Abstract
The ‘empowerment’ approach to development adopted by international institutions has recently enabled the Indian Dalit movement to avail itself of western funds. This case study of a network of Dalit NGOs in Uttar Pradesh highlights how these funds are being used and to what political effect. It shows that in such a previously politicized context, politicized actors of the NGOization process actively defend a radical agenda that links up caste, class and gender, while pursuing under the label of women’s empowerment a pre-existing trend of mobilization of the rural poor. Their political work, however, requires tactical adjustments so as to fit exacting and costly norms of management imposed by funding agencies. While pointing to certain radical experiments that show the political resilience of the Dalit movement in spite of a depoliticizing pattern of ‘professionalization’, this article also highlights the economic precariousness encountered by the activists.
Keywords
Introduction
The ‘human rights-based approach’ to development, which was officially endorsed in 2003 by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), has paved the way for the NGOization of social movements in the ‘global south’. This article examines the manner in which the anti-caste Dalit movement in India has been affected by NGOization. What results from the official agenda of ‘empowerment’ of international institutions once it enters the domain of social movements? Have the activists who took the new opportunities of funding been helped at all to pursue their political aims?
By putting forward the notion of ‘empowerment’, the official discourse has recast targeted populations as fellow citizens asserting their rights rather than as passive recipients of development aid. The discourse of empowerment thus boasts of introducing a democratic package for the poor whose participation is valued for making the technocratic ideal of ‘good governance’ a reality. 1 Ironically, the concept of ‘empowerment’ was developed 25 years ago by Ferguson, who criticized the ‘powerful depoliticizing effect’ (Ferguson, 1990: 21) of the politics of economic development and advocated an alternative political vision – ‘empowerment’ – asserting that better power-sharing might be all it takes to allow affected populations to effectively combat poverty. Nowadays, having entered the neo-liberal vocabulary of international institutions, ‘empowerment’ subordinates subaltern politics to purposes of ‘good governance’, ‘development’, etc., thus paradoxically fulfilling the anti-political functions of development that Ferguson denounced. In this neo-liberal world view, mobilized actors of civil society at the margins of global capitalism are designated as ‘stakeholders’, a term whose linguistic proximity to ‘shareholders’ cannot be overlooked. This altered version of ‘empowerment’ typically illustrates the ability of neo-liberal jargon to digest critical thought and to neutralize it. Can social activism be harnessed to create political stability from the fringes? This is the tendency that Johanna Siméant denounces when she describes NGOs as ‘administrative and management structures’ whose work she equates to ‘the setting-up of pockets […] of rational-legal bureaucracy in unstable contexts’ (Dauvin and Siméant, 2002: 86, my translation). The NGOization of social movements could therefore simply consolidate what Escobar denounced two decades ago, i.e. that instead of solving the problems of underdevelopment, the developmental approach merely succeeded in creating a ‘politically and technically manageable’ version of it (Escobar, 1995: 47). Concerning the relationship between NGOs and social movements in contemporary India, Ray and Katzenstein have pointed out that ‘economic liberalization has been accompanied by the massive NGO-ification of civil society, arguably crowding out some of the more protest-oriented forms of organizing within the social movement sector.’ (Ray and Katzenstein, 2005: 9). 2 My case study confirms that there is recruitment to previously existing movements but also shows that activists sometimes use NGOization as a way to overcome certain limitations of these movements. The present case study deals with an attempt by grassroots Dalit NGOs to politicize the rural poor. It is premised on the assumption that this kind of political experiment needs to be acknowledged and therefore researched ethnographically instead of being turned down from the start. Identifying a grey area, Rucht proposed to consider the possibilities of an alternative approach, lying ‘beyond dominant forms of “civil society”, intervention and NGOization’ (Rucht, 1999: 8). We need, therefore, to reassess ethnographically the relationship between NGOization and depoliticization that critiques of NGOization tend to take for granted.
The case study takes place in the poverty-stricken state of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) in northern India where the rise to power of the BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party) 3 in the 1990s has politicized local Dalit communities to a great extent. Once a bastion of caste orthodoxy, this state, with a population of 200 million in 2011 and where Dalits comprise 21.5 % of the population, emerged as a new bastion of Dalit activism. 4 The sudden availability of western funds is something entirely new for the Dalit movement, which had previously never indulged in any developmental activities and had remained focused on the defense of Dalit rights through electoral means and street politics.
I will show that, in spite of the difficulties it brings, NGOization has nevertheless enabled activists from the Ambedkarite and Marxist traditions to carry this movement beyond some of its former limitations, especially by encouraging rural Dalit women to join new forms of radical action based on an intersectional agenda of caste, class and gender.
From the ‘Structural Adjustment of the Political’ to ‘Political Resilience’
The new tendency of protest-oriented organizations to rely on transnational sponsors who impose technocratic conventions on them has given rise to a paradox. Sangeeta Kamat notes on the one hand that in India ‘the NGOization of bottom-up struggles’ has had the effect of ‘transforming the culture of politics as we know it, engendering a “structural adjustment” of the political space that is not unlike the structural adjustment of the economy’ (Kamat, 2002: 154). On the other hand she emphasizes the political vigilance in Indian civil society of this tendency. From the outset NGOization has been the subject for debates and criticism in intellectual, left-wing circles. She notes the importance of left-wing activists (socialists, communists, liberation theologians) in the grassroots movements. While setting up development projects to tap into available funding from the state and/or overseas development funds, these grassroots organizations remain wary of ‘how capitalist institutions deploy various mechanisms to control and regulate radical popular initiatives’ (Kamat, 2002: 153). Kamat concludes that ‘this attempt to structure political culture at the grass roots to better fit with neo-liberal imperatives is by no means a finished historical project’ (2002: 167).
The struggle against caste-based exploitation and discrimination inflicted on the ‘untouchables’ or ‘Dalits’, who represent one sixth of the Indian population, has mostly been the preserve of Dalit activists. 5 The anti-caste ideology of what I will refer to as the ‘traditional’ (i.e. the existing, non-NGOized) Ambedkarite movement combines a strong sense of Dalit communitarian identity and autonomy with ideological references to political modernity. Politically it can be summarized as the Dalit struggle for a classless and casteless democratic society, as emphasized by its historical leader Ambedkar (1891–1956), whose influences combined liberal thought with Buddhism as well as a critical engagement with Marxism (Jaoul, 2016).
In U.P., non-electoral Ambedkarite organizations were sidelined by the BSP during its rise to power in the mid-1990s (Jaoul, 2007). The BSP chief, Mayawati, wanted a free hand to form political and social alliances which were sometimes contrary to the movement’s ideological and ethical principles. In contrast, these non-electoral, agitational outfits that criticized her opportunism reaffirmed their ideological commitment to the Ambedkarite legacy by fighting anti-Dalit violence, organizing commemorations of Ambedkar as well as conversions to Navayana Buddhism, thus carrying forward his religious legacy (Jaoul, 2016).
The NGOization that has been affecting this heterogeneous and fragmented movement for the past 15 years entails negotiations and adjustments within a political tradition firmly rooted in the Dalit social milieu. Ambedkarites insist on a Dalit movement run by Dalits. As a consequence of their autonomy, but also because of the lack of support and even hostility from the rest of society (from the left as well), the movement has always been financed exclusively by the Dalit community. Funding is by way of donations and collections. The movement’s economic self-reliance goes hand in hand with its ideological insistence on autonomy. Therefore most Dalit organizations continue to function without seeking funds from foreign donor agencies. It is therefore important to bear in mind that within the movement there is strong resistance to, as well as a lack of interest in, the recent trend for NGOization, which remains relatively marginal.
Recent French studies on the NGOization of Palestine are helpful for understanding the global nexus between NGOization and depoliticization. In his book Julien Salingue argues that ‘here depoliticization equates to the expectation that NGOs will retreat from the domain of national liberation in order to focus on development, thus forsaking their role in Palestinian de-development’ 6 (Salingue, 2015: 131, my translation). In his unpublished PhD (on which Salingue’s argument relies extensively), Sbeih shows that ‘the refusal to finance NGOs which are deemed political effectively becomes part of the battle against the “politicization of development”’ (Sbeih, 2014: 370, my translation). Sbeih highlights that the NGO Development Center was first conceived by the World Bank in 1997 and eventually set up in 2006 in order to monitor Palestinian NGOs. ‘[I]n the event of success, the World Bank’s idea was to repeat this experiment in other developing countries’ (Sbeih, 2014: 363). It is therefore tempting to consider the World Bank’s experiment in Palestine as a template by which to study the issue of politicization in the ‘global south’. However, the high degree of censorship on political activities in Palestine contrasts with less sensitive regions where the connection between NGOs and grassroots political movements is not being curbed so drastically.
One common feature of the NGOization process across regions concerns the ‘professionalization’ of activism, which Sbeih characterizes as the introduction of ‘new modalities of struggle that are so-called rational’ (2014: 45). Sbeih insists on expanding and problematizing this notion, which it is important to contextualize according to local political realities for the sake of comparative knowledge. Applied to India’s ‘political society’ (Chatterjee, 2004), the term ‘professionalization’ becomes tricky without a proper contextualization of social and political activism. From an occupational point of view, many political and social activists are already ‘professionals’ in the sense that they are full-time activists who earn money from mediating on a daily basis between the people and the administrations (by facilitating low-level corruption, getting access to officers, obtaining administrative services, pensions, scholarships, etc.). For those providing such services, activism already constitutes a lucrative activity, if not a salaried profession in the conventional sense. In this context ‘professionalization’ means the transition from benefiting from the informal economy of social and political activism to earning a salary as an NGO employee. On the other hand, it also represents a shift in political culture (understood to mean ideological discourses and practices in the domain of political activity) from following local political traditions to adopting the management standards and global linguistic norms of the transnational NGO sector. In the case of Palestine, Sbeih observes that in addition to corporate patterns of the evaluation processes, the donor agencies’ methods of funding individual projects rather than financing the NGO structures themselves, also contribute to the adoption of an ethos of management (Sbeih, 2014: 239). Therefore, to what extent can this neo-liberal framework coexist with a tradition of plebeian assertion?
As an example, Steven Robins points out, as regards the NGOization of the social movement in South Africa, that to associate rights-based activism with the sometimes unintentional pursuit of a neo-liberal agenda would be to misinterpret local realities and struggles (Robins, 2008). However, to what extent can the political agency of NGO activists really curb this powerful agenda of international institutions? Siméant argues that mere intentionality cannot overcome certain structural effects: ‘Does not subscribing to an ideology or economic program prevent one from sharing certain aspects of it in practice?’ (Dauvin and Siméant, 2002: 86, my translation). Bearing both of these views in mind dialectically, one needs to be sensitive to developments and events as they unfold, sometimes unexpectedly, when small, marginal NGOs with a base in oppressed communities practice ‘empowerment’.
The Dalits’ Transnational Breakthrough and its Consequences
The recent limited trend of NGOization of the Ambedkarite movement was not simply imposed from above. The connection with transnational civil society was prepared by repeated attempts to highlight the Dalit question internationally against the wishes of the Indian government. From the early 1980s Dalit activists based in India and the diaspora (mostly in the UK) started sending delegates to the United Nations Human Rights Council (Jaoul, 2006). The first international recognition occurred in 1996 when the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Radical Discrimination (CERD) finally agreed to include caste discrimination as discrimination based on lineage. These initiatives that led to this recognition were political in nature, since they were a means to contest the Indian state’s negligence towards its duty to protect Dalits. The Dalit movement never took part in any development activity: it was only when the human rights approach to development was officially adopted that a link between donor agencies and this movement could be made. It is nevertheless true that developmental NGOs have been present in southern India among Christian Dalits since the 1980s, whose connections to the Ambedkarite movement have been highlighted (Mosse, 2012). Those Dalit NGO activists took a lead role in the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), which initiated the process of NGOization. In 1997 Human Rights Watch announced a survey on Dalit oppression. The Ford Foundation supported the initiative on the condition that the forthcoming report should involve Dalit organizations and take into account the way that they perceive the problems they face. Under the pretext of improving the efficiency of a movement fragmented regionally and caste-wise, the Ford Foundation also offered to provide a platform for national coordination among Dalit organizations (Clifford, 2007). However, enrolling and making Dalit organizations accountable to its foreign trustees meant made it possible for the latter to exert a discrete but powerful influence over the former. Unlike the Palestinian NGO Development Center, however, this initiative was not commissioned directly by the World Bank or any other international institutions but emanated from two major actors of transnational civil society based in the US (a human rights organization and a donor agency), thus introducing an additional layer.
The NCDHR was founded by two Dalit activists from Christian communities. At the time its National Convener was Martin Macwan, an activist from Gujarat who has campaigned against caste violence. Paul Diwakar, who held the post of International Secretary, comes from Andhra Pradesh. He is a former Marxist-Leninist who later held positions of responsibility in Christian NGOs and came late to Ambedkarism. His involvement in both the Dalit community and the NGO sector made him a spokesperson who was both legitimate socially as a Dalit and reassuring for western NGOs. This is what I concluded from discussions with him in 2011 and with French NGO representatives who explained that they felt less comfortable with political activists of the Ambedkarite movement, whom they argued were much too political.
In 1998, in accordance with the wishes of the Ford Foundation, Human Rights Watch called a meeting of Dalit organizations with a view to drawing up its report. This initiative led to the creation of the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), commissioned by 300 organizations across India. The NCDHR was officially inaugurated on 10 December 1998 on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A petition denouncing violence against Dalits was delivered to the Indian president, K. R. Narayanan (himself a Christian Dalit), at Rashtrapati Bhawan, the presidential palace in New Delhi. A public campaign was launched that same day, which ended symbolically on 14 April the following year on Ambedkar’s birthday (Hardtmann, 2003). By choosing these two symbolic dates, the NCDHR sought to reconcile an international human rights approach with a local political tradition that places emphasis on dates and symbols.
The final consecration of the NCDHR was achieved on the fringes of the World Conference against Racism (WCAR) in 2001 in Durban. It was opposition by the Indian government against the inclusion of caste discrimination in the conference’s agenda that created controversy during the event and therefore enhanced the NCDHR’s visibility at the conference. Its 180 delegates campaigned alongside 15,000–20,000 representatives of transnational civil society and distributed a ‘black paper’ on caste. However, whereas legitimacy was achieved in transnational civil society at Durban, the NCDHR’s legitimacy was never really achieved in the Dalit movement itself. There it remains loosely linked to established regional Dalit organizations and therefore contested, as any claim to national leadership is bound to be. But the NCDHR’s performance at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004, where Dalits converged on Mumbai from different regions, gave foreign participants of transnational civil society the impression that this truly represented the Dalit movement, as several foreign participants visiting Mumbai for the occasion testified to me.
Reconfiguring the Dalit Movement?
The ‘traditional’ (non-NGOized) Dalit movement can be characterized by its emphasis on the anti-caste ideology of Ambedkar and other ideologues. Their cultural critique of Brahmanism as well as their political culture of informality stand poles apart from the standardized norms of management promoted by international institutions and donor agencies. As a political culture the Dalit movement values precisely the opposite of this attempt at ‘professionalization’ and ‘rationalization’. As well as strongly defending the liberal, philosophical values of enlightenment and rationality, Dalit political culture, and Indian political culture more generally, is based on volunteering, sociability, caste and religious-based identities and networks, devotional ways of paying homage, emotions and theatricality, etc. (Jaoul, 2008a, 2008b). Thomas Hansen thus characterized the urban political culture of Maharashtra as ‘the politics of permanent performance’ (Hansen, 2004).
The NCDHR’s strategy for linking up with the Dalit movement consists of organizing training courses and making them accessible to all Dalit activists in India, paying attention to the existing practices of Dalit activists before attempting to standardize and ‘rationalize’ them. However, the very idea of ‘rationalizing’ social movements betrays certain prejudices against political culture, implying that only technocratic management is ‘rational’ (as was also argued in the Palestinian case by Sbeih (2014)). I attended one of the NCDHR’s ‘recapacitation’ courses – a term which, in spite of its technical appearance that makes it seem politically neutral, illustrates how condescending the technocratic vocabulary of transnational civil society can be towards political activism. Dedicated to the legal battle against anti-Dalit violence, the workshop took place over several days in New Delhi in March 2011 at the Indian Social Institute, a Jesuit institution which is a key venue in Indian civil society. First participants listened to delegates from different provinces who shared their expertise of existing activist practices. This was followed by a general discussion. In the next step, the practical know-how collected was then to be collated by a communications specialist into brochures to be distributed to Dalit organizations as guidelines. The distribution of these brochures was entrusted to provincial branches of the NCDHR, whose task was to coordinate the various existing local organizations, gather available statistics on caste violence and set up a network of activists, lawyers, journalists and civil servants sympathetic to the cause.
Sometime later in Lucknow, the capital of U.P., Ram Dular, the NCDHR representative I had met at this event, explained the difficulties he had in obtaining the cooperation of ‘traditional’ local Dalit organizations. From an economic point of view what made things difficult was that he did not have the budget to financially assist the local organizations and activists he sought to persuade to campaign on behalf of the NCDHR. In addition to this economic obstacle, the bureaucratic nature of the NCDHR could hardly compete with the local political culture’s theatricality. Moreover, by virtue of the legal restrictions of the Foreign Currency Registration Act, international funding prevents the NCDHR from participating in protest movements or publicly criticizing the authorities. Deprived of the flamboyance of protest, at a local level the NCDHR has thus been reduced to a bureaucratic vigilance network whose aim is to gather information and try to reorganize the movement in a ‘rationalized’ manner. However, as I will now illustrate with my case study of the Dynamic Action Group, local struggles by grassroots Dalit NGOs can diverge strongly from this agenda.
The Dynamic Action Group of U.P
The case study is based on fieldwork conducted in March/April 2011 in U.P, where BSP campaigns and politics have been increasing popular participation in the Ambedkarite movement since the mid-1980s. This study thus deals with NGOization in a highly politicized milieu.
I came into contact with a network of Dalit NGOs, the Dynamic Action Group (DAG), whose main organizer, Ram Kumar, I had met previously. The DAG was formerly associated with the NCDHR but it now operates independently, which does not rule out cooperation. Having set up its headquarters in Lucknow, the state capital, it is not an NGO in the conventional sense but rather a centralized network of small Dalit NGOs spread all over the state with a common program and shared resources. In practical terms, this means that the DAG redistributes the funds that it collects from donor agencies to tiny local grassroots organizations. Apart from redistributing these funds, the DAG coordinates them from its headquarters in a simple Lucknow apartment where meetings are held regularly.
The head and founder of this network, Ram Kumar, is a Dalit from U.P. and a former member of the CPI-ML (Communist Party of India – Marxist Leninist) or Naxalite party, which was clandestine and engaged in armed struggle at the time when he was part of it. 7 He left the party in the mid-1980s because he felt that it didn’t attach enough importance to the question of caste and because of the various forms of caste domination and exploitation of Dalits inside the organization, which was controlled by upper-caste intellectuals. Like many former ‘comrades’ from the Naxalite movement, he has moved into the professional NGO sector, which gave him an opportunity to organize the rural poor. He organized a mass movement of forest dwellers in a district in northwestern U.P. and then in 1991 helped set up a federation of grassroots organizations (U.P. Voluntary Action Network, UPVAN), united in the goal of opposing the rise of Hindu nationalism in working-class communities. He distanced himself from the UPVAN following a conflict that, according to him, once more revealed internal caste prejudices against Dalits. In 1998 he founded the DAG, a network of 30 Dalit organizations in U.P. (it now represents 75 organizations spread across 35 districts), along with Sujit Ghosh, a middle-class, upper-caste Bengali from New Delhi and former comrade of the CPI-ML. At the time my fieldwork was conducted, the DAG was funded by Christian Aid (75%) and Human Rights Global Funds (25%), constituting a total budget of 3.3 million rupees per year (approximately US$74,000 in 2011).
The DAG’s blog presents its main objectives as being ‘to reinforce the concept and philosophy of Dalit emancipation’ and ‘to procure training and education in order to create a new leadership’ (DAG, 2005). It thus organizes regular public hearings (jansunvai) where Dalit villagers can air their grievances, giving women and the poor a voice and highlighting issues rarely discussed in public, even in the ‘traditional’ Dalit organizations where the domination of educated men and government employees is felt. Ram Kumar explained to me that his aim was to use foreign funds to reorganize the Dalit movement from a grassroots perspective, by enhancing the participation of the most deprived sectors, and to simultaneously address caste, gender and class oppression. The DAG focuses primarily on the question of caste and gender violence faced by Dalits in the countryside as well as on their economic grievances as the agricultural proletariat (effective implementation of agrarian redistribution measures, minimum wages, etc.).
In our conversations Ram Kumar described the difficulties of working on the fringes of the NGO community due to the temporary, renewable, insufficient and exacting nature of contracts with western donor agencies in New Delhi. Not being an English speaker, he described the difficulties of communicating with funding agencies, explaining that too much of the allocated budget went on hiring professional writers specialized in drafting NGO reports and projects in English. Furthermore, competition between different organizations for grants had led to factionalism, forcing one of his former associates, Kapil Dev, also a Dalit, to break away and set up a rival network, the Dalit Action Group. Both networks now competed with each other to obtain funds. Considering these drawbacks, he was not ruling out shifting to a traditional career in electoral politics by standing as a candidate in local elections. The Congress Party had made him offers. In addition to the local power conferred on a Member of Legislative Assembly (provincial assembly) or Member of Parliament (national assembly), the development funds made officially available to elected political representatives were also substantial in comparison with the scant resources offered to him by donor agencies which he described as ‘greedy and exacting’. He said that he had always been interested in politics, explaining that his father, an armed CPI-ML activist, was killed by the police and that from an early age he had been shaped by his father’s political education and by the memory of his martyrdom. While calling on his political past to justify his temptation to join politics, he was well aware that the climate of revolutionary politics in which he grew up and participated was totally different to the kind of institutional politics that the Congress offered him now. The many compromises and arrangements with local elites and the economic interests that he could foresee as inevitable explained his reluctance to join this party and why he still preferred to carry on his radical politics under the NGO label.
Moreover, external funding allowed the DAG to escape some of the political limitations imposed on the ‘traditional’ non-electoral Dalit movement by its economy. This movement relies on an informal economy of donations, often in return for mediation services with the local administrations. Obtaining welfare benefits from and getting things done by more or less uncooperative and corrupt officers is what activists generally spend their time doing, as well as organizing protests and celebrations. As a consequence of the greater purchasing power of the urban middle class, activists have learned to tap into the Dalit middle and lower middle classes, whose individual donations can be substantial in comparison with the arduous and unproductive task of collecting small bank notes from the have-nots in slums and villages. The expectations of the urban middle class in return for their donations are also easier to meet than the demands of the rural poor in class terms with the status quo. Any claims by the rural poor that upset the agrarian class structure can result in violent backlashes from the dominant castes who have the support of the police and local administrations. This is potentially dangerous for the activists who defend them. As I saw from my earlier research into the Ambedkarite movement in Kanpur region, becoming financially dependent on middle-class Dalit civil servants has had the effect of distancing these local organizations from the rural poor. Their interventions with the administration on behalf of Dalits depend on the discretion of sympathetic Dalit officers who are expected to convince recalcitrant (generally upper-caste) officers to pick up files and respond to administrative demands that otherwise tend to be blocked, ignored or simply stalled further down the line. ‘Traditional’ Dalit organizations have therefore become increasingly caught up in the practice of back-scratching within administrations. This paradoxically reduces the chances of countering the administrative malpractices of corruption that mostly harm the poor who do not have the financial capacity to bribe and whose chance of being heard by the administration therefore depends on the activists. Moreover, the patronage of non-electoral Dalit organizations by Dalit officials in the high administration results in an ambiguous form of indirect state control over the movement itself. Activists have had a tendency to internalize these restrictions on their militancy in order to avoid alienating those powerful patrons whose support and interventions their local power relies upon (Jaoul, 2008b). In contrast, the small organizations affiliated to the DAG encourage radical actions against local administrations. Hence, while leading to dependence on external sources of funding, NGOization has also enabled activists to escape certain subtle forms of social control over their movement that prevents them from fighting local administrations in a straightforward manner.
The Radical Politics of Self-Help Groups in Jaunpur District
During a state-level meeting of the various local organizations of the DAG, Ram Kumar introduced me to several local organizers of the network. I asked two of them, whom Ram Kumar pointed to me as among the most dynamic among the latter, if I could visit them to see their work.
Their two separate organizations worked side by side and operated from the same building in a small rural town of Jaunpur district, Eastern U.P. There, I stayed with a handful of activists who worked and stayed there most of the time while their families lived in the surrounding villages. Usha Devi and Motilal Behtu, whom I had met in Lucknow, were employed by DAG which paid them a regular salary of 3,000 rupees a month. This represents a slightly higher income than that of the rural proletariat, whose minimum daily wage is fixed at 100 rupees per day of labor but who do not get work every day. Women also tend to be paid less. In addition to their salary, the DAG provided them with logistical support (rent, laptops, scooters and running costs). They also had two assistants and a cook. Motilal Behtu, who was in his mid-40s, started his activism in the non-electoral Ambedkarite movement. His present organization specialized in agricultural labor trade unionism. The other organization was run by a 30-year-old woman, Usha Devi, who organized women’s self-help groups in villages. Married as a young girl and the mother of two daughters, this local figurehead of Dalit women’s liberation divorced her husband after discovering that he had secretly married another woman in Mumbai where he worked as a builder. She had a secondary-school education and started out as an activist for a local NGO before being spotted by Sujit Ghosh, co-founder of the DAG, who saw in her a promising Dalit leader. Sujit Ghosh continues to promote Usha in his private capacity, encouraging her to travel and take part in national events in order to build her network, sporadically lending financial support to her organization, thus supplementing the support she gets from the DAG. Her organization, Savitri Baï Phule Dalit Mahila Sangharsh Morcha (Savitri Baï Phule Dalit Women’s Liberation Front), is named after a historic female character from the 19th-century movement against Brahmanism and caste. During my visits I noticed a preponderance of female inhabitants in the villages, which was explained to me by the fact that it was the low season for farming and therefore many of the men had migrated far away for employment. The women in the organizations appeared to be strongly mobilized to obtain the benefits of the government’s social and development schemes, thus challenging those local officials and employees who were pocketing a significant proportion of the public money that was supposed to reach them.
Although I noticed a greater participation by women and the rural poor compared with ‘traditional’ Dalit organizations, certain similarities could also be observed. These self-help groups were dominated by Chamars. In U.P. about 60% of the Dalit population are Chamars and they have traditionally dominated the Ambedkarite movement. Usha and Behtu were themselves Chamars. I also noticed their desire to gain financial independence from the DAG by cultivating alternative sources. Indeed, to avoid being totally dependent on the DAG, whose subsidies had decreased lately, Usha and Behtu had set up a ‘government-registered organization’, named Sankalp Samajik Vikas Samiti (literally ‘determination social development committee’), allowing them to be part of the implementation process of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 8 and therefore to obtain government funds. However, since the registered status of this organization was legally incompatible with any protest against public authorities, the campaigns against the local administration and government policy were organized separately, a tactical division of political labor also noted by Kamat in her study on Maharashtra NGOs (Kamat, 2002: 75).
Interestingly, these organizations also retained, symbolically, a form of traditional financing consisting of donations of cash or agricultural produce. In the rented house I stayed in with the activists, there was a tin container for storing grain at the entrance. Usha explained to me the symbolic value of these donations in kind by the peasants: ‘People need to feel that this is their organization’ (my translation). Rather than entirely subsidizing the village self-help groups, activists also asked villagers to raise funds locally to hire buses to take them to meetings and demonstrations in order to avoid passivity. As demonstrated by Usha’s explanation above, involving villagers in fundraising was a way to retain the organic relationship with the people. In the ‘traditional’ Dalit movement the link between the organizations and the people is based on this moral economy of donations which entails personal visits by activists to their supporters, thus sustaining a political sociability. This organic political link between the Dalit organizations and the Dalit communities is firmly rooted in a moral economy of reciprocal commitment. In return for these donations there is a moral obligation on local leaders to show support for their well-wishers in the event of oppression, caste-related violence and special needs (financial assistance for the sick and for weddings and cremation rituals, etc.).
Besides retaining the moral economy of the Dalit movement, DAG activists were also careful to avoid falling into the trap of becoming dependent on external funds, which, according to Behtu and Usha, had happened to one rival Dalit NGO in the district. In their words, the risk it presented was one of ‘funds nahi, to kam nahi’ (‘no work without funds’). Indeed, they dreaded seeing the mood of protest replaced by the passivity of salaried employment and by bureaucratic dullness. Similarly, they shied away from any aspirations of comfort which might distance them from the daily lives and preoccupations of the poor. They associated such comforts with the professionalization of the social movement in India and so with leading NGOs, which they called ‘air-conditioned NGOs’. On an ideological level, they also insisted on keeping the traditions of the anti-caste movement alive by commemorating the birthdays of Ambedkar and Savitri Baï Phule.
Above all, their vigilant and reflective approach to NGOization insisted on a bottom-up, grassroots perspective of politicization which characterized an earlier phase of the Dalit movement and therefore precedes the international campaign for ‘empowerment’. The politicization of Dalit villagers started in the 1980s and early 1990s with agitations by the Dalit Panthers (Jaoul, 2013), the DS4 9 and subsequently with the BSP’s electoral campaigns. However, once the BSP came to power, it started dissociating itself from this grassroots movement of rural Dalits and quashing it. Mayawati, the Dalit Chief Minister, felt unable to control the sudden initiatives for economic and social change from below, whose subversion of the social order and potential for violence hampered her prospects of making political alliances with mainstream parties. Having once encouraged villagers to set up Ambedkarite committees during its earlier phase, the BSP thus dissociated itself from the latter’s local struggles once it came to power (Jaoul, 2007). Mayawati’s governments chose instead to focus on a top-down strategy of social change. She thus demanded the unconditional and obedient support of the Dalits whom she treated merely as an electoral vote bank. However, this conflict between grassroots Ambedkarite organizations and the BSP has not prevented a form of division of labor between them (Jaoul, 2007).
From ‘Empowerment’ to Dalit Women’s Insurgencies
Like other activists of the Ambedkarite movement, DAG activists emphasize the importance of an autonomous Dalit movement immune from electoral opportunism. At village level, their strategy focuses on Dalit women and their emergence as public actors. Dalit women’s electoral participation was already an important aspect of the BSP. Dalit women identify with the BSP Chief Minister Maywati, whom they admire for her boldness and whom they call ‘behenji’ (‘respected sister’). However, in spite of their emotional involvement and participation in mass meetings and elections, Dalit women remained excluded to a large extent from more active forms of participation in the party. This reflects both the traditional division of social roles as well as the higher rates of illiteracy among women in a context where participation in public life is premised upon literacy, even though the Dalit movement has produced many noticeable exceptions.
This previous politicization of women by the BSP explains the enthusiasm generated by women’s empowerment schemes, whether by the state (such as their involvement in elected local bodies) or by NGO campaigns for participation (Figure 1). Dalit women have seized this as an opportunity to take their political participation further. Although this change is now being orchestrated and tentatively monitored by empowerment programs, I will show that the results can challenge the way ‘good governance’ is envisioned and promoted by international organizations.
Cover of a Dynamic Action Group report. Copyright: Dynamic Action Group.
This contrast is dramatically illustrated by the local notoriety gained by Phulpatti Devi in Jaunpur district. This middle-aged Dalit widow and member of a self-help group set up by Usha Devi owes her local celebrity to the fact that she cut off the penis of an upper-caste man close to the village Pradhan (municipal council leader). After swindling her under the pretext of obtaining a bank loan for her, which he then embezzled, this man blackmailed her sexually with the promise of a second bank loan in order to repay the first loan. However, one night, instead of rejecting his advances as usual, she pretended to acquiesce and followed him to the outskirts of the village. There she asked him to undress and instead of performing fellatio on him, as she had promised, she cut off his penis with a knife. She then went straight to the police to confess her crime, leaving her persecutor-turned-victim in a state of unconsciousness. Since the police did not believe her she returned with the cut-off penis to prove her act. He survived his castration and they were both jailed: her for the mutilation and him under the Scheduled Castes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, which punishes sexual exploitation of Dalit women by non-Dalit men. It is one of the 22 legally recognized ways of practicing untouchability.
A journalist from New Delhi working for the reputed Tehelka magazine heard the anecdote. This in itself is important. It shows that in contrast with the ‘traditional’ Dalit movement, whose reliance on caste and regional networks has kept it isolated from the progressive circles of the intelligentsia, Dalit NGOs are able to more easily communicate their struggles to a national audience, especially in left-wing circles, which have historically remained cut off from the anti-caste movement. The journalist went to Jaunpur prison to interview Phulpatti Devi and asked her how she had mustered the courage to act. To this she responded bluntly: ‘I thought, now Mayawati is in power, she’ll save me’ 10 (Vij, 2007b). Interestingly, her justification reveals the local perception of supporters of the DAG that there is a consistency and a complementarity between the BSP leadership’s strategy of empowerment through the acquisition of state power and their grassroots movement’s focus on empowerment from below.
Far from condemning or dissociating themselves from Phulpatti Devi’s violent act, local activists celebrated her boldness by organizing a public meeting on her release from prison (Figure 2). Inviting her to speak on stage, they offered her greater responsibilities in the organization, which she turned down on the grounds of her shyness and lack of interest in activism.
Phulpatti Devi at a meeting held by Savitri Baï Phule Dalit Mahila Sangharsh Morcha (The Savitri Baï Phule Dalit Women’s Liberation Front). Copyright: Usha Devi.
I discovered, while leafing through the organization’s ‘archives’ (which contained articles from the local press, leaflets, copies of police ‘first information reports’, photo albums, etc.), that Phulpatti’s story of castration was simply the most spectacular among a host of collective protests and individual acts of rebellion in which Dalit women played a key role. The local protests were mainly directed against everyday forms of administrative corruption (bribery, embezzlement of funds, commissions taken on pensions, scholarships, etc.). Furthermore, they were straightforward compared to the negotiations and maneuvers often favored by the ‘traditional’ Ambedkarite activists before engaging in protests. Over the past few years various local government officials have been gheraoed (‘besieged’) by DAG activists contesting the embezzlement of welfare and development funds. Admittedly, the gherao represents a radical form of collective action in India. It often tends to be ritualized and therefore superficially radical with established local personalities courting arrest for the sake of their popularity, meanwhile being assured of VIP treatment by the police during their arrest which lasts only a few hours. But once appropriated by marginal, unauthorized actors, the gherao takes on a new flavor of spontaneity and subversion. For instance, local leaders Usha and Behtu took pride in one such incident whereby an elderly woman slapped a block development officer in his office. The officer had showed her a lack of respect by telling her to get off her chair and squat on the ground. Responding to this derogatory remark, she got up and slapped the government officer in the face, warning him that he ought to honor her like he would his own mother instead of insulting her. Just like Phulpatti Devi’s act of castration, her words were reported to me several times by the local people during informal chats. She seemed to have become a local legend. It is common for the poor and illiterate to spontaneously squat when they come to government offices, only timidly taking a seat if they are invited to do so, sometimes two to a chair even when other chairs are free. These forms of subordination do not mean that there is not a strong cultural claim to human equality in North Indian popular culture, especially in religious cults popular among Dalits, whether in Ambedkarite Buddhism or in Dalit devotional (Bhakti) sects. What made this woman suddenly ask to be treated as an equal by a high-ranking officer? Although I could not meet her and ask her directly, my impression is that her assertiveness was probably the result of her pride in being part of a sangathan (‘people’s organization’) that had made a name for itself locally. Security guards immediately arrested her but other women who were present at the scene used their mobile phones to mobilize a crowd of villagers who instantly ‘gheraoed’ the building, sequestrating the officer and securing the release of their comrade. Eventually, the officer was transferred out of the district. One of my respondents, a local shopkeeper, argued that the hierarchy had transferred him because it would have been impossible for him to continue to wield public authority after being humiliated in this manner by an elderly Dalit woman who represented the lowest of the low.
At the organization’s premises, small groups of women would turn up each day, smartly dressed in brightly colored saris and wearing make-up, in a euphoric mood. This new role in public life was obviously generating excitement, fun and pride. They often came to the office to seek advice from Usha Devi before going on, as a group, to local government offices. Instead of accompanying them, Usha told me that she insisted on them going by themselves so that they would learn to deal with the administration without an intermediary. Equipped with mobile phones that enabled them to consult her if need be, they therefore managed to bypass the usual process of mediation with party activists and other self-proclaimed ‘samaj sevaks’ (‘social workers’), who were of dubious intent. This thus curtailed the trade of petty local leaders who demanded payment for their intervention or sometimes even sexual services, as testified by the case of Phulpatti Devi.
Conclusion
‘India Should Be Proud of Phulpatti Devi’
‘India Should be Proud of Phulpatti Devi’ (Vij, 2007a), wrote journalist Shivam Vij on his blog following the publication of his article in Tehelka (Vij, 2007b). The publicity given to an individual violent act of rebellion, apparently disconnected from any existing political repertoire or discourse, shows the potential for an NGOized grassroots movement to garner support beyond local society. After decades of complete isolation and mutual defiance, the ‘traditional’ Dalit movement has only recently started generating sympathy from India’s left-wing intelligentsia. 11 According to J. Rancière, it is the wider identification of society at large with their certain voices that generally ‘do not count’ that is symptomatic of a broader politics of collective emancipation. This emancipatory process of ‘political subjectivation’ or ‘dis-identification’ presupposes a renewal of the actors of political action and the shape it takes (Rancière, 1998). His assumption highlights the political significance of the emergence of a new category of mobilized actors who were formerly assigned a subordinated and passive role in the ‘traditional’ Dalit movement.
Phulpatti Devi’s explicit way of tackling phallocracy illustrates in an unexpected and spectacular manner Laclau’s populist argument that ‘truly political thought and practice would consist in liberating the political moment from its enthrallment to policed societal frameworks’(Laclau, 2005: 245). This case study shows more generally that ‘empowerment’ has been radically reinterpreted or ‘resignified’ (Butler, 2004) by a new set of grassroots activists who have applied for NGO funds. The official discourse of ‘empowerment’ of international institutions is thus reinterpreted, and redirected by the grassroots movement.
However, the possibility of a radical politics within the NGOization process does not just depend on the bottom-up renewal of actors and repertoires, as both Rancière and Laclau argue. My case study highlights the major role of seasoned activists with previous experience in political organizations in devising strategies to sustain the radicalism of participation. The past political affiliations of NGO activists like Ram Kumar and Behtu qualify Laclau’s statement that globalized capitalism ‘makes traditional institutionalized forms of political mediation obsolete’ (Laclau, 2005: 231). Indeed, my case study highlights the recycling of previous political experiments in Ambedkarite and Marxist Leninist organizations in the process of NGOization. For many former underground activists of the Naxalite movement in India, NGOization represents an attempt to sustain their full-time activism as well as pursue radical agendas legally without being repressed. This has enabled activists like Ram Kumar to live a secure life (with a salary that enables them to raise their families in the relative comforts of the lower middle class) while pursuing their political agenda of democratization from below. The DAG president’s background in underground Marxist-Leninist politics has helped to equip his organization with the intellectual tools to approach NGOization critically and to restart the Dalit movement with a grassroots perspective, seeking participation from the most underprivileged Dalits. By pushing forward a radical, intersectional agenda of caste, class and gender, NGOization has meant an opportunity for this network to pursue a political trajectory of subaltern assertion. Far from leading to depoliticization, in this case NGOization has carried forward a history of proletarian upsurge within the Dalit movement, which started in the 1970s with an attempt by the Dalit Panthers to conciliate Marxism and Ambedkarism.
The kind of grassroots radicalism described in this paper shows conflictual, unsolicited and subversive interpretations of institutional norms of ‘empowerment’ by subordinated groups attacking local hierarchies. One way to describe the phenomenon is as a resilient political culture of emancipation despite attempts from above by international institutions and funding agencies to ‘professionalize’ it and ‘technicize’ it and therefore neutralize it. Whether depoliticization is intentional or not on the part of international institutions and donor agencies is not the subject of this article. Documenting how popular politics is apprehended at this level would require a specific enquiry. What the perspective from below has shown is that the fact that it is implemented on the ground by politicized activists represents one of the great paradoxes of NGOization, which can potentially bring unplanned political developments.
Nevertheless, the resources put at the disposal of these local organizations by funding agencies in the form of salaries, logistics and networks, remains double-edged for local activists, partly because of the insufficiency of funds but also due to constant uncertainty regarding the renewal of contracts. On my visit to the NCDHR’s headquarters in New Delhi in 2011, its leaders were worried that funding from the Ford Foundation would not be renewed because of a current refocusing on domestic poverty in the United States. DAD activists in U.P. were stressed about the precariousness of this funding program, which is why they also cultivated alternative resources from the state. They were aware of the risks posed by a psychological dependence on western funds and so they stigmatized the comforts of bigger, often foreign NGOs, referred to as ‘air-conditioned NGOs’.
Similar remarks have been made regarding the professional NGO sector in Palestine where the elitist lifestyles of NGO professionals are completely out of touch with the living conditions of villagers under Israeli occupation (Sbeih, 2014). However, in contrast with the disparities between people’s assertions at a local level and those of NGOs based in Palestine, I have been able to highlight certain consistencies between current NGOization and previous political mobilizations of Dalits in U.P. While refusing the co-option entailed by career opportunities in the NGO sector, DAG activists appear to be haunted by the uncertainty of their venture and aware of its contradictions. The political nature of their work means there is a constant risk of being sanctioned by donor agencies and yet obtaining additional funds means potentially being co-opted into the affluent middle-class lifestyles of the more affluent NGOs, thus becoming cut off from their social base. These anxieties place a question mark over the future sustainability of practicing radical politics against the grain of the NGO sector’s neo-liberal guidelines.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article is dedicated to Usha Devi, Motilal Behtu and Ram Kumar.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.