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| Development: Politics and Prospects |
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Post-Development, Democratic Discourse and Dissensus: A Critique of Vision 2020
The essentially contestable ideas of “development” and “democracy” come to a global construction of social and economic realities, a kind of epistemic and cultural grounding into a representative discourse that follows a strategic path of choice and action. Such contestable ideas strategically become a part and parcel of archaeology of power and self-identity. Given this entrapment of development discourse, the nation-state of India with its expansive market relations give rise to “peripheries” marked by sharp differences with what can be called “mainstream.” The difference can be contextualized in terms of a periphery such as Northeast India that gets represented in the mainstream by its “lack” of development. Mainstream developmental agenda defines the “lack” in terms of what is lacking in a region such as Northeast. Looked from a different angle, the lack that Northeast apparently has can also be defined by what the developmental agenda itself lacks. This whole idea of “lack” is not simply a negative idea, it is rather a complex outcome of developmental practices that ensues from the mainstream. The so-called shared experience of development between mainstream and periphery turns out to be a hierarchical flow of material and financial resources that assumes a centrist pattern. One understands the structuring of the centre-periphery relationship between the national mainstream and the Northeast around a bipolar “exchange relation”(1): POST-DEVELOPMENT BLUES This so called “vision” of development proposes to develop “comparative advantages” and exploit it through trading by way of creation of markets, which is nothing but a proposition of shift from agricultural to cash-crop farming and creation of a small scale low labour-intensive service sector. But how such a shift brings in a “structural change” is not spelt out except an assertion such as, “A common market in the region would crucially depend not only on the production of goods and services, but on the effective and efficient distribution of these.…”(4) This idea of developing a market mechanism and a shift from primary sector to tertiary sector does not alter the concrete spatial and social relations that manifest in the “exchange relation” between the mainstream market and the periphery. It rather reproduces the internal processes of balancing and adjusting various sectors of production within the framework of capitalist mode of production. Further the idea of accumulation based on investment as expressed in “market-based economy” in the Vision 2020 reproduce “capitalist relations of reproduction” by affirming that decision of production must be based on “comparative advantage,” which lies, as per the document, in untapped natural resource endowment of NER and “geographical contiguity” of the region with South East and East Asia. Both these sources of advantage, needless to say, are conceived keeping in mind the possibility of extracting natural resources and supplying them to the world economy across borders to Southeast and East. To drift the attention of resource endowed communities of Northeast from the processes of extraction, the document talks of “industry” and “service sector,” although there is no real advantage in these sectors. The idea of a prospective service sector that can thwart the social and economic cost of natural resource extraction is what the document envisions in next two decades. Such a possibility of a blooming service sector at the edges of an extractive economy is the neoliberal assumption of the document that talks of “participation” by people of NER in a globalized “outside,” the economy of Southeast and East. The “outside” now constitutes the Centre, the East Asian hub, beyond the national boundaries that stands out as the goal of a regional integration of Northeast Indian economy with the Greater Mekong Region (GMR). The paragraph began indeed with a much humbler statement about the “enormity of understanding the region” that ends up blaming the ongoing social movements that often took the path of armed resistance, which, according to the document, made use of “dense forest covers and open border with Myanmar” as well. The paragraph makes light of “hegemony” and dissatisfaction with it, as if it would change the scene by an enumeration of palliatives that will satisfy the “dissatisfied” people. The document that appreciated the natural resource advantage of Northeast, now deplores the “dense forest cover,” which incidentally grew over centuries because of an active human-nature symbiosis as ingrained in the life-world of many of these bordering communities and tribes. If development is a matter of outlook and attitude at a fundamental level, the revised draft exhibits an attitude of condescension, which actually constitutes the neoliberal strategy of blaming the deprived and the underdeveloped for their state of being. The document applies the discursive strategy of “consensus building” for the already existing hegemonic economic strategies by enlisting support from a section of the society through the means of “public hearing.” The voices of support and dissent find a place only at the “end” of the text and the text remains silent about how it culled all these diverse and variegated public opinions in finalizing the document. |
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RETHINKING THE DEMOCRATIC DISCOURSE |
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Post-development theorists have pointed out that “consensus building” over development measures through public discourse has been the most important strategy for providing “alternatives to development.”(5) In the context of Northeast India, the neoliberal frame of development propounded in terms of market relations advance an idea of “substitution” of modes of production without changing the “production relations.” The idea of substitution works not as a replacement but as an introduction to a new mode. For example, substitution of shifting agriculture by settled agriculture, agriculture by horticulture and other such cosmetic measures are provided as “alternative” to the existing cultures of cultivation. The alternative is supposed to be higher, better and advanced, instead of being an alternative to such “developed” method of production. This emphasis on the “developed alternative” leads to the rationality of “realising the vision” in terms of a “new strategy” (pp.17–9 of the revised Vision) that identifies “deficits” in physical terms. Post-Developmentalists point out that the absence of any exercise of agency on the part of people themselves marks how the developmental strategy condones itself from enabling the agency of people. This absence of reciprocity between strategic thinkers and the people for whom it is thought out gets compounded with a reductionist notion of “people” understood from an already determined set of priorities. Here this is reflected in the guiding statement that brings out the real motive behind the document, Given the large number of stakeholders, the variety of groups demanding various concessions, and the international dimension mired in diplomatic tangles, various issues need to be addressed delicately, using both the carrot and the stick. (pp. 19–20).
The strategy of using “carrot and stick” is how the document spills the beans of “paradigm shift in development strategy.” Such a strategy is a bleak adage of an already existing mainstream perception of the people of the Northeast as “other.” In terms of post-development theory, the practice of non-conformism on the part of the Subjects of development strategies, especially any strand of resistance, is often coerced(7). The ideas of such coercion, albeit, is represented in the form of a discursive choice, as the document chooses to speak in a avant-garde subtitle, “Harnessing resources for the benefit of the people” for its Subjects,
The people would like to see the large river systems converted into a source of prosperity, and mineral wealth used to create opportunities to increase employment and incomes. They would like to harness the vast hydroelectric energy potential and use the comparative advantage to expand economic activities in the region. They would like to see that the global public goods they provide through the vast forest cover is recognised and given adequate compensation. (p. 14) This is an articulation of building up cultural capital and feeding it into a circulating global economy. But how these extraordinary and specific cultural resources can be sustained within a trajectory of cash-contract-tourist economy without “commoditification” is the moot question that Post-Development thinkers ask for. The Vision continuously curbs and transmutes the existing forms of social and cultural practices of the region to fit them to the economis-tic drill, which is a return to a Hobbsean notion of “order.”(8) How such an order is given a content in the Vision is an ideological ploy, whereby, the relationship between NER and Southeast and East Asia is given a phantasmal description in terms of fly-by-night trading and connectivity. The idea of “geographical contiguity” with the ADB built trans-Asian road, rail and air connectivity now replaces the old nationalist myth of “Integration” and substitutes it with a signifier of “regional economic integration” through bodies like BIMSTEC. The transnational fantasy simultaneously uses the cultural symbols and practices for sustaining the global connectivity, while at the same time, it reduces cultural values and artifacts to a mere instrument of circulation of capital. |
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| DISSENSUS | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This entire “consensus building” discourse of Vision places emphasis on “responsive governance” by maximizing self-governance and generation of resources. On the face of it, such an exercise is part of a strategy of inclusion that plays the truant’s tune in an orchestra of global capital. This certainly has an experiential dimension. Various accounts of this experience begin from the affirmation of being different and being an other to the main frame project of Nationalist hegemony. The otherness is not self-ascribed, but it is the by-product of the relationship between the misrecognized cultural particularity of various ethnic and cultural identities of the NER and the dominant discourse of national identity. The misrecognition is confronted by social identities from below, the phenomenon of which is entirely misrecognized by the Vision in following terms, (…) underdevelopment is caused by insurgency and terrorism and therefore all developmental efforts will be in vain, unless political volatility is controlled simultaneously. Thus, the development vision for the NER should focus on the primary requirements of safety and security in these states. However, there is an alternative view which maintains that insurgency is the cause of underdevelopment, in which case the vision would be to hasten the pace of development to solve the problems of insurgency in the long run. However, the causality runs both ways. That is, insurgency and unemployment resulting from poor economic development feed on each other. Thus, poor economic performance results in insurgency and hence the solution of insurgency lies in the achievement of rapid economic progress of the region. If this can be taken as a legitimate position then perhaps one need not worry too much about the insurgency, which would be solved by achieving faster growth. (p. 30) |
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| Needless to say that the Vision establishes a causal nexus between insurgency and underdevelopment as an economistic subterfuge for the “vicious cycle” between investment, growth and poverty. Further it confuses between reasons and causes in the realm of social phenomena. Apart from these methodological short-circuits, the Vision tom-toms economic growth as a solution to Insurgency. That there are greater cultural and social reasons for affirmation of self-identity against the hegemony of a unified Vision is completely obliterated from this narrow perspective on economic development. The Vision does not build up on critical scholarship on the link between Insurgency and Underdevelopment. In a sense, the Vision promotes certain stereotypical ideas about Northeast through its economistic vision that fails to recognize the lived experiences of people. The binary between development/underdevelopment, insurgency/peace, governance/terrorism are deployed without any context-sensitivity in order to formulate a God’s-eye-point-of-view that reduces multiple possibilities of meaning of social action to a pre-ordained discourse of economic growth. The Vision does not celebrate the inner creativity of the people of Northeast in their concrete social and economic practices and turns a blind eye on these practices. This is purging out of values and beliefs from the realm of rational calculation, the basis of which lies in ideological domination and in the colonizing function of technical-manipulative and objective knowledge. The Vision merely cites the “evidences” to confirm its hypothetical take on problems faced by Northeast as a region. It contextualizes the idea of “interest” of development, in which People are supposed to partake as a fait accompli. The word “Vision” here is more like a gameplan or a blueprint for operationalizing a structured scheme of thought, the body of which merely seeks a confirmation of all its tailor-made inferences by way of fitting the “facts of life” into the premises of a derivative discourse. This is not first of its kind that the Vision gives a subsidiary role to the agency and choice of self-representing collectives, but this has been the mainstay of subversion of political meaning within socio-economic interests. If the realm of the political is taken to be the terrain in which the so called “interests” are contested and the notion of “autonomy” is re-constituted. How this contest of meanings is subverted by the hegemony of global political economy is represented in the Vision by way of appropriation of different voices. Let me cite an instance from the Vision. In one of the public hearing held in Nagaland, Rosemary Dzuvichu termed the document to be “patronizing” (p. 270), while Sanjeeb Kakoty suggested “social audit” (p. 266) for the projects implemented under the Vision. The document attempts to reverse such critical difference that not only positions the critics outside the discursive frame of the Vision, but such criticisms express the stifled truth and re-establishes the connection with reality. As the Vision suggested a transition from primary to tertiary sector of production, it charts a course of passage from material to immaterial forms of production. But this passage in the periphery of Northeast region has to follow the mode of production of global capital, which is to carve a margin to the global network of production. From the perspective of integrating NER into the global market, the immaterial kind of production in the form of symbolic-analytical functions carried out by financial brokers, for example, cannot happen in an autonomous manner. What the Vision formulates is the changed role of Northeast into a collaborator of globalization that begins with changes in physical aspects of connectivity and infrastructure to be followed by an abstract collaboration by material labour. Such a process ensures compatibility between hierarchical network of capital and the immaterial form of labour, which can be embedded in the physical infrastructure. The social-symbolic function of distinct ethnic cultures shall merely remain as one of the incomplete constituent of material labour, but it can’t survive for long in the virtual networks of global capital. |
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NOTES & REFERENCES: 4. Section III overview. 5. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “After Post Development,” in Third World Quarterly, Vol. 21, 2000, pp. 175-191. 6. The deficits identified by Vision are fivefold: “a basic needs deficit; an infrastructure deficit; a resource deficit; and a two-way deficit of understanding with the rest of the country. To this should be added the governance deficit.” 7. The process of victimization through “development agenda” is theorized by Escobar, following Focault, in the notion of a struggle to reconstruct the connection between truth and reality. See, Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 223. 8. Hobbesian notion of order emanates from the will of the ruler as the only unified will that the community can have – a will that is deemed to be better and superior to the disorder emanating from the state of nature that threatens the order of the society. See, for a full discussion on Hobbes, Ernesto Laclau, Emancipations, London: Verso Books, 1996, p. 62. |
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