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12 - Reading Caste and Class Together: A Dalit–Bahujan–Left Alliance?
- from Part III - Transformations in Ideology and Identity
- Edited by Sudha Pai, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, D. Shyam Babu, Centre for Policy Research, India, Rahul Verma, Centre for Policy Research, India
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- Dalits in the New Millennium
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- 12 July 2023
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- 16 November 2023, pp 210-231
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Summary
‘In the swirl of contradictions that envelope India, no other pair of terms has had as baleful a consequence for the politics and future of this country as caste and class,’ wrote Anand Teltumbde. ‘These two words have divided the working-class movement into two camps – movements oriented towards class struggle and those against caste, each driven by the ideological obsessions of their protagonists through divergent paths that led to the eventual marginalisation of both.’ While they have different conceptual horizons, ‘the similarity between the two is enough to build a unified emancipatory struggle – a potential that both these movements have failed miserably to realise’ (Teltumbde, 2018: 91). One can have no quarrel with Teltumbde on the fact that both class-blind caste movements and caste-blind class struggle have reached an impasse in contemporary Indian politics. The parties that fought upper-caste domination are now split and fragile, and the class-based left parties, sequestered as they are, have turned largely ineffective. A serious rethinking of class and caste politics, therefore, is needed to imagine a popular politics as alternative to the hegemonic surge of authoritarian populism in today's India.
The surge is represented by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with its Hindu majoritarian ideology. This has a telling effect on India's secular constitution, her public institutions, as well as the political space for articulating protest and dissent. For the survival of India's democracy, it is necessary to have an array of counter-hegemonic popular mobilizations which cannot be constituted in the absence of a confluence between two distinct solidarity positions: of the oppressed Dalit and Bahujan castes and of the grossly exploited informal working classes. While Dalit and Bahujan mobilizations had scaled new heights in India's democracy and altered its polity's representational character, they barely breeched the limit of symbolic recognition for marginal social groups. On the other hand, the parliamentary left and the social democratic parties are now faced with a crisis emerging from their inability to move beyond the economic demands of the organized working class and failure to adequately politicize the rural proletariat. The challenge, therefore, is to overcome the extant approaches of both caste and class politics and imagine a concrete possibility for a reciprocal, non-reductive exchange between the two.
Frontmatter
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 05 March 2016
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- 08 January 2016, pp i-iv
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Index
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 05 March 2016
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- 08 January 2016, pp 265-273
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Government as Practice
- Democratic Left in a Transforming India
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- 05 March 2016
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- 08 January 2016
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The democratic Left in India is in crisis. During the first decade of this century it slid from its highest parliamentary presence to virtual irrelevance. A key to its retrieval, this book argues, lies in its ability to imagine a new popular politics for reinventing its democratic credentials beyond electoral posturing. In this respect, much can be learnt from the Left's governmental practices as they have evolved since the late 1960s, crafting a unique blend of politics, policy, idealism, practicality, vision and delivery. By looking at the problematics of government from the days of deft land reforms to messy land acquisition, this book situates 'government as practice' as a prism for critical thinking on democratic politics in postcolonial India. Grounded in empirical and archival research, the book will be useful for those who are passionate as well as sceptical about the revival potentials of a new Left in India's fast-changing political economy.
Appendix I - The Left through Elections
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 05 March 2016
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- 08 January 2016, pp 213-231
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Summary
This section looks at the Left Front in West Bengal through five successive elections – the Lok Sabha (LS) or the national parliament in 2004 and 2009 and the Vidhan Sabha (VS) or the state legislature in 2001, 2006 and 2011 – during the last decade of its governance. While the elections of 2001, 2004 and 2006 reflected the left's undisputable dominance in the state, in 2009 the left received its first serious challenge from a buoyant Trinamul Congress–Congress alliance, which eventually unseated it from power in 2011. Here, we trace the left's transformation from a seemingly invincible political force to the one defeated by focusing on the changing dynamics of its electoral constituency.
In the pages below we attempt to find answers to the following questions: Who voted for the left? What constituted the left's electoral base in West Bengal in terms of economic classes, social categories, age groups or locations? Had there been any significant change in these characteristics over the last decade of the Left Front in power? What did the left's changing electoral fortune actually signify in terms of its broader political effects or its capacity to represent the poor and the marginal? In what way was the left's governmental performance responsible for its electoral decline? What can we make of the social outlook of the left voters? Is it markedly different from the rest?
In taking up these questions, we make use of the massive pre- and post-poll surveys conducted in the course of the National Election Survey (NES) by Lokniti, a group of political and social scientists attached to various academic institutions in India who have done an exemplary work since the mid-1990s of studying voters' identities and opinions in the course of periodic elections at both state and national levels. The surveys are based on significantly large data sets developed from scientific sampling techniques and structured questionnaires, carried out by a dedicated crop of coordinators and investigators spread in every district of the country. In terms of its meticulous planning, time-bound execution, and comprehensive coverage, the NES has no parallel in India. Here, we use fragments of such data collected in West Bengal in the course of 2001 VS, 2004 LS, 2006 VS, 2009 LS and, finally, 2011 VS.
Contents
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- Government as Practice
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- 08 January 2016, pp vii-viii
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Dedication
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 08 January 2016, pp v-vi
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Bibliography
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 08 January 2016, pp 241-264
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Abbreviations
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 08 January 2016, pp xvii-xx
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4 - Machinery: Party Society
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 08 January 2016, pp 123-154
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In the last chapter we saw how in the rural public sphere the relationship between the local society and the leadership of the left changed over the years, how the school teachers – who in the early days of the Left Front were the principal agents of popular engagement at the grassroot level – eventually turned into socially distant entities, even ‘enemies’ of the poor and marginal groups. This transformation took place within a larger geography of power, a populated space made of intricate relationship between social classes and institutions in the countryside with its own unique characters evolving through decades of a mutative government as practice. Much of the parliamentary left's ground level politics in rural West Bengal derived its meaning and consistency from the rationale of this networked grid which may be called by the name ‘party society’. Here we trace its roots, follow the genesis of its instrumentality and its eventual crisis before changing hands from the ruling left to its fiercest rivals. Born in the midst of pro-poor promises we explain below how party society metamorphosed into a dangerous outfit for reproducing social marginality and political exclusion.
The idea
Analysing the CPI(M)'s repeated electoral renewals in the light of its rhetoric of ‘development’, Partha Chatterjee had highlighted the mediatory nature of its politics. The left's rural developmental records were not exceptional, nor did it patronize a solid block of electorate as its client on a durable basis. Then how could it retain such a long and unprecedented electoral dominance, especially in the rural areas?
The point is rather that a field of political transactions has been opened which is within the reach of most villagers and where matters of local interest can be negotiated and sorted out on a daytoday basis. It is in that field that the CPI(M), with its permanently mobilized corps of workers, enjoys an advantage in the matter of the daily renewal of the legitimacy of power (Chatterjee, 1997, 160–61).
The ‘field’ got a theoretical expression in what Chatterjee later called ‘political society’ (Chatterjee, 2004). The political society consisted of the poor and the marginal population groups, which constantly strived to protect or enlarge their livelihood needs and entitlements.
1 - Inception: Government as Practice
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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Parliamentary left parties in India never had it so bad before. In the national election of 2014, they won barely 12 seats, down from 60 odd seats they got 10 years ago, when their support proved crucial to form the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government in New Delhi. By contrast, the left is now voted out of relevance in national politics. It is virtually wiped out in its bastion – West Bengal – where the tally came down sharply from 35 to merely 2 seats. Over the first decade of the twenty-first century, some 20 years or so after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the mainstream left slid from its historic high to an all-time low in the country's electoral battlefield. This dramatic debacle also coincides with an unprecedented rise of rightwing forces clustering around a party of religious and market fundamentalism. The question is: can India's democratic left ever hope to retrieve, and how?
An attempt to answer this cannot but move through West Bengal – an eastern Indian state with a population of 90 million – where an alliance of communist and socialist parties, the Left Front, ran a government for 34 years, from 1977 to 2011. It had been an exceptional feat for a government to win elections without a break for so long in the slippery domain that is Indian politics. Few such cases of continuity perhaps exist in the democratic world. Barring the troubling last half decade, the alliance maintained its superiority in every local, regional or national election by garnering almost half of popular votes and an overwhelming number of constituencies. Just when the regime seemed ‘invincible’ after a resounding triumph in 2006 election, its popular support started to wane. In 2011, the Left Front government met with its first definitive defeat. The left's rare continuity and dramatic collapse – this book argues – can be traced to the dynamics of its administrative and strategic priorities as a governmental force in West Bengal. In this chapter we travel through some major turns in its long journey over some seven decades and ask how the democratic left can think afresh beyond its restricted social, ideological and regional appeal, and hope to contribute meaningfully to the evolving ideational and public policy debates in a rapidly transforming India.
Preface
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 05 March 2016
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- 08 January 2016, pp ix-xvi
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This book waited for a closure for way too long. It is a peculiar problem of writing on the present. With each passing moment one experiences a shift in perspective calling into question some assumptions which until yesterday seemed firm. New circumstances demand a somewhat reworked frame of analysis, inviting a ripple of changes in the ordering of ongoing events and arguments. In 2011, the historical rout of the democratic left government in West Bengal brought a three and half decades of unbroken saga to its close. This gave the book, work for which started in 2009, a point of arrival.
The present impasse of the democratic left was felt simultaneously on several fronts: electoral, organizational, and more importantly, ideational. Here we will trace the lineages of the crisis more particularly through the government of the Left Front, a coalition that the left managed to maintain for a record 34 years in West Bengal. The government, in the first decade of its existence, took some important legislative steps to provide social and economic security for the disadvantaged groups and to promote local democracy for curbing the influence of the bureaucracy.
In the early years the left evolved an art of conducting its government, which the book calls ‘government as practice’. It strategically combined top-down policies with the lived experience of different population groups. The art was perfected through popular movements and alliance-politics in the 1950s and the 1960s, which offered the backdrop for subsequent governmental projects of agrarian reforms and administrative decentralization in the late 1970s. This required a disciplined party and a complex structure of mass organizations for blending social democracy's ideological commitments with the everyday compulsions of postcolonial democracy. They helped the left consolidate its position among the rural and urban poor for an unprecedented duration.
However, the ‘success’ of the left in enlisting popular support also proved a bane, as its electoral triumphalism reproduced a stasis of predictability and famished its veins for infusing fresh ideas, so necessary to grapple with the contingencies of the ‘new’ economy in a rapidly transforming India. The gap proved costly, as the left failed to come up with an appropriate alternative to capital-led acquisition of farmlands, and faced a debilitating defeat with the alienation of its own constituency.
3 - Agency: School Teachers
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 08 January 2016, pp 89-122
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It is widely expected of a leftwing government to place priority on universal school education, which can greatly improve the material conditions of the poor and marginal sections of the population. A quick look at some of the key indicators reflecting more than three decades of left rule, however, tell us a different story. As a Planning Commission document noted in 2010, West Bengal in creating infrastructure for primary education ranked third from the bottom, only above Jharkhand and Bihar, among 16 major states in the country. In literacy, West Bengal ranked sixth, which did not change during the long rule of the left. More critically, Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and the Muslims had lower literacy rates than the state's overall average, indicating the continuity of a systemic inequality and exclusion. The question is, why after three and half decades of left government West Bengal cut such a sorry figure in elementary education, and, more importantly, what does it say about the character of the government?
Teachers as leaders
West Bengal's poor, and exclusionary, record in elementary education is certainly not due to any lack of activism on the part of the state's large body of primary school teachers. In 2006–07, almost 78 per cent of the state's 155,000 primary teachers were members of the pro-CPI(M) All Bengal Primary Teachers' Association (ABPTA) (Sarkar and Rana, 2010, 4), a good number of whom were for quite some time ‘natural’ leaders of the left (Pratichi, 2002, 5). Primary teachers maintained a level of civic activism for decades, as one can trace ABPTA's lineage to the Nikhil Banga Prathamik Shikshak Samiti (henceforth, Samiti) founded in 1935. In its conference resolutions and petitions sent to the colonial government, the Samiti however placed more stress on the need for education as an abstract public good; there was scarcely any demand for raising the paltry salary that the primary teachers received, or any sharp criticism of the government on political grounds. The Samiti was also silent on issues of social exclusion, there was no strong demand to educate women or Muslim students, though access to education was severely constrained for both these groups (Nikhilbongo Prathamik Sikshak Samiti, 2007; Poshchimbongo Prathamik Sikshak Samiti, 2009; Sarkar and Rana, 2010, 5–13).
2 - Consolidation: Land Reforms
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 05 March 2016
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- 08 January 2016, pp 56-88
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After forming the government, the parliamentary left in West Bengal implemented some of the country's most effective land reform laws that had a long-term impact on the structure of rural property and power. Although the stated intent was to reduce poverty and encourage a just sharing of agrarian assets by reducing age old exploitation of poor cultivators by a handful of landlords, these reforms also helped the left build a solid constituency of support that stood by it in every election for decades. The use of an economic policy as a political tool for organized support required skilful manoeuvring since land reforms could also split the rural classes and pit one against the other. To garner a composite electoral constituency from the rural population that included its ‘class-friends’ as well as ‘class-enemies’, the left modified its radicalism and mellowed down its rhetoric. The shift in the left's ideological position was attempted in a strategic and calibrated way so as not to appear ‘revisionist’ or ‘class collaborationist’. While it helped the left's electoral prospect in the state, it also created some long-term insoluble problems.
Land reforms had been a demand of the nationalist bourgeoisie in its attempt to enlist support from the peasantry during the anticolonial mobilization. A resolution of the Agrarian Reforms Committee of the Indian National Congress in 1935 stated that a ‘fundamental method of improving village life’ was to introduce ‘a system of peasant proprietorship under which the tiller of the soil is himself the owner of it and pays revenues direct to the government without the intervention of any zamindar or taluqdar’. Post-independence, the First Five Year Plan (1951–56) echoed these concerns despite its care not to hurt the property rights of the intermediary classes. In some states, policies were made to eliminate big tax-farming zamindars which effectively ended up increasing the power of the rich peasants and the intermediary landlords. The demand for ‘land to the tiller’ figured in Congress party's agenda only until the mid-1950s (Harriss, 2012). The party put land reforms to rest in its annual meeting in Nagpur in 1959, when Charan Singh – a North Indian leader of rich farmers – made sure that a reformist draft entitled ‘Resolution on Agricultural Organisational Pattern’ was rejected.
5 - Implosion: Singur, Nandigram
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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On a sultry August day in 2005, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee left for Jakarta with a 22 member trade team to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Indonesia's biggest industrial house, the Salim Group of Companies. This was certainly not the first foreign trip by a Marxist chief minister to invite foreign direct investments, Jyoti Basu – West Bengal's previous and the country's longest serving chief minister – made several such trips to Europe and the US. This was, however, Buddhadeb's first major trip outside the country, and the investment proposed – to the tune of 50,000 crores – was extraordinarily high for the state's dwindling economy. A debate triggered off within the left over whether the government should invite a foreign multinational, if the Salim group – which allegedly had an anti-communist past – should be allowed to invest in the state. On both counts, Buddhadeb got the state committee and the politburo of the CPI(M) to come round his way. At a press conference on the eve of his departure the chief minister said that there was no other alternative, but the government was committed to protect the interests of the state's workers and the peasants. Three days later, on 25 August, the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation (WBIDC) signed a MoU with the Salim Group to promote an industrial park in the form of a special economic zone (SEZ) in West Bengal. The final agreement was to be inked later, after the company submitted a detailed project report to the government.
This marked the beginning of a long saga in West Bengal's present politics. The left government was copiously doing what an investment-friendly state government does in India's competitive federalism. Major states try to outbid each other to woo private investment for setting up industries and infrastructure as state funding for such projects – which was the case in the pre-liberalized dirigiste economy – got dried up. However, a left state government had to answer a few difficult questions: Should it invite multilateral capital of foreign origin, which had been a target of its ideological opposition for decades? Should it accept proposals for SEZ, whose internal workings – including discriminatory labour law and questionable land-use – had already invited several criticisms from the left parties?
Appendix II - Local Governance and Electability
- Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya
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- Government as Practice
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- 08 January 2016, pp 232-240
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The panchayat election in 2008 was a watershed election in West Bengal. That year the left met its first serious challenge in the countryside after 30 years of uninterrupted domination. In the preceding panchayat election (2003), the Left Front had won in 85 per cent Panchayat Samiti seats, which came down to 57.45 per cent in 2008. In 2003, of the total 3,220 Gram Panchayat the Left Front had won 2,311 or 71.77 per cent; in 2008 the number was 1,625, or 50.47 per cent (Chattopadhyay, 2008). As the 2008 panchayat election launched an unmistakable power-shift in West Bengal's rural politics, a trend that continued even in 2013 and beyond, one was obviously curious about what actually made people vote so differently in it in comparison to the previous local elections. The media in general attributed the left's land acquisition policy as primarily responsible for its setback. We wanted to find out, more specifically, if there was any correlation between the electorate's perception of the quality of local governance and their voting preference. For this we placed a set of governance-related data drawn from a large sample of Gram Panchayats in 2005-06 against the outcome of the 2008 panchayat election in the same localities. The exercise gave us some results which may have interesting implications.
The pre-2008 data were collected in the course of a baseline survey conducted by a team of researchers on the impact of the state government's policy of ‘Strengthening Rural Decentralization’ (SRD), a policy initiated with the financial assistance of the British Department for International Development (DFID). The study had a wide coverage: it included all 18 districts of rural West Bengal with a sample size of 162 Gram Panchayats (or 5 per cent of the total number of Gram Panchayats excluding the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council) and was based arguably on one of the country's largest surveys of households (37,000 plus) for evaluating the performance of Gram Panchayats in any state. For sample selection, a two-stage sampling method was employed. In the first stage, all blocks were grouped into four quartiles according to their degree of ‘backwardness’ based on three principal indicators drawn from the Census of 2001: percentage level of illiteracy, percentage of SC/ST population in total population, and percentage of agricultural labourer in total population.