A Fragmented Civil Society

Former Times of India editor Madhav Nalapat bemoans India’s lack of coordinated civil society in this enlightening interview in The Diplomat. Civil society “has allowed itself to get fragmented into myriad small groups, each championing the perceived needs of a small segment of society. Such splintering of civil society platforms in India has enabled vested interests to selectively pick on a few while indulging others, rather than face coordinated action on fronts such as official corruption and political lack of accountability and nepotism.” This includes political parties, which are in thrall to particular cliques or families, closing off the possibility of an outsider breaking through to shake things up along the lines of a Blair or Obama.

In the first ever survey of the voluntary sector earlier this year, it was found that India had 3.3 million NGOs in 2009 – one for every 400 people – and that the industry was worth about $17 billion a year. This certainly seems to support Nalapat’s contention that civil society is overly fragmented. The over-abundance also reflects the fact that many NGOs are basically unscrupulous ways of making money or avoiding tax.

As for the dynastic certainties of India’s political system, the past fortnight has seen Rahul Gandhi all but nail the crown to his head after placing himself at the centre of the battle between tribal villagers and the Vedanta corporation in Orissa and looking to repeat the trick on controversial stories elsewhere in the country. Yesterday, his mother Sonia Gandhi was “elected” to the presidency of the Congress party for the fourth time, unopposed. This makes her the longest serving leader of the party. Rahul will now have to do something very stupid to ruin his chances at the premiership in 2014.

It is unclear how sincere Rahul is about the causes he fights for. Flying in to Niyamgiri just as the struggle against Vedanta was coming to fruition smacks of politicking, but hopefully stems from an understanding that these causes need close political attention.

The one distressing point for the government is that only one organisation currently comes close to responding to Nalapat’s assertion that “civil society in India needs to coalesce around broad themes and needs a pan-Indian resonance.” It's not the Congress party, which does a pretty good job of this at election time through its claim to represent the aad admi (common man), but when in power does a better job of representing business interests. No, the one party able to effectively tie together the myriad grievances of the poor are the Maoists, who have a handily adaptable ideology of class struggle with which to absorb and magnify all the issues of India’s poor. The challenge for civil society is to put forward an alternative with less of a propensity for violence.