The Round Table

Vol. 97, No. 399, 851–855, December 2008

Commonwealth, Democracy and (Post-)

Modernity: The Contradiction Between
Growth and Development Seen From the
Dalit Point of View
MICHEL NAUMANN
Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Pontoise, France

RESUME Dans quelle mesure les politiques du Commonwealth refle`tent-elles une confusion
largement répandue entre croissance et de´veloppement, démocratie et gouvernance ? A travers
l’e´tude de la place des Dalits dans une Inde dont le libe´ralisme, le succès e´conomique et la modernité
sont souvent vante´s, l’auteur analyse les rapports entre démocratie et question sociale. Si le
Commonwealth veut promouvoir la de´mocratie, il est nécessaire qu’il prenne ses distances vis-à-vis de
la nature actuelle de la globalisation et entreprenne une analyse critique du modèle anglo-saxon.

KEY WORDS: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), cultural hegemony, Dalits, democracy,
development, economic growth, globalization, governance, liberalism, poverty

MOTS-CLES: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), croissance économique, Dalits, démocratie,

développement, gouvernance, hégémonie culturelle, libéralisme, mondialisation, pauvreté

Introduction
Why hasn’t the Commonwealth asked the Indian government, in the name of
democracy, to do something in favour of the Dalits (untouchables) and landless
farmers who walked to Delhi last year? Does this silence mean that democracy has
nothing to do with the plight of the people?
When the official results of the 2008 Kenyan elections were proclaimed riots
started. The Commonwealth immediately called for an understanding between the
two party leaders involved and condemned the rioters. How could these politicians
be presented as the defenders of democracy whereas the people whom they had
reduced to the status of impoverished thugs were not given the slightest recognition
or understanding?
In proposing such a strategy to help a member state the Commonwealth had
probably confused democracy and ‘governance’. Even French, the language of 1789,
has started using the verb ‘ gouvernancer ’! The condemnation of the Kenyan people

Correspondence Address: Michel Naumann, Université de Cergy-Pontoise, SARI (Société d’Activités et de

Recherches sur l’Inde), 2 avenue Adolphe Chauvin, F-95300 Pontoise. Email: naumann_lalita@yahoo.fr

ISSN 0035-8533 Print/1474-029X Online/08/060851-05 Ó 2008 The Round Table Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/00358530802485841
852 M. Naumann

was not due to the sin of violence because the Commonwealth did nothing about the
Indian Dalits (Untouchables) whose organizations do not resort to violence,
although Dalits suffer every day from what has been called in India ‘atrocities’. Must
we conclude that India’s economic success and growth rate seem to show that her
government and her democracy are adequate to the new liberal and global
dispensation, which is what governance is about? Governance is formal law and
actual order for the sake of the elite and economic growth. It means that the issue of
the development of the many is forgotten or, at least, that it will necessarily come as
a consequence of growth. As long as this confusion between democracy and
governance dictates Commonwealth policy in favour of democracy among its
members, the cause of democracy is doomed.
Subsequently, global (post-)modernization can be the cause of a dramatic
regression instead of the progress of enlightenment. Globalization might be a
process of negative unification of the world accepted without any proper criticism by
the Commonwealth. The Indian Dalit Parties, such as the BSP and the Dalit
Panthers, have studied this paradox and their contribution is among the most
interesting ones in favour of democracy. It involves a criticism of governance and of
economic growth.

The Blindness of Good Governance

The Dalit movement has the feeling that it is invisible to political actors coming from
the Anglo-Saxon tradition which prevails in the Commonwealth as well as in the
economic global process. The causes of this invisibility are to be found in the fields of
ideology and practical politics nowadays.

Liberal Democracy, Good Governance and the Dalits

Globalization and good governance are ideologically based on such principles as
human rights, individualism, democracy, the market economy, private property, free
trade, competition, humanism, science and technology, secularity, a chosen tongue
(English) and the cultural inheritance of the West—mainly the Anglo-Saxon
tradition—which is now only coloured by the process of hybridization.
For the Dalits it is the very cultural tradition that developed the myth of an Aryan
invasion which substituted the concept of race to the concept of caste by hinting that
the low castes come from invaded and defeated people. In fact, archaeologists cannot
find any proof of such an invasion and the lore of Indian tribes do not reflect any
such event. Later in history, in 1857, in the name of religious tolerance, Queen
Victoria, realizing that the fears of forced conversions had been one of the causes of
the Indian War of Independence, put an end to the colonial policy of reforming
Hinduism, which the Dalits understood as a refusal to do anything in their favour or
to recognize them as an existing group. It is also, for the Dalits, the Anglo-Saxon
tradition which called the Indian elite to speak for the nation within the Indian
National Congress (INC) and inspired a national movement led by the upper castes.
The cultural hegemony of the Brahmins, who provided most of the national leaders,
can still be seen in the process of sanskritization, which erases the visibility of the
Dalits when they take on the norms and the appearance of the Brahmins in Indian
 Commonwealth, Democracy and (Post-) Modernity: The Dalit Point of View 853

big cities. Nowadays, the castes of traders and usurers are praised by economists,
who see them as the ancestors of Indian global capitalism and the problems of the
Dalits are once more forgotten.
Western democracy cannot easily see the Dalits because this cultural tradition sees
the citizen as an abstract entity, not a Dalit nor a Muslim or a Hindu. But in this
process of blurring identities, the Dalits are in the worst possible position: the West
knows about religions and classes as it still deals with such factors, but it cannot
define and understand castes, as they disappeared a long time ago in Europe. The
concept of good governance is too Western and based on individual economic
competition to see an actor in the economic field as a Dalit. Even many Indian
Marxists tend to erase the Dalits. In the past they were a necessary casualty of the
only mode of production available according to a very narrow and mechanical
interpretation of Marxism. Nowadays, the caste system, this abnormal and obsolete
remnant of the past, will gradually disappear within our very different mode of
production thanks to the modern process of class struggle and economic and
technological development. So, once more, the Dalits are forgotten and no special
and sufficient attention is given to this social structure.
Indians, of course, know about castes, and although the Dalits should, according
to the upper castes, remain invisible, they have dealt with this social structure. The
Indian Constitution was drafted by, among others, Ambedkar, the most prestigious
Dalit leader. But has India overcome the global hegemony of the concept of good
governance and brought the Dalits out of invisibility?

Democracy Lured by Good Governance

Good governance means a competent, democratic, modern and honest state with a
strong identity and army, but also a state which guarantees free trade and free
enterprise and rejects heavy bureaucracies, subsidies and expensive social
programmes.
The Dalits find that these goals are extremely ambiguous in so far that they favour
the BJP, a strong pro-Hindu party with a leadership drawn from the Indian elite and
an electoral base of poor Hindus. The leadership claims that they are more
competent and less corrupt than the INC. The BJP wants a strong, unified state
based on the Hindu and Aryan identity. The leaders appear authoritarian which
makes them look like very reliable rulers. They are not likely to start expensive
bureaucratic programmes in favour of the poor because for them, poverty comes
from the karma of past lives of sin and inequality is part of life. In this way, they are
very close to the Anglo-Saxon theories of the neo-conservatives, who think that
helping the poor makes them more dependent and that a generous policy towards
them is useless because no institution can go against natural laws. The BJP’s anti-
Muslim stance attracts the sympathy of Anglo-Saxon hawks.1
Thus, the aims of good governance favour a political force which has revived
communalism, especially against the Muslims and the Dalits. BJP leaders want to
weaken the programmes of positive segregation and subsidies in favour of the low
castes. They condemn state enterprises, where many Dalits work, as useless and
costly. Very often they divide people to rule them, and during the anti-Muslim riots
of Gujarat they engaged many Dalits as thugs to attack Muslim people. In such
854 M. Naumann

circumstances Dalits disappear as Dalits to become Hindus, and their specific

problems are never taken into account.
So Dalit invisibility comes not only from some archaic Indian zones of cultural
obscurity, but also from the ideals of good governance which the Commonwealth
and other international organizations promote in the name of democracy and
economic success in the globalized world. The economic consequences of these
policies are extremely harsh to the Dalits.

Growth and Development

Cities as much as Indian villages suffer from the economic decisions which go with a
policy of good governance. The Dalit movements have analyzed the consequences of
the Green Revolution2 and urban violence.

The Green Revolution

In the 1960s India realized that its agriculture was not doing well enough to avoid a
coming famine. It started a ‘Green Revolution’, whose success turned India into a
food exporter. Nevertheless, the situation is nowadays rather difficult.
The new species used by the Green Revolution needed pesticides, fertilizers and
machines whose cost was crushing to small farmers, many of whom were Dalits. The
successful farmers first backed the Dalit struggles to get more reserved jobs and
places at school, and in the process they increased their share in these policies to help
the poor. But, soon satisfied with what they had gained, they used their newly
acquired political and economical power to exploit the Dalits as cheap labour and to
rule without them.
The Green Revolution is also water-consuming and the driest regions did not take
advantage of general agricultural progress in India. The great dams have, as
Arundathi Roy has shown in some of her pamphlets, expelled many tribal groups and
Dalits from their lands when they were flooded. The invading multinational
corporations buy 25 000 acres of rice fields each year, pump the underground water
used by small farmers and use their strong position on the market to sell machines,
fertilizers and seeds to small farmers at prices which bring some to bankruptcy. As a
consequence, some 2000 poor farmers committed suicide between 1997 and 2000 and
2500 farmers in 2001–2002. In Kerala cocoa producers were suddenly told that their
crops were not going to be bought as usual by Cadbury who had signed a new
contract with Ghana. In 10 years (1994–2005) the proportion of people who live on
less than 10 rupees a day diminished from 31% to 22%, but the proportion of people
in a precarious situation (that is to say who survive on more than 10 rupees but less
than 20 a day) has increased from 51% to 55%. No one can say such progress, if any,
is enough. Obviously the argument that the success of a few brings hope to the many
doesn’t work. Even the idea of the greatest common good doesn’t solve the problem
of exclusion.
As a consequence, Dalits, who are always very numerous among the very poor,
have to rely on charitable Hindu organizations linked to the BJP, which sometimes
recruit them to attack Muslims.3 The disruption of the social order of villages and
 Commonwealth, Democracy and (Post-) Modernity: The Dalit Point of View 855

values brings anomie and despair. Many Dalits are thrown out onto the roads which
lead to the large cities.

Urban Poverty and Violence

In the cities as well as in the countryside the Dalits are socially and economically
fragile. The decay of the state factories means more unemployment. Jobs connected
with the private sector are very unstable. The multinational corporations compete
successfully against traditional craft products and create more unemployment in that
field. Sometimes the possibilities of jobs favour women (as workers in the seafood
factories in Kerala, for instance, or nurses or servants) and put unemployed men in a
humiliating position for which they are not prepared by traditional values.
Simultaneously new expenses appear: school fees for more literate children, longer
periods of unemployment due to the instability of the labour market, reduced social
help and subsidies, funds needed to create a small business for those made
redundant, the cost of a passport for those who want to migrate to the Gulf
(sometimes 100 000 rs), an increasing financial pressure created by consumer society
to keep up appearances. For unemployed or badly paid men, frustrated and
humiliated, often obliged to cling to traditional groups and values to survive, debts
and needs increase. The dowry is often a difficult issue and wives may be harassed,
threatened, beaten, attacked with acid or burnt by their husbands. Even in Kerala,
where the status of women is very advanced, crimes against women increased by
40% between 1990 and 1997.4 Dalits are always among the poorest of the poor in
urban areas as much as in rural ones. The politicians recruit thugs from these
sections of the population that they despise so much.
What the Commonwealth institutions call democracy is actually the opposite of it.
They do not understand and sometimes do not want to understand that a sound
democracy needs development, and that the present policy of growth without
development, what we call liberal globalization, is a factor of regression not only for
excluded men and women, but also for the rich who try to built a society which
doesn’t listen to the majority of citizens and even scorns them. Every day, in the
Mecca of high technology and successful globalization, Bangalore, the Indian Silicon
Valley, women are threatened not because of old Indian traditions, but because of
the living conditions, the anomie and the despair created by what is called progress
or (post-)modernity. Formal democracy imposed by the elites always betrays the
people, as Noam Chomsky once said: ‘‘it is when the threat of popular participation
is overcome that democratic forms can be safely contemplated’’.5

Notes
1. Radhakrishnan, P. (2006) Religion, Caste and the State (Bangalore: Rawat Publications), pp. 102–131.
2. Bandhu, P. (2007) Dalit Situation in South India (Bangalore: NEPA).
3. Teltumbde, A. (2005) Hindutva and Dalits (Calcutta: Samya).
4. Bandhu, P. (2001) Dalit Situation in South India, pp. 156–166.
5. Quoted by Slavoj Zizek, ‘‘Democracy versus the people’’, New Statesman, 18 August 2008, p. 46.