Why Development Can’t Be Above Politics

Context: Recently, while flagging off a new section of the Eastern Dedicated Freight Corridor, the Prime Minister demanded to put development above politics. However, politics and development must go together.

Arguments for development as an apolitical entity:

• Development has been typed as quintessential ‘anti-politics machine’: by James Ferguson.
• Leader around the world calls development as value-free and apolitical, as a binary opposite to politics as a contestation of power.

Analyzing the role of politics:

• An idea of contestation: Politics is not only about an accumulation of power by elites; It is a battlefield of disputed ideas, beliefs, worldviews, perspectives, ideologies and even mere opinions
  • Thus, it demands to create precondition of respect towards rights to freedom, equality, justice, citizenship, dignity and social goods.
• Politics is by its very nature contested, even if the state of politics in the country is heavily dependent upon the politics of the state.

Adverse impact of depoliticization of development:

• Garnering of power by the elites: Splitting development from politics obfuscates its profoundly political role, of garnering power for elites at the expense of the people.
• Suspension of civil liberties: It delegitimizes protest against big projects and thus diminishes the political status of citizens.
• Political tragedies wrought: Agitations of the farmers are dismissed and denigrated in uncivil terms, despite their contribution in increasing productivity over time.
• Bears an uncanny resemblance to colonialism: which was based on a ‘civilizing mission’, the legitimized mantra of post-independence government, as development.
  • It as resumes that citizens are passive and inert subjects of merciless process called development.
  • The post-colonial discourse on development also focuses on building infrastructure and harnessing natural resources to ensure economic growth.
• Declining democracy: India slipped ten places, to 51^st place in 2020 Global Democracy Index., mainly due to downgrading of Article 370, the arrest of Kashmiri leaders and ban on internet.
• No real development despite building infrastructure: India has slipped one position to 131 out of 189 countries in the 2020 Human Development Index of the UN Human Development Report.

Conclusion: We have to bring back development into our understanding of politics as contestation every time a tribal community is alienated from its habitat, and every time a poor person’s hut or shantytown is demolished in the name of development.

Anecdote:

• Sisyphus, the cunning and deceitful ruler of Corinth, was sentenced by the Greek god Zeus to roll a boulder up the hill in the underworld. Each time he reached the top of the hill, the boulder would roll down, forcing Sisyphus to begin his labour all over again.
• Similarly, societies progress and regress, become independent and are colonized once again, institutionalize democracy but democracy continues to elude them.