Habits of the Political Heart

Chapter 12

THE HABITS OF THE POLITICAL HEART: RECOVERING POLITICS

FROM GOVERNMENTALITY

Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar

‘If half my heart is here, doctor, the other half is in China, with the army

fl owing towards the Yellow River’ writes Nazim Hikmet, in his famous

poem, Angina Pectoris: ‘I look at the night through the bars, and despite the

weight on my chest, my heart still beats with the most distant stars.’

Partha Chatterjee’s ‘Politics of the Governed’ and in particular, his concept

of political society, is deservedly famous because it identifi es the central

conundrum in a post-Foucauldian theoretical world, where hope is not lost

but politics loses its way in a mass of identities and governmental ascriptions,

where universalist citizenship is an ideal, but the citizen herself or himself is

a cipher in some computerized code; when welfare becomes the ideal of an

equal citizenship in a Marshallian framework, but this notion of welfare itself

creates a ‘proliferation of governmentality’ (Chatterjee 2004, 36). What do we

do when our deepest aspirations (for example, for universal equality) turn into

categorical chains that imprison us (as has happened to affi rmative action in

India); or, conversely, as the communitarians bemoaned of old, what do we

do when the idea of universal citizenship that we struggle for obliterates our

most personal identities? Unlike Foucault, for whom resistance or politics was

only possible at the interstices, for Chatterjee, ‘popular politics in most of the

world’ remains an abiding area of interest, an arena that he fl eshes out with

compassion and insight.

However, having identifi ed the problem, Chatterjee appears to lose the plot.

For Foucault, the problem was a general one: the individual could not be the

locus of citizenship rights and demands, since ‘the individual is not the vis-à-

vis of power; it is one of its prime effects’ (Foucault 1980, 98). For Chatterjee,

This chapter has been published in the volume “Re-framing Democracy and Agency in India:Interrogating Political Society,” edited by Ajay Gudavarthy.

London: Anthem Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780857283504.

270 RE-FRAMING DEMOCRACY AND AGENCY IN INDIA

however, the problem Foucault poses is sidestepped. Instead, he disaggregates

the conceptual contradiction between the liberal theory on civil society and

citizenship, and the Foucauldian idea of governmentality into two empirical

spheres, inhabited by two kinds of people: a small group of elites ‘enjoying

legally protected rights of freedom, equality and property’ who constitute civil

society; and a much larger group of people who are part of a heterogeneous

population who ‘are governed and looked after, often by ignoring or violating

civic norms’. This group negotiates its way to subsistence and constitutes

political society (Chatterjee 2008, 91). In colloquial terms, this implies civil

society for the classes, political society for the masses. In past readings, this

might have been civil society for the West, subaltern politics for the rest.

This compartmentalization of the social landscape is profoundly

problematic for it is founded on concepts which are themselves informed

by politics and by history. For Chatterjee, civil society is bourgeois society,

comprising a ‘small section of culturally equipped citizens’, whose rights are

legally and formally protected, as against the ‘concessions’ granted to the

masses in recognition of their subsistence needs. However, some of the most

signifi cant political movements today are precisely over the legal recognition

of rights. If there is a distinction between those whose rights are legally

recognized and those whose aren’t, this is not a distinction that members of a

so-called political society themselves make.

Legality is a sleight of hand, the aye of the legislator or the judgement of

a court. For instance, the simple act of reading down Article 377 by the Delhi

High Court in 2009 decriminalized the hitherto illegal act of gay consensual

sex; but this legal action was itself the outcome of a long sustained political

struggle. Admitted it was led by middle-class health NGOs and gay rights

activists, classic ‘culturally equipped citizens’. However, the alliances, networks

and political modes they employed were not very different from those used by

less culturally equipped people, and before they were legalized, they too lived in

a grey zone of compromise with the police. What, moreover, would Chatterjee

make of the struggle of the rickshaw pullers of Delhi – the quintessential

constituents of political society as he defi nes it, whose subsistence needs

require them to negotiate with and bribe the authorities. They were instantly

transformed into civil society in his framework, only because a sensitive bench

responded to a simple question: when there is no cap on the number of car

licences that can be issued, why is there a cap on the number of rickshaw

licences in Delhi?1 It is the law that criminalized them and not the activity, and

it is through their engagement with the law, rather than with some uncertain

1 WP (C) 4572/2007, judgement dated 10 February 2010, Manushi Sanghatan vs. Govt.

of Delhi and Ors.



THE HABITS OF THE POLITICAL HEART 271

‘political terrain’, that the rickshaw pullers sought to assert their claims as

citizens. In any case, the law is not divorced from politics – there is always a

long political run-up to any legal action, and every legal judgment also has

meaning only within a particular politically defi ned terrain.

The issue for many political movements of the poor is not just subsistence

but a recognition of their legal property rights. Chatterjee’s example of the

‘people’s welfare association created by the residents of Rail Colony Gate

Number One, where the squatters admit that their occupation of public lands is

both illegal and contrary to good civic life’ (Chatterjee 2004, 59) is not typical of

all such movements. A majority of the struggles taking place across the country

are, in fact, struggles over property and over the framework of law (for example,

whether customary law should defi ne property or state law). As struggles

over traditional fi shing rights or the recognition of forest rights, or struggles

against rural and urban displacement show, the poor believe in their own rights

of property as much as the rich. They are not asking for simply the ‘righteous

demands of livelihood and survival’ (Chatterjee 2008, 92) but the implementation

of the rule of law and an equal recognition of the property rights of all.

In other words, even if we grant that civil society and political society are

represented by corporate capital and subsistence needs, they do not occupy

two sides of a divide regarding property, law and political action – the struggle

between them is over whose defi nition of property and whose defi nition of

law will prevail. It is ironic that the removal of property as a fundamental

right in the Indian Constitution, meant to enable the abolition of the practice

of zamindari, has been turned primarily against the poor. This insight is not

new. Austin writes that when the 17th Amendment was being debated in

1964, which enlarged the 9th Schedule to include more state laws on agrarian

reform, thus freeing them from judicial review, ‘for both the communists and

socialists, the heart of the property issue was not ownership or none, but how

much is enough?’ (Austin 2000, 105).

When Chatterjee writes of ‘the induction of ever-increasing sections of

the people, individually as well as in the mass, into a web of power relations in

which they are being transformed into the subjects of power...not necessarily

being transformed into republican citizens, but (they are) nevertheless acquiring

a stake, strategically and morally, in the processes of governmental power’, he

misses the fact that while people want services from the government, they are

also propelled by the idea of justice, which, in turn, is animated by a deep

republican impulse. If large parts of the country are up in arms today, it is not

because of development or the lack of it, but because their rights as citizens

are being violated.

This republican impulse has acquired a language and style all of its own,

which, however, has not been analysed as intensively as the practices of




governmentality. To begin with, one needs to look at the links between the

different sections, which Chatterjee terms ‘civil’ and ‘political’, respectively.

Senior lawyers who fi ght cases for corporate capital also fi ght cases for rickshaw

pullers and poor adivasis pro bono, numerous activists and NGOs have sprung

up from the ranks of both the poor and the middle classes and created their

own NGO/activist culture, people from one state rush to do ‘fact-fi ndings’

when violence breaks out in another state; the practice of people’s tribunals set

up to defend subsistence and the rights of those in political society, mimic the

forms and trappings of civil legal forums. Citizenship as a desire for equality

and for rights – not just welfare handouts – is deeply embedded across the

Indian political landscape.

Having presented this hopeful picture of a sense of united citizenship,

however, we must hasten to add that the other side of Chatterjee’s claim

regarding the moral legitimacy of subsistence is under attack in these neo-

liberal times. According to Chatterjee, when members of civil society or

corporate capital violate the law, the public admission is ‘shamefaced’. But

shamefaced is not perhaps the best description for the reaction of corporate

capital or the political class it funds to the host of scams that repeatedly come

to light: the IPL controversy, the controversy over paid news, Enron, and so on.

A quick papering over so that business can continue as usual is more like it.

Chatterjee goes on to say that ‘it is mistaken to claim that the dominant and

propertied classes any longer set the standards of morality for society; rather,

in a democratic age, the moral passion of entitlement and outrage is on the

side of those who have little’ (Chatterjee 2008, 92). During the last fi ve years,

however, this belief has been belied by the ease with which the moral claims of

the poor to food security have been transformed so rapidly into seeing the poor

themselves as the biggest security threat facing the country; the way in which the

right of corporate capital to violate forest and environmental protection laws is

defended through the widespread deployment of paramilitary forces, and the

way in which, above all, the media amplifi es the state’s security perspective.

Sure, there are still voices claiming that Naxalism is a ‘socio-economic’ problem

and not just a ‘law and order one’ but the chorus in favour of extermination,

especially among political parties and corporates, has also seen rapid growth

(N. Sundar 2007).

On occasion, Chatterjee writes as if in dialogue with some curmudgeonly

bhadralok interlocutor, who, on reading the morning newspapers, clucks over

the violence and superstition of the masses, and the populism of the political

classes. True enough, there are many of those – decent offi ce-going men

and women, who defi ne the contours of morality with reference to school

exams, civil service jobs and ‘gorment’ policy, for whom politics is a dirty word,

and sects like the Santan Dal aberrations in a Nehruvian Indian modernity.




As Chatterjee writes: ‘A modern civil society, consistent with the ideas of

freedom and equality, is a project that is located in the historical desires of

certain elite sections of Indians’ (Chatterjee 2004, 46). But people from these

same elite sections (defi ned by income and not just tautologically by belief) also

hold all night jagrans, keeping their neighbours awake, feed their Ganesh idols

with milk, and advertise on caste-specifi c websites for matrimonial matches.

In Gujarat, during the genocide of 2002, it was people from the middle class

localities, who drove up in their cars and used their cellphones to summon

friends and relatives to loot Muslim shops (N. Sundar 2002, 89).

On several empirical counts then – recourse to legality rather than

politics, preference for civility rather than violence, modern rationality

versus superstition, republicanism versus incorporation as political subjects,

formal associations versus ascriptive communities – the distinction between

civil and political society cannot be sustained in the sense that Chatterjee

would have us accept; certainly not as a description of types of citizens, their

beliefs or their practices. Nor does this distinction help us usefully understand

the direction of change in the economy and polity or address questions of

democracy and agency.

Let us then return to the problem that Chatterjee so helpfully identifi es

for us – how do individuals and communities engage in politics, when they

themselves (as both individuals and communities) are the products of a certain

kind of governmentality that is purposively apolitical and seeks to subordinate

demands for rights into demands for welfare? For this, one needs to attend

to other constructions of civil society and other ways of conceptualizing

political society. In particular, we would like to focus on the double movement

of capitalism – the way in which it dissolves certain forms of community and

recreates others around new axes; the way in which this is mirrored by the

state – dissolving certain forms of association and recreating them in a formal

sense; and fi nally, the double movement of popular politics and movements

that are transformed in the process of both resisting the state and seeking to

turn it to their own ends.

In the rest of this chapter, we draw on two political settings to exemplify

our argument – the associations and struggles of the fi shing communities of

Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, and the movements by adivasis in Chhattisgarh

to secure their rights over land and forest. The reason why we have chosen these

two sites is not only because of our own long-term familiarity with these areas

over twenty years, but because they provide a useful contrast both to each other

and to the West Bengal setting that Chatterjee writes about. The people that

we write about are both marginal to the Indian polity, and embody subsistence

practices that are under threat. While the fi shers face commodifi cation and

depletion of stocks, the adivasis face displacement of another kind, to make




way for industry. On the other hand, the contexts in which they organize are

quite different. The states of Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh have remarkably

different levels of service provisioning, as well as different densities of civil

society networks, political associations, and media coverage. The average

income and literacy also differs. The Tamil Nadu villagers are closer to

civil society in Chatterjee’s sense given the range of formal institutions and

associations they are part of, while the adivasis of Chhattisgarh are, for him,

outside the sphere of both civil and political society.

The point that we are trying to raise, however, is that both these groups

articulate a common idea of citizenship. An ethic of subsistence is not an

alternative to this republican idea, but a quintessential part of it. At the

same time, associations and movements change their demands in response

to both economic and political changes, and to the forms that state reaction

takes. In the case of the fi shworkers, they have moved from social movement

to social capital, while in the case of the adivasis, they have moved from

political action through village communities to participation in an armed

struggle. In other words, rather than try and posit two different types of

societies, we need to see how societies move from being civil to political and

back again.

Further, once we start to unravel the concept of civil society, we fi nd that

that may still be a more useful lens to understand the direction of democratic

change in India, rather than Chatterjee’s use of the term ‘political society’.

If this term was used in Tocqueville’s sense to refer to the ideas and feelings of

equality and mediating institutions that enable government, the habits of the

heart that lie underneath the practice of politics and government (Tocqueville

1945, 303), it would serve a more precise purpose to distinguish certain kinds

of institutions in civil society – those which are engaged in political change –

from other, more anodyne, apolitical institutions which also make up civil

society (see White et al. 1996; Woods 1992). For instance civil society, defi ned

in its most common form as an intermediary sphere between the state and

the individual, includes not just trade unions, political parties or welfare

associations, but also personality-driven fan clubs, sufi cults, yoga clubs, bodies

of students, lawyers and journalists, and so on.

However, the distinction between political and apolitical associations is a

hazy one, given that seemingly purely social associations – like women’s self

help groups (SHGs), or the fi lm star fan clubs in Tamil Nadu – may also be

harnessed for political ends, and indeed the burden of Putnam’s version of

social capital is precisely to claim this link between the density of associations,

howsoever defi ned, and successful government/development (Putnam with

Leonardi and Nanetti 1993; Putnam 1995; for the World Bank’s version of

social capital, see World Bank 2000; for critiques of social capital, see Portes




1998; Wall et al. 1998; Fine 1999; Harris and de Renzio 1997). In the following

section, we run through a discussion of civil society to show the way in which

we use it.

Defi ning Civil Society

The term ‘civil society’ has been defi ned in several ways: the most common

understanding is of civil society as an intermediate sphere between the

individual/family and the state, though the exact ingredients of this sphere

vary (see Kumar 1993; Calhoun 1993; Chandhoke 1995; Foley and Edwards

1996). For Hegel, for instance, the market, bureaucracy and judiciary were all

part of civil society as against the ethical state. For Tocqueville, civil society

was a space of voluntary association, which replaced primordial community;

properly speaking, it was the base for political society. Byrant’s (1993) defi nition

below seems as good as any to encapsulate this common view of civil society,

which emphasizes self-organization, civility and voluntary association:

The sociological variant of civil society refers to a space or arena between

household and state, other than the market, which affords possibilities

of concerted action and social self-organisation... De Tocqueville’s art

of association is crucial to civil society. So is civility – the equable

treatment of others as fellow citizens however different their interests

and sensibilities... The sociological variant of civil society also embraces

Habermas’s public sphere as developed by, for example, Nancy Fraser...

In short, civil society refers to social relations and communications between

citizens. These may sometimes be informed by the law and by state policy

but even then are not dependent on them. (Bryant 1993, 399)

While this defi nition includes the public sphere or the communicative space

as part of civil society, in recent work, there has been a bias towards the

associative aspects over the communicative. No doubt, much of this has been

fuelled by the social capital debate, wherein the density of associations and

their local character is important, not their content. But, as we argue, attention

to the content of associations, to ideas that defi ne them and emerge in them, is

essential for understanding their implications.

For Marx, civil society was coterminous with bourgeois property relations,

the form in which it was mediated socially, and the universalist appearance of

the state was an outcome of the contradictions of civil society (Marx 1977).

For Gramsci, civil society was the arena wherein consent was elicited rather

than coercion exercised, but in either case, it was not separate from the state.

As Kumar points out, without specifying the concrete infl uences on civil




society – whether from the market or the ideological state apparatus – it is

unreasonable to expect it to be autonomous or a countervailing power to the

state (Kumar 1993, 386). In general, we follow Chandoke (1995, 39), where

she argues that ‘Civil society cannot be understood unless we see it as the

sphere through which the state seeks to control society, as well as the sphere

where state power and that of the dominant classes can be contested’. In other

words, civil society is the arena where politics is possible.

It is generally believed that, as an empirical phenomenon, civil society

arose out of particular historical developments in Western Europe: the growth

of a bourgeoisie, the church–state split and the secularization of society,

and social differentiation due to industrialization; in America, its social and

political context was the egalitarian individualism of the yeoman farmer and

the adoption of a liberal constitution. As an analytical category, it refl ects the

specifi c conditions of its origin, with an emphasis on individual voluntary

association as against ascriptively generated communities, which are thought

to be ‘natural or primordial’. For instance, Cohen and Arato (1992, ix) note,

‘Modern civil society... is institutionalized and generalized through laws, and

especially subjective rights, that stabilize social differentiation’. Habermas’s

defi nition of the public sphere is based on this understanding of its participants

as rational individuals freed from communal identities (Calhoun 1993, 273).

It is this particular history that has led theorists such as Kaviraj and

Chatterjee to question the validity of using categories developed through

the European experience to describe alternative, post-colonial modernities.

They have argued that constructs such as civil society are historically and

sociologically specifi c to Europe, and that their application elsewhere serves

as an updated form of the modernization theory, to smuggle in an implicit

teleology. Partha Chatterjee argues that in much of the ‘Third World’, people

use the rules and procedures of civil society to claim rights as members of

communities. Chatterjee further points out that it is the community that

provides much of the norms and networks of trust and reciprocity that are

described as ‘social capital’. Yet this same community may contain norms

that are antithetical to those of civil society, such as affi liation based on birth

and excommunication as a sanction. For Chatterjee, the tensions between the

reality of community, and the ideal of a self-determining individual, cannot

be reconciled in civil society; civil society is the limited domain occupied

by the middle classes who see themselves as autonomous, self-determining

rights-bearing subjects, whereas a large majority of India’s population seeks

representation as members of communities through a political society.

However, these sociological assumptions have been questioned on a number

of grounds. Firstly, critical Habermasians (see Eley 1992; Fraser 1989, 1992)

have raised questions about the public sphere in Europe, pointing out that




such a unifi ed sphere of rational, detached and liberal debate never existed

there, and that such a requirement would, in fact, exclude several people –

for example, women, minorities, who communicate in different ways. Fraser

(1992, 1989), Eley (1992) and others show how both physically in terms of the

arenas through which the public sphere is supposed to have emerged, and in

terms of the languages and styles it uses, it has been a gendered, racialized,

and class-defi ned sphere. They argue that it is necessary, therefore, to think of

several publics rather than a single unifi ed one.

Secondly, there is the doubtful assumption that the community exists

in some unchanging form in non-European societies. While Chatterjee, or

the nineteenth-century sociologists see ascriptive community as natural,

undifferentiated, and ‘given’, much of the earlier Indian ‘modernization of

tradition’ around caste groups or broader ‘invention of tradition’ around

ethnicity, religion, language, or community property relations (see for example,

Breckenridge and Van der Veer 1993) literature challenges this. Agrawal

(1999) makes the distinction between two senses of community: ‘community-

as-social-organization’ and community as shared understandings, or interests.

As Aparna Sundar (2010) shows, the two are not synonymous, and it is civil

society which is the space where community is challenged or strategically

invoked in struggles around class, the church, and gender. As Calhoun (1980)

notes, identities and interests do not come completely pre-formed into the

public sphere; rather, it is through the process of struggling for recognition

and representation in this sphere that social groups identify around certain

issues, articulate their interests and make their claims, against other social

actors as much as against the state. Community might serve as a powerful

legitimating claim within the public sphere, to counter displacement by market

imperatives, or to insist upon a moral economy; or to make claims against the

state, or for state schemes/benefi ts premised on community (thus performing

governmentality); it may equally be a language used to mask class or gender

differences (see N. Sundar 2009 on the debates within adivasi communities

on custom).

Thirdly, it may be possible to think of diverse antecedents for particular

civil societies. If the public sphere in Europe emerged through a particular

bourgeoise history, the public sphere in India is no less one for being marked

by particular caste or gendered logics. Mosse (2003) for example, shows how in

Tamil Nadu, tank management systems have historically been viewed not only

as sources of irrigation water, but as forming part of a village ‘public domain’

through which social relations are articulated:

In Tamil villages (some at least) the ‘village public’ (u-r potu) happens

to be the domain of authority and rank and status, which makes the




management of common property an eminently political action. This also

makes tank management a heavily gendered action in that women (and

their interests...) are largely excluded from this public domain and its

decision making. (Mosse 2003, 486)

Thus, the ideas of the public may have indigenous roots and understandings,

quite distinct from the European; or they may derive from bodies like the

church, with its ideals of public service, as Putnam has shown for Italy. But

for modern India, even more important as an antecedent is the way in which

liberal democracy, quite apart from its legal and institutional structures or its

still limited success in achieving radical social transformation, has altered the

‘map of political imagination’ even for subaltern groups. Talking of various

populist programmes, Kaviraj notes:

The radical rhetoric did not alleviate poverty, but it quickened the process

which Tocqueville depicted with incomparable acuity, establishing the

principle of political equality and dignity indelibly in the political world…

Above all, democracy in the post-Nehru era has gradually conveyed to

the Indian electorate the pervading, elusive but crucial modern idea of

the plasticity of the social world, and democracy and development both

as frameworks of collective intentions to shape it in preferred forms.

(Kaviraj 1995, 126–7)

White et al. (1996) charge that defi nitions such as that of Arato and Cohen

derive clearly from the Anglo-American liberal tradition whereby civil

society is equated with political society in the sense of ‘a particular set of

institutionalised relationships between state and society based on the principles

of citizenship, civil rights, representation, and the rule of law’. ‘In effect,’ he

argues, ‘this view of civil society makes it virtually indistinguishable from a

standard conception of a liberal democratic polity’. Yet, he argues, stripped

of the insistence that only certain forms of association and communication

be recognized as legitimate constituents of this realm, civil society can serve

as a useful sociological category to explore the quality of public life in diverse

non-European societies. Further, as recent debates on the degree of civility

required in civil society show (Turner 2008; Alexander 2008), the term would

fi nd it hard to exclude voluntary associations of an uncivil and even violent

nature, except as a normative concept.

Thus, civil society is useful as a sociological tool to map alternative modernities,

as well as a practico-indicative concept (Anderson 1976–7, 35) for ‘conceptually

analysing the empirical contours of past, present or emergent relationships

between social and political institutions and forces’ (Keane 1988, 13). This is




also important because it allows us to see that civil society, like its public sphere,

is an analytical sphere distinct from society as such and is best conceived of as a terrain

or zone of contestation between competing actors, projects and discourses.

Associational Life and Politics in Two Marginal Spaces

In this section, we look at two different kinds of civil society, and try to map

the ways in which they express particular forms of public life that people are

engaged with in contestations either with other classes or the state. We also

examine the kinds of ideas of citizenship and public that they throw up.

The fi shing communities of Tamil Nadu

The fi shing communities of Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu have perhaps

one of the richest diversities of associational life, both formal and informal,

found anywhere in the country. These communities, comprising the Paravar

and Mukkuvar castes, have been predominantly Catholic since the sixteenth

century.

Both the church and the state have governed through mobilizing popular

participation; however limited and instrumental their aims in doing so might

have been, their efforts have created spaces for the learning and practice of

formal associational politics, and have had often unpredictable outcomes.

The state has exercised its welfare function through a series of ‘participatory’

initiatives – beginning with the Community Development Programme and

fi shermen’s cooperatives of the 1950s, and the elite dominated panchayats

of that period, as well as the more representative panchayats of the present,

following the 1993 Panchayati Raj amendment to the constitution. The

state’s turn to work with ‘civil society’ in the 1990s can be seen in the district

administration’s support for the Arrivoli Iyakkam (Total Literacy Movement)

initiated by the Tamil Nadu Science Forum, and the adoption of a participatory,

campaign mode for the delivery of adult literacy.

The church established sodalities and pious associations in the villages from

its very beginnings in the region, as a way of raising lay assistance in running

the parish, and established a central role in secular governance through its

close relationship with the existing village and caste committees. In the 1960s

and 70s, the diocesan social service society embarked upon development works

in the district; among the associations it set up were self-help and support

groups for women and widows, and fi shermen’s cooperatives. The latter were

member-managed organizations that sought to replace the bureaucratically

governed government cooperative societies established in the 1950s. They

grew in strength, became formally independent of the diocese, federated with




similar societies in two other districts into the South Indian Federation of

Fishermen’s Societies, and are now the largest and most powerful fi shermen’s

organizations in the region. Both the diocese and other organizations also

initiated similar organizations for fi sh-vending women. The dramatic

movements of reform within the Catholic Church following Vatican II and

the rise of a new ‘liberation theology’ led to further efforts at lay participation,

in the form of youth groups, elected parish councils, and basic Christian

communities.

The villagers themselves have long associated in chit funds (rotating savings

and credit associations common across the country), youth groups and football

clubs, and, in the villages close to the Kerala border, in the library movement

to create village reading rooms that originated there. Villagers are also active

in the fi lm star fan clubs that are unique to Tamil Nadu. Given the role of fi lm

stars in politics, these fan clubs become sources of political support during

election campaigns (Dickey 1993). In addition, most major political parties

(the Congress, CPI-M, ADMK, DMK, Janata Dal, MDMK) have village level

units, including units of their women’s and youth wings.

Kanyakumari District is densely populated with NGOs, sponsored by

the Catholic and Protestant churches, and by secular organizations and

foundations. A major thrust of these NGOs since the early 1990s has been on

microcredit, or the creation of self-help and income generation groups, almost

entirely for women. Women across the district are frequently members in

several of these at once, and almost everyday either receive a collection visit by

an ‘animator’ from one of the groups, or attend a group meeting where issues

like overall performance around savings, repayment of loans, and applications

for new loans, are discussed. Depending upon the organization sponsoring

them, the self-help group can also take up discussion, or even action, around

more social and political issues in the villages.

The fi shing struggle in Tamil Nadu/Kerala under the banner of the

National Fishworkers Forum is, however, by far the most famous political

movement to come out of the area (Sundar 1999). This movement, which was

very active in the 1980s and 1990s, took up the issue of trawling and called for

a sustainable fi shery. Locally, it was led by village or parish committees, or ad

hoc committees set up for the purpose. But more formal organizations were

also set up to deal with the rights of traditional fi shers: a fi shworkers’ union set

up by the National Fishworkers’ Forum (NFF), the Vallam Union spearheaded

by fi shermen from several villages, and the Boat Owners’ Associations

representing trawler interests. In the early 2000s, the diocese set up a Peace

and Development Committee with government approval, to ‘manage’ this

confl ict in more ‘civil’ ways. And the local union set up by the NFF, which,

at its height, helped spearhead resistance against the Koodankulam nuclear




plant in the region, campaign for the rights of migrant women workers in the

fi sh processing industry, and set up a unit of the National Alliance of People’s

Movements in the district, had by the early years of this century become taken

over by a leadership that was devoted solely to running microcredit groups

for women.

What can we infer from this abundance of association? Several of the newer

associations described above are aimed at civilizing, uplifting or bringing about

an improvement, through, for instance, opposing alcoholism, factionalism and

feuding; income generation and economic development; improved service

provision; democratizing of the church; village self-government and political

participation. They are self-consciously modern, with an avowed commitment

to procedures such as elections, accounts, and written records, and to the equal

participation of hitherto excluded groups such as women, lower status families

and youth.

Despite this self-conscious modernity, however, not all these associations

can be said to be the outcome of autonomous action. As subaltern people –

poor, dependent as fi sherpeople upon a fragile primary resource, low caste –

associational life is not always a matter of voluntary participation for

Kanyakumari villagers; rather, it is enjoined upon them as a condition of their

class. They are exhorted, often required, by the state, church and NGOs to

form cooperatives and other forms of association for a variety of ends such

as access to markets and credit, government benefi ts and social services. As

signifi cantly, it is their membership in ascriptive or involuntary communities

(defi ned by village, locality, occupation, caste, religion and language) that is

expected to provide the personal knowledge, norms of reciprocity, trust and

habits of interaction (that is, the ‘social capital’) necessary for the success of

the associations or ‘intentional communities’ that they enter.

It can be argued then, that these associations, and, in particular, some like

the microcredit groups, serve to produce a ‘governmentality’ as ‘the direction

toward specifi c ends of conduct which has as its objects both individuals and

populations, and which combines techniques of domination and discipline

with technologies of self-government. Governmentality offers a way of

approaching how rule is consolidated and power is exercised in society through

societal relations, institutions, and bodies that do not automatically fi t under

the rubric of ‘the state’ (Gupta and Sharma 2006, 277).

Equally, however, we can see, in the militant assertion by the Kanyakumari

village committee of their customary rights to manage the fi shery against

incursions by the trawlers, and in their counterposing of village law to the law of

the state, a resistance to such efforts at containment and disciplining. Villagers

represent themselves as members of a village community, as traditional fi shing

castes, and as fi shworkers. While asserting village law, they also fi led cases against




the trawler owners in the police station and in court, and lobbied with their

elected representatives. As members of the church, they at fi rst successfully

pressed the church hierarchy to act on their behalf, and later acceded to the

hierarchy’s exhortation to behave in more ‘civil ways’ in the interests of caste

and community unity. In articulation with the national movement led by the

NFF, they sought to infl uence state legislation, and to work through the media

and through alliances with environmental groups and other trade unions, to

make a case for themselves in the public sphere.

An examination of the content (debates, practices) of the associations also

leads to questions about the unchanging nature of ascriptive identity. The

basic Christian communities and elected parish councils were initiated by the

diocesan clergy infl uenced by the social justice tenets of Vatican II. When

successfully established, participation in them did have the desired ends of

beginning to challenge village hierarchies and exclusions, around gender or

economic status. But in many villages, these new associations were resisted

because villagers not only feared the social change that they might engender,

but also saw them as a means for the church to re-assert control over village

governance. There is no easy unity then, between religion as faith, identity,

and institutional allegiance, and even conversion (to Hinduism) has been used

to negotiate the latter.

The adivasis of Chhattisgarh

In contrast to the rich array of formal associations found in Kanyakumari, the

adivasis of Bastar have a marked paucity of formal associations. In the entire

former undivided district of Bastar, comprising an area of 39,000 sq. km,

there are a handful of NGOs, three political parties (the CPI, Congress,

and BJP), and one Maoist guerrilla movement, which has been described by

the prime minister repeatedly as the greatest security threat to the whole of

India, an indication of its political strength. Organized religion of the Hindu,

Christian, Sikh and Muslim variety is marked only in the urban centres,

though since the early 2000s, the RSS has become active and set up a number

of schools to convince the adivasis that they are Hindus. Christians have also

made small inroads into the region. While welfare governmentality in the form

of state-initiated women’s self-help groups (SHGs), panchayats, and so on is

not unknown – with the most ubiquitous being the forest produce cooperative

set up to sell tendu patta – it is not fl ourishing, in contrast to that in many other

places in the former state of Madhya Pradesh (see, for example, Vasavada,

Mishra and Bates 1999).

However, traditionally, the villages have been marked by strong levels of

social capital in the Putnam sense – face-to-face associations, trust, collective




action – and have worked out arrangements for collective self-management.

While these were recognized by the colonial state, they were rendered informal

by the post-colonial one. During the colonial period, the village was represented

outside by the headman, and the priests, and by the pargana majhis (headmen

of village clusters or parganas) at state-wide events. Every village maintained a

rest house and one or two functionaries to serve the needs of visiting offi cials.

The other villagers contributed grain to them annually, in essence paying to

have the service performed by one of them as part of a collective service

they performed for the king, zamindar or any state offi cial. Demands for forced

labour or corvee in the form of porterage were met by households, in turn,

or each household contributed a member to work on roads, clearing forest

lines, and other such work. Rebellions against colonial rule were also premised

on the basis of collective responsibility – with each household sending

members to fi ght under the leadership of their headmen and the pargana majhis

(see N. Sundar 2007).

In the fi eld of natural resource management too, there was a strong tradition

of collective management. Although the appropriation and reservation of

forests by the Forest Department meant that forests were offi cially taken out

of village boundaries, they often continued to be part of a village for ritual

purposes. There has continued to be a strong tradition of managing the

forests within one’s village boundaries till quite recently, involving a system of

charging residents of other villages a small fee known variously as devsari, dand,

man or saribodi, in exchange for the use of one’s forest. In some villages in north

Bastar, the fee was charged according to the amount of timber taken, while in

south Bastar, villages which used the forest of another village, made collective

contributions to that village at festival times. This ‘fee’ often took the form of

meat or liquor. Some villages protected their forests by engaging watchmen

who were paid through contributions of grain from each household. In each

case, the continuation of the system had to be continually negotiated because

the pressure for free riding was quite high. Local disputes could snowball; and

excessive logging by the Forest Department could invite pre-emptory felling by

the villagers. In other words, even seemingly ‘natural’ communities with high

levels of social capital face the same kinds of problems as individual-based

voluntary associations.

Many of these practices – of collective provisioning for outsiders and mutual

help by the village at times of death, weddings, and other such occasions –

continue even today. However, state intervention has, as a conscious policy,

ignored these traditional forms of collective management and sought to impose

new formal structures in the form of Joint Forest Management Committees

and other such organizations, which are managed by the Forest Department.

Similarly, while elections for village panchayats may build upon the existing




axes of infl uence and power derived from being members of the founding

family or belonging to the patel or pujari’s household, it has created a parallel

power structure in the village and the only one that is formally recognized.

However, the government is not the only agent that seeks to rebuild

society in its own image. The Communist Party of India (Maoist), like the

government, has simultaneously built upon and destroyed the traditional

structures, by creating their own village sanghams or collectives, which carry out

land distribution, and serve as a conduit between the Maoists and the villagers.

In some places, the sanghams have displaced the traditional village patel, while

in others, the transition has been either more nominal or more seamless. In

some places, the traditional leaders continue to decide on rituals, festivals and

other such events, while sangham members concentrate on calling meetings on

economic or political issues. Local politics segue into Maoist politics, when the

Maoists are called upon to decide local disputes.

The point of this discussion is that even where there are ‘traditional’

associations based on existing forms of community, their form and content

change, depending on whether they are appropriated into a governmental

structure or a Maoist structure or ignored altogether. Even in their ‘traditional’

form, they had to be continually sustained and reworked to avoid falling into

disuse and disarray, like any modern voluntary association. There is thus no

reason to remove them from a sphere of civil society.

The Maoists have not only brought the claims of adivasis and dalits

centrestage but managed to do so without negotiating with the government

through the usual petitioning which is limited by the categories and avenues

created by the government. This is unlike other adivasi movements for

reservation or even for the recognition of forest rights, which are forced to

accept and internalize categories like the Scheduled Tribes (STs). At the

same time, locating this in village associations is important for them. As far

as the government is concerned, the needs of corporate capital quite openly

take precedence over the moral claims of the adivasis, with the Maoist

armed struggle providing the pretext for massive state repression. Where

adivasi claims are recognized, they are seen as a drag on the real business

of government, which is to promote growth, despite the evident failures of

the trickle-down theory. At the second annual Harish C. Mahindra Endowed

Lecture at Harvard in 2007, the home minister, Mr Chidambaram, gave voice

to this frustration thus:

Democracy – rather, the institutions of democracy – and the legacy of

the socialist era have actually added to the challenge of development. Let

me explain with some examples. India’s mineral resources include coal –

the fourth largest reserves in the world – iron ore, manganese, mica,




bauxite, titanium ore, chromite, diamonds, natural gas, petroleum and

limestone. Common sense tells us that we should mine these resources

quickly and effi ciently. That requires huge capital, effi cient organizations

and a policy environment that will allow market forces to operate. None

of these factors is present today in the mining sector. The laws in this

behalf are outdated and parliament has been able to only tinker at the

margins. Our efforts to attract private investment in prospecting and

mining have, by and large, failed. Meanwhile, the sector remains virtually

captive in the hands of the state governments. Opposing any change in

the status quo are groups that espouse – quite legitimately – the cause of

the forests or the environment or the tribal population. There are also

political parties that regard mining as a natural monopoly of the state

and have ideological objections to the entry of the private sector. They

garner support from the established trade unions. Behind the unions –

either known or unknown to them – stand the trading mafi a. The result:

actual investment is low, the mining sector grows at a tardy pace and it

acts as a drag on the economy.2

Further, one of the major forms that state intervention has taken has been the

promotion of vigilante groups, euphemistically called ‘local resistance groups’,

with impunity to kill, rape and burn villages. In 2005, the government of

Chhattisgarh sponsored the Salwa Judum, which involved forcibly evacuating

villagers to camp, in an effort at strategic hamletting to counter the Maoists,

and employed young men and women from among the adivasis themselves

to provide information on their former comrades. The idea was specifi cally

to target the sanghams, and create a class of people – traders, sarpanches and

SPOs – who would ally with the state against the Maoists (N. Sundar 2007). If

civil society is the sphere of rights-bearing citizens making claims on the state,

what does one make of a state which purposely sets out to disorganize relations

in society and introduce incivility, in order to take away people’s rights?

Conclusion

The point of the descriptions above is to show how the nature and density

of associational life varies across rural and coastal India, and how formal

commitment to norms or networks, the hallmarks of classic civil society,

coexists with the articulation of political demands that seek to transform the

way in which rights and obligations are described in civil society. Both the

fi shing communities and the adivasi communities have articulated demands

2 http://www.mahindra.com/Enewsletter/july-sept07/html/feature.html (accessed 1 May 2010).




which are explicitly about citizenship, about property and about law, and not

just contingent claims to livelihood or recognition. In both cases, associations

at the village level articulate with wider social formations, be it the National

Fishworkers’ Forum or the Maoist guerrilla struggle. The emphasis in each area

also shifts in keeping with wider political and economic changes. In the fi shing

sphere, Aparna Sundar (2010) has outlined the shift from social movement to

social capital, while in the forest sphere, people move from village level politics

to armed struggle and back again to their (transformed) village associations.

Thus, it is neither sociologically accurate nor analytically helpful to

demarcate two distinct spheres, as Chatterjee does. To think of subaltern

actors as operating only within a political society of contingent and politically

negotiated outcomes and practices of questionable legality, while more middle-

class or bourgeois actors act within a civil society defi ned by constitutional

practices and liberal understandings of citizenship, is to fail to see the way in

which routinized legal practices and associations, as well as contingent political

negotiations segue into each other. To fail to see the range of subaltern political

practices – from associations to new social movements to armed struggle – is

to ignore the richness of their democratic experience and to under-estimate

the extent to which a liberal political subjectivity is emerging/becoming

generalized, even when expressed in the form of a Maoist armed struggle.

Simultaneously, to defi ne civil society in terms of its adherence to the law, and

political society as its opposite, misses out both the fundamentally contested

nature of law itself, as well as the way in which the state continually violates its

own laws. Finally, while there is a genuine contest between corporate capital

and non-corporate spaces, this contest cannot be mapped onto one between

civil society versus political society. Societies are simultaneously civil and

political all the way down.

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Habits of the Political Heart

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