Column

There will be more civil society activity in the political arena in 2012 for two reasons. The ruling Congress party was looking beyond the political arena to borrow ideas and plan for action. The party structure does not have place for internal think tanks. The Congress is only too willing to take the necessary risks of dealing with civil society as it did with those involved in the now-there-now-not-there National Advisory Council headed by Sonia Gandhi and with the Anna Hazare group.

The most valuable ideas for the party — right to information, national rural employment programme, the proposed food security plan — came from the NAC. A senior cabinet minister acknowledged, ‘We (the Congress and the UPA government) have institutionalised civil society intervention through the NAC.’ The Congress has found in civil society groups a good source for ideas and plan for action. The party has now tried to appropriate, however shabbily, the idea of the Lokpal, made loud and famous by the Anna Hazare group. The Congress seems to have recognised that civil society groups are here to stay and it would be useful to deal with them, and make use of their ideas.

The BJP and the two communist parties are not so comfortable with civil society groups, each for their reasons. The BJP has its own form of civil society pressure in the RSS and its affiliates, and the ideas that these groups throw up are both regressive and right wing. They go into central India’s tribal belts mainly to counter Christian missionary work and to Hinduise the tribes. It would of course be unfair to blame them for ideological biases because the left-wing groups led by front organisations of civil liberties and anti-globalisation are equally blinkered in terms of their ideological presuppositions. The leftish civil society groups display a bit more savvy than their hopelessly reactionary counterparts on the right.

Politicians and political scientists might be forgiven if they feel civil society groups are deepening democracy. The thinking and the actions of these para-political forces has not yet been sufficiently studied or understood. The civil society groups articulate and reflect dead ideas of a few decades ago and a few centuries ago.

The NAC civil society groups are generally the welfare state advocates, trying to secure for the poor and marginalised people entitlements that a modern state owes its citizens. The fact that people and their governments have moved on over the past half-century and more and that the challenges they face are different has been overlooked. The Anna Hazare group on its part is engaged in the same classic battle with the state — making it accountable to citizens.

It can be argued the civil society groups are not merely deepening democracy but they are completing the democratic circle that moves from the people who elect their leaders and the leaders who are made to remain solicitous towards the people. It is a fulfillment of democracy. But what these groups do not think of doing, or they are incapable of doing, are those things that will enable the state to perform its duties. If the state is to fulfill its welfare obligations towards its needy citizens, it has to have sufficient funds in its kitty, which depends on national economic activity. In other words, the economy has to grow so that the size of the national pie grows too and the slice for each one of the groups increases as well. This is an issue that goes beyond the thinking of activists. Similarly, groups that want an accountable state in terms of probity are not thinking innovatively of downsizing the state as one of the ways of containing and curbing corruption. All that the Lokpal agitators can think of is to empower the watchdog system.

Somewhere, the civil society activists achieve obsolescence faster than they can know because they are operating on the simple basis of a ruling state and a ruled citizenry. When faced with a crisis situation of societal magnitude they do not know what to do.

It might seem cruel to ask simple-minded civil society to explain their response to complex crises. Unfortunately, society is becoming more complex than ever and it is not entirely because of Facebook, Twitter, and the smart phone.

There are basis issues of increasing food production for a growing population, of finding work for people crowding more than ever into cities across the globe for earning livelihood. These are issues that civil society groups, like the traditional political parties, do not have the wherewithal to confront. The civil society and politicians are comfortable confronting each other but not serious issues of managing society.
l inbox@dnaindia.net