When the development model subverts democracy

Neera Chandhoke

Political Scientist

MEMBERS of the G20 are meeting in New Delhi next month. Undoubtedly, leaders of the Global South will bemoan lack of development in their countries and ask for concessions. Development is a tricky buzzword. It carries tragedy in its wake.

In April, a Vande Bharat train speeding through Alwar district in Rajasthan hit a cow. The cow, thrown 30 metres away, hit a man who was relieving himself, as people deprived of toilets tend to do, on the tracks. The man lost his life and the cow died too. In October last year, the nose panel of a Vande Bharat train was dented because it hit four buffaloes on the Mumbai- Gandhinagar route. Railway officials said the carcasses were removed fast enough. What does a death or two matter as long as it is for the cause of development — the ultimate magic mantra of governments?

The assumption that development leads to well-being is one of the major mockeries of history. Development does not automatically lead to democracy and redistribution of wealth.

This year, January brought news that should make every right-thinking Indian stagger. Oxfam India’s report on inequality told us that 5 per cent of the Indians own over 60 per cent of the country’s wealth. The bottom 50 per cent of the population owns only 3 per cent. The marginalised continue to suffer in a system which ensures ‘survival of the richest’. Is this development?

Since the 1970s, scholars have criticised the notion of development that seeks to replicate the path followed by capitalist societies — industrialisation, commodification and accumulation. It is forgotten that advanced industrialised economies benefited from colonialism because they stripped the Global South of resources and labour. Development and underdevelopment are two sides of the same coin, wrote Andre Gunder Frank, the guru of the dependency theory. The West developed because colonies paid for the cost of the process. It will take us decades, if not centuries, to catch up with the developed world.

In the 1990s, a compelling critique of development began to be articulated by a number of distinguished scholars, such as Arturo Escobar, Gustavo Esteva, Ivan Illich, Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (2009), edited by Wolfgang Sachs, contributed greatly to the critique. Scholars subscribed to different methodologies and adopted diverse approaches. But all of them believed that development is based on the epistemological domination of the West. The Global South, far from achieving self-sufficiency, has sought to become a clone of the advanced capitalist world.

The idea of development, argued post-development theorists, is flawed beyond belief. It rests on the assumption that man can conquer nature through technology. It was technology that was used to execute millions of Jews in Hitler’s Germany, put to death millions in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and create surveillance states, cause environmental destruction and trigger climate change. It has led to stockpiling of weapons, civil wars and destructive nuclear power. This technology can only help dictators; it cannot give food to starving millions, provide jobs to the unemployed, or promise people lives that are worth living.

The jury is still out whether post-developmentalists offer a sound alternative to development that is promoted by global institutions. The alternative is largely Gandhian: decentralisation, participation and respect for diversity. A number of scholars believe that the alternatives offered by social movements can provide models for specific regions and their specific needs. The alternative offers a corrective to the damage that development has done to democracy.

The government can take away land, rivers and forests of tribal communities who live off these resources — in the name of development. Rivers are polluted by industrial effluents and the delicate environmental balance of the Himalayan region is wrecked by the building of roads and highways. The region has experienced floods and earthquakes, houses have collapsed, and people have been rendered homeless. In the Doon valley, thousands of trees are cut down to provide rapid transit to the ‘abode of the gods’, leaving behind only barren, arid landscapes. The government can take away our civil liberties because they are a hindrance to development. Democracy is perpetually subverted by so-called development.

The notion of development is meaningless. It is teleological; it assumes that societies reach from point X to Y along a straight line. Defenders of development ignore the simple fact that to reach a goal, societies take detours, traverse hilly paths, cross valleys, and often take a U-turn. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill. The gods certainly knew the law of gravity, which relentlessly pulls boulders that are rolled uphill to the centre of the earth. There is no linearity in history. Marx had prophesised that history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, and the second as farce. In both cases, development is power — power over natural resources, power over human beings, and power for the sake of power. It is astonishing that the name of the coalition of Opposition parties, INDIA, includes the word ‘developmental’. Is not the ‘D’ of democracy infinitely preferable to the ‘D’ of development?

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