De-centred development

What can the political parties do but to rush in? The fourth meeting of the World Social Forum in Mumbai has been different from the earlier ones in one important respect. It is the first time that the leftist political parties have participated in the meeting, although not as official representatives, and engaged in debates with non-party organizations. This engagement was long overdue.

In seminars and panel discussions held in the meet, speakers hammered out their strong and not-so-strong views on globalization and how to cope with it. Among them was Prakash Karat, the politburo bigwig of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). I found his comments interesting because they provoked a number of questions, which, I strongly feel, one has no option at the current juncture other than to confront and honestly seek answers to.

There are apparently two reasons for Prakash Karat’s unease with non-governmental organizations. First, while the leftist parties seek to pressurize the state to redistribute income and productive resources in favour of the underprivileged, the stated objective of the NGOs is to bypass the state and reach the poor. Second, the left parties want a redistribution of national income and wealth while NGOs operate entirely with money from abroad. He declines to endorse this foreign-funding based, anti-state modus operandi of these organizations.

It is not my purpose to celebrate NGOs; nor is it to denigrate the party form of politics. I am only critically reflecting on Prakash Karat’s comments in the hope of getting an answer to the complex question of forms of contestations in the context of our current experience of globalization.

NGOs are indeed outside, and often in conflict with, the state. And this non/anti-statist stance has provoked the left everywhere to portray them as the “community face” of neo-liberalism. They are seen as serving the interest of global capital by ameliorating the devastations wrought by its predatory practices. But there are many reasons why one can be anti-state, of which neo-liberalism is only one. The term NGO covers a set of organizations that is so enormous and so heterogeneous that it hardly makes any sense to interpret their suspicion about the state as necessarily an endorsement of the ideology of neo-liberalism.

It is one thing to say that NGOs are an instrument of governance for global capital, and their anti-state rhetoric is a sign of their complicity with the emergent neo-liberal order. But it is quite another to assert that the state-centric redistributive politics is the only form of politics that carries the potential for radical contestation of that order.

Such an assertion is far less convincing today than it was fifteen years ago. For in the face of globalization, the nation state is increasingly losing its autonomy as a domain for the politics of redistribution. The imperatives of the global market are closing the channels in the space of the state through which the logic of capitalist calculations could be contested earlier. With this emaciation of the nation state, the traditional form of statist politics is fast losing its effectiveness. West Bengal is a glaring example of the predicament of a government that is committed to redistribution but finds itself hopelessly straight-jacketed by the imperatives of globalization.

Why then, one would ask, should we put all our stakes in the statist form of politics and not look for alternative channels outside the state? This question is important and inescapable because state-centric politics has a cost side too. The appropriative capacity of the game of statist politics is so insidious that one does not even realize when one is succumbing to the considerations of “pragmatism” and “practicalities” of realpolitik. Today, we can only sadly watch the parliamentary left exhausting its political energy in chalking out strategies for the game of pre-election alliance and solving psephological puzzles with the sole aim of getting a slice, however thin, of the state’s power-pizza. When benefits are meagre, this cost seems huge.

I am sure Karat will not deny that a deep-rooted and intense mistrust of the power game of the state now dominates the popular psyche. If NGOs have succeeded in energizing an anti-state space, it is not because they are part of a global design or because they receive generous foreign funding. If they have succeeded, it is because they have been able to cash in on this mistrust. Unfortunately, the left parties too, as enthusiastic players of the electoral game, have allowed themselves to be the target of the same mistrust. The space now occupied by NGOs is a potentially political space from which the left has alienated itself; NGO-ization is the flip side of the failure of the left. NGOs of course cannot be seen as the saviour where the political parties have failed, but their emergence and prominence do make that failure visible.

On the question of foreign funding, it is true that foreign money is generally regarded with suspicion. But think of the foreign aid we receive. They are transfers to the state, and the money is channelled exclusively through the organs of the state. What is not at all clear is why the flow of foreign money through non-state, private channels should be seen with contempt when the same money, if it comes through the state, is considered disinfected and sanitized.

It is well-known that the benefits from these transfers to the state largely accrue to the elite, not trickle down to the poor. If the same money flows through NGOs, there may not be enough grounds to claim that the poor will get even less. Of course, it can be demanded that the NGOs be subjected to greater democratic accountability in matters of decision-making and handling of finance. But where the state is corrupt at all levels, is it fair to be squeamish about private flows of foreign money?

Prakash Karat distances the leftist parties from NGOs by insisting that the former is engaged in a politics that seeks to redistribute the national pie, while the latter depends on international transfers. The traditional distinction between the national and the foreign in this context is hardly relevant today, for what we are witnessing is the emergence of an integrated global economy with a very high degree of dispersion of productive activities across national boundaries. There are a myriad channels through which the surplus produced in this global economy flows and circulates in mutliple directions. The politics of redistribution needs to be redefined in terms of these “deterritorialized” flows, as a global redistributive politics.

The NGO space is an extremely heterogenous and de-centred one. In terms of political possibilities, it is counter-productive to see these organizations as committed only to maintaining status quo of the global order of capital. For there are numerous instances where NGOs have hit the limit of the status quo and unsettled the network of vested interests. They have subverted the project of depoliticization of development, which according to Karat “is desired by the forces of globalization”, and revealed its essentially political nature. The brutal murder of Sarita and Mahesh Kant in Shabdogaon is a case in point (it was reported in detail by the “bourgeois press”, while the CPI(M)’s Bengali daily did not consider it newsworthy). Only an honest and serious engagement by the leftist parties with the NGOs can open up new terrains of political praxis which will bring into visibility new forms of contestation. We desperately need these forms to confront the oppressive order we are facing. And the precondition for such an engagement is that we try not to be self-righteous.