CHAPTER VIII
CIVIL SOCIETY AND WESTERN SOCIETIES:
Tradition, Modernity and Communism
Sanjeeb Muirherjee
Traditional societies are suspicious of the idea of civil society. The dominant version of civil society is part of the Western imperialist onslaught on the non-Western societies under the aegis of colonial enlightenment. Civil society is contrasted with natural society, the primitive state of nature which provides the foundational distinction between culture and nature, and it became `the white man's burden' to `civilize' the non-Western societies.
Charles Taylor has read the European Enlightenment1 as a project which redefined the self and established a new relationship with nature and society. The self was like John Dalton's concept of the atom -- the smallest, self-sufficient, indivisible whole which is the building block of society. Each self pursues happiness, which it defines in its own way and uses the reason with which it is endowed to achieve its self appointed goal. Hence, reason becomes the instrument of the pursuit of self-interest. And freedom is all about freely choosing one's goals and happiness, and having the ability and conditions to pursue them.
All rational beings desire happiness; they are equal and equally free to pursue and choose their life plans.
In order to remove obstacles in the pursuit of their self-interests, these individuals, being rational, enter into a contract to establish a society and state which will guarantee them the fundamental rights to life, liberty, equality and property. Thus civil society is born from within the state of nature. Like reason, civil society, state and government are not only products of human deliberation but are in the nature of instruments or means which enable individuals to pursue their self-interest -- all doing so freely and equally.
In whatever way we conceive of civil society, it presupposes the pursuit of self-interest by a free and atomic rational self. The essence of civil society means that the conditions and rights are guaranteed by the state and government which enable individuals freely to pursue their pleasures and interests either simply or in free association with others in matters of mutual interest. In liberalism, the freedom of, and freedom in, civil society is maintained as long as the state and government protect the fundamental rights of the individual and do not usurp power or dictate terms for the individual's conduct of his life or his free associations and institutions.
Liberalism claims that all humans are rational beings: this is what it means to be human. The abstract rational self is not bound to any culture, tradition or history. That is why all rational doctrines produced by the Enlightenment dreamed of society on a world scale, be it Locke's liberalism or Marx's communism. But throughout the world, liberal civil societies or communist societies are confined to the level of the nation. Why have all Western civil societies become national in character? What happens when a rational self becomes a national-rational self? And why does it so happen?
The concerted view of the universal theories of the Enlightenment led them to fashion all social life in the image of their theories based on a universal rationality free from all culture and history. This view does not give any content to the life plans of individuals or to such common affairs of society as education or values. It can only destroy the past in the name of freedom, but the same notion of freedom prevents them from giving positive content and values to any new institution or society.2
Secondly, confronted with these difficulties, liberal civil society and universal reason had to make a philosophical compromise. This gave birth to the modern nation and national civil societies. The idea of the nation solved both the difficulties.
Pre-modern societies are based on the idea of the community as prior to the individual and on the moral code of the community governing the life of the individual. Reason, self-interest and contracts do not tie the individual to the community. He is born into a community -- it is not a product of choice. The ties are of blood, kinship and love. The individual is not a self-sufficient whole or atom, but rather a part of the community and subservient thereto. There are multiple communities -- local, occupation-based, cultural, religious, et cetera. Partha Chatterjee3 has argued that modernity dissolves these communities and liberates the atomic self. At the same time, modernity, per force, creates one single legitimate community, namely the nation. Out of multiple traditions, cultures and languages legitimize one core set of values and traditions and impose that as the authentic character upon the whole society. That is how a uniform, homogenous nation is born. The nation gives content to the abstract and empty rationalism of liberalism. This is the philosophical compromise between liberalism and nationalism, giving birth to the national civil society. In recent years, Michael Foucault's work on the homogenization, normalization and disciplining of modern society can be better understood as processes which actually produce a nation and its civil society -- its culture, values and ways of life and thinking.
This nationalism became a particularly potent force in the world arena, whereby Europe sought to conquer and civilize the rest of the world in the name of national glory, power and historic mission. This brings us to the question of modern man's relationship with nature. Modernity conceives of the self as an asocial atom, which constructs a society by contract. Similarly, it postulates that the self is outside nature and is entitled to conquer and harness through scientific knowledge.
The result is the familiar story of imperialism -- the political and economic conquest by Europe of the entire globe, together with the plundering of the world's natural resources. What is not fully realized is the gravity of the world's greatest genocide, whereby Europeans almost decimated the indigenous populations of not three countries but three continents -- North America, South America and Australia. It thus becomes imperative to ask and answer why modern Europe, in its belief in inviable and universal human rights and civil society, could deny these so violently to the rest of the world -- and in the name of civilizing it?
How does the non-West react to the onslaught of Western modernity? What options does it have? The dominant re-action has been to become like the West, to replicate the Western idea of the nation, civil society, state and economy or to adopt the dissident version of modernity -- the Soviet alternative. However, at a subterranean level, there have been attempts to draw upon traditional resources to confront modernity.
In Europe, civil society emerged from the womb of feudal society. Over time it strengthened itself and ultimately questioned and overthrew the old state to set up a liberal state compatible with the emerging civil society. In India, under colonial rule, the colonial state gave birth to a modem civil society -- one sponsored and controlled by the state. Moreover, it was an enclave; it did not cover the whole of Indian society. It was limited to the colonial port cities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It was an enclave created by the state and its laws, and buttressed by such new institutions of colonial rule as universities, press and associations.
A fundamental divide came about in Indian society -- a state-sponsored, modern-arena, civil society based on modem individualism and a vast hinterland organized along communitarian principles and traditions. Partha Chatterjee4 in his research on Bengal has shown how the modern sector has been unable to break up the community and establish its hegemony over the whole of society. This has been the main stumbling block on India's road to modernity, despite the efforts of the colonial state and some fifty years of independence.
In this essay, we shall explore the nature and limits of civil society in contemporary West Bengal, under communist rule since 1977. Bengal was one of the most important centers of colonial rule in India and its history reveals several peculiarities. Compared to the rest of India, colonialism made very deep inroads in Bengal, creating in the process a considerably entrenched civil society and a large, English-educated middle class -- the Bengali Babu Bhadralock.
Soon the Babu was disillusioned with the promise of colonial Enlightenment and embarked on a nation-building project -- it engaged itself with constructing an autonomous national society. Politically it sought freedom or the creation of a sovereign national state; economically, a technologically advanced industry and a modern agriculture; socially, democratization and equality which meant doing away with caste and traditions; and culturally, a rationality based on Enlightenment ideas of science and reason, together with a rejuvenation of a core national identity. In other words, the Babu strove to replicate the model of Western development in India, especially after India attained independence in 1947.
The strength of the Bengali Babu lay in the fact that he was largely autonomous of any of the basic classes of society, namely, the bourgeoisie, landlords, peasants or workers. After the partition of Bengal in 1947, and the creation of a Muslim majority state of East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh, the Babu came to assert himself to attain supremacy over society. However it was not hegemony in the Gramscian sense.
Though in the first two decades after independence the Congress Party retained its political leadership both in West Bengal and in the country at large, in Bengal it faced a serious political and cultural challenge from the Bengali middle class, in alliance with other subordinate classes, especially in the sphere of modern civil society. The contest in civil society was between the old social and political elites, allied with the dominant classes and embarked on a project of building a modern capitalistic state, and the vast sections of the Babu in alliance with the people freed by dreams of a Leftist utopia
Leftist-inspired social commitment and intense political participation in the form of ideological struggle and mass political movements in all spheres of the Babu's social world gave this class a certain cultural and political vigor and autonomy. In the process, Bengali civil society became rich and vibrant through endless debates and discussions and social praxis. Besides direct political institutions like parties and mass organizations, new institutions and spaces emerged within civil society like small magazines and neighborhood associations, theater groups, study circles, et cetera. Values, virtues, social commitment and political action and intervention, as against the ideology of individual success, came to the forefront. Serious attempts also were made to break the enclave nature of modem Bengali civil society by politically organizing and allying with the working class and the peasantry. This was a traditional communist (vandguardist) strategy where the Left sought to lead, educate and organize the masses by revolutionizing their consciousness. The traditional values, beliefs and institutions, which enabled them to lead their lives over centuries was delegitimised and simply dismissed. Through it, came some changes in people's lives and ideas. No radical transformation occurred, nor was the divide between the Babu and the masses erased. Tradition proved to be more resilient.
The challenge to capitalist modernity and the Indian state reached a new phase in the mid-1960s. This was reflected in the 1967 elections, when the communists, in alliance with other parties, formed a United Front Government in West Bengal. This gave a further spurt to the process of strengthening and radicalizing Bengali civil society. Visions of a socialist utopia gripped the imagination of the Bengali middle class. A section of the Left, inspired by Maoist ideology, issued a call for armed revolution. Dreams of instant revolution swayed large sections of middle class students and youth. Sharp dissensions came about within civil society, which could no longer be held together by the ethic of debate and discourse. Resort to violence was of two types: one, traditional Maoist insurrections against the state and the dominant classes and two, violence within civil society to settle ideological and political differences.
In independent India, the Left in West Bengal in the latter half of the 1960s posed the most serious threat to the power and ideology of bourgeois modernity. To overcome this challenge, the Indian state engaged itself in counter-insurgency in West Bengal.
The Indian state openly flouted all democratic norms and unleashed open war on the Left, especially on the Maoists and the middle class and its allies. Mass killings, violence and torture were resorted to in order to quell the Leftist challenge. More than 25,000 radicals were jailed. Congress, the ruling party of the central government, organized lumens and small sections of the middle class to set up semi-fascist organizations -- the Youth Congress and the Charta Parishad. This two-pronged attack created near civil war conditions. Bengali civil society and its autonomous associations and institutions were battered and forcibly controlled by the forces of order and status quo. Against this backdrop the Congress won the 1972 elections, taking recourse to widespread violence and rigging.
This was a traumatic experience for the Bengali bhadralok. From this defeat it learned some far reaching lessons. It's republican virtues and non-conformism were quickly jettisoned. It could not recover from the assault during the five year Congress regime. In 1975 India, Gandhi declared a countrywide. emergency and clamped a dictatorial regime over the whole country. She put an end to democratic politics by a reign of fear, violence and mass imprisonment. Ironically, West Bengal hardly experienced these emergency excesses as its democratic politics had been pulverized in the early 1970s.
Mrs. Gandhi surprised her opponents by calling for elections in 1977. She was led to believe by her official intelligence agency that her dictatorship enjoyed mass support. Under the conditions of censorship, she had no way to know the mood of the masses. Congress was simply decimated, and there was a revival of the democratic spirit and politics all over the country.
In 1977 in West Bengal the communists came to power and have won all consecutive elections to become the world's longest serving democratically elected communist government. The paradox of the Left victory came in the wake of the defeat and pessimism of the Bengali middle class -- the Communists defeated the Congress, not through any mass resurgence of its earlier strength, but in the secrecy of the ballot booth where singular rejections of the Congress spawned a collective verdict. Its pessimism and defeat had robbed the Babu of its earlier ability publicly to debate and collectively intervene in matters of state and civil society.
This was not a temporary respite, a step backward in order to take two forward. The communists who had earlier led the middle class and made Bengali civil society autonomous and vigorous was now in no mood to revive the spirit of the 1960s. Rather, along with the Babu, the Left made a historic compromise with the state and capitalism, both indigenous and multinational. As a result Bengali civil society changed fundamentally.
The Bhadralok made a dramatic exit from civil society and the public sphere into domestic concerns, its self-interests and those of the family. Having failed to realize the Left utopia, now the Babu redoubled his efforts to make it within the existing system itself. Also, having lost the opportunity, the middle class now started making superhuman efforts for propriety. This meant costly and exclusive English schools where, more important than the formal course, a new ethic or weltanschauung is taught. They came to share as a new identity that of the most powerful class in India -- the English-speaking elite (ESE).
Unlike the Bengali bhadralok which was bi-lingual, where English and Western knowledge and Bengali and traditional culture interacted, often to their mutual benefit, the ESEs of India are rapidly distancing themselves from their native tongue and culture. They are steeped in the American ideology of individual success and conformism. With the Babu joining the ranks of the ESEs, it is succumbing to the sway of the ideology of scientism and technical and managerial efficiency. Thus, politics and public deliberation, which kept alive Bengali civil society, is declining at a frenetic speed. This has led to the decline of liberal education in the human sciences and basic natural sciences. Rather, careers in modem engineering, medicine, computers and management are considered to be most attractive. This has led to the decline of traditional colleges and universities which were centers of intellectual and political debates in Bengal. From dreams of a Left utopia, now this class dreams of emigrating to America -- the land of opportunity and wealth.
These cultural changes, along with the economic decline of Bengal, have led to the disintegration of the bhadralok, its elan and political vigor. The dominant section has made it to the ranks of the ESE, but a sizeable section, unable to afford exclusive English education and being schooled exclusively in the vernacular, is being relegated to the social backwaters of Bengal. The social and political initiative has been wrested from the Babu by the bourgeoisie. In fact, the leading capitalists of Calcutta have set up a forum -- Bengali Initiative which meets regularly in plush hotels to deliberate on contemporary affairs and chart the course of government policies.
The erosion of civil society and the public sphere is closely linked to the loss of autonomy and initiative of the middle class. This is clearly evident in the decline of public debate and the small magazines, the withering of autonomous public institutions and the political passivity of the Babu. Thus we see the rise of glossy magazines guiding the awkward Babu to a new order of home decoration, fashions, sex and weight reduction. For long, Calcutta's leading football clubs and the soccer league, along with politics, were a Bengali passion which helped build solidarity and a healthy civil society. But now, due to the lack of public enthusiasm, which often bordered on madness, the fortune of football and the leading clubs has nose dived to such an extent that serious negotiations are going on to sell some of them to the leading business houses of India. More important, the Babu's addas5 no longer linger; they are breaking up. The survival of civil society is now dependent on the forces of the capitalist market or the bureaucratic state.
Following the defeat of the middle class in the 1970s and its withdrawal from civil society, it made a historic compromise with the Indian state and capitalism. Ironically, this strategy came into its own under communist rule since 1977. The Babu had carved an autonomous space for itself in civil society through a protracted political and ideological struggle against the onslaught of the state and capitalism. This was largely inspired by the Left. The communists in power firmly kept the people under leash and, almost with a vengeance, upheld the legal and constitutional niceties of the state, reaffirmed its legitimacy and took great pains to stop the people from taking any popular political initiative. The emphasis was on order and legitimacy and efficiency of the state. Secondly, the Left strategy for economic, particularly industrial development, was entirely a policy to entice private Indian and multinational capital to invest in West Bengal. To make the investment climate conducive, it had to discipline the work force and trade unions, which in the past had played an important role in the affairs of Bengali civil society. In fact, Jyoti Basu, the communist chief minister of West Bengal, though not a party theoretician, was fundamentally in charge of the entire discourse of the Left. The key elements of this discourse were bureaucratic order, private industrial development, political passivity and a modicum of welfare measures under the firm tutelage of the communist-run government. The stress on order, efficiency and development made popular initiatives and politics illegitimate as they were sources of disorder. Basu's success in reestablishing the legitimacy of the state and capitalism through formal democratic means under communist party rule has endeared him to the bourgeoisie to the extent that in 1996, under conditions of political instability in the central government, he was offered the prime ministership of the country.
Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were characterized as totalitarian mainly because they destroyed the autonomy of civil society. In West Bengal, the communists are only running a provincial government in India's quasi-federal set up. Though the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), as the major force of the Left, is openly run on Leninist and Stalinist organizational principles, it has limited powers in India's liberal democratic constitutional polity. However, in spite of its limited powers, and a civil society having already faced a counter attack from the state and the Congress Party in the 1970s, the CPM has made a concerted move to establish its strangle hold over Bengali civil society.
The Left has been able to overrun civil society because of three major factors: ideological, political organizational and social.
Ideologically, Marxism is deeply suspicious of the idea of individual rights, reducing it to a mere piety to protect bourgeois property rights. Secondly, Marxism claims to have discovered the science and laws of history which enable the communist party to know the Truth. This gives the Left a `scientific rational' ground to legitimately crush all opposition as reactionary and against the trend of history.
In political-organizational terms, the most powerful instrument which can inaugurate a regime of Left fascism is a communist party built along Lenin's tract. What is to be done? It is a highly centralized and hierarchical organization where the central committee has total control over all units of the party from above, but there is no horizontal or lateral interaction among the different units of the party. Nor is there any free exchange of ideas and views within the party as a whole. The party, through an array of mass organizations, like trade unions, woman's associations, et cetera, aims to control every corner of civil society. Where it fails, it often resorts to open violence and intimidation. This makes the communist party a Foucauldean panopticon par excellence.
Through the mechanism of separatIon of powers and checks and balances, the liberal state prevents the usurpation of power and the overrunning of civil society. The communist party, through its centralized control over mass organizations like employees associations, has very adeptly undermined the legal constitutions mechanisms of liberalism. Though the police and other organs of the state enjoy autonomy, they are subverted from within through the powerful network of party and mass organization nexus. As a result, there is no authority to protest the violation of human rights in civil society. The communists claim that these mechanism are mere stratagems of the bourgeoisie to prevent the people from coming to power.
There has been longstanding criticism by the Left of the Indian state and the bourgeois nationalist elite's inability and lack of political will to address socially the oppressive hierarchies of caste, class, culture, nationality, gender and age in Indian society. These hierarchies are an open invitation to political authoritarianism, which also poses a serious constraint on the functioning of a democratic civil society. The Left till the 1960s engaged itself in organizing mass movements against these hierarchies oppressive of democratic society. But after its defeat in the early 1970s and its realization of the risks which attend any radical social struggle, it has now compromised with these forces in the name of order and social and political stability. Having adopted the bourgeois development paradigm, it sees no reason to launch a radical democratic struggle from below. Rather, like the official policy of the Indian state, the Left, too, is now attempting to reform society from above through state and bureaucratic tinkering.
Both the bourgeois development model and the Leftist alternative seem to have failed to sustain and create an autonomous civil society which is not a middle class enclave, but encompasses the whole of society. Even if such a civil society is forcibly constructed, it would be a replica of the West and would involve a most violent and brutal attack on traditional society. Moreover, the civil society attained by the people of Western Europe not only was possible by colonizing the whole world and plundering its resources, but also involved the genocide of the indigenous people of thee continents and mass emigration to these regions. Even today, the developed countries consume three quarters of the world's natural resources to maintain life styles of only a quarter of the world's population.
This simple arithmetic makes it ecologically impossible for the non-West to become like the West. Only a tiny Western enclave, based on a brutal internal colonialism, can lead to such development.
What, then, is the alternative for countries like India? Bengal underwent two centuries of colonialism; since independence it has followed capitalist modernity and later a communist government. Under all these dispensations, tradition was undermined, attacked and delegitimized. As a result, traditional society, as a complex and diverse unity, no longer confronts modernity, Left or otherwise. Rather, elements of traditional society, like caste and community, confront and negotiate with modernity, often to find a secure place. But modernity is united under the nation state.
In India's struggle against colonialism there was a strong current of thought and action anchored in India's myriad traditions. It sought to reinvoke traditions, to redefine traditions and to dialogue with modernity on an equal footing. Gandhi best represented this trend. Though India after independence acclaimed Gandhi as the father of the nation, his philosophy was cast into the dust heap of history by the new elite and the state. Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya, 20th century India's foremost philosopher, in his seminal address, Swaraj in Ideas7 criticized the national movement against colonialism as limited to only the twin goals of economic and political freedom. He called for freedom of the mind, freedom to think in Indian categories and dream, an authentic future of India rooted in her traditions, as against replicating the West by aping them.
George McLean8 allays some of our suspicion about civil society when he follows Gadamer's reinvoked tradition in the making of civil society. If civil society is not limited to Enlightenment philosophy, then the non-West can imagine and conceptualize an alternative type of civil society, not out of the blue, but rooted in its own traditions, history and civilizations.
Bengal, like the rest of India, has a long, rich and diverse living tradition.9 An autonomous and authentic civil social space still can be found here. Louis Duxnont,10 the French social anthropologist, summarized one contrast between Indian and Western society. Western society is based on the idea of the free and equal self -- homo equalis, while India is hierarchical where the unit is not the individual, but the caste, ordered hierarchically. Dumont's essentializing of one aspect of caste has led to its wholesale condemnation not only by Western educated Indians. Caste has become almost a dirty word in modern Indian political discourse. Its only relevance in this world is to demand reservation in official jobs and admissions in higher education by members of oppressed castes who lack modern education and are economically under privileged. In this entire discourse, the underlying question is how to bring about equality, especially equality of opportunity.
But caste is much more than that, especially in its civil social aspect. There are several thousand castes in Bengal, not only among the Hindus but among Muslims and other religions as well. Each caste has an autonomy of its own, having a distinct culture, skills and tradition, but at the same time it is part of a larger social order defined in linguistic, cultural, religious and civilizational terms. Each caste is like a community, with a strong sense of solidarity. It deliberates in its caste panchayats or assemblies to govern itself. Each caste has a core set of skills which it cultivates and transmits across generations. A large part of India's economy is furnished by products and services which are not formally produced in the modern sector, but are contributed by these castes. Given the ecological impossibility of building a modern industrial economy, it is these caste-based crafts, services and products, which have been ecologically sustainable over the centuries, that hold some promise for the future.
But the modern Indian state seeks to undermine and delegitimise these traditional civil societies and to impose a homogeneous, faceless, impersonal national unity and an insipid and weak civil society. This leads to extreme individualism, alienation, a loss of control over one's life, culture and society and thus threatens to be the end of pluralism and diversity. Under its impact, castes are disintegrating.
But this account should not lead one to romanticize the caste system. Upper caste oppression and exploitation and the lack of respect for individual freedom have been the major fault of this system. On this count, the traditional caste system has much to learn from modern liberal ideas of individual freedom and equality. However, within tradition there is a powerful democratic trend in the ideas and social movements of India's medieval Bhakti poet-saints. It is through the revocation of tradition and dialogue with other cultures that an autonomous and vibrant civil society can be created.
NOTES
1. Hegel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), ch. I.
2. Ibid.
3. "More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry" R. Guha ed. Subaltern Studies II (Delhi: OUP, 1983). See also his The Nation and Its fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories (Delhi: OUP, 1994).
4. Bengali: The Land Question (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi, 1981).
5. A regular gathering where intense conversations are held. A popular salon.
6. See Sanjeeb Mukherjee, The Bourgeoisie and Politics in West Bengal, Occasional Paper (Calcutta: Center for Studies in Social Sciences, 1983).
7. S.h. Gosh ed., Four Indian Critical Essays (Calcutta: Jijnasa, 1978).
8. George F. McLean, "Philosophy and Civil Society: Its Nature, Its Past and Its Future," in Civil Society and Social Reconstruction, ed. George F. McLean (Washington: The Council for Research in Philosophy and Values, 1997).
9. The title of K.G. Subramanyam's book: The Living Tradition (Calcutta: Seagull, 1982).
10. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Delhi: Vikas, 1970).