INDIA'S EXPERIMENT WITH COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT REVISITING THE STATE AND COMMUNITY.

• Author: Khatun, Hena

INTRODUCTION

The evolution of every modern state, more so in a postcolonial state like India, is integrally connected with the evolving notions of development. These notions in turn have implications for the idea of the state, its relationship with citizens, its ability to create conditions for economic and political freedom, and everything associated with the questions of democracy and legitimacy. India's experiment with development as discourse and as a practice has been characterized by shifting priorities of what constitutes a meaningful life and the state's role to ensure it, something that continues to resonate decades after independence. In a nutshell, development was and continues to be the most important register for understanding India's postcolonial experience. The recent skepticism of development in academic debates (as in post-development thought) has not been translated into political rhetoric, nor has it diluted the intrinsic carrying capacity of development to capture people's aspirations. Like modernity's continuation in offering hope for millions in spite of the so-called postmodernist surge, development as normative thought and an aggregate of services continue to anchor politics in a developing country like India.

The delivery of development in India since independence traversed uncritical adoption of Western models as well as alternative models of grassroots development, community empowerment, and practices around political freedom and justice. Later these approaches were conditioned by the global developmental institutions and neoliberal governance. This is not to say that these experiments followed one after the other, or that one model's failure led to another. India's development is an experiment with hybrid expressions of socialism and market economy, material and political well-being, state-led and community-led development strategies. In other words, India offers an intriguing site of simultaneity and hybridity in its development practices that both interrogate and feed into one another, and it is difficult to identify whether state-led development contests or facilitates popular understanding of development. As we engage in the following pages, Indian development politics occupies the interstices of both the statist and the popular. It even goes beyond that when the state appropriates community-based practices for its legitimacy and representative character, and community practices often align themselves with statist notions so as to find currency and institutional teeth. This politics of legitimation brings the state and the community to a conversation and helps them constitute each other.

This leads to a model of development practice where the community is as much a product of the state as it is a producer, and vice versa. Development emerges as an effect of that process of negotiation and contestation. This interstice of state and community, institutional and popular, hope and anxiety, and contestation and corroboration is the theme of this paper seeking to offer fresh evidence for a reappraisal of what we know as state-led development and its relationship with people, and moreover, the way people become development subjects vis-a-vis the state. Now, this is easier said than done. Development subjectivity for an otherwise passive mass of humanity in a "Third World" country, who should be objects of state largesse under normal circumstances, requires not just a change in the state's ways of engaging with its people but also the academic and praxis-based climate that creates a template for appreciating such changes. That brings us to the evolution of development practice in the Indian context and its mediation by the state, its political cultures, changing dimensions of global development discourses, and more importantly the local culture and the people who make these ideas matter when they receive development benefits.

Drawing from the Indian experience, we engage, historicize, and interrogate the way the developmental state since independence delivered itself to the community of people. We go beyond the idea of a fixed and unitary state predicated on notions of sovereignty and locate it in various administrative and developmental institutions that work toward ensuring the quality of life for its citizens. This comes close to what Foucault saw at the end of the eighteenth century when the sovereign power over life made way for an idea of state defined by governmentality. (1) We see development as an outcome in terms of material conveniences as well as a process that facilitates decision making. Desire for this outcome brings the community of people with aspirations for material and political development to the heart of the developmental state. As Rhonda Phillips and Robert Pittman propose, (2) communities may be defined in geographic terms as in a locality (village/town) or in social terms with a community sharing common interests and concerns (as in a community of farmers). For convenience and without derecognizing internal contradictions within, we see the community as both shapers of and shaped by the developmental state.

It may be noted that articulations of the state, development, and community are always mediated by cultural and quotidian practices and that any universalist pretensions in their usage are better avoided for the sake of a grounded understanding of these concepts. What is intended in the following pages is a critical exploration of the state-community relation vis-a-vis existing domain literature with illustrations from the Indian experience. With this objective, the paper is divided into three sections followed by the conclusion. The first section traces the evolution of development thought both at global and national stages. The second part engages with the idea of a postcolonial development state and its problematic relation with people, and also the way state and community mediate each other. The third section highlights the mainstreaming strategies of community development in India and their subversive/complementary potential to disrupt/complement institutional development. The conclusion summarizes the arguments.

EVOLUTION OF DEVELOPMENT PRACTICE IN INDIA

To situate and contextualize the paper, it will be appropriate to historicize the evolution of alternative discourses after modernization theory and its trickle-down philosophy were subjected to scrutiny. Doubts regarding the efficacy of modernization were not confined to academic scholarship, nor reserved for global development discourses, but were integral to the development practice in the Global South. In the late 1980s and 1990s, partly due to the failure of the modernization model of development and partly due to the rise of alternative vocabulary, questions were raised about the desirability of Western models in delivering development in the underdeveloped world. There was a realization, if not unanimity, that development has reached an impasse. Critics like Dudley Seers, Michael Edwards, and Frans Schuurman (3) articulated such disenchantment when they questioned the vast range of experts trying to solve "Third World" problems from their comfort zones. Edwards went on to propose the need for learning from below and participating in the process of development so as to minimize the distance between the researcher and the researched, the subjects and the objects of development, and also the state and its people. (4)

Even before the 1990s, the modernization theory of development had started losing its uncontested run; there was a dissolution of the dream that development institutions and First World countries had promised. A number of critiques from many quarters started unfolding the failure of mainstream development approaches in addressing problems of Asian and African countries. The first and foremost came from the dependency school of thought, and it interrogated the modernization school for being top-down and technocratic and for bringing more destruction than prosperity. One of the most important advocates of the dependency school, Paul Baran, had claimed that the "underdeveloped" condition of most of the Third World countries is due to the continuous flow of resources from the periphery to the center, and that the development of the center is responsible for the underdevelopment of the periphery. (5) Such critiques bring the focus to the idea of development not just as an outcome but also as a process. If the allocation of resources is a political process, then the political dimension of development cannot be ignored. Similarly, issues like agency and freedom are developmental problems, as are the questions of food security or housing.

Post-development thinkers like Arturo Escobar went on to expose the "invention" of the Third World by modernist development discourse. (6) Although Escobar's ideas, or for that matter post-development discourse, often descend into a romantic localism, such interventions can certainly be used as critiques of normative development thought. The primary line of departure of post-development thought from its modernist counterpart is that for the former it is misleading to imagine problems as universal. There are specific problems in each community, and a universalist notion would only misrepresent the lived realities of these peoples. In his study of poverty in a culturally specific context, Majid Rahnema tells us that poor is not always the opposite of rich and that being poor may refer to the loss of status, the exclusion from community, public humiliation, and so forth. (7) What had been ignored in modernization theory is the specificity of non-Western societies and the recognition that people across the world have different priorities and that development and well-being have different connotations. Similarly, national development complexes (through a planning commission, as in India) tend to take for granted cultural, regional, and communal...