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Criticisms of western civilization are commonplace today, but Gandhi was a critic long before others. That was what made him the forerunner of the environmentalist and ecological movements of modern times. Those concerns and the words themselves came into currency much later. In the late 19th century, and in the early years of the 20th century, the general climate of opinion in the world at large was that of a belief in ‘progress’ and the conquest of nature through Science and Technology. Those ways of thinking had come into India through colonial rule, and there was a general belief that the future of India lay in discarding tradition (regarded as obscurantism and superstition), marching towards modernity through western education, embracing science and technology, and emulating western progress. Most eminent Indians of the time took that proposition for granted as self-evident. In that ambience, it was an astonishing performance for anyone to reject that current wisdom, to question the colonial imposition of western civilization on India, to subject that ‘civilization’ itself to fundamental criticism, and to undertake a rediscovery of the lost Indian ways of thinking and living.
-- Ramaswamy R. Iyer on Gandhi and Ecology
Address at Mathrubhumi Publications Function at Palakkad on 13 July 2010
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Towards a new Political imaginary
a talk by Prof. Shiv Vishvanathan on the occasion of 35 years of CIEDS.
( Introduced by Madhu Bhushan - see 1 below)
Shiv Viswanathan
I have noticed that my friends, of late, say that they knew me 25 or 30 years ago, and it’s almost as if they served time together in the same jail for the same dream. I wonder what is take to get 25 years as a sentence. I think it is the crime of the social scientist. The pity or the crime of the social scientists is that they make such poor storytellers. What I’m going to do today is juxtapose the social science with the story, because that is what the search for an imaginary is.
(reference to CIEDS & CIEDS people - See 2 below)
I will begin with 2 stories: 2 stories of a remarkable woman who has been harassing me of late. She calls me the Dacu social scientist. The social scientist as dacoit. Mahashweta Devi. Remarkable woman. Crusty, totally impossible at 83 or 84, and she is the only one who can make the CPM feel like it is in its breeches. I want to begin with these two stories of hers because in a way it captures the need for the imaginary: the political imaginary, the social imaginary.
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The Invention of UNDER development
‘Development has become an amoeba-like concept’, says Wolfgang Sachs, ‘shapeless and ineradicable. It spreads everywhere because it connotes the best of intentions. The term is hailed by the IMF and the Vatican alike, by revolutionaries carrying their guns, as well as by field experts carrying their Samsonites. The concept allows any intervention to be sanctified in the name of a higher goal. Therefore even enemies feel united under the same banner. The term creates a common ground, a ground on which right and left, elites and grassroots fight their battles’.
The notion of development was highly contested at one stage. Marxists saw it as the process of developing into a classless society, through class struggle, whereas the liberals looked for growth or enlarging the cake rather than re-distributing it. There is also the trickle down effect! Among NGOs, several constructs have been considered synonymous with development: peoples participation and empowerment are but two of them.
Today, ‘development’ by whatever name, seems to boil down to one thing: the market - produce, organise, sell, save, speculate, … anything. So long as it gives you that extra rupee, it is ”development”! Even leftist governments the world over seemed to have resigned themselves to this fate.
It is in this context - and given recent events, with a sense of déjà vu, that we re-read the Development Dictionary, where the authors start with how Truman, in 1949, labelled the large parts of the world as ‘under-developed’, thereby setting the US and the Western capitalist model as the ideal or aim of ‘development’.
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Reversing Development
The dream that economic development can bring prosperity to the poor is over, argues Teddy Goldsmith.
Poverty is not an age-old problem.
It is the invention of the development paradigm, which in the name of eradicating poverty and in the promise of a world of plenty for all, has created the ever expanding circle of want, deprivation, exploitation and misery.
This need not be so.
But do we have the capacity to recognize this truth? Do we have the will to reverse this depredatory process that is the basis of todays globalisation?
There is not much time left, before this process can become dangerously irreversible.
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Measuring Human Development
John M. Alexander, Koen Decancq
The much-awaited Human Development Report (HDR) published annually since 1990 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) was the brainchild of the late Pakistani economist Mahbub-ul-Haq. Amartya Sen, however, has right from its birth provided intellectual insights and refinement by thinking of human development as an expansion of human capabilities and human freedoms and by contributing to develop a Human Development Index (HDI) that measures human well-being along three dimensions of life expectancy, educational attainment and command over resources required for a decent living.
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