Participatory Democracy or ‘Transformative Appropriation’? The People’s Planning Campaign in Kerala

Abstract

This article seeks to make sense of a widely acclaimed political experiment in decentralisation and people-centred development in Kerala of the 1990s, the People’s Planning Campaign, by placing it within a wider contemporary history of politics in the region. Much celebratory literature on this experiment has tended to view it as essentially an extension of pre-existing political initiatives in the state associated with mainstream left parties. Moving away from this view, the present analysis views it as a political response of the mainstream left to various challenges it faced in the early 1990s, to throw light on the many contradictions of political decentralisation in Kerala. Further, it reflects on ‘glocalisation’ of participatory democracy in Kerala and the subject-positions it has produced.

Keywords

Kerala People’s Planning Campaign Kerala model participatory democracy glocalisation neoliberalism post-imperialist liberalism

Introduction

In India, the arrival of the neoliberal order in the 1990s was accompanied by a heightened discourse of democracy—understood as political decentralisation and ‘stakeholder involvement’. Since the mid-late 1980s, models of participatory democracy in India have been put forth not just by the oppositional civil society, but also quite explicitly by the state, through the rejuvenation of the debate around panchayati raj. Perhaps it is useful to remember Barry Hindess’ contention that ‘neo-liberalism’ may well be regarded as ‘post-imperialist liberalism’, and that liberalism was never just the defence of normative ideals but also—or even primarily—a form of governmental control in which the market is accorded an exemplary role.2

Barry Hindess, ‘Liberalism—What’s in a Name?’, in Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, ed. Wendy Larner and William Walters (London: Routledge, 2004), 23–26.

More importantly, it is concerned with determining ‘which individuals and which areas of conduct within the state can best be governed this way [i.e., through liberty] and which cannot, and with deciding what can be done about the latter’.3

Hindess, ‘Liberalism—What’s in a Name?’, 26.

Thus, it is hardly surprising that decentralisation, democracy and good governance came to be incorporated into the World Bank’s prescriptions for macroeconomic reform. As Cheema and Rondinelli note, ‘[The] International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other international organizations prescribed decentralization as part of the structural adjustment needed to restore markets, create or strengthen democracy, and promote good governance’.4

G.S. Cheema and D.A. Rondinelli, ‘From Government Decentralization to Decentralized Governance’, in Decentralzing Government: Emerging Concepts and Practices, ed. G. Shabeer Cheema and Dennis A. Rondinelli (Washington, DC: Brooking Institution Press, 2007), 4.

Nevertheless, there have been claims that the democratising component may well be separated and deployed against the marketising and individualising logic of neoliberalism. In their critical review of the new hegemonic democratic discourse of the 1990s, Cooke and Kothari point out that the stress on participation and local priorities was widely accepted in the South as an alternative to donor-driven development agendas.5

Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari, ‘The Case for Participation as Tyranny’, in Participation: The New Tyranny?, ed. B. Cooke and U. Kothari (London and New York, NY: Zed Books, 2001), 5.

The thrust against state capture by private interests was welcomed; strengthening local communities and shrinking the state both featured prominently in the new development agenda.6

Cheema and Rondinelli, ‘From Government Decentralization to Decentralized Governance’, 3–4.

Self-help to improve the productivity of the poor and project-based approaches to service delivery began to be advanced as alternatives to conventional welfare programmes and public services.7

G.D. Ponte, ‘The Changing Urban Discourse of the Multilateral Trade Institutions’, International Social Science Journal 54, no. 172 (2002): 205–16.

There is also much caution offered in the contemporary literature on globalisation about viewing political decentralisation as an exclusively top-down process and external imposition. The idea of ‘glocalization’,8

Roland Robertson, ‘Glocalization Theory: 2000+’, in Handbook of Social Theory, ed. George Ritzer and Barry Smart (London: SAGE Publications, 2001), 458–71; Thomas J. Courchene, ‘Glocalization: The Regional/International Interface’, Canadian Journal of Regional Science 17, no. 1 (1995): 1–20.

understood as the interpenetration of the global and the local resulting in unique outcomes in different geographic areas, for example, urges us to reject the view that globalisation processes, including the emergent agenda of governance, leads to the unambiguous dominance of neoliberal cultural and political ideals. The People’s Planning Campaign (henceforth, PPC) undertaken by the mainstream political left in Kerala9

T.M. Thomas Isaac and Richard W. Franke, Local Democracy and Development: People’s Campaign for Decentralised Planning in Kerala (Delhi: Left Word Books, 2000).

in the mid-1990s has been widely regarded as an experiment in deepening democracy through local governance and planning to fend off the deleterious impact of liberalisation and globalisation. Given this, PPC offers a good opportunity to reflect whether such ‘glocalising’ effort, if consciously undertaken, can overcome the dangers of the coupling of market and democracy within the post-imperialist liberal project.

The PPC was launched in August 1996 by the Left Democratic Front government (LDF from now) in Kerala, and it was hailed as a unique effort to draw in people as participants in planning for development and implementation of projects. Local bodies were to be substantially promoted as institutions of governance, and considerable financial devolution, which made available to these bodies some 35–40 per cent of the resources of the Ninth Plan, was approved. Efforts were also made to institutionalise local-level planning and implementation by setting up the Administrative Reforms Committee. The PPC was to unfold in six stages, the first of which (September–October 1997) was the convening of the local village assemblies, the Grama Sabhas, with maximum popular participation (special attention was to be paid to ensure participation of women) in which people were to voice their needs and demands through group discussions aided by trained facilitators. An estimated two million people took part in the assemblies, of which some 26.22 per cent were women. In the second phase (October–December 1997), assessments of local resources were made through participatory studies, presented as the Panchayat Development Report at Development Seminars to be attended by delegates from the Grama Sabhas. The report was to have a mandatory chapter on women and development. The third phase (November 1997–March 1998) was the election of ‘Task forces’ for various sectors, consisting of elected representatives, experts and activists, who were to formulate projects. Gender impact statements were made mandatory for all projects and a separate task force was set up for women’s development projects. The fourth phase (March–June 1998) involved plan finalisation at the local level in meetings of elected representatives, and the plan document was to have a separate chapter on women’s development projects, with 10 per cent of the resources set apart for the Women’s Component Plan. The fifth phase (April–July 1998) consisted of the integration of local plans at the block and district levels, and the final phase (May–October 1998) was the formulation of a State Plan from the District Plans, in which the local-level plans were to be evaluated by the District Planning Committees. In this phase, the Voluntary Technical Corps were raised, consisting of retired government officials with various technical skills, to help the local bodies to assess the feasibility of the plans.10

For a detailed account, see Isaac and Franke, Local Democracy and Development.

The PPC opened the era of decentralised governance in Kerala and the most-lauded features of Kerala’s local government system, which persist to varying degrees today, were shaped by it. It has been often celebrated as a democratic alternative to neoliberal models of local governance.11

C. Saito and R. Kato, ‘Contrasting Experiences of Decentralization in Two States of India’, in Foundations for Local Governance: Decentralization in Comparative Perspective, ed. F. Saito (Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag, 2008), 93–111; Patrick Heller, ‘Local Democracy and Development in Comparative Perspective’, in Consolidating Developmental Local Government: Lessons from the South African Experience, ed. Mirjam van Donk, Mark Swilling, Edgar Pieterse and Susan Parnell (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2008), 153–74; John Harriss, ‘Social Capital Construction and the Consolidation of Civil Society in Rural Areas’, Working Paper No. 00-16, London: London School of Economics and Political Science (2001); Patrick Heller, K.N. Harilal and Shubham Choudhury, ‘Building Local Democracy: Evaluating the Impact of Decentralization in Kerala, India’, World Development 35, no. 4 (2007): 626–48; Sandbrook Richard, Marc Edelman, Patrick Heller & Judith Teichman, Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, and Prospects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); T.M. Thomas Isaac, ‘Women Elected Representatives in Kerala (1995–2000): From Symbolism to Empowerment’, in Decentralization and Local Governance: Essays for George Mathew, ed. G. Mathew and L.C. Jain (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2005), 366–416.

Assessments of its performance, however, have been markedly mixed from the earliest years. Researchers have noted some success in providing basic needs, such as water supply and housing, but have voiced apprehensions over its sustainability.12

G. Gopikkuttan, ‘Public Housing Schemes for the Rural Poor in Kerala: A Critical Study of their Suitability’, Discussion Paper No.9, Kerala Research Programme on Local Level-Development, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram (2002); C.Santhakumar, G. Gopikkuttan, P. Kodoth, T. P. Sreedharan & V. Sasikumar, ‘Procedural Changes Required for Making Local Self-Government’s Role Effective in Rural Housing in Kerala’, Research and Policy Note No.1, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram (2008).

While the broadening of welfare disbursements is acknowledged, the same scholars’ voice widespread and persistent concern about the local bodies’ inability to boost productive investments and their excessive interest in highly individualised and consumption-oriented welfare distribution.13

Heller et al., ‘Building Local Democracy’. N.D. Gopinathan Nair, ‘People’s Planning: The Kerala Experience’, Discussion Paper No. 16, Kerala Research Programme on Local-level Development, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram (2000); N.D. Gopinathan Nair and P. Krishnakumar, ‘Public Participation and Sustainability of Community Assets Created under the People’s Planning Programme in Kerala: Selected Case Studies’, Discussion Paper No. 60, Kerala Research Programme on Local-level Development, Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram (2004); Rashmi Sharma, Local Government in India: Policy and Practice (New Delhi: Manohar, 2009); Abhilash Babu, ‘Governmentality, Active Citizenship, and Marginalization: The Case of Rural Drinking Water Supply in Kerala, India’, Asian Social Science 5, no.11(2009): 89–98.

There is also serious concern that the funds allocated to Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST) welfare have not been utilised in ways that improve the condition of these groups.14

Sharma, Local Government in India. Government of Kerala (GoK), ‘Report of the Committee for Decentralized Planning and Development’ (Thiruvananthapuram: Kerela Government, 2009), 124.

Also, research notes that the local bodies are often powerless to deal with a range of externally induced political and developmental effects, ranging from agricultural price variations to the growth of a ‘real-estate mafia’.15

K N. Harilal, ‘Redesigning Local Governance in India: Lessons from the Kerala Experiment’, in Foundations for Local Governance: Decentralization in Comparative Perspective, ed. F. Saito (Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag, 2008), 75–92. GoK, ‘Report of the Committee for Decentralized Planning and Development’, 68.

Others have raised the issue of opaqueness of the political process—conforming to participatory rhetoric on the surface but letting earlier practices survive below—and the absence of social movements supportive of local governance.16

Olle Tornquist, ‘The Politics of Democratic Decentralisation’, in A Decade of Decentralisation in Kerala, ed. M. A. Oommen (New Delhi: Har Anand Publications, 2007), 23–40.

There is a very large literature that points to some degree of success in addressing women’s practical needs, and the starkness of failure in raising their strategic interests.17

N.V. Nair and John S. Moolakkattu, ‘Women Component Plan at the Village Panchayat Level in Kerala: Does it Live Up to its Promise?’ Indian Journal of Gender Studies 21, no. 2 (2014): 247–76; Suma Scaria, ‘A Dictated Space? Women and Their Well-being in a Kerala Village’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies 21, no. 3 (2014): 421–49.

Very recent research on development planning in Kerala’s local bodies reveal a loss in planning freedom at the bottom and very heavy bureaucratisation.18

K.N. Harilal, ‘Confronting Bureaucratic Capture: Rethinking Participatory Planning Methodology in Kerala’, Economic & Political Weekly XLVIII, no. 36 (2014): 52–68.

Mandatory projects now take a very large share of the plan funds compared to earlier periods; meanwhile earlier problems, such as poor performance in the productive sector and overwhelming dominance of individualised welfare distribution seem to have become stable features.19

Vipin R. Kumar, ‘Decentralisation and Planning: Development Intervention of Local Self-government Institutions in Kerala’ (Doctoral thesis submitted to Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala, 2015).

From the mid-1990s to around 2010, ‘development and governance from below’ was most often closely identified with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), and this clearly echoes in the academic literature on the PPC including in very recent writings.20

For example, John Harriss and O. Tornquist, ‘Comparative Notes on Indian Experiences of Social Democracy: Kerala and West Bengal’, Simon Papers in Security and Development No. 39 (2015), http://folk.uio.no/ollet/files/Draft-Harriss-Tornquist-28-01-15-Kerala-WB.pdf (accessed 2 November 2015).

In this article, my concern is with the PPC as a political project, specifically of the dominant left in Kerala represented by the major party in the LDF, CPM, and not its development achievements. In other words, I seek to argue that the PPC of the 1990s in Kerala was not just a simple continuation of slogan of public welfare familiar in Kerala, but an attempt by the mainstream political left to renew itself under perceived hostile conditions: challenges from other forms of democratic politics and the looming economic, social and political consequences of liberalisation and globalisation. This is not the same as the commonplace cynicism of the late 1990s, which saw the PPC an arrangement to perpetuate the CPM’s institutional clout. This fear was raised in the context of the invitation sent by the LDF government to S.B. Sen (who was the Vice-Chairman of the State Planning Board in West Bengal) to head the Committee on Decentralisation of Powers. As Sharma21

Rashmi Sharma, ‘Kerala’s Decentralisation: Ideas in Practice’, Economic & Political Weekly 38,

no. 36 (2003): 3835–36.

pointed out, this sounded strange if only because in matters of social development, it was West Bengal that had to learn from Kerala. However, I argue that this view is perhaps too narrow; political decentralisation and local planning exemplified in the PPC were not a short-term tactic to cling to power but as a long-term strategy to refurbish hegemony.22

The argument that the non-left coalition, the United Democratic Front (UDF), which came to power after the LDF lost the elections in 2001, set back the pace of decentralisation and was essentially hostile to bottoms-up development is much heard. The claim that the UDF fundamentally altered the design and structure of decentralisation in irreversible ways at that time still lacks strong empirical backing. But it seems that the present UDF government’s policies may be undermining the local bodies in more fundamental ways (Harilal, 2014; Kumar, ‘Decentralisation and Planning’). There is also the admission by admirers that this strategy of the CPM has tapered off to a dead end politically (John Harriss and O. Tornquist, ‘Comparative Notes on Indian Experiences of Social Democracy: Kerala and West Bengal’).

As such, the argument that the PPC was an attempt by the mainstream left to renew itself under the hostile conditions of the late twentieth century is not new. It has been made earlier, in very different ways—sympathetically by Tornquist and Tharakan,23

Olle Tornquist and P.K. Michael Tharakan, The Next Left? Democratisation and the Attempts to Renew the Radical Political Development Project—The Case of Kerala (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Report Series, No. 24, 1995).

and more critically by Mannathukaren.24

Nissim Mannathukaren, ‘The Conjuncture of “Late Socialism” in Kerala: A Critique of the Narrative of Social Democracy’, in Development, Democracy, and the State: Critiquing the Kerala Model of Development, ed. K. Ravi Raman (London and New York: Routledge 2010), 157–74.

Despite their differences, these accounts argue that the PPC was indeed a political project, one of refurbishing the hegemony of the left, which had been under threat from a variety of forces. I build critically upon their insights through recounting the contemporary history of politics in the region, which takes a broader view of the political field emergent in Kerala in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Highlighting the importance of the crisis that hit the mainstream left—represented by CPM here by the early 1990s, I contend, would help us to make sense of the many contradictions that riddled this project, most of which have been simply ignored or reduced by the admirers of PPC.25

The PPC has often been compared with that of ‘municipal socialism’ in Porto Alegre, Brazil. However, such comparisons rarely consider the fact that the CPM continues to be highly centralised, quite unlike the left led by the Workers’ Party in Brazil, which was a loose coalition of a number of broadly left political perspectives (Gianpaulo Baiocchi (ed.), Radicals in Power: Experiments in Urban Democracy in Brazil [London: Zed Press, 2003]).

The ‘Hegemony’ of the Left in Mid-twentieth Century Kerala

The decades following independence were the heyday of left politics in Kerala, during which it successfully steered popular demands for health, land, housing, education and higher wages, towards the developmental state.26

Robin Jeffrey, Politics, Women and Well-being: How Kerala Became ‘A Model’ (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 150–211.

Left parties led by the Communist Party successfully brought together several underprivileged groups and put pressure on the state for welfare resources. ‘Political society’ in the sense that Partha Chatterjee uses the concept,27

Partha Chatterjee, ‘On Civil and Political Societies in Post-colonial Democracies’, in Civil Society: History and Possibilities, ed. Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2003), 165–78.

shorn of its normative load, and in the plural, is useful to characterise left politics in Kerala in these times: to refer to the many diverse groups excluded from civil society and at the fringes of organised politics. The consolidation of the Malayali leftist ‘national popular’ between the late 1930s and the 1960s, a process which accompanied the militant redistributionist politics mentioned above, did allow several ‘political societies’—groups such as landless squatters and head-load workers—and their ‘unconstitutional struggles’ to proliferate. Many of these groups were subsequently absorbed into the organised left, into a certain citizenship that claimed state welfare as ‘peoples’ right’, and such absorption was mediated by members of civil communities, such as school teachers.28

Jeffrey, Politics, Women and Well-being.

The gains made by the poor have been indisputable, as the ‘Kerala Model’ literature shows.29

Ibid.; Parayil Govindan (ed.) Kerala- the Development Experience: Reflections on Sustainability and Replicability (London and New York: Zed Books, 2001).

It is necessary, however, to have a clearer view of the nature of communist hegemony. Elaborating on his notion of ‘hegemony’, Gramsci pointed out that while the supremacy of a particular group can be manifest as ‘domination’ or ‘intellectual and moral leadership’, hegemony in a parliamentary regime combined the two to attain a reciprocal balance, without force predominating consent.30

John Storey (ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf and University of Georgia Press, 1994), 215.

Hegemony ‘presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed’.31

Ibid., 216.

Hegemony is thus neither permanent nor even stable. For this reason, it needs refurbishing.

In Kerala, communist hegemony was built gradually over the decades of the 1930s. Its substantial victory in articulating a vision of united Kerala and leading the movement for unification was an important step in this direction, and the idea of development—as a catch-all for wealth creation, social welfare, and economic redistribution—soon became central to the conception of Kerala as a subnational entity32

J. Devika, ‘A People United in Development: Developmentalism in Modern Malayali Identity’, Working Paper No. 386, Thiruvananthapuram: Centre for Development Studies (2007b).

by the 1940s and 1950s. This was, of course, bolstered by the hegemonic presence of Nehruvian developmentalism in the space of the Indian nation in the immediate post-independence decades.33

Satish Deshpande, Contemporary India: A Sociological View (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003).

In Kerala, the communists successfully developed a version of developmentalism, harnessed to egalitarian political goals.34

J. Devika, ‘Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in Kerala State, India’, Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 3 (2010): 799–820.

The public policy which emerged from the left in Kerala was of course hotly contested by economically and socially dominant caste and religious community organisations and indeed, the first communist government in Kerala was brought down through their combined agitation.35

Jeffrey, Politics, Women and Well-being.

This attack, however, did not affect the effectiveness of the egalitarian developmentalist ideology that made use of already existing demands and aspirations, reinterpreting them within a leftist framework. For example, the demand for expanded public welfare which pre-existed the communists was redone substantially and established as a core element of egalitarian developmentalism, articulated in texts like Onnekaalkodi Malayalikal (‘One and Quarter Crore Malayalis’) by the communist theoretician and leader, E.M.S. Nambutiripad, the chief minister in the first communist ministry (1946). In other words, socialist and redistributive aspects were built into developmentalism substantially by the communists, and these attained the status of common sense through very vigorous propaganda.36

Ibid. Egalitarian developmentalism however retained the thrust of Nehruvian developmentalism on large-scale industries and centralised systems of government, even though leaders like E.M.S. Nambutiripad often espoused the decentralised government (Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, ‘Writers’ Building and the Reality of Decentralized Rural Power: Some Paradoxes and Reversals’, in Local Governance in India: Decentralization and Beyond, ed. N. Gopal-Jayal, A. Prakash and P.K. Sharma [New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006], 91–124).

Also, as Prerna Singh notes, since both the communist- and Congress-led governments were faced with uncertainty of tenure, both remained mindful of the popular demands that were shaped by the Malayali subnationalism37

Prerna Singh, ‘We-ness and Welfare: A Longitudinal Analysis of Social Development in Kerala, India’, World Development 39, no. 2 (2011): 282–93.

—which was a vehicle of leftist cultural hegemony. Further, the international context of decolonisation, and left-dominance of Kerala’s public sphere and the literary public (elements of which often clashed with the official left) were vital in bolstering the communist hegemony between the 1950s and the 1980s.

The compromises that characterised communist hegemony were in their agenda for socio-economic change. Here, their commitment to freedom and modernity was strictly limited. While in some contexts, the communists upheld equal rights for women, they largely conceded to conservative gender values, even in militant trade unions with a majority of women members.38

Anna Lindberg, Experience and Identity: A Historical Account of Class, Caste and Gender among the Cashew Workers of Kerala, 1930–2000 (Lund: Department of History, University of Lund, 2001).

The Women Question was posed as a developmental, not political, question.39

J. Devika, ‘Modernity with Democracy? Gender and Governance in the People’s Planning Campaign, Kerala’, in Engendering Governance Institutions: State, Market and Civil Society, ed. Smita Mishra-Panda (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2008), 57–80.

This was also the case with the caste question, as Dalit critics from Kerala have recently argued.40

Susie Tharu and K. Satyanarayana, No Alphabet in Sight: New Dalit Writing from South India, Dossier I: Tamil and Malayalam (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2011).

The land reforms piloted by the communists in the early 1970s clearly benefitted the middle- and upper-caste Hindus, Syrian Christians and Muslim peasants and not the actual, largely Dalit tillers of the land—who were given land not as a productive resource but as a welfare benefit.41

Devika, ‘Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in Kerala State, India’.

Besides these, there were groups whose traditional capabilities were severely undervalued as the region came to be integrated into the World System—particularly tribal people and the fisher communities, which were largely left out of the politics of redistribution. John Kurien refers to these groups as ‘outliers’ of the Kerala Model.42

John Kurien, ‘The Kerala Model: Its Central Tendency and the “Outlier”’, in Kerala: The Development Experience, ed. G. Parayail (London and New York, NY: Zed Books, 2000), 178–97.

These, then, were also the groups most likely to withdraw consent to hegemony.

The limits of the ‘Kerala Model’ seemed to have been reached by the end of the 1980s and the state faced serious fiscal crisis for its social development achievements were not based on expanding production.43

K.K. George, Limits to Kerala Model of Development: An Analysis of Fiscal Crisis and Its Implications (Thiruvananthapuram: Centre for Development Studies, Monograph Series, 1993).

Also, by the 1970s, the migration to the Gulf began to create pockets of affluence.44

B.A. Prakash, ‘Gulf Migration and its Economic Impacts: The Kerala Experience’, Economic & Political Weekly 33, no. 50 (1998): 3209–13.

This helped avert an economic crisis but brought new challenges, primarily through making inequalities conspicuously visible, especially through consumerism.45

G. Parayil and T.T. Sreekumar, ‘Social Space, Civil Society and Transformative Politics of the New Social Movements in Kerala’, in Development, Democracy, and the State: Critiquing the Kerala Model of Development, ed. K. Ravi Raman (London, New York: Routledge, 2010), 245.

Indeed, consumerism seemed to be posed to bring about a fundamental change in the very perception of modernity in Kerala.46

Harold Wilhite, Consumption and the Transformation of Everyday Life: A View from South India (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

The same period—between the 1970s and 1990s—saw a shift in civil society—which looked less Gramscian,47

To Gramsci, the consent of the ruled to domination, which is for him, a key aspect of power, rests in the civil society, which he compares to the series of trenches and redoubts which surround a fortress guarding it from direct attack. The state pursues hegemony in this sphere through the church, educational and cultural institutions, etc. For him, civil society is more the sphere of hegemony than of freedom (J.A. Buttigieg, ‘Gramsci on Civil Society’, Boundary 2 22, no. 3 [1995]: 1–32).

and more like an oppositional space from which to challenge the exclusions of organised politics and the developmentalist state.48

Parayil and Sreekumar, ‘Social Space, Civil Society and Transformative Politics of the New Social Movements in Kerala’.

While its interlocutors were clearly educated middle-class people who had benefited from the expansion of welfare in the 1950s and 1960s, it provided a space for diverse movements challenging developmentalism and its concomitants, such as modernised patriarchy and casteism (as distinct from patriarchy and caste oppression shaped by pre-modern institutions and ideologies and perpetuated through custom). Voices sceptical of the mainstream left began to be heard more frequently from civil society after the 1970s, ranging from Naxalite critiques to public pleas on behalf of incarcerated psychiatric patients. Three cultural pillars of the mainstream left in Kerala—faith in the desirability of large-scale development, the notion of social justice rooted in the rhetoric of class struggle and the consecration of the consumption-oriented bourgeois domestic ideal as the best and possible social arrangement—came to be questioned. The first came under attack with increasing reflexivity regarding industrial development, a sharper perception of risk. The second and the third were destabilised when, from the early 1980s into the 1990s, women, tribal people, fisherfolk and Dalits—began to emerge into public view. The feminists challenged formal politics’ understanding of power as merely a resource or at best a relation by pointing to the non-sovereign nature of patriarchal power49

Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–77, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1980).

which rendered it much less visible, if all the more pervasive and effective. They sought to highlight the extent to which progressivism in Kerala also rested heavily on patriarchal power which underlay the taken-for-grantedness of the unequal gender divide there. Indeed, they hinted at the possibility that challenging such power called for activism that engaged not just formal politics but also the market and civil society.50

J. Devika, ‘Feminism and Late Twentieth-century Governmentality in Kerala, India: Towards a Critical History’, in Feminist Subversion and Complicity: Governmentalities and Gender Knowledge in South Asia, ed. Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay (New Delhi: Zubaan, Forthcoming).

The acceleration of such critiques did not add up to, say, a phase of ‘reflexive modernization’ in Kerala’s context—that is, we were not witnessing significant ‘reflex’ social action to the experience of an earlier phase of modernity here. Some of these definitely constructed Malayali modernity reflexively, that is, as Ulrich Beck says of reflexive modernity, it became ‘a theme and a problem for itself’.51

Ulrich Beck, ‘The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization’, in Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, ed. U. Beck, A. Giddens and S. Lash (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 8.

However, others stayed well-within the concerns of early mid-twentieth century modernisers. Nevertheless, they did become forces to reckon with in and through Kerala’s vibrant public sphere, and did shake the very foundations of communist hegemony in the state. These movements crucially widened the scope of leftist politics, expanding it to the institutions deemed external to it earlier, and bringing in a host of new issues to be legitimately regarded as ‘political’. In sum, in the 1990, the dominant left faced serious political challenge from three locally emergent forces: feminism and environmentalism, which advanced other notions of leftist politics, and consumerism, which unleashed the processes of depoliticisation.

Responses to Environmentalism and Feminism

The first environmental struggle in Kerala emerged directly counter to the industrial policies shaped by the developmentalism promoted by the communists.52

Abey George and Jyoti Krishnan, ‘River, People and Industry: The Politics and Pollution of River Chaliyar’, Report submitted to the KRPLLD (Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India, 2002).

However, environmentalism was introduced here by groups with roots both within and outside the communist circles. Ex-Naxalite intellectuals and groups, romantic nature-lovers, and, importantly, communist activists and intellectuals who were disillusioned by the dominant developmentalism of the CPM who came together in the People’s Science Movement, the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat (KSSP), contributed environmentalisms of different shades. Communist labour unions vehemently opposed the leftist intellectuals who moved away from the state-modernist camp towards environmentalism, and this, by the 1990s, had proven deeply divisive. While labour was deeply against environmental objections,53

Olle Tornquist, ‘The New Popular Politics of Development: Kerala’s Experience’, in Kerala—the Development Experience: Reflections on Sustainability and Replicability, ed. Govindan Parayil (London: Zed Books, 2000), 116–38.

the largely middle-class leadership was not necessarily so; yet the divides were deep indeed.54

In his reminiscences, M.P. Parameswaran, a leading CPM intellectual who led the KSSP—the People’s Science Movement which was very close to the CPM—recalls thus about the debate on the dam-building that would have destroyed the ecologically unique Silent Valley in North Kerala in the early 1980s (M.P. Parameswaran, Janakeeyasastra Prasthaanam [Thrissur: Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat, 2014], 75–76).

However, the communist middle-class intelligentsia’s interest in environmentalism was couched in the language of instrumentalism and within the logic of the cost–benefit analysis. The positions taken by the KSSP on environmental issues in the 1980s reflects this very well indeed. Even as it was critical of Nehruvian developmentalism, it chose to characterise other positions that opposed instrumentalism as ‘environmental fundamentalism’.55

M.P. Parameswaran, Janakeeyasastra Prasthaanam, 75–76.

Feminism, similarly, was sought by women activists associated with communist organisations and circles, especially by those who were disillusioned by the male dominance within party organisations and sought a civil social platform.56

Monica Erwer, Challenging the Gender Paradox: Women’s Collective Agency and the Transformation of Kerala Politics (Goteborg: Department of Peace and Development Research, Goteborg University, 2003).

However, other feminist groups of the late 1980s which sprang from outside were viewed with great suspicion and resentment. The CPM campaigned against the National Conference of Indian Women’s Movements which was held at Kozhikode in north Kerala in 1990, accusing it of receiving foreign funding, and feminists were painted as immoral harridans out to destroy families.57

Erwer, Challenging the Gender Paradox, 208.

But while these feminist groups were small, they too received a great deal of attention from the media, and were widely noticed as an open and persistent challenge to communist hegemony.

However, despite these suspicions about feminism there were efforts in the KSSP, led by women activists closely connected to the CPM, to propose a more ‘developmentalist’ feminism, which held out the promise of a new universalistic public activism, that of ‘development’.58

Ibid., 197–98.

However, the developmentalist feminists’ chief interest was in a pedagogic role within the new space of civil public activism—the question as it appeared to them seems to have been whether women’s citizenship may be secured through a new culture of learning without violently disrupting but gradually eroding patriarchal social arrangements, especially the modern conjugal family. ‘Developmentalist feminism’ thus differed significantly in its thrust on civility, in its willingness to be proximate to the state and its stress on pedagogic relations and reformist orientation in the struggle against patriarchy.

Women entered the KSSP’s Total Literacy Campaign in 1990 in large numbers: 18,000 women took part in it as activists and teachers.59

Erwer, Challenging the Gender Paradox, 199.

Monica Erwer, who interviewed women leaders in the KSSP in the1990s remarks that they did have a consensus in the 1990s.60

Ibid., 198.

On the one hand, their demand was that women’s issues should be treated as a ‘general’ question, and not as representing a group interest. On the other hand, this conciliatory position was tied to high faith in the power of pedagogy. Erwer notes that the women leaders clearly indicated in their interviews with her that literacy activism attracted many women because it did not demand the breach of new elite gender norms and respectability, and indeed, built on them.61

Ibid., 200.

This seems to have been carried into the post-literacy campaign women’s forums that emerged within the KSSP, called Samata, which were intended to train women to utilise the opportunities that were to emerge in political decentralisation.62

Ibid., 200–01.

While the KSSP aspired to be a bridge connecting the CPM’s women’s wing with feminist ideas,63

Ibid., 298–300.

it ultimately ended up as a space in which feminist political goals and strategies were recast in non-threatening moulds so that they could be readily reappropriated by the dominant left parties in the discourse of the PPC.

The above moves are perhaps understood as a ‘transformist appropriation’ of political challenges by the CPM, in some ways similar to the ‘transformist’ nature of New Labour described by Stuart Hall.64

Stuart Hall, ‘New Labour’s Double Shuffle’, Soundings 24 (2003): 10–24.

‘Transformism’ refers to the absorption of ‘conflicting political demands into a “consensus of the well-intentioned”...This did not produce enemies, but it did specify an extreme’.65

Oscar Reyes, ‘Skinhead Conservatism: A Failed Populist Project’, in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Fransisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005), 101.

It points to a regime which constantly works on a dominant and a subaltern strand, transforming the latter to the terms of the former, resulting in a dynamic hybrid formation.66

Hall, ‘New Labour’s Double Shuffle’, 19 analyses New Labour and identifies the two strands as neoliberal and social democratic, dominant and subaltern, respectively.

In this case, the dominant strand was masculinist-developmentalism, while the subaltern strands consisted of the political and ecological alternatives advanced by feminists and environmentalists. Scholars who have researched the empirical shaping of neoliberal regimes argue that such hybridity is a feature of neoliberalism.67

Catherine Kingfisher (ed.), Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women’s Poverty (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). K. England and K. Ward (eds), Neoliberalism: States, Networks, Peoples (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).

The impact of globalisation—in a broader sense, as Malayalees had begun to slowly turn away from the nation state and towards the international job market for employment since the 1970s—was also becoming apparent by the early 1990s, with very complex social repercussions. Writing soon after the heady days of the PPC, Olle Tornquist reposed hope in its potential to alleviate a situation he sketched out thus:

...while public consumption is being reduced...the comparatively high level of private consumption...is being maintained by the labours of young Keralites...But, just as former tenants have turned petty bourgeois and seldom work together with others to produce more on the lands they obtained through the land reforms, the incomes earned by migrants are individual in nature, and are often spent unproductively.68

Olle Tornquist, ‘The New Popular Politics of Development: Kerala’s Experience’, 119–20.

Doing fieldwork in Kerala in the early 1990s, Ritty Lukose noted a cultural shift from a political public devoted to the nation to a civic public based on discourses of consumption to be ongoing.69

Ritty Lukose, ‘Empty Citizenship: Protesting Politics in the Era of Globalization’, Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 4 (2005): 506–33.

However, consumerism was never really acknowledged as a problem for the communists in any direct sense at this time. Yet its political effects were beginning to be identified.

Adding to this were shifts in the national scene: the politics of public finance in India which gradually shaped a full-fledged fiscal crisis by the end of the 1980s. By early 1990s, Kerala’s financial problems worsened and have continued to be serious right into the heyday of the PPC and after.70

Planning Commission, Kerala Development Report (New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2008); K. Ravi Raman, ‘Asian Development Bank, Conditionalities, and Social Democratic Governance’, Development, Democracy, and the State: Critiquing the Kerala Model of Development, ed. K. Ravi Raman (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 135–56.

The overall fiscal deficit rose from 3.67 per cent to 7.26 per cent of the gross state domestic product in 1999–2000.71

GoK, White Paper on State Finances, (Thiruvananthapuram, 2001).

The gross fiscal deficit had been growing a very high rates since the 1980s, and now rose fourfold between 1994 and 2000.72

For a detailed analysis, see K.M. Abraham, ‘Kerala: The Fiscal Crisis and its Aftermath’, in Kerala’s Economic Development: Performance and Problems in the Post-liberalisation Period, ed. B.A. Prakash (New Delhi: SAGE Publications [First edition, 1999], 2004), 374–416; N.J. Kurian and J. Abraham, ‘The Financial Crisis: An Analysis’, in Kerala’s Economic Development: Issues and Problems, ed. B.A. Prakash (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1999), 326–59.

By the early 1990s, there was a growing consensus that the Kerala Model of development was in crisis. In this debate, the concern was about the continuing stagnation in Kerala’s economic growth.73

Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), ‘Kerala Economy at the Crossroads’, Special Issues on Kerala (1990), 25 and 35–37.

These discussions percolated into the Malayalam public sphere and the International Congress on Kerala Studies organised by the CPM’s AKG Centre for Research and Studies in 1994 highlighted the ‘crisis of the Kerala Model’ as a key theme.74

E.M.S. Namboodiripad, ‘Ullu Thuranna Samvaadam Aavashyam’ [An Open and Free Debate is Necessary], Speech at the International Congress on Kerala Studies, Thiruvananthapuram (26–27 August 1994), 8, http://www.keralapadanacongress.in/sites/default/files/EMS%20SPEECH.pdf (accessed 13 April 2011).

And even as these concerns were being raised, the gains in social development seemed to be under threat as well. Expenditure on education and health care, already declining in the 1980s, continued to fall at accelerating rates in the early 1990s as well.75

A.V. George and S.S. Nair, ‘An Overview of the Health Scenario of Kerala’, in Kerala’s Economic Development: Performance and Problems in the Post –Liberalisation Period, ed. B.A. Prakash (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2004), 319–34; For more detailed analysis, see D. Varatharajan, ‘Impact of Fiscal Crisis on Public Health Services in Kerala’, in Kerala’s Economic Development: Performance and Problems in the Post–Liberalisation Period, ed. B.A. Prakash (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2004), 335–58; M.A. Oommen, ‘Freedom, Economic Reform, and the Kerala ‘Model’, in Development, Democracy, and the State: Critiquing the Kerala Model of Development, ed. K. Ravi Raman (London, New York: Routledge, 2010), 75.

Nevertheless, the crucial context of rethinking economic strategy and political framework was that fall of the Soviet Union, which triggered Marxist intellectuals here into considering alternate means of accelerating economic growth without compromising on social development and ‘national pride’.76

T.M. Thomas Isaac and K.N. Harilal, Keezhadangalinte Arthasastram [The Political Economy of Surrender] (Kozhikode: Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishat, 1991), 162–76.

They identified decentralisation as the fundamental political structure for the proposed nationalist economic alternative77

Isaac and Harilal, Keezhadangalinte Arthasastram, 176.

to counter the ills of both liberalisation and the Nehruvian developmentalist framework.78

Ibid., 176–77.

Decentralisation was identified as a crucial precondition for an agricultural growth strategy rooted in regional and local planning and the effective way of mobilising human power in rural areas for a fresh thrust in agriculture79

Ibid., 177.

It continued to be projected as a shield against the neoliberal global order even after the CPM began to deal with the Asian Development Bank.80

T.M. Thomas Isaac, Decentralisation, Democracy and Development (Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala State Planning Board, 1998).

The Search for Solutions

The PPC sought to begin by projecting the ‘people’ as the major historical agent of social transformation and economic growth, in a much broader sense than ever before. It is important to stress the contradictory pulls that the dominant left was trying to negotiate. Dismissing them as the strategies of a neoliberal Trojan Horse would ignore the fact that the CPM is primarily a political force, a political agent, and not merely a governmental one. The deepening of the fiscal crisis in the mid-1990s perhaps pointed to the impending possibility of a change in the core of the welfare-oriented characteristic of the government in Kerala. However, the CPM in power, being primarily a political agent, could not passively implement those. Rather, it had to renew its moral standing with traditional supporters—anxieties about waning influence among these groups were being voiced in the mid-1990s.81

Quoted in Erwer, Challenging the Gender Paradox, 141.

More importantly, it sought to extend influence to new groups. There is the reason to think that the CPM may have sought to expand its base not just in class terms but also in gender terms, given the general emphasis on gender equity in the national and global thrust towards decentralised governance in these times. The working class base of the CPM was not much threatened, and this seems to be intact more recently too. For instance, according to the CPM’s official statistics, even in 2008,82

Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), ‘Nineteenth Party Congress Political and Organizational Report’ (2008), http://cpim.org/documents/2008-19cong-pol-orgreport.pdf (accessed 24 September 2010).

members of the CPM in Kerala hailed largely from the ‘working classes’ and ‘agricultural labour’, constituting 53.48 per cent and 24.90 per cent of the total membership, respectively. The ‘middle-class’ accounted for a miniscule 2.56 per cent. In post-liberalisation times, when the middle class enjoyed rising visibility and voice, the PPC, led by the educated left-leaning middle-class intellectuals of the KSSP, may have aimed at securing more middle-class support to the CPM. Therefore, what the dominant left attempted in the PPC and after was neither an attempt to bolster declining membership or support bases, nor a direct form of marketisation or concession to capital, but the renewal of its moral and political standing, and an extension of its support base.

I argue that in Kerala, these heterogeneous imperatives came to be managed very soon through a division of leftist political space into the two specific domains, ‘high politics’ and ‘local governance’. They differ from each other in crucial ways, four of which are relevant here. First, is in the degree of activity and autonomy. The former is characterised by a certain hyperactivity especially in political decisions and policy innovation; this is demonstrated by the many dramatic instances of state action undertaken by leaders, including the dramatic ushering of the PPC itself (called the ‘big-bang approach’) and the more recent ‘Munnar demolitions’ by the then LDF chief minister V.S. Achuthanandan.83

Mannathukaren, ‘The Conjuncture of ‘Late Socialism’. The ‘Munnar demolitions’ refer to the decision taken by the LDF Chief Minister V.S. Achutanandan to demolish illegal encroachments which included ninety-one buildings, some of which were high-end tourism resorts, at Munnar and surrounding areas in north Kerala. A three-member hand-picked team of top bureaucrats led the move, which generated unprecedented public support for V.S. Achutanandan, who termed it a crusade to redistribute the land to the landless poor and protect this ecologically fragile zone. See R. Krishnakmar, ‘Challenging Task’, in Frontline 24, 14, July 14-27, http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2414/stories/20070727003503100.htm (accessed 14 April 2016).

In contrast, local governance is markedly less dramatic, characterised by adherence to rule and procedure, and is squarely under the supervision and guardianship of agencies, such as the Department of Local Self-Government, the Planning Board and the Ombudsman.

Second, the modes of rule prominent in each differ. In ‘high politics’, the political and moral authoritarianism and use of force, if not violence, to silence critics, is amply evident, whereas in ‘local governance’, there is more concession to consensus building. Third, the institutional forms that populate these spaces are strikingly different. The former represents statewide politics with direct links to the national scene, and is the seat of both legislative and executive power. In contrast, the domain of local governance consists of a number of interconnected governable units—the different tiers of the panchayats that rest on the basic unit of the ‘neighbourhood group’. These are ‘hypermoralized communities’ of neoliberal governance, as Nikolas Rose84

Nikolas Rose, ‘Governing the Social’, in The Future of Social Theory, ed. N. Gane (London and New York, NY: Viva-Continuum, 2007), 182.

calls them. In M.P. Parameswaran’s words, the neighbourhood group is ‘a unit that lies in between a joint family and a commune, in size and mutual relationship…a true extended family in which every house is a home for all’.85

Empowering People: Insights from a Local Experiment in Participatory Planning (New Delhi: Daanish Books, 2005), 157–58.

Fourth, the relation of each domain to capital is also different: while in high politics, leaders struggle to smoothly translate the earlier agenda of state-led large-scale industrialised development into approval for predatory neoliberal growth, the domain of local governance tries out ‘sustainable and small-scale development programmes’ and even tries to fight predatory capital, as in Plachimada, where the panchayat took on Coco-Cola.86

K. Ravi Raman, ‘Transverse Solidarity: Water, Power and Resistance’, Review of Radical Political Economics 42, no. 2 (2010a): 251–68. It must not be assumed, however, that these are watertight compartments. In panchayats in north Kerala where the CPM forms a strong ‘moral community’ bound together by ties of affect (Ruchi Chaturvedi, ‘Violence, Justice, and a “People’s Democracy” in Kerala, South India’, Paper presented at session, Democracy, Anti-Democracy: People’s Politics in the Global South, at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting [3–6 April 2008], Atlanta), the moral authoritarianism of the left is quite alive. Fieldwork on urban governance in Kerala also revealed that the local governments in urban spaces try to actively translate ‘development’ as ‘growth’, quite like in the domain of high politics (J. Devika and Binitha V. Thampi, New Lamps for Old? Gender Paradoxes of Political Decentralization in Kerala [New Delhi: Zubaan, 2012]).

PPC and the Bid to Renew Left Hegemony

The PPC, as a bid to renew hegemony, was housed in the newly-opened space of local governance, and essentially involved four key moves.

First, through the construction of the discourse of local governance that drew eclectically on several political and ideological agendas, the CPM architects of the PPC sought to gain rhetorical flexibility. While the untangling of these various strands in this discourse is beyond the scope of the present essay, one may point to the jumbled-up presence of a whole host of keywords from a variety of paradigms, such as participatory development/citizenship, ‘pro-poor growth’, Putnamite exhortations towards ‘social capital’, the new public management discourse and others along with vestiges of the earlier discourse of social justice, such as the rhetoric of class struggle, the rhetoric of Gandhian village self-rule and newer forms of demotic populism. This, indeed, was noticed by observers.87

Jos Chatukulam and M.S. John, ‘Five Years of Participatory Planning in Kerala: Rhetoric and Reality’, Economic & Political Review 37, no. 49 (2002): 4917–4926. Tornquist and Tharakan, The Next Left?, 74.

The ambiguity of this construction may have initially provided the flexibility required to resolve multiple dilemmas and contradictory pulls: notice, for instance, how M.P. Parameswaran’s description of the experimental beneficiary-built-and-controlled drinking water project implemented by the KSSP at Olavanna may be interpreted both as ‘participatory development’ and as ‘self-financed’ water supply (Parameswaran uses the latter term).88

M.P. Parameswaran, Empowering People, 37.

Indeed, it is this project that became the model for the World Bank’s Jalanidhi rural water supply project.89

Narayanan and Irshad (2009, 22, footnote 23) in Proceedings of the Kerala Environment Congress, N.C. Narayanan and S. Mohammed Irshad, ‘Governance of Drinking Water in Kerala: Analysis of Recent Institutional Changes’, (Trivandrum: Centre for Environment and Development, 2009), 171–85.

Nevertheless, this utility of this move diminished rapidly, since it left the advocates of the PPC open to charges of bad faith and ultimately eroded the fragile consensus that had been achieved about decentralisation within the CPM. In an acrimonious debate that followed which contributed unfortunately to the discrediting the very idea of local governance in general, sections of the CPM came out publicly against the PPC, accusing its architects of being ‘imperialist stooges’, mainly pointing to its discursive sharing with neoliberal self-help and self-financing discourse. The defenders, however, insisted that they were advocates of ‘participatory development’.90

J. Devika, ‘Fears of Contagion? Depoliticisation and Recent Debates Over Politics in Kerala’, Economic & Political Weekly 25, no. 42 (2007a): 2465–78.

Second, through the PPC, the CPM sought to extend the ‘transformist articulation’ of feminism and environmentalism and of consumerism as well. This is well illustrated by the PPC’s transformative articulation of feminist questions. The question of expanding women’s access to public life was partially adapted while the feminist critique of sexual norms, family structures and women’s lack of control over their own bodies which was being raised in the late 1980s and early 1990s was more or less ignored. For instance, Parameswaran’s major recommendations for gender equality (2004)91

M.P. Parameswaran, Nalam Lokam: Swapnavum Yadharthyavum (Kottayam: D.C. Books, 2004).

revolved around a fairly limited governmentalised liberal feminist agenda focused on equal representation for women in public institutions and enabling conditions for women’s active public presence as local development activists. Indeed, in seeking to empower women within local governance while keeping high politics largely out of bounds to them on the one hand, and ignoring or attacking feminist articulations of politics in the oppositional civil society,92

J. Devika, ‘Feminism and Late Twentieth-century Governmentality in Kerala, India: Towards a Critical History’.

the ‘empowerment’ envisaged by the PPC stayed well within the bounds of the ‘social’, a domain historically coded ‘feminine’ in Kerala.93

Erwer, Challenging the Gender Paradox.

It is also interesting to note that it was the cause of environmental activism, something that also seems more amenable to become a ‘general’ cause, that Parameswaran stressed most.94

A.P. Muralikrishnan, ‘Interview with M.P. Parameshwaran’, Mathrubhumi Weekly, 26 October–1 November (2003): 42–45; Parameswaran, Nalam Lokam.

This figured in the PPC’s obvious inclination towards sustainable development and preference for small-scale enterprises that would supply local needs. The PPC’s environmentalism was however strictly limited, reduced to broader developmentalist terms. Staying within the KSSP’s reading that environmentalism’s insistence on granting nature an independent and irreducible value in considerations of development was merely a form of ‘romanticising Nature’, the PPC tended to regard all natural environments as primary forms of dead economic resource. This perhaps led to, and was further weakened by, the absence of cross-cutting and integrating ecological thinking in the planning process.95

Parameswaran, Empowering People; V. Plummer and S. de Cleene, ‘Community Learning, Information, and Communication Case-study: KerTrivandrum’, Working Paper No. 106 (GHK Research and Training, London, 1999).

Consumerism was perceived as an ‘external intruder’: Parameswaran viewed it as a major cultural instrument of global capitalism that the anti-capitalist new world ought to actively battle.

Others found it necessary to ‘control the ostentatious consumption of the rich minority’, but did not feel that consumerist greed was spreading through society in general.96

Isaac, ‘Women Elected Representatives in Kerala (1995–2000)’, 170.

Instead, consumerism too was ‘transformatively’ articulated through the highly individualised welfare entitlements distributed through the panchayats. Important observers97

GoK, ‘Report of the Committee for Decentralized planning and Development’.

remark that in the case of welfare handouts, the boundaries between welfare entitlements that promote social development and those which feed consumerist impulses are not clear. This may not be entirely coincidental; in the wake of rising inequalities accompanied by expanding access of the media and widespread literacy, bolstering the capacity of the poor to consume might well have been perceived as an important move to retain the traditionally loyal groups.

‘Transformative’ appropriation of this sort may have aimed at containing the threat perceived by the CPM, but it may well have backfired on the political itself. On the one hand, the sapping of the political charge of feminism and environmentalism weakens the possibility of alternate ways of imagining leftist politics. They pale into governmentalised versions that do not seriously challenge existent forms of power. On the other, consumerism is not curtailed but appeased in this move. Consumerism is not just an effect produced by inequality between social positions in society; inequality in general need not entail consumerism. It is actually related to unequal social positions, the possibility of comparison and upward mobility, and the idea that one can bridge the inequality—chase the position perceived as ‘superior’—through individual consumption. Even as it may challenge some prevailing ideologies that hamper consumption, consumerism rarely demands democratisation. Rather, it propels and propagates itself through the desires of the individual or the household.98

Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom (New Delhi: Worldview Press, 1997).

Increased welfare allotments for consumption need not disturb the existent map of social inequality; indeed, social inequality remains sanctioned silently. The worst consequence of this falls precisely on the political left. Consumerism leads people away from public services even when they are of reasonable quality towards ‘high-status’ private sector alternatives, a process very visible in education and health in contemporary Kerala. This destroys the wider ‘moral constituency’ of the left, which was rooted in the shared experience of public education and public health care across social class.

A third move was to mobilise a pool of expertise outside the bureaucracy to deal with the business of local government and planning. The PPC involved many great activists who were retired government officials invited to form ‘voluntary technical corps’ to help project formulation. M.P. Parameswaran cites the presence of ‘active and informed citizens who strengthen civil society’ as a major achievement of the PPC.99

M.P. Parameswaran, Empowering People, 214–15.

Politically, the gains from this were obvious: it would bring a large number of educated middle-class people with broad left sympathies closer to the dominant left. However, this also proved to be the weakest link. With the rival non-left United Democratic Front government coming to power in 2000, the voluntary groups were either dismantled or chose to disperse. But more crucially, Chatukulam and John express the doubt whether the KSSP activists were themselves sufficiently ‘de-bureaucratized’.100

100

Chatukulam and John, ‘Five Years of Participatory Planning in Kerala’, 4919–20.

Over time, the Technical Support Groups and the Working Groups, which were responsible for converting the suggestions raised in the village assemblies—the Grama Sabhas—into technically viable, socially beneficial and economically feasible projects, have been found to be ‘stuffed with favourites’ with little expert knowledge.101

101

GoK, ‘Report of the Committee for Decentralized planning and Development’, 75–79; Sharma, Local Government in India.

It was also noted that women were a miniscule presence among the resource people trained for the PPC, even at the height of its enthusiasm—a mere 8 per cent of the resource people at village, district and state levels.102

102

Chatukulam and John, ‘Five Years of Participatory Planning in Kerala’, 85.

Fourth, there was also the move towards the disarticulation103

103

‘Disarticulation’ is borrowed from articulation theory, associated with cultural theorists like Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau who criticise reductionist Marxist understandings of culture. ‘Articulation’ refers to the joining together of ideas, institutions and practices which need not necessarily be found together. Hall defines it as

**** …the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage that is not necessary, determined, absolute, and essential for all times…The ‘unity’ which matters is a linkage between the articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain social conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected. Stuart Hall, ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall’, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 2 (1986): 45–60.

This also implies that discourses may also be ‘disarticulated’ under other historical and social conditions. In the present case, demands such as the redistribution of surplus land which was once articulated with the CPM’s democratising agenda are now excised, disarticulated.

of certain demands associated with the early left. Marked among these was the CPM’s commitment to redistribution of land to the Dalits and Adivasis, who were not beneficiaries of land redistribution during the land reforms of the 1970s. Rashmi Sharma notes about the village panchayats of tribal areas in Kerala that they could not address severe and immediate issues, such as that of land alienation and loss of employment; however, they were ‘expected to address the manifestations of these problems, that is, unemployment and poverty’.104

104

Sharma, Local Government in India, 161.

However, contrary to the expectations that welfare disbursement targeting the SC and ST streamlined and strengthened through the decentralised governance would effectively substitute the earlier demands for land for these groups as a productive resource, militant struggles broke out in the post-millennium years in Kerala for precisely this resource from among the Dalits and the Adivasis.105

105

C.R. Bijoy and K.R. Raman, ‘Muthanga: The Real Story’, Economic & Political Weekly 38, no. 2 (2003): 1975–82. K.T. Rammohan, ‘Caste and Landlessness in Kerala: Signals from Chengara’, Economic & Political Weekly 43, no. 37 (2008): 14–16.

The divide between high politics and local governance became blatantly clear in the course of these struggles. Prominent among these has been the land struggle at the Harrisons Malayalam rubber plantations at Chengara in south Kerala. When the lease of the planters expired, landless protestors, largely Dalit and tribal, occupied the plantation under the leadership of an organisation called Sadhujana Vimochana Samyukta Vedi demanding that the government redistribute the plantation land to the landless people in the state. This was followed by determined attempts to resist eviction and fight against the hostility of the (fewer numbers of) plantation workers with whom the CPM sided. In the course of the debate, it became clear that the demand for redistribution of surplus land, once prominent on the CPM political agenda, was now disarticulated. The chief minister of Kerala and veteran communist V.S. Achuthanandan even ordered the protestors at Chengara to return to their native villages and put in applications for three cents of land in their panchayats.106

106

J. Devika, ‘Will the Left’s “Negative Hallucination” End in Kerala’ (22 August 2008b), http://kafila.org/2008/08/22/will-the-leftsnegative-hallucination-end-in-kerala/ (accessed 4 October 2010).

In defiance, these struggles addressed not local governance, but high politics—and, in fact, refused to be disciplined into the former. And as the idea of land redistribution to Dalits was being disarticulated, advocates of the PPC tried to project E.M.S. Nambutiripad’s interest in decentralisation as a fundamental aspect of the left’s political legacy since the mid-twentieth century, thereby claiming historical continuity. Besides, the prolonged battle fought by the feminist movement in Kerala against elements across almost the entire political spectrum over cases of sexual violence in which politicians were directly involved did reveal that the question of patriarchy could not be encompassed by the limited and markedly economic liberal feminist solutions that were being advanced in People’s Planning.107

107

J. Devika and Praveena Kodoth, ‘Sexual Violence and the Predicament of Feminist Politics in Kerala’, Economic & Political Weekly 36, no. 33 (2001): 3170–77.

Conclusion

This bid by the CPM to refurbish its hegemony is at present severely damaged as each of the four moves mentioned above provided initial flexibility but ultimately failed. In the recent years, the CPM has tried other strategies, like building alliances with emergent forces among the Muslim community, which too have not been sustained. The widespread violence during polling in the 2010 elections to the local bodies (in which the LDF suffered considerable losses) further confirmed this. Recent developments, such as the controversy around the Gadgil Report also saw that the KSSP and the CPM grow apart on core concerns in development.108

108

The Hindu, ‘KSSP Supports Gadgil Report’, Kozhikode edition (21 November 2013), www.thehindu.com/news/cities/kozhikode/kssp-supports-gadgil-report/article5375369.ece?ref=related

News (accessed 2 November 2015).

Nevertheless, the PPC has indeed produced concrete political effects—unintended consequences—that need to be studied more closely, Of these, the most important one is likely to be the new political subjects emergent in and through the PPC.

What kind of subject has PPC produced? Certainly, not the docile ‘good’ subject of Hindess’ post-imperialist liberalism; but also not the productive subject integrated firmly in local circuits of production and consumption and resistant to globalised capitalism, as envisaged by the proponents of PPC. This is what emerges from available assessments, including government-commissioned reports.109

109

GoK (2009).

Going by the nature of the welfare distributed—largely individual beneficiary oriented and consumption centred—it appears that it is the subject of responsibilised welfare which is now emergent. This is clearly different from the welfare recipient of earlier times when welfare was demanded militantly and collectively as ‘people’s right’.

Can the special provisions, besides the reservation of seats, for such disadvantaged groups as women, Dalits and Adivasis be read as evidence for the argument that the PPC has, indeed, managed to deepen democracy? While such recognition and redistribution was part of the design of decentralisation, in effect, these identities were not accepted as of political significance in a liberal polity, but as governmental categories of welfare recipients. Clearly, the identification of women as the principal agents of local development—as more capable of self-governing—has not automatically translated into the recognition of ‘Women’ as a specific interest group capable of advancing collective claims and asserting rights. No wonder then, that after more than a decade of decentralisation, women in Kerala continue to lag hugely in access to economic and social opportunities. The opportunities opened up to them in local governance have not led to their greater upward mobility in the political field.110

110

Devika and Thampi, New Lamps for Old?

Nor have Dalits and indigenous people accepted the ‘resolution’ attempted of the caste/land question, which tried to substitute the redistribution of surplus land to the landless poor with welfare entitlements distributed through the local bodies. Indeed, the most significant political events of the new millennium in Kerala is precisely the upswing of Dalit and Adivasi struggles for land and public recognition.

Nevertheless, the unintended consequences of the present governance practices have to be mapped. Sections of the poor have been suspicious of the line that projects decentralised governance as a viable substitute for the earlier agenda of land redistribution. But there are other interesting consequences as well. For example, the entry of women into local governance in large numbers seems to have led not so much to the end of populist demands for welfare, as to its reincarnation. The large network of women’s self-help groups for poverty alleviation that were formed alongside the PPC and after, the rank-and-file of the Kudumbashree, originally planned as a state-centric civil society, seems to function now as a ‘civil-political society’, overwhelmingly of women. The ‘civil-political society’ gathers in the space in which the legal and bureaucratic apparatus of development interacts with populations, like in Partha Chatterjee’s description of ‘political society’ (2008). But if the groups that manoeuvre in Chatterjean political society are often illegal entities that advance demands through projecting on to population groups the moral attributes of a community, the ‘civil-political society’ is composed of legal entities with which the state can negotiate with directly. Self-help groups operate within a framework of clearly-laid-down rules; they are formally shaped and controlled by government agencies; nevertheless, the rank-and-file of the Kudumbashree seem to force their leaders to engage quite frequently in paralegal negotiations conducted by the mediators of Chatterjean political society (2008).

In other words, political decentralisation in Kerala may have produced neither the globally recognisable (at least going by the available literature) docile welfare recipient nor a resistant local producer, but an interesting hybrid. This new hybrid which often claims utter civility, sometimes even eschews all associations with politics, and always claims to follow bureaucratic norms and procedures in securing welfare, is surely less ‘dependable’ as a political constituency compared to earlier mobilisations around welfare under communist leadership.111

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Centre for Development Studies (CDS), ‘Gendering Governance or Governing Women? Politics, Patriarchy, and Democratic Decentralization in Kerala State, India’, Thiruvananthapuram: Centre for Development Studies (2008), http://gender-is-citizenship.net/sites/default/files/GenderingGovernance_Kerala.pdf (accessed 16 April 2014).

In sum, political decentralisation in Kerala has certainly glocalised, but perhaps not in ways foreseen or desired by its proponents.

Acknowledgements

It was the late Praful Bidwai who urged me to turn my scattered ideas on the PPC into a journal article. This is dedicated to his memory, with much warmth.