The Hindu Business Line : The unfulfilled promise

The Centre for Security Analysis (CSA) needs to be complimented for holding on October 5-6 at Chennai, a national seminar devoted to the role of the civil society in conflict situations, with particular reference to Jammu and Kashmir, North-Eastern States and the naxalite movement.

(Civil society has been broadly understood to comprise a wide spectrum of non-governmental organisations, including registered charities, development activists, community groups, women’s organisations, professional associations, trade unions, self-help groups, social movements, business associations, media and advocacy groups.)

It was a timely move to turn the spotlight on the role people’s organisations can play to resolve thorny issues bedevilling the body politic and largely left to the government machinery to handle.

By its very nature, resistance to, or rejection of, established system of governance results from alienation from national identity or social and economic discontent. It does not lend itself to a law-and-order and security-oriented approach.

But this precisely is what most governments round the world adopt towards those who, for whatever reason, have made it their life’s mission, even by resorting to violence, if need be, to change the existing dispensation to suit their objectives.

Again and again, the experience of various countries tells us that those who are convinced of fighting for a cause, however misconceived it might look in the eyes of establishmentarians, cannot be bull-dozed into submission.

There are two main problems with governments: The first is that they go by the book, and regard any individual or group opposing them as trouble-makers deserving to be put down. Second, in a democratic framework, political parties, having their own axes to grind, and with their own vested interests in mind, do not want to yield ground to demands running counter to their inbuilt prejudices and predispositions.

It is being realised on all hands that it is not possible to arrive at a durable solution for conflicts in which the state itself is the interested party except with the help of a disinterested third entity forging a convergence of minds with patience, goodwill, sensitivity, empathy, imagination, transparency and vision.

Patchy record

Theoretically, the civil society can be trusted to make up for what the governments lack, and that is why academic writings and political tracts of recent years have been extolling it as the ready-at-hand answer for the ills of the society and the failures of governments.

The US, perhaps, is the only country where the civil society has conformed to the flattering image associated with it in scholarly expositions. It has been the driving force, for example, behind the granting of vote to women and civil rights legislation for blacks.

Its record in India has at best been patchy. One can only think of three examples of effective civil society action in the recent past: The campaign spearheaded by Mazdoor Kisan Seva Sangathan for right to information, the determined effort by the Association for Democratic Reforms to make it mandatory for candidates standing for elections to file affidavits disclosing their criminal antecedents, if any, their movable and immovable assets, and their educational qualifications, and the mediation between the naxalites and the Government undertaken by the Committee of Concerned Citizens of Andhra Pradesh, under the dedicated leadership of Mr S. R. Sankaran. It was not the civil society but an individual Sunil Dutt who courageously confronted the Khalistan movement by going on a padayatra in Punjab.

There has been no visible evidence of civil society involvement in Jammu and Kashmir and the North-Eastern States.

The plain truth is that civil society, often plagued by lack of resources and want of the necessary degree of commitment on the part of members, is itself content either to look the other way or to take the path of least resistance.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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