Abstract
Representation: a fanciful word in the dictionary of liberal democracies. Representation implies that an individual or group is capable of simulating the characters, features, concerns, challenges, and privileges of another individual or community and communicating those issues and challenges on behalf of them to a larger social platform. As much does this sounds romantic, at the functional level it stays a matter of concern if representation really works. In other words, can another person, group, or community simulate and communicate my issues, privileges, and concerns to the world at large? The next question: who is going to represent who? As in, who decides the object and agency of representation? Who has the power to represent who? Can a person/group, represented by another, refuse to be represented at any point? These are the questions Manjusha Nair deals with in her curiously titled book, Undervalued Dissent. Questions like these cannot be navigated without referring to state–market–community interconnectedness and interdependence, a discourse of analysis that Nair unravels and consolidates in the book.
Set in the mining areas of Chhattisgarh in India, this book narrates the challenges of miners in the informal sector. These workers are often migrants from neighboring villages and districts, tribal and nontribal, with little money in hand and large families, including ‘goats and chickens’ (p. 2) to cater for. They are exploited at the hands of the state with no regulation of their payments, privileges, or work conditions. To save themselves from the onslaught of the state as they seek shelter from the union leaders, they are exploited there, too. As a result, they start forming their own union to survive, to strive for their rights. Based on ethnography, Nair tries to capture the double whammy these miners are subject to in the informal economy in India, and effectively questions the benefits of political representation in a democracy, especially for those who survive through multiple challenges in terms of money, status, caste position, and regular employment.
The book has six chapters apart from the Introduction and Conclusion. Before getting into the details of each of them, it is pertinent to state that Nair discusses two binary cases – one where the workers have been successful in claiming their rights and one where they have not – in order to assess how much agency can one actually draw from representation. Here she discusses the importance of democratic dissent, i.e., ‘the ability of workers to organize contention through the channels of trade union activism, political party formations and social movements’ (p. 6). It is the possibility of exercising democratic dissent that, as Nair observes, enabled the miners to succeed while the industrial workers failed.
In the first chapter, ‘The shifting state–labor relation in India,’ Nair discusses the process of nation-building in India from post-1950 to the late 1980s, as neoliberalism was embraced by the Indian state. Although an evolutionary process, the journey of the Indian state and its economy from regulated public sector enterprises to open market is underscored by a certain disjuncture, especially in terms of labor and citizenship rights. This is more so because free-market policy compromises with the principles of democracy, and as a result, labor rights and citizenship rights are compromised too. This argument is carried forward in the next chapter, ‘Mining for the nation: Inclusion and exclusion in the mining township,’ where Nair asserts the perceptional difference between India and Bharat and how the differential level of this perception shaped nation-building in India in which the informal workers, at least the ones in her research, became one of the primary contributors even without belonging to the urban space denoted by ‘India.’
In ‘Determined to win: The mining-workers’ success,’ Nair emphasizes that the miners could win against the state just because they exercised their democratic right to dissent. She insists that in this case, the miners could succeed because the trade union that represented them could truly reflect their demands and uphold their concerns. This indicates the necessity of trade unions (or any representational bodies) to stay connected with their members and not turn into power hubs themselves. This is exactly what she observes in the fourth chapter, ‘The neoliberal development state in Chhattisgarh.’ In this chapter, Nair points out that the ‘steroid-driven’ growth of Chhattisgarh is a fallout from the neoliberal policies in India and is responsible for the ever-shrinking space for legitimate politics of workers in the state, or for that matter, in other states in India, because the neoliberal drive is a pan-India policy of the central government.
In ‘Molding lives in the steel city,’ her ethnographic site of Bhilai, ‘steel city’ (BSP), is explored in great detail. Here Nair focuses on the industrial workers in BSP for whom the city is their universe: it accommodates not just their workspace but their everyday lives as well. Shifting her focus from the miners to the industrial workers, Nair tries to decipher what makes the two categories distinct and how their specificity affects their work profiles and that their overall existence is dominated by the neoliberal worldview on the one hand and state regimentation on the other. This chapter paves the way for the final chapter, ‘The taming of dissent: The industrial workers’ failure,’ where Nair argues that business enterprises defeated the industrial workers’ politics first by criminalizing their activism and then by legitimizing their struggle.
Drawing upon her ethnographic data and observations, in the Conclusion Nair insists that in the ever-evolving triad of state–market–community, workers’ rights and demands are conditioned by their ability to exercise their democratic rights to dissent and assert and proclaim their space. She compares societies like India and China with reference to fewer formalized rights of workers – a challenge, she insists, that can be overcome by expanding social policies as they try to create for themselves in a democracy. She also defines the growing population in India as a problem and compares the Indian situation with other societies in the Global South that have undergone similar population overload and poor policy formulation at state-level for informal sector workers.
The most fascinating part of the book is its detailed presentation of the nuances of the everyday lives of the workers, a pictorial description of their habitats, and an almost empathetic understanding of their struggles. Nair also chooses an interesting title with the word ‘undervalued.’ It immediately draws our attention by questioning the theoretical hallmark of a democracy: the right to ask questions, to dissent, to assert. It makes us wonder, as pointed out in the beginning of this review, if everybody in the real world has equal right and opportunity to dissent. Nair’s book is thought-provoking, leading readers to a crucial question of ‘modern times’ – how far democracies are successful in upholding the rights and demands of the citizens as laborers and members of society. As pointed out at the beginning of this review, in a larger context, the book draws our attention to the crisis of representation – whether Left or Right. Political representation turns into a battleground for power as neoliberalism dominates our interests. This point is aptly communicated by Nair throughout the book.
However, a point of disagreement may emerge from her claim that population is a bane and not a boon. Population, if envisaged as a human resource and supported by public policies thereby, could undoubtedly become a demographic dividend. In particular, with reference to democracies, turning population into effective human resources emerges as a salient hallmark. Having said that, it is not to confuse an ideal type with what is observable across societies, but to insist upon state failure as a major reason for the shrinking of democratic spaces in societies in the Global South, including India. Because neoliberalism considers resistance a dirty word, the entire onus of democratic dissent cannot be transferred to the informal sector workers – a certain amount of responsibility should also lie with unions that often cease to represent the workers in favor of power and money. For a broader perspective and to draw comparison across societies, Nair’s work can be compared with Anthony Pahnke’s recently published book on Brazil’s landless workers’ movements, Brazil’s Long Revolution: Radical Achievements of the Landless Workers’ Movements (2018).