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dam-l LS: Devaki Jain in the The Hindu 'A fistful of salt'
> The Hindu, 8/11/99
>
>A fistful of salt
>
>By Devaki Jain
>
>WHEN HE picked up a fistful of salt from the beaches of Gujarat, Gandhiji
>was not trying to give free salt to the people of India. It was a symbol,
>an idiom of political assertion, but in a language, a vocabulary which
>represented the masses, not the elite. When Mr. Nelson Mandela said in his
>inaugural speech after assuming office as the South African President, `we
>want bread, water and salt' it was not that he wanted to limit the
>lifestyle of his people to bread with salt and water: it was to signal the
>aspirations of the masses, again a vocabulary which was representative of
>both political assertion and identification with the deprived. Imagine if
>these actions and words had been interpreted literally? That Gandhiji
>wanted to give free salt or that Mr. Mandela wanted only bread with salt
>and water for his people? How absurd it would have been? Imagine that the
>salt satyagraha had not fired up the imagination of Indians and opened the
>floodgates of the movement for freedom? What a loss to the grammar and
>method of politics and most of all to democratic processes which attempt to
>move the state towards justice?
>
>The struggle now going on in the Narmada Valley is a similar satyagraha. It
>has a potential which is close to Gandhi's fistful of salt. It has to
>succeed as it represents in its process and alliances more than a struggle
>against big dams or for better rehabilitation of the displaced persons. To
>interpret it thus would be as absurd as seeing the salt satyagraha as
>giving free salt. To miss its point of using spaces in a democracy for
>negotiating justice through public action would do more than submerge
>people. It would throw a dark shroud on democratic spaces; the use of such
>spaces through a diffusion of knowledge, the institutional framework,
>dialogue, consensus building across the divides of occupation, location,
>class and caste. It would break and perhaps even kill the will to seek
>justice from the state and the centres of power through informed
>negotiations.
>
>This struggle must be enabled to succeed so that many more doors and
>corridor that lie behind its purpose, which today are choked and in turn
>are choking India's journey to a just society, to an environmentally secure
>land, to a representative democracy are opened.
>
>Yesterday's workers movements and their collective voice are today people's
>movements. Workers movements have had to take a back seat as much because
>in economies like India the trade- unionised labour represents less than 10
>per cent of the labour force, as because the structure of production and
>trade systems worldwide have blurred as well as dampened working class
>culture. As the space for trade unions and cooperatives is protected as
>part of the institutional machinery for bringing the strength and opinion
>of the less privileged or the larger masses, people's movements must be
>seen as the institutional vehicles for carrying the voices of the masses
>into public debate and policymaking.
>
>The left movements have been marginalised by world events as well as by the
>emergence of the assertion and affirmation of injustice, a critique from
>within, as for example by women, the Dalits and the minorities.
>
>The space for the voices of the oppressed once occupied by the left and the
>unions then is available, unfilled - and in the last decade or two has been
>filled by people's movements all over the world - North and South.
>
>But people's movements by definition do not have the institutional
>structure that political parties and trade unions have. They do not have a
>space in the state's institutional framework, nor do they come under any
>legal framework. They are fluid and this enables them to be inclusive as
>well as broadbased and massive in numbers. But it also demands from them
>unity of purpose, single-minded thrusts, which in turn requires shared
>knowledge, clarity of purpose - attributes of efficiency. They need to be
>taken seriously by agencies of the state and society as the most vital
>safeguards of democracy and for sustaining the democratic spaces outside
>the conventional structures, which are often suffocated, crippled.
>Treatises have been written, and here we can draw on our own Nobel
>laureate, Prof. Amartya Kumar Sen - apart from other stalwarts of the
>Indian political economy such as the late Prof. Raj Krishna and the late
>Prof. Krishna Bharadwaj - who repeatedly emphasised that unless the voices
>and strength of collective public action were included as an element in
>economic models, there would be no way of generating equity with growth.
>This is the political element in economics - the space for a negotiated
>settlement in making the choices at the macro-level.
>
>Where this space is not encouraged, where it is snuffed out, there will be
>the danger of mishandling of economic policy - information which is crucial
>to the design and management of public policy is denied to the system. This
>particular public action - the Narmada Andolan story, its historical
>course, its method of informed negotiations, broadening the issues from
>oustees to science and technology, to educating the state with good humour
>and seriousness, with a view to influencing policy, - is perhaps the most
>elegant case study - to illustrate one of Prof. Sen's political points -
>that public policy needs the intervention of public action, the
>transformation of a lobby into a participant in policy.
>
>The viewpoint of emphasising the role of democratic spaces where
>information is available to the state through both the press and collective
>public action, as crucial for justice, for enabling the state to put forth
>what could be called a rational approach is illustrated by Prof. Sen in his
>comparison of the responses of India and China to famines. He argues that
>the impact of famine was less in India due to the information channels
>available to a democratic society.
>
>The Narmada struggle is one brilliant example of a course of action which
>systematically has tried to do this, but after so much review and court
>debates, has gone back all the way, as if these 15 years of discussion and
>exchange of information are of no value. This rolling back should not be
>allowed to happen. It will once and for all nullify the kind of approach,
>the kind of analysis and prescription that provide for justice in the
>political economy.
>
>If it fails, then more than itself fails. If it wins, it can begin the
>rollback in the other direction, namely give hope and muscle to rational,
>informed, slow and honest public action for justice. It could be the
>beginning of revival of spirit for those of us who want to broaden the
>scope and improve the quality of representation in a democratic structure.
>It could be the beginning of broader based coalitions which will raise the
>political voice of the discriminated against, such as women. Its failure
>will be a blow to all this.
>
>However for it to win, we need to ally ourselves with its larger purpose.
>We need to win this particular resistance. We need to make it the
>modern-day salt march - a symbolic fist to show that we are a state and
>society that can feed on information and can be bent to justice.
>
>(The writer is a development economist based in Bangalore.)