THE CRUELLEST MONTH
Introduction: April, according to TS Elliot in his poem ‘The
Wasteland’, is the cruellest month; it breeds lilacs out of the dead land,
mixes memory with desire, stirs dull roots with spring rain, and other such
things. What he misses is that it is also when another cohort of young
graduates set off from the comfort of their campuses into the wild world, just
as I did 30 years ago.
What can I tell
these kids about the trials and tribulations ahead – the challenges they will
face, and the hard choices they will have to make? Not much – the world has
changed, and anyway they have to make their own journeys through life. At best,
I would sound like that old codger in the film ‘The Graduate’ who extols the
virtues of plastic to Dustin Hoffman.
Sadly, the nature
of the ‘wannabe guru’ business is such that having nothing relevant to say is
at best a minor factor in a decision to go forth and pontificate. I will
therefore commemorate April by listing five (academic) papers that I wish I had
read before beginning my own professional journey (instead of in my late 40s). I
will, however, not exacerbate April’s cruelty by regurgitating the papers for
you – instead, I will merely describe why I wish I had read them earlier. Here
goes, in no particular order!
1.
Panopticism – Michel Foucault – 1977
This likening of
power relations and social control mechanisms in modern institutions to a 19th
century idea of a model prison gave me a creepy feeling at the bottom of my
spine – it described my boarding school (not a pleasant place) almost exactly. The
idea of power being diffused and ever present, in every person (including the
so-called powerless), family and institution, and in every action, would have
helped me make sense of some simple but incomprehensible things – like the
space you occupy on a ‘charpoy’ at a village meeting being reflective of your
status, like the serving order at a family dinner, and like the fact that
people who have complete control over you (one’s spouse, the local drug lord, and
the Prime Minister of India) being as pathetically prisoners of their
circumstances as you are of yours.
An additional
dimension to Foucault’s arguments comes from the Czech poet-politician Vaclav
Havel’s 1978 essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in which he analyzes submission
and dissent using the parable of the sign ‘Workers of the World Unite’ outside
a vegetable store. He sees ideology as something that offers a person the
illusion of identity, dignity and morality while making it easier to part with
these virtues, and as a veil behind which humans can hide their own fallen
existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to status quo. Required
reading for anyone who has to exist among the vocally ideological – no shortage
of this type in many professional spheres.
2.
The Use of Knowledge in Society – Frederick
von Hayek – 1945
A common trait in
my early professional life was that of seeing the devil in market principles
and America – and fusing them into one. In those days of cold war politics and
Keynesian ideas on the role of the state, Pepsi was as close to pederasty and
paedophilia in perception as it would be in a dictionary (though it was
acceptable to have Windows open on one’s computer). There was also a
deep-seated belief in the nanny state, where everyone had right of access to food,
childcare, education, public sector employment, and everything else, with
little thought on who would pay. Today, such ideas would belong to Jurassic
Park or to left-of-centre think tank bar discussions after a bottle or two have
emptied, but they were dominant in the late 1980s.
The importance of
Hayek’s paper is that he makes a logical case for market principles at a time
when central planning and an overarching state were considered the way to go. He
compares centralized decision making systems with anarchic markets in their
ability to make efficient use of resources, and says that the beauty of the
price system as a signalling device is that it has ‘economy of knowledge’ –
individuals need to know very little in order to take the right action. The
scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, and without more
than a handful of people knowing the cause, results in many people using the
material and its products more sparingly. He quotes Alfred Whitehead in saying
that ‘it is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of
thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization
advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without
thinking about them.’
3.
Power: A Radical View – Steven Lukes –
1974
A common tool of
analysis from the 1980s onwards was ‘participatory rural appraisal’ or PRA –
going into villages for short durations in teams and conducting a series of
exercises (village mapping, wealth ranking, chapatti diagrams, activity
mapping, etc.) that resulted in a village plan. ‘This is what the village has
decided for itself,’ was the common refrain after a PRA, ‘as per its own needs
and priorities. This plan has a people’s mandate.’
Though a user of
its techniques, I was never quite comfortable with the legitimacy that PRA ascribed
to its planning outputs, and I did not know why – until I read up on Steven
Luke’s concept of the three dimensions of power.
Creating spaces
to speak on a level footing and providing information to participants, as PRA
requires, addresses only Luke’s first dimension. It does not address the fact
that there are hidden power equations in such spaces that constrain or enable
the expression of particular viewpoints. The tenants’ expression of
satisfaction in arrangements with local landlords may have less to do with their
perceptions of fairness and justice and more with their wanting to continue to
live and their interest in the continued virtue of their women – but no PRA
will capture this second, hidden, dimension.
The greatest form
of domination, according to Lukes, is ‘the power to prevent people from having
grievances by shaping their perceptions so that they accept their role in the
existing order of things, either because they can see no alternative to it, or
because they see it as natural and unchangeable, or because they value it as
divinely ordained and beneficial.’ This third dimension explains things that
otherwise confound, such as – why do women participate in the killing of girl
children, or think it is OK for their husbands to beat them? Or, why do Hindu
ceremonies require Brahmins to be fed?
4.
The Logic of Power – Mancur Olsen – 2000
What is this
beast called government, which the philosopher Thomas Hobbes likened to a
twisted sea monster and a gatekeeper of hell in his book ‘Leviathan’ in 1651? How
did it come about? Why do we need it? What would happen if it didn’t exist?
Would life be ‘nasty, brutal and short’ in its absence? Though not among those
who spent happy years of unemployment studying for civil service exams, I have
always been fascinated by these questions.
The simplest, and
most potent, explanation of government is from this essay by Olsen. He likens
it to a stationary bandit, one who has acquired a monopoly over theft in a
given area and whose interests thereby have changed dramatically. He will not
bother to steal any more, and will demand a hafta
from his victims instead. He will reduce the percentage of hafta so that his victims retain incentives to produce and trade,
and may even spend some of his takings on public goods that benefit his
victims, like education and health, and make them more productive. He will
become the government, and the hafta
tax. Government, therefore, arises because of the rational self-interest of
those who can organize the greatest capacity for violence.
5.
Representation, Citizenship and the Public
Domain in Democratic Decentralization – Jesse C. Ribot – 2007
Some common
questions we in the NGO sector faced back in the 1990s were – who has given you
the right to do what you are doing? And, who are you accountable to? That we
had no answers did not trouble us – we were confident that we did ‘good’ work,
for which donor agencies gave us money, and who was anybody to question our
intentions anyway in a free country? I for one balked only when the international
charity I worked for began to claim that it was speaking for India’s poor at
various international development forums. How did an organization that was
accountable to a board consisting of three old white men take on the
responsibility of representing India’s 300 million plus poor? Certainly, nobody
from the 300 million had a say in this.
My argument
against such acts of delusion, and for a rational role for NGOs in the
development space, would have been better for a reading of Ribot’s paper. Democracy
requires strong institutions to pay dividends, as everyone tells us in this
season of elections. Ribot is considerably more specific; he says that these
institutions should be democratic, and for them to be democratic they have to be
representative – accountable to people, and equipped with the power to make
policy and to convert policy into practise. People should ‘belong’ to such
institutions by virtue of residence and not ethnicity, religion, linguistic
affinity or any other identity or interest-based identifiers. And these
institutions should retain substantial powers in the public political space,
where citizens feel able and entitled to influence authorities.
‘Good’ public institutions,
therefore, are not merely those that do good work. They also strengthen
democracy by being representative of society, by enabling citizenship, and by
enhancing the public domain.
