main problems I had with the conference were about the manner in which issues were framed. I felt that the women’s issue and poverty were framed in a narrow fashion such that they could be presented with little complexity to a wider international audience. This not only diluted the agenda of the conference, but also eclipsed real problems that Indians face day after day. For instance, Digvijay Singh did a wonderful job of outlining all the various schemes and plans he implemented as CM of MP. However, he did not mention that most of MP and major cities at that (like Gwalior) suffer from 14-20 hour power cuts everyday in the summer. This has many consequences. In most of Gwalior, for instance, the economy shuts down during the non-power hours. Shops shut down, health services are affected. Last year residents of Deen Dayal Nagar, a housing colony, marched to the local power distribution station and beat up the workers there in sheer frustration.
MP has one of the worst average board exam results in India. According to many school principals in Gwalior, children are not able to study at home in the evenings because of the lack of electricity. Their exam performance suffers and this affects their chances of getting into good higher educational institutions that use Board Exam percentages as a yardstick to measure academic worth. The better-off schools are able to get generators to run during school hours and try and pack in as much exam-related tutoring between 7 am and 1 pm on a normal school day.
A third peripheral problem not connected with the issue of framing, was the emphasis on road/transport as indicative of progress. Most politicians who attended (Reddy, in particular) commented on this as a sign of progress. This is something we observed under the NDA administration (Golden Quadrilateral) and even under the UPA. Sheila Dixit is best known for constructing at least 23 flyovers in Delhi and for implementing the Metro Rail. Politicians’ fascination with getting citizens from Point A to Point B by train, bus, tram is strange. As my journalist friend from CNN-IBN once mentioned, “Chhatisgarh has beautiful roads, leading from everywhere to everywhere, but you will not find many bus running on them. Mostly bullock carts and tractors.” Another student mentioned Musharraf’s fascination with bullet trains in Pakistan.
Perhaps roads and transport are the most tangible indicators of a government’s efforts at development. Perhaps when it is time to go to the polls the next time around, government’s can say ‘look we actually did something… see that nice road?” Perhaps, like the BJP thought, building more roads is a quick fix to the employment problem in the country. Whatever, the reason roads and transport while necessary, are not the only infrastructural requirements for India. What about the rest?
The conference engaged a host of speakers to make sense of the issue of local governance. However, it was the framing of the problems that deserves some attention. In particular, I take issue with the framing of two sets of problems:
1. The women’s question
2. The poverty issue
The very first panel headed by Pranab Bardhan and Thomas Isaac (Finance Minister of Kerala) was able to place Indian democracy and development in a larger framework. Mr. Isaac’s commentary on decentralization in Kerala coupled with Prof. Bardhan’s narrative about poverty and the crisis of development in India was a great start to the program. However, our enthusiasm waned subsequently when the second panel headed by Mani Shankar Aiyar, Vijendra Rao (IBRD) and Anirudh Krishna came on.
The first problem with framing the issue was made apparent in this panel.
Aiyar gave the audience a welcome reality check. While Panchayati Raj/local governance was a great idea, it was going to take a lot of time for any of the plans to work. While some of us in the back seats wondered why there was a Union Minister for Panchayati Raj, Aiyar happily went on to refer to Muslim women’s burqas as ‘tents’, not once but twice in his anecdotal speech. “There was a Muslim woman standing next to me in her ‘tent’”, he said. I double-checked this with several members of the audience who were all equally bewildered at his deployment of the word to refer to a specific form of dress.
Aiyar also mentioned some facts and figures. There are more elected representatives in India (3 million) than there are people in Norway. Out of these about 1.2 million are female elected representatives. Of course, we thought, how odd that out of so many elected women not one made it to the FDRI/Berkeley conference on local governance. How very odd indeed!
Aiyar also went on to talk about various incidents where he had been impressed with female Sarpanches in villages. What he seemed to be saying, and which other panelists including Digvijay Singh echoed, was that women weren’t as badly treated in Panchayats as was often understood. In presenting their anecdotal evidence, Aiyar and his cohort valorized certain women and made them represent the pool of women in elected posts in India. Of course, in doing so they suppressed alternative narratives which prevail in many parts of the country where women are still judged by caste panchayats, men still rule panchayats by proxy, women do not take independent voting decisions and are still made to suffer humiliation at the hands of men from higher castes.
This first problematic framing of the women’s condition was in danger of going virtually unnoticed had not Rajeev Dhawan stepped in and demolished this myth in the final panel. Mr. Dhawan chose to recount incidents of women’s oppression in panchayats and before them and in doing so was able to shift the framing of the women’s question to a slightly more realistic position.
Mr. Digvijay Singh also took recourse to anecdotal evidence to mention his own efforts in addressing the women’s issue. An SC woman-Sarpanch in a village in MP had not been permitted to unfurl the national flag on a particular event. Mr. Singh as CM had the woman brought before the district and she was asked to unfurl the flag on 15th August. While his efforts were no doubt sincere and welcome, they did not challenge the power structure that was obviously dominant in the woman’s village. I am not sure if it matters that she unfurled the flag with the CM by her side. What matters is that even the CM was not able to direct the social notables of the village to let her unfurl the flag on her turf.
Perhaps the oddest thing I heard in the two days was the suggestion that those who chose to believe in the murkier side of India did so to validate certain ideological positions.
The second problematic framing was on the issue of poverty.
Poverty, announced Anirudh Krishna, could be understood by using the metaphor of a bathtub. The water in the tub represented the mass of poverty stricken people. However, this was not to be mistaken as a constant mass. Some people slipped into poverty as represented by the running tap and some slipped out of poverty, as in the water that flows out from the bottom of the tub. In this analogy, which I think can best be described as ‘curious’, Krishna did not consider the possibility that the mass of poor could actually increase with the rate of addition to the tub (mass of poverty) exceeding the rate of run off.
Krishna, who has conducted extensive fieldwork in rural India, was able to tell us that the reason people in rural India seemed to prefer a teaching job in a government school, the police or the army was because they lacked ‘aspiration’. So in village X only one person had become a software engineer, while most others languished in what he termed the ‘rupee economy’. As I sat thinking about how the person who became a software engineer probably did so because of affirmative action and the point system for backward areas, Krishna announced he did not believe in and didn’t think reservations were a good idea.
I was gobsmacked!! Doubly so when Rao from the World Bank proudly announced that they ran a regression which showed them that the street in front of the Sarpanch’s house was better maintained than streets elsewhere in the village Y. As my friend M- said, “They needed a regression to tell them that?”.
Missing in Krishna and Rao’s explanation of poverty was the manner in which local economies are captured by locally dominant castes or guilds, how the lack of land reforms feeds into the narrative of poverty and how government policies (affirmative action) do offer many SC’s and tribals a way out. Krishna made a distinction between the dollar economy (*hurrahs*) and the rupee economy (*wails*). The object of poverty eradication, or so it seemed to me, was to make sure people could enter the dollar economy. His charts equated low paying teachers’ jobs as being a part of the rupee economy. And of course, the reason people opted to become teachers, jawans and havaldars was because they lacked aspiration.
Fieldwork conducted in 2002 by my cohort at JNU revealed that in UP and Rajasthan people opted for a ‘sarkari naukri’ for themselves and their children for a number of reasons including – job security, pensions and access to the state. But most importantly because employment data that I collected last year from the Ministry of Labor shows that in many states like UP and Rajasthan the government is the largest provider of jobs. So technically, it is not a lack of aspiration so much as a lack of any other kind of job in a separate sector that leads to people in rural areas opting for government jobs. Besides, how does one operationalize ‘lack of aspiration’, anyway?
On the second day, the panel on urban governance including John Hariss, Arvind Kejriwal (Parivartan) and Ramesh Ramanathan (Janagraha) commented on how it was urban areas as well that required more decentralization. Kejriwal’s work in Delhi and Ramanathan’s work in Bangalore outlined the manner in which development was being scuttled by inefficiencies stemming from poorly outlined administrative boundaries (Bangalore) or a corrupt and insensitive MCD (Delhi). Both Kejriwal and Ramanathan talked about the Right to Information and Public Disclosure as a means of holding governments and their local bodies accountable.
The second panel of the day on media and its role in empowerment included Kalpana Sharma (The Hindu) and Chandan Mitra (Pioneer, Rajya Sabha). The panel did a good job of problematizing the media and its capture by consumers. Sharma, who ran her own press and newspaper during the Emergency, commented on how stories were dictated by consumer demand rather than by ethics or necessity. The casualty of the commoditization of news was developmental stories. Of course, what I would have liked to see more in the panel was how the media chose to represent certain issues. In a lecture at Berkeley late last year, Yogendra Yadav had mentioned how the media treated poverty as an ‘incident’ not as a process. The result of such a treatment was that stories about poverty were reported and forgotten and the media undertook no sustained investigation into the causes and consequences of such poverty.
Conclusion
The main problems I had with the conference were about the manner in which issues were framed. I felt that the women’s issue and poverty were framed in a narrow fashion such that they could be presented with little complexity to a wider international audience. This not only diluted the agenda of the conference, but also eclipsed real problems that Indians face day after day. For instance, Digvijay Singh did a wonderful job of outlining all the various schemes and plans he implemented as CM of MP. However, he did not mention that most of MP and major cities at that (like Gwalior) suffer from 14-20 hour power cuts everyday in the summer. This has many consequences. In most of Gwalior, for instance, the economy shuts down during the non-power hours. Shops shut down, health services are affected. Last year residents of Deen Dayal Nagar, a housing colony, marched to the local power distribution station and beat up the workers there in sheer frustration.
MP has one of the worst average board exam results in India. According to many school principals in Gwalior, children are not able to study at home in the evenings because of the lack of electricity. Their exam performance suffers and this affects their chances of getting into good higher educational institutions that use Board Exam percentages as a yardstick to measure academic worth. The better-off schools are able to get generators to run during school hours and try and pack in as much exam-related tutoring between 7 am and 1 pm on a normal school day.
A third peripheral problem not connected with the issue of framing, was the emphasis on road/transport as indicative of progress. Most politicians who attended (Reddy, in particular) commented on this as a sign of progress. This is something we observed under the NDA administration (Golden Quadrilateral) and even under the UPA. Sheila Dixit is best known for constructing at least 23 flyovers in Delhi and for implementing the Metro Rail. Politicians’ fascination with getting citizens from Point A to Point B by train, bus, tram is strange. As my journalist friend from CNN-IBN once mentioned, “Chhatisgarh has beautiful roads, leading from everywhere to everywhere, but you will not find many bus running on them. Mostly bullock carts and tractors.” Another student mentioned Musharraf’s fascination with bullet trains in Pakistan.
Perhaps roads and transport are the most tangible indicators of a government’s efforts at development. Perhaps when it is time to go to the polls the next time around, government’s can say ‘look we actually did something… see that nice road?” Perhaps, like the BJP thought, building more roads is a quick fix to the employment problem in the country. Whatever, the reason roads and transport while necessary, are not the only infrastructural requirements for India. What about the rest?
posted by Vasundhara at 4:19 PM
4 Comments:
The official confusion over decentralization and governance is something all Indians live with. Our local governments do not have fiscal powers or responsibility, the 2 pillars that empower any administration. This applies to urban and rural landscapes in India. Let us not get confused here and say that we do not need roads or reforms in the energy sector (to stop those 14 hr long power cuts). What needs to happen is that the middle classes in India stops 'stealing' from its poor. Pray why is there a subsidy for the middle class to run thier ac's, fridges etc? why can't they pay for water, for the relatively nicer roads, for thier education? As JNUite, you have probably seen middle-class IAS wannabe's eat and sleep at government expense while they slogged away at 'Dholpur' house. What is the contribution of the Rs. 17, 000 subsidy per student to India? In most cases not even a decent, well researched paper. South Delhi's well heeled protest at water tariffs while they waste tons of the stuff on rain-dance parties??! We need to address infrastructure and governance reforms, but none of that can happen as long as India's slothful, self-righteous and deceitful elite (and I am not referring to the politicos) believes that they have a god-given right to a government subsidized good life. And, if I may say so, the regression (to show the oh! so obvious) is part of a larger problem of academia and 'seminar' circuit. Don't tell me that you have never made an obvious observation in a round-about and insanely complicated fashion to get that publication or seminar invite. So lets not be so self-righteous on the poor economist....he is just an extreme version of the way knowledge is controlled, dominated and used by...you guessed it! by the likes of us.
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What Mani Shankar Aiyar said about '3 million elected representatives in India which is more than the population of Norway' is nothing new. Actually he is repeating data like this all the time to highlight "the greatness of Indian democracy". In an interview published at Outlook's website in August 2006, Mr Aiyar had said that "a silent revolution taking place in rural India, very little is known about this is in urban India - neither the policy makers, nor the media or the opinion makers have paid attention to this revolution". In my critical /sarcastic opinion, such anecdote recitations are more about showing off how important his ministry is and how India is blessed to have such an intellectual who is presiding over 'a silent revolution'. And last month, Mr Aiyar, also the minister for sports and youth affairs, vociferously opposed New Delhi's bid for 2014 Asian Games in the Union Cabinet, saying such events do nothing for the poor and funds meant for holding the Asian Games could be better spent on the poor, rather building new flyovers. New Delhi lost the bid to Inochen, which highlighted the political differences within the Indian camp. So if Mr Aiyar cannot come up with plans to overhaul or revolutionize the "silent revolution" in rural India, atleast let the urban India have more flyovers, roads and stadiums. Atleast the urban Indian middle class will have something to benefit from. It seems that he is a bit too intellectual to handle the panchayati raj ministry and very frustrated for not being given a high profile ministry like external affairs after his ejection from the oil and petroleum ministry. On the other hand, it is Mr Aiyar's far less high profile cabinet colleague Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, who heads equally less glamour's ministry for rural development, and like Digvijay Singh as former MP chief minister, is making genuine
and honest efforts to decentralize rural development. This guy spends 12 hours in his office, is far more innovative with rural welfare schemes, and often crosses his swords with North Block and Planning Commission asking for more
funds for the rural poor. Strangely, he is a Lok Sabha MP from Laloo Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal-- a party not known for governance. In spite of NREGS, RTI and three years of aam aadmi's government presided by 'the father of economic reforms in India', we have no mentionable administrative, political, social, legal reforms to back up the lame economic reforms. India cannot continue with an electorally- democratic political structure, a colonial bureaucracy, a feudal society, a confused economy with a pseudo-socialist mindset and still dream to become, or atleast be called "developed".
Thanks for this post. I had missed some sessions, and now know what I missed. I couldn't stay for long after hearing the stale things Jaipal Reddy had to say.
Regarding anecdotes from Mani Shankar Aiyar, I totally agree. There were many occasions when I was surprised at what I heard.
When you put in academics and non academics together, there is bound to be differences, even in axioms and definitions :)
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