ABSTRACT

Globalization for the Indian political economy implies a new process of simultaneous and double accommodation: of private entrepreneurial intrusions in the sphere of public collective goods and services; and of foreign multinational occupation of agricultural land, forests, coasts and labour resources. The first – very evident in the actual and projected privatisation of banking, insurance, pensions and medical-educational facilities –makes these goods and services precarious and fragile, and at the mercy of unregulated global market forces. The increasing divestment of public sector undertakings implies the erosion of the protected rights of workers, their trade union organisations and secure employment, and a growing casualisation of the workforce. The second trajectory – transfer of natural resources to multinational-owned

Special Economic Zones and other corporate ventures – has several important implications. First and foremost, it means the alienation from their habitations and livelihoods for peasants, adivasis (tribal people) and fish workers, who are evicted in huge waves to provide land for corporate mining and industries. It also leads to the formation of pockets of extraterritorial rights for multinational owners of the Zones. The Indian state is systematically moving massive and productive slabs of arable land, forests and coasts from producers to corporate owners: the contemporary phenomenon of accumulation by dispossession. Beginning properly with the Structural Adjustments programmes under the

World Bank/ International Monetary Fund directives from the early 1990s, this economic turn has assumed a striking urgency and expansion in the past decade, leading to massive peasant and tribal insurrections under many different political leaderships. In the same measure, it has led to ruthless and brutal state repression of popular opposition, under police and ruling party cadres who, in resorting to paramilitary forces and even aerial strikes, have ushered in situations of semi-military occupation in the heart of the subcontinent. The recent genocidal state violence in Sri Lanka has, clearly, offered what is seen to be a viable model for state action in India. There is, however, yet a third accommodation that needs to be referred to,

namely that the entire political nation in India, with its spectrum of electoral parties ranging from Left to Right, has embraced the logic and the vision of this development paradigm – albeit with somewhat divergent rhetorical

justifications. While the Indian National Congress masterminded and organised this paradigm, even the Left Front government in West Bengal has backed it, its rhetoric against neoliberalism notwithstanding. Furthermore, it was the Hindu Right BJP when it ruled at the Centre between 1998 and 2004, which aided in its development and growth through creating a Ministry of Dininvestment – a move that signified both a firm retreat from public sector undertakings and a commitment to privatisation. The political rainbow is thus fast acquiring a uniform hue. In the process the Centre and the Left have, however, failed to locate a

larger ‘moral’ doctrine that can charge their support bases with emotional fervour and a sense of righteousness. The economic philosophy of development appeals to the privileged, who can use growth figures to identify ‘national’ interests with personal ones. A more hegemonic and wider support base requires an ideology that can also appear as a moral mission in order to cement social differences and enable an exit from, or a forgetting of, the interlocution of social power and injustice. The ideology of ethnic violence, with its attendant ‘historical’ justifications and political lessons that interchange with religion, has, I would argue, been the Right’s answer to this lack of a moral framework. How powerful this ideology has been in energising the entire majority community was seen in Gujarat in 2002. Its limits also, however, became evident in the two subsequent national elections, where such an ideology proved unable to sustain itself indefinitely in the face of growing poverty levels and social injustice. This moral alternative of the Hindu Right can be explored on many regis-

ters: the charity work done by the RSS among dispossessed tribals; the schools and the unions they run with middle-class cadres; the temple networks they coordinate; their mobilisation of religious issues and figures for violence; and the daily training schedules they impose upon their members. In this chapter, I will attempt to look at how they deploy women in their projects. The gender politics of the Hindu Right direct our attention to the micro levels of political mobilisation in informal and non-visible ways. They also reveal interesting interconnections between stolidly conservative and dizzily modernising desires. Let me begin with a very brief historical lineage on the attitude of the Hindu Right towards gender.