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3 - Democratising Education
- Kalaiyarasan A., Vijayabaskar M.
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- The Dravidian Model
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Summary
In September 2018, a Dalit family in Kuzhumur, a village in the backward district of Ariyalur, built a library housing 2,500 books and computers with online access (TNM 2018). Making a case for the initiative, members of the family said that this will help rural children access educational materials that are normally available only to children from urban elite households. Supported by various political parties, the library was to commemorate the memory of their daughter Anitha, who had committed suicide a year earlier when she failed to get admission into a medical college despite scoring 1,176 marks out of 1,200 in her school final exams. These marks were the sole basis for admission into medical colleges in the state before introduction of the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET), a national-level eligibility-cum-entrance exam for admissions, overturned the basis for eligibility, and rendered such high marks irrelevant. Anitha's death fuelled large-scale protests all over the state and constituted an important moral axis for subsequent agitations around this issue. Since then, a couple of more teens committed suicide following their failure to clear NEET (Ranjan 2019). This raises important questions about aspirations and access to education in the state: What made such aspirations the norm for many lower-caste youth? When NEET failed to evoke similar resistance in other parts of the country, why did it become a major concern in Tamil Nadu?
Such aspiration, we argue, is rooted in a Dravidian common-sense that made access to modern education a key pathway to mobility and social justice. This chapter explains the forging of this common-sense and such aspirations among lower-caste groups, and the policy response in this domain. We draw upon Arjun Appadurai's (2004) conceptualisation of the ‘capacity to aspire’ to map the constitution of aspirations among subaltern groups in the state. Appadurai defines the ‘capacity to aspire’ as the cultural capacity of the poor to find the resources required to contest and alter or improve the course of their destiny. For him, such a capacity comprises of two domains of freedom. First it requires removal of material deprivation rooted in backwardness in education and poverty. The second involves securing dignity and respect that are denied by low status aspirations vis a vis the elites.
6 - Transforming Rural Relations
- Kalaiyarasan A., Vijayabaskar M.
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Summary
Many scholars have suggested that identity-based mobilisation in the state has ignored class- based issues such as land reform or empowering of labour (Mencher 1975; Thangaraj 1995; Subramanian 1999). In this and the next chapter, we argue for a more nuanced understanding of how the subnational state has negotiated the question of labour welfare even as it sustained capital accumulation. In this chapter, we focus primarily on how mobilisation and policy interventions have improved the terms of work, incomes and status of rural labour including small holders and tenant farmers. As we argued in Chapter 2, ensuring inclusive structural transformation was critical to the Dravidian vision of social justice. Translated into developmental challenges, this implies two sets of processes. First, interventions ought to ensure shifts of people out of agriculture and other traditional occupations into secure livelihoods in the non-agricultural sector to undermine caste hierarchies. Second, while this involves shifts over time, interventions should also secure place-based livelihoods and income security at a given point in time.
We map three policy interventions that have made this possible. First, though land reforms were not pushed through strongly by legislation at one stroke, land transfers from upper-caste landlords to lower-caste tenant farmers did take place through molecular interventions and pressure from collective mobilisation. Second, investments in physical and social infrastructures have enabled diversification of rural livelihoods away from agriculture. Such diversification, accompanied by investments in education, in turn has led to better bargaining power for labouring households within agriculture. Third, an important argument that both this chapter and the next make is that substantial interventions in the labour market have been indirect through economic popular and social popular measures outside the domain of the workplace. Rural welfare interventions primarily through the public distribution system (PDS) and caste mobilisation sought to undermine hierarchical labour relations between the landed and the landless. Availability of food through the PDS weakened the basis of labour control and opened up economic possibilities for labouring households outside the domain of agriculture and the rural milieu. Such mediations outside the workplace have not only transformed rural social relations, but have also helped poorer households diversify into the non-farm sector on relatively better terms.
1 - The Dravidian Model: An Introduction
- Kalaiyarasan A., Vijayabaskar M.
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Summary
Subnational trajectories of development and sources of divergences increasingly constitute an important dimension of understanding the political economy of global development (Crouch and Streeck 1997; Storper 1997). The literature on subnational variations in the Global South, and institutional sources of their dynamism is, however, recent but expanding (World Bank 2009; Moncada and Snyder 2012; Giraudy, Moncada and Snyder 2019). Given that the fastest growing economies are primarily in the Global South, particularly Asia, an understanding of such processes in the Asian context becomes important at the current conjuncture. In fact, the Asian experience with ‘catching up’ and economic transformation has contributed substantially to the idea of the ‘developmental state’ (Evans and Heller 2018). While the Japanese experience highlighted a strong role for state action, recent successes of the East Asian newly industrialising economies (NIEs) reinforced the importance of the ‘developmental state’ as a conceptual category to understand what makes some countries improve their citizens’ capabilities better than others.
Importantly, the relationship between capital accumulation, state and civil society in the Global South is seen to be distinct from the experience of Western capitalist economies. Chatterjee (2004) and Sanyal (2007) for example, have dealt at length with how governamental imperatives in postcolonial countries do not follow that of advanced capitalist economies even as they significantly shape the global capital accumulation dynamic. Chatterjee in his more recent work (2019) also points to the distinctiveness of politics in these regions, arguing that mobilisation in postcolonial democracies like India often draws upon reworked social identities forged through modern print cultures and governmental imperatives. Further, as Harriss-White (2003) has established, capital accumulation tends to rely on social stratification and actually reinforces social hierarchies based on caste and gender identities. Piketty (2020), in fact, argues that status-based inequalities in such countries, for instance based on caste, not only persist but constitute important sources of inequality as they modernise. Mapping the links between accumulation, state acts, political mobilisation around identities and development trajectories in these regions therefore becomes important.
India and China have been two of the fastest growing economies in the world since the early 2000s, contributing substantially to global wealth creation, given the size of their economies (Bardhan 2008). Talking about China's achievements on the growth front, Evans and Heller (2018) reason that it is impossible to understand the Chinese state as a unitary one despite having a centralised apparatus.
List of Abbreviations
- Kalaiyarasan A., Vijayabaskar M.
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8 - Fissures, Limits and Possible Futures
- Kalaiyarasan A., Vijayabaskar M.
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Summary
Chantal Mouffe makes a strong case for ‘Left populist’ mobilisation in building radical democracy. By Left populism, she refers to a populist mobilisation based on an expansive construction of a ‘people’ that works towards deepening equality and social justice for multiple marginalised groups. Taking cues from Laclau's works on populist reason (2005, 2006; Laclau and Mouffe 2014), she argues that radical politics requires deepening the idea of democracy so that ideas of freedom and equality are no longer confined to the domain of the liberal. They ought to be reworked so as to transform social relations towards realising substantive freedom and equality. Our narrative of the developmental trajectory of Tamil Nadu suggests that populist mobilisation around a non-essentialised Dravidian-Tamil identity and a demand for ‘social justice’ has indeed worked to expand freedom and reduce inequities across castes. Operating within a constitutional democratic framework, the state's experience highlights the democratic possibilities that can be opened up within such a structure. This is particularly important in postcolonial societies where mobilisations have often drawn upon essentialised and exclusionary constructions of ‘people’ that tend to undermine prospects for democratising social relations. The state's political experience suggests that it is indeed possible to institutionalise an inclusive populist mobilisation leading to a comparatively egalitarian developmental trajectory in the Global South.
There are thus two distinct contributions that our analysis of the state's development makes to the literature on subnational development and politics in the Global South. First, we establish that an inclusive populist mobilisation can generate sustained developmental outcomes for the marginalised social groups even when national-level interventions have an elite bias. Populist mobilisation and institutionalisation of that populist logic in the state apparatus have fostered better developmental outcomes in Tamil Nadu than in most states in the country. Such outcomes have been embedded in a growth process that has managed to structurally transform the state's economy and livelihoods. In fact, such outcomes have fed into the broad-basing of opportunities for entry into expanding modern productive sectors. Second, we have also demonstrated how an emphasis on status-based inequality has shaped this process. We thus call for greater attention to this source of inequality in the Global South.
In contrast to other political mobilisations that focused merely on classbased inequality, the Dravidian movement conceptualised injustice emanating from caste hierarchies to be more central in India. Piketty's recent work (2020) only affirms such a conception.
Acknowledgements
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5 - Broadening Growth and Democratising Capital
- Kalaiyarasan A., Vijayabaskar M.
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If social justice, as the Dravidianists imagined, was rooted in a process of inclusive modernisation, what does it mean for the process of capital accumulation? There are two interpretations of the unfolding of the process of accumulation in the state. According to one, both Dravidian parties have focused on welfare politics, leaving the elites to dominate the realm of capital accumulation (Harriss and Wyatt 2019). Harriss (2003) in fact observes that the prominent business leaders have continued to remain at the top for decades. Harish Damodaran (2008), though not exactly contesting this position, argues that there has been a ‘democratization of capital’ in southern India including Tamil Nadu, due to certain historical factors. Drawing upon works by historians like Mahadevan (1992, 2017), Damodaran argues that the absence of a dominant trading community (Vaishya) in the south allowed for entrepreneurs from lower castes to emerge, bringing about a process of ‘democratisation of capital’. He thus attributes this ‘democratisation’ to a combination of opportunities opened up by colonial commerce and the ability of specific lower castes rooted in particular geographies to take advantage of these opportunities. In other words, this process has happened independent of any deliberate policy interventions. On a similar note, while Swaminathan (1994) suggests a relative absence of entrepreneurship in the state, Sinha (2005) argues that there has been inadequate state support for industrialisation. Partly contesting these propositions, in this chapter we make a case for the role of state intervention backed by a political imagination in facilitating and ‘democratising’ capital accumulation in Tamil Nadu.
According to ideologues of the Dravidian movement, there were two factors that hindered democratising capital accumulation in the region. First, they held that the caste system rendered actors from some castes ‘born capitalists’ and those from others ‘born labourers’ (Vidiyal 2017: pp. 737–38). Addressing railway workers in 1952, Periyar called upon the workers to understand that it was being born into a specific caste that made them a part of the working class while members of the upper castes become capitalists by virtue of their birth. Their struggle should therefore be to destroy the institution that generates and sustains this class divide. Second, the dominance of Marwari (‘north Indian’) capital in the country and in the region was seen to prevent modernisation of the economy and entry of ‘Tamils’ into business (Annadurai 2017 [1949]).
4 - Democratising Care
- Kalaiyarasan A., Vijayabaskar M.
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India compares poorly with other developing countries on health parameters despite being among the fastest growing economies in the world (Balarajan, Selvaraj, and Subramanian 2011). In fact, compared to other developing countries, India has one of the lowest expenditures on health as a proportion of its gross domestic product (GDP) (A. Chakraborty 2019). As a result, citizens incur one of the highest out-of-pocket expenditures on health among countries with similar levels of income. Importantly, the increase in economic growth has not been matched by corresponding increases in human development in India. This is a paradox in a country where democratic practices have been better institutionalised as Evans and Heller (2018) point out. Countries with such democratic institutions are expected to invest additional resources towards welfare interventions in education and health compared to more authoritarian regimes that may emphasise growth at the expense of investments in human development.
As in the case of education, scholars use the elite bias hypothesis to explain this paradox (Das Gupta 2005). The Indian health system is biased in favour of elites as it focussed on curative health more than public health. Elites relied on curative medicines to insulate themselves from communicable diseases while neglecting public health, that is, to prevent exposure to such diseases for the rich and poor alike. Tamil Nadu is one of the few states that has, however, managed to work against this bias and build a robust public health infrastructure. The state for example, has already achieved the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of reduction in infant mortality rate (IMR) and maternal mortality ratio (MMR) (Vaidyanathan 2014). Given the macro-bias against healthcare, the state's achievements that we map in the next section clearly stand out. What made such outcomes possible?
This chapter traces a set of interventions in this regard, starting with the creation of a separate department for public health in the early-20th century. It goes on to identify factors contributing to the dramatic decline in fertility rate in the state including interventions focusing on maternity and early child care. The state, as mentioned in the previous chapter, is known for launching the nutritious noon meal scheme, a forerunner to similar schemes launched at the all-India level. The chapter also therefore discusses the history of processes instituted and the health implications of the nutritious noon meal scheme.
Bibliography
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Frontmatter
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List of Tables
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2 - Conceptualising Power in Caste Society
- Kalaiyarasan A., Vijayabaskar M.
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If subnational political regimes can shape development trajectories, the constituents of such a regime, and the factors enabling this, require explanation. Towards this, in this chapter, we develop a framework to understand the factors and processes contributing to the state's developmental achievements. We emphasise the primary role played by Dravidian mobilisation against upper-caste hegemony and its vision of social justice in shaping this regime (Pandian 2007; Rajadurai and Geetha 2009; Krishnan and Sriramachandran 2018a and 2018b). We highlight the political labour involved in the formation of a historic bloc or a ‘people’ comprising of a range of subaltern groups under a transitive ‘Dravidian’–‘Tamil’–‘non-Brahmin’ identity against this hegemony. We argue that this mobilisation articulated a demand for ‘self-respect’ and ‘social justice’ which has shaped the development trajectory of the state as political regimes sought to respond to this demand. Social justice was to be secured through a process of inclusive modernisation that will undermine the caste-based division of labour. The mobilisation thus demanded, and sought to ensure, equality of opportunity in the expanding modern domain. We draw upon Laclau's (2005) interpretation of populist mobilisation to understand how such demands coalesced to become a ‘Dravidian common-sense’ (Forgacs 2000) in the state, and shaped its subsequent development.
Following Pandian (1994, 2007), Rajadurai and Geetha (1996) and Geetha and Rajadurai (2008), we show how leaders of the Justice party, the political precursor to the Dravidian movement, and subsequently Periyar, founder of the Dravidian movement and the Self-Respect Movement (SRM) distinguished the ‘productive’ ‘non-Brahmin’ castes from those who survived off rentierism and/or through labour that did not contribute to the well-being of the region. Their mobilisation made visible the contours of caste-based social injustice, constituting in turn what we refer to as ‘Dravidian common-sense’ that comprised of securing justice through caste-based reservation, faith in a productivist ethos, need for greater state autonomy and forging an inclusive modernity. Importantly, as Pandian and more recently Sriramachandran (2018) point out, mobilisation was not founded on essentialised identities, but through forging of Dravidian ‘people’ based on an aggregation of disparate subaltern ‘social’ demands. We propose that the Dravidian movement approximates to what Mouffe (2018) calls left populism that effectively created a chain of equivalence between caste oppression and Dravidian-Tamil identity.
List of Figures
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7 - Popular Interventions and Urban Labour
- Kalaiyarasan A., Vijayabaskar M.
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In the last chapter we argued how traditional rural labour relations were destabilised and new opportunities opened up for lower castes due to a set of measures informed by Dravidian common-sense. Identity-based mobilisation was not merely about a politics of recognition but also a politics of redistribution that ensured a degree of material improvement in rural Tamil Nadu. In this chapter, we turn to ask: How did such mobilisation shape the material conditions of urban and non-agrarian labour in the state? Given the different institutional embedding of formal and informal labour, we make a distinction between interventions and outcomes in the two labour market segments. Establishing that the condition of labour in both formal and informal segments is relatively better than in other states characterised by industrial dynamism, we map a set of processes that made this possible. The study of Tamil Nadu's interventions in the domain of urban labour, we argue, suggests a solution to an interesting puzzle. A state which embraces economic reforms including the key tenets of labour market flexibility also does relatively better with regard to wages, working conditions and social protection for labour in both organised and unorganised sectors. Tamil Nadu's commitment to liberalisation has been accompanied by a relatively higher degree of social protection of informal workers.
Apart from secondary data and literature, the chapter also relies on detailed interviews with trade union officials, labour bureaucrats, activists and professionals employed in the software sector. We observe that the state has a relatively better share of decent jobs in the labour market, better wages and conditions of work. Importantly, while the state has not been able to counter the process of contractualisation of labour that we witness all over the country, it has nevertheless managed to contain it. The share of wages in organised manufacturing too is higher vis-à-vis other states in India. We explain such relatively better conditions for labour in terms of collective mobilisation and better embedding of the state's political regime in the interests of the lower castes and labouring classes. While Left unions and the DMK-affiliated Labour Progressive Front (LPF) played an important role in mobilisation, political regimes tend to respond to such demands better than in other industrially dynamic states.
Contents
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Dedication
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Index
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The Dravidian Model
- Interpreting the Political Economy of Tamil Nadu
- Kalaiyarasan A., Vijayabaskar M.
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This book adds to the growing literature on dynamics of regional development in the global South by mapping the politics and processes contributing to the distinct developmental trajectory of Tamil Nadu, southern India. Using a novel interpretive framework and drawing upon fresh data and literature, it seeks to explain the social and economic development of the state in terms of populist mobilization against caste-based inequalities. Dominant policy narratives on inclusive growth assume a sequential logic whereby returns to growth are used to invest in socially inclusive policies. By focusing more on redistribution of access to opportunities in the modern economy, Tamil Nadu has sustained a relatively more inclusive and dynamic growth process. Democratization of economic opportunities has made such broad-based growth possible even as interventions in social sectors reinforce the former. The book thus also speaks to the nascent literature on the relationship between the logic of modernisation and status based inequalities in the global South.
5 - Populism and Party: Society Developmental Regimes in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal
- from Political Economy by Regions of India
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- By Kalaiyarasan A, Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, New Delhi
- Edited by R. Nagaraj, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Bombay, Sripad Motiram, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Bombay
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Introduction
It is increasingly recognised that the nature of political mobilization of classes and castes produces specific political regimes; and these regimes, in turn, set the path of policy regimes and developmental outcomes (Kohli, 1987). Owing to specific regional histories and politics, there are variations in such political regimes. According to John Harriss (1999), Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal are states with political regimes dominated by lower castes and classes – albeit in different ways. Pranab Bardhan contrasts ‘welfare regimes’ in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu and attributes the differences between the two to the divergent nature of regional social movements. He argues that regional capital in Tamil Nadu is more indigenised and it has a ‘culture of wealth creation as opposed to redistribution’ (Tillin, 2013).
Tamil Nadu is home to anti-caste movements and political mobilisation of OBCs and SCs for over a century (Arooran, 1980; Chandrababu, 1993; Pandian, 2006). The DMK came to power in 1967, with a broad social base among the lower castes and classes, had a huge inf luence on the policy regime in the state. West Bengalwas ruled by the Left Front Government headed by the Communist Party of India – Marxist (CPM) since 1977 till 2011. The left coalition had an uninterrupted electoral triumph for more than three decades. The state has been credited to have a distinguished record of implementing agrarian reforms in rural Bengal (Bandyapadhyay, 2008; Mishra, 2007).
This paper uses two distinct categories to understand the political milieu and policy regimes Tamil Nadu and West Bengal – populism and partysociety respectively. Contrary to common understanding, populism need not be negative but can have positive connotation for the socially and economically disadvantaged sections. Andrew Wyatt (2013), in the specific context of Tamil Nadu, defines populism as ‘an ideological construct that celebrates the importance of the ordinary people, asserts these people should not be divided by social hierarchy and justifies improvements in their welfare.’ Bardhan argues that populism has indeed produced positive results in Tamil Nadu by taking economic growth and social welfare together (Bardhan, 2014).