This paper analyses the meaning of three different engagements with charitable and philanthropic activity in India between c. 1820 and 1960: it looks at the East India Company's movement into philanthropic activities in the decades after 1820; then it explores the significance of philanthropy, social service and social work carried out by Indian organizations in a period of growing nationalism between roughly 1890 and 1947; and thirdly, the paper considers the approach taken toward philanthropy and social work by the newly independent Indian state in the 1950s.

The essay shows some surprising continuities over this 140-year period, as well as some important differences. In each of the three cases listed above, philanthropic and charitable initiatives were linked to issues of moral authority and political legitimacy. In most societies, and certainly in India, ‘giving’ resources or services as charity or relief, without expectations of personal reward, can enhance the giver's social or political status. Charitable and philanthropic actions can even support claims or aspirations to political leadership and authority. Indeed, historically there have often been expectations that kings and other wealthy or prominent individuals ‘give’ to their communities. Rulers, in a sense, were responsible for the redistribution of wealth. It is not surprising, then, that in two periods when new states were being built, the Company state in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and the independent nation-state of India under Jawaharlal Nehru's leadership in the late 1940s and 1950s, embryonic governments took deliberate steps to involve themselves in charity, philanthropy or social work.

Introduction

In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, public education began to assume a special place within the colonial civilizing mission in India. On the one hand, an important shift occurred in the East India Company's approach towards education and learning, a shift which culminated in the ‘great education debate’. Leaving behind the patronage of ‘the learned natives of India’, the Committee for Public Instruction, which had been installed in 1823, formulated a consciously interventionist educational policy in the frame of a civilizing mission. Instruction in Western sciences in the English language was assigned a special role in winning the consent and cooperation of the Indian middle classes for the colonial project. Thereby, however, the Bengal Committee of Public Instruction – in accordance with the Court of Directors of the Company in London – almost exclusively concentrated its resources on higher education, hoping that knowledge would diffuse ‘downwards’ from there and thus transform Indian society as a whole.

At the same time, crucial developments also happened in the field of elementary, or popular, education, even if this field was frequently neglected and sometimes even discouraged by the Company. The efforts of privately operating educationalists (British as well as Indian), missionaries and voluntary educational associations found entrance in the colonial statistics and are also well known to historians. However, they attracted much less scholarly attention than the ideological (and financial) battles over higher education.

Introduction

The nature of political regimes in South Asia has always constituted a puzzle within the political science discipline. In particular, the emergence and consolidation of a democratic regime in India situated in a region with culturally similar countries dominated by mostly non-democratic regimes has been difficult to explain using the standard explanatory factors from different strands of democratic theory. India is either being seen as being too poor, too illiterate, socially and culturally too traditional and ethnically too fragmented to be a likely candidate for a stable parliamentary democracy. In comparison, political developments in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka have been in much greater conformity with the standard prescriptions of the prevailing theories of preconditions for parliamentary democracies.

In this chapter I will give an overview of some prominent academic positions in two related but nevertheless distinct debates. The first debate concerns the background for India's democracy and tries to answer one of the great intellectual puzzles within the social sciences: Why did India end up having a democratic political system? The survey of the relatively few contributions to this academic debate will be followed by some critical observations and some reflections on the different answers given over the years to this question.

The second and much more unwieldy debate concerns the question of why the democratic political system, once established – and unlike the situation of most other newly independent poor countries – has persisted in India despite the many and varied challenges it has encountered in the post-Independence period.

Consent and Community

A particular conceptualization of the local community has acted as a core constituent of the anti-politics watershed machine. Ideas of community as homogenous and un-stratified have vitally underpinned notions of local bodies that are suitable exemplars of this community spirit, while drawing a sharp and, as we have seen, often unsubstantiated contrast with the much reviled panchayats. In watershed development policies, and more generally in contemporary natural resources governance discourse (see Leach et al 1997), ‘consensual communities’ hold the key to the apolitical character of participatory decision-making that is prized above all else. This chapter will take a closer look at how the idea of consent becomes transformed as an active ally in the depoliticization project. The word ‘project’ is not used lightly, not just because it does not necessarily succeed, but also because not all actors are equally pledged to it in the first place. This follows Tanya Murray-Li on the point of her divergence from scholars who emphasize the ‘effective achievement of depoliticization’ (2007, 10).

While we know that the theoretical sway of new institutionalist and communitarian ideas have yielded the apolitical formulation of communities that we are regularly confronted with, it is not as easy to identify the precise origins of the apolitical use of the idea of consent. In fact, here there is a perplexing conundrum at play.

The Machine that Depoliticizes

In 1990, James Ferguson wrote a book called The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development”, Depoliticisation and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. This book contained an anthropological analysis of the disproportionately large donordriven development machinery in this small landlocked country in southern Africa. Its implications had profound resonances for the critical treatment of development far beyond Lesotho, in all of Africa and certainly most of the developing world. The reason for this prima facie appears to be a simple one, and indeed Ferguson offers it to us. No one before Ferguson or at the very least few as clearly and cogently, had turned their critical attentions to analysing the actual apparatus that drove development. While scholarly analyses and critiques galore had thrashed out the political, social and economic potential of development, there was a surprising gap in understanding about the development industry itself. The existing literature in the field was dominated by the ideas of ‘insiders’ or ‘sympathetic outsiders’ who believed in development planning and therefore scrutinized it with a fix-it attitude, or at the other extreme, by radical Marxist and dependency theorists for whom the entire development effort was a great capitalist sham. There was little insight into how the bureaucrats, experts, consultants and planners that populated development organizations and establishments actually operated and the effects their operations created beyond their own proclamations.

India is often described as a country of paradoxes. There are skyscrapers and slums, free newspapers and moral policing, global achievers and neverschooled children, deserts and flood plains. It is also amongst the world's most vibrant and reliable democracies. The remarkable life history of Indian democracy since its independence from colonial rule in 1947 has brought about the irrevocable expansion of popular politics. Paradoxically, while India is feted for its democratic institutions and processes, the politics that accompanies these institutions and processes has been subject to a great deal of disparagement. Such cynicism seems to affect a generally negative perception of what democratic politics and politicians can deliver: efficient services in cities, proper disbursement of state welfare in villages and security against terror. This irritation with politics and politicians was initially observed as part of an elite urban discourse (Hansen 1999), but researchers documenting talk, gestures and strategic manoeuvring amidst a cross-section of social groups even in rural India have noted the description of politics as ‘dirty’ and ‘morally ambivalent’ (Osella and Osella 2001, Ruud 2001).

In this book, I am concerned with such cynicism about politics; but more specifically, I am interested in examining the notion that development is indeed apolitical, or devoid of politics, no matter how trenchant the view of political influences, processes and behaviour. Indeed, my purpose is to question the very belief that implementers of development are wilfully engaged in keeping politics away from development.

Looking into the Watershed Machine

This chapter takes a closer look at the conditions in which the key actors implementing the 1994 watershed guidelines were situated in the two Indian states of study. Since I started this investigation in 1999, Andhra Pradesh in southern India and Madhya Pradesh in central India have been the subject of much interest and fascination for their simultaneously unfolding albeit distinctive initiatives regarding decentralization (see Manor 2000 and 2002, Jenkins et al 2003 and Johnson, Deshingkar and Start 2005). Curiosity has endured in the popular media about the two men – Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh and Digvijay Singh in Madhya Pradesh – who as Chief Ministers spearheaded bold reform processes in their ten-year stints of power, which in seeming political synchrony ended roughly around the same time. Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP) lost to the Congress in Andhra Pradesh in 2004 and Singh's Congress regime succumbed to the BJP in Madhya Pradesh a year earlier, in 2003. While the reasons for their defeat were rooted in statespecific factors, what is of interest here is the contrast that has been drawn between their respective attitudes and policies towards decentralization. Both Naidu and Singh projected themselves as proactive governance reformers, of which decentralization was the ostensible cornerstone. Naidu's governance reforms emphasized technocratic efficiency of the bureaucracy, popular mobilization through strictly monitored government initiatives (Janmabhoomi for example), and the unabashed promotion of local user bodies for local participation, but did not attempt to integrate these initiatives with panchayats (Reddy 2002, Mooij 2003).

Discourses, Agencies and the Micro-Politics of Local Bodies

The watershed machineries in Kurnool and Dewas embodied the constraints and opportunities presented by their wider political and administrative environments of decentralization. These were most strikingly manifested in the extent to which the two adopted discourses of depoliticization regarding the selection of watershed villages and agencies. However these machineries were not homogenous entities; they comprised a hierarchy of officials and, in cases where NGOs were engaged, then actors from ‘outside’ the formal state apparatus. As the implementing agencies of watershed projects, these actors came into close contact with villages. They were responsible for initiating the formation of watershed committees in a peaceful and cooperative manner, as these would be at the fulcrum of the participatory decision-making that the 1994 guidelines so eagerly espoused. But they also had to take a stand with respect to village panchayats, which are typically maligned as bodies torn apart by ‘pointless politics’ arising from the domination of entrenched interests as well as seemingly endless contest. As my previous chapter has illustrated, whereas the discourse to distance panchayat politics from the watershed programme was clearly articulated by officials at different levels in Kurnool, this was not the case in Dewas, where integration of decentralized development with panchayats was a state priority.

This chapter will empirically ascertain the extent to which watershed committees could be distanced from the respective panchayats in the four villages where the fieldwork was carried out.

For the radical activists and critical scholars who encounter and observe the juggernaut of the development machine, anti-politics is a quotidian reality. States, international development agencies, NGOs and donors are, to varying degrees, accomplices in the vehement and unrelenting tendency to treat politics in the widest sense with disdain or disquiet, or both, and the desire to ‘depoliticize’ development is as strong as ever. This book is not trying to prove otherwise. Indeed, it is in large measure an attempt to document the making and unfolding of a definite discourse of depoliticization through the premier state-led and nationally implemented participatory watershed development programme in India. This is a country with an unequivocal history of antipolitics, since colonial times, through technocratic development planning embedded within a large state bureaucracy. Being a vibrant and dynamic democracy with a highly differentiated social fabric, India puts James Ferguson's views about development as an anti-politics machine to the test in very unique ways. While there is no doubt that there is an anti-politics machine in India, its outcomes are different from those Ferguson predicted for Lesotho. Studying the particular contours of the anti-politics machine in India is the principal business of this book, and in doing so, the book develops a distinctive approach to examining the problem of depoliticization in general. The book concludes not just that India presents a different context for the anti-politics critique of development that Ferguson levelled at Lesotho, but also that there is a need to go considerably beyond what Ferguson proposed.

Part I: State Power, Depoliticization and Watershed Development

Watershed development (WSD) in India has come to embody the dilemmas around state power, decentralization and depoliticization that this book is about. A watershed or catchment is quite simply ‘all the land area from which all water drains to a common point’ (Kerr 2002, 1387). The term ‘watershed’ above any point on a defined drainage channel is used to denote all the land and water areas that drain through that point. In effect, anywhere that one lives is part of a watershed, usually classified as micro, milli or macro in size. The transformation of what was narrowly defined in the past as soil and water conservation all around the world into a comprehensive intervention for rural development (Farrington et al 1999, Hinchcliffe et al 1999) can be clearly observed in India over the recent decades. WSD programmes now encompass core development objectives of the Indian state, most notably agricultural productivity, environmental conservation and poverty reduction. These objectives have been variously important to the state at different points of time, but their convergence as core pursuits has lent WSD an unparalleled significance for the Indian state. The central ministries of rural development and agriculture devote considerable administrative and financial resources to WSD. As a result, WSD programmes are perfectly poised to be intricately bound with the exercise of state power. In other words, WSD constitutes a ‘rational’ development project for the state to follow (Chatterjee 1998).

Is there an ‘Anti-Politics Machine’ in India?

This question may be justifiably asked. Is there, after all, an anti-politics machine in India? The Indian development machinery has for long served as a symbol of decisive state intervention to shape and regulate the economy. In the formative years after independence in 1947 it was the newly formed Planning Commission that provided a vehicle for the political leadership to take contentious decisions without these being subject to the wider political arena for debate. It was the planners'; ‘rationality’ and ‘expertise’ that made them suitable for taking decisions in the interest of the nation at large, as contrasted with political representatives who were expected to be partisan in their views. In subsequent years, the planning commission itself may have somewhat declined in significance, but development decision-making has been prominently carried out by the bureaucracy, which is itself a mammoth, multilayered, hierarchical and overstretched organization. Even though recent years have witnessed key trends relating to state reform, notably decentralization and participatory development, the terms of engagement between the bureaucracy and relatively new actors like NGOs or international donors continue to be heavily prescribed by the former. The presence of a highly bureaucratized state apparatus and a culture of development planning that has traditionally distanced itself from ‘politics’ together signify that the Indian state could serve as an archetypal example of the Fergusonian antipolitics machine.