The Political Economy of NGOs

State Formation in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh

Jude L. Fernando

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781783714582
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Economics

This book explores the paradoxical relationship between NGOs and capitalism, showing that supposedly progressive organisations often promote essentially the same policies and ideas as existing governments. It examines how a diverse group of NGOs have shaped state formation in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It argues that, rather than influencing state formation for the better, NGOs have been integrated into the capitalist system and their language adopted to give traditional exploitative social relations a transformative appearance. This enlightening study will give pause to those who see NGOs as drivers of true social change and will encourage students of development studies to make a deeper analysis of state formation.

1

The Emergence of the Unified Nation-State: Precolonial NGOs in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

“[A]uthoritarianism, chauvinism, and inequity were as much constitutive of middle-class modernity as democracy, secularism, and egalitarianism.”

Sanjay Joshi¹

“Whatever little chance there may have been of a genuinely ‘Ceylonese’ nationalism growing up in time was aborted almost at conception. The unitary state, freed from the strait-jacket of imperial order, became the battle-ground of competing nationalisms which convulse the country to this day.”

Adrian Wijemanna²

Contemporary Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are heirs to a rich legacy of organizations exhibiting characteristics typical of NGOs, and they are also home to some of the largest and most innovative of these organizations. The histories of these organizations date back to the precolonial period and continue to shape NGO–state relations today. While most studies of Bangladeshi NGOs begin in 1971, with independence, the story in fact begins much earlier. Likewise, in Sri Lanka, “NGOs have emerged out of a long history of people’s participation and self-help, a history that stretches back as far as the times of ancient Sri Lankan kings.”³ These premodern social organizations, known by many different names, were embedded in the symbiotic relationship between religion, the state, and society, and although they were transformed by colonial rule and capitalist development, the associational traditions they established continue to inform the practices of NGOs in both countries. The culture of NGOs underwent significant changes following the era of Christian missionary organizations which predate the colonial state. Ever since, the relationship between Christianity and NGOs has continued to play an important role in shaping the relationship between NGOs and the state, and determining how NGOs are mobilized by the state as sources of its power and legitimacy.

Analysis of NGO-precursor activities in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka offers us a way to explore the trajectories of social change—the processes of living as a community. Proto-NGOs were among the most fundamental institutions shaping community processes, predating the modern nation-state. Local, regional, and national associations were integral to the evolutionary trajectories of state formation in both the precolonial and colonial periods. In fact, they were the instruments through which various nongovernmental social groups sought to consolidate their power by soliciting state patronage and vying for economic advantage.

Contemporary social histories of NGO–state relationships are too often based on simplistic binaries and selective readings of a country’s history, a problem found in the work of NGO proponents and opponents alike. In Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, popular perceptions and written histories of NGOs have distorted the complexity of their role in shaping the antagonistic and reciprocal relations between local elites and the colonial state. These distortions are rooted in highly contested revisionist histories of these countries. Since independence, the invocation of these revisionist histories has continued to play an important part in both countries’ economic and political processes.

This chapter illustrates the impact of NGOs on state formation in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka during the precolonial and colonial periods, in terms not only of their respective activities but also the discourse surrounding them. Such analysis is of critical importance for this study since the postcolonial relations between NGOs and the state are significantly impacted by the revisionist histories. In fact, one may meaningfully refer to NGOs themselves as a “discursive formation” when certain of their common ideas and practices are configured in a coherent framework. While the reference points of this discourse are NGO activities, those framing it may be far removed from such activities. In these cases, discourse functions ideologically, as “NGOism.” NGOism conceals more than it reveals about the realities of NGOs and their impact on state formation. As an ideology, NGOism acquires political power through linkage with history. NGOism is an important part of nation building, particularly in terms of how the state mobilizes the nation and its history in order to concentrate and legitimize its power. Current controversies surrounding NGOs are not only about NGOs themselves, they also concern history, and how history informs a sense of belonging in multicultural states as they undergo capitalist development. A nuanced understanding of history is important not only because history informs the relationship between NGOs and the state today, but also because NGOs can achieve positive social change only if they are willing to critically engage with the past.

BANGLADESH

Any truly useful history of NGOs in Bangladesh must begin with an inquiry into the history of precolonial Bengal, and postcolonial East and West Bengal. Without an examination of this early period, we cannot understand the evolution of modern NGO culture, or the forces that have shaped its development and the relationships between NGOs and the state to this day. Such an inquiry is necessary to counter the distortion of NGO history that I discussed above.

The territory of Bengal, out of which Bangladesh was later carved, was conquered by the British in 1757. Lying within the Ganges delta, Bengal’s eastern and western regions were inhabited primarily by Bengali-speaking Muslims and Hindus, respectively, although many ethnic, tribal, linguistic, and religious groups are scattered throughout the region. When India was partitioned in 1947, Pakistan incorporated the eastern part of Bengal and became an independent state unified by faith in Islam. In 1971, civil war in East Pakistan, sparked by discrimination against the Bengali-speaking population, resulted in Bangladeshi independence. Since then, political boundaries have remained more or less stable, even though they have been challenged by Chakmas living in the northern part of the country. Despite the fact that 90 percent of the country’s population identify as Muslim, the national identity is defined by the ongoing contest between secularism and Islam. NGOs play an influential role in this process by providing ideas, mobilizing financial and social support, and functioning as fora for public debates.

During the precolonial period in Bengal, particularly in the urban centers, a diverse array of traders, artisans, and welfare and religious organizations flourished, particularly during the vibrant Husain Shai period (1496–1583). Among them guilds such as the pundit sabhas (assemblies of scholars) and the Kavyagosthi’s (associations of poets) were common.⁴ But the most dominant form of association (although more widespread in western than eastern Bengal) was the panchayat system, under which were dallas (family groupings). Panchayats provided the means by which members of the dallas negotiated their respective interests and status in society. These associations were rarely interested in changing the status quo, and operated under the imperatives of revenue accumulation in the economy of the Mughal Empire (1526–1725). Christian missionary associations, on the other hand, promoted reforms and challenged the social status of elites, and also provided those same elites with new ideas and structures within which to organize their activities. This new type of association became a means by which elites managed the diverse regimen of accumulation that allowed them to simultaneously monopolize the opportunities provided by British colonial rule, legitimize their authority as indigenous leaders, and manage threats to their authority from subordinate classes. The tensions between these different kinds of organizations, between elite and lower classes, and between these organizations and the state have shaped the development of Bangladesh.

In eastern Bengal, as I mentioned above, the topographical, social, cultural, and political characteristics were not as conducive to the development of village organizations like panchayats, or the councils that encompassed entire villages in other parts of the subcontinent. The upper delta lacked nucleated villages, though the British and Mughals continued to use the term muza, a term commonly used to refer to a village. While there is scattered evidence that social groupings like bamsa and gosthi are of common matrilineal descent, they did not have the same “cohesiveness or social significance as the endogamous baradaries among the Muslims of the upper delta.” They were “much less endogamous[than the] jati of [the] fully developed Hindu caste society.”⁵

Village communities in eastern Bengal were diverse and stratified. They were built along the creeks and riverbanks and were scattered as amorphous clusters, which makes it difficult to identify clear boundary demarcation patterns.⁶ The relations between them, and with local and imperial functionaries, were not merely maintained by feudal type relations. They also involved a complex array of interpersonal relationships. The homesteads maintained multiple ties between local and imperial authorities without depending on the mediation of a single designated person or organization. The widespread use of cash for transactions made it easier for the central authorities and local interest groups to bypass tradition and provide flexibility to “deal with groups of different cultures.”⁷

Groups in eastern Bengal, particularly in the areas dominated by agriculture, were closely associated with Samaj (worship assemblies) and Jamaat (Islamic organizations). Their mosques and shrines were administered by individual mullahs (heads of mosques) and pirs (holy men), and were the focal “social institutions” of group solidarity and mobilization. More than one of these institutions existed in an area that can be identified as a village. A single Samaj did not claim the monopoly of authority over a given locality. It was the mosque and its constituency, rather than the muza, that was the physical embodiment of social relationships and the expression of social identity as group solidarity.⁸ Broad-based manifestations of group solidarity were limited to occasional religious functions such as Friday prayers and annual religious events. Authority over religious and social matters was divided between the mullahs and local authorities known as matababdars, who drew their authority from a series of networks and patronage. However, the “social order was unstable as, for centuries, in the lower delta, authority was poorly organized; centers of officialdom were few and widely scattered. Islam and Vaisnasvis functioned to provide authority in anarchic frontier society, and they did so through loosely constituted religious organizations.”⁹

Throughout the Mughal Empire, agriculture and Islamic institutions developed in parallel. A revenue-maximizing regime, the Mughals used their reciprocal relations with local institutions to achieve the conversion of forests into arable land. Land grants (waqf) were given to pirs to develop Islamic institutions in return for their participation in state-centered agricultural development.¹⁰ Mughals issued document called sanads as titles for the transfer of land from the crown to the pirs, granting “tax-free lands directly to the trustees (mutawalli) of mosques or shrines […] Hence grantees became the de facto and de jure land lords of territories alienated from the support of institutions under their administrative control.” The pirs “combined religious piety with the organizational skills necessary for forest clearing and land reclamation; hence they were remembered not only for establishing mosques and shrines but also for mobilizing communities to cut the forest and settle the land.”¹¹ The waqf endowments prohibited personal land use, as they were reserved for the support of Muslim institutions such as schools, hospitals, shrines, and mosques. In 1770, the British found that in Chittagong two thirds of the land grants were used by charities.¹² In this process, “forest land became rice fields and indigenous inhabitants became rice-cultivating peasants, at once the economic and religious clients of a new gentry,”¹³ a trend that continued into the second quarter of the nineteenth century. During the Mughal period, Bengal urban society had cosmopolitan characteristics and the state actively patronized numerous institutions. Trade and commerce, and a cash economy, helped spread this cosmopolitanism from urban centers outward. The Bengali frontier regions accommodated even the growth of Christian institutions. In 1713, the French Jesuit Père Barbier encountered a Christian community in the Noakhali district organized around the authority of a local patriarch.¹⁴ But the development of associations in the eastern part of Bengal began much later than in western Bengal for several reasons, the first of which was the relative distance between the center and the periphery. During the Sultanate (1345–1575), elites in Bengal had been integrated into local culture and were close to local groups. The gap between the Ashrafs (aristocratic Muslims with roots outside of India, who often had expertise in Persian and Islamic law) and non-Ashrafs widened as Ashrafs increasingly identified with the central administration, and Ashrafs maintained a considerable degree of social distance from the rest of society.

Mullahs were subordinate to the Ashrafs,¹⁵ enforcing revenue collection on behalf of the imperial state, and they did not have a harmonious or stable relationship with the peasants who were frequently forced into debt and flight¹⁶ due to constantly increasing revenue demands, wedding expenses, the purchase of cattle, and expenses involving dispute settlement.¹⁷ These eastern traditional ruling elites—who were directly dependent on, and functioned on behalf of, the state—did not see the necessity of forming associations to legitimize their status in society.

A second reason for the relatively late development of associations in the east was the decentralization of revenue accumulation, and the resolution of conflicts through religious, caste, and other traditional institutions, although the landlords did mobilize state power when it became necessary to curb peasant unrest. The expansion of a revenue-maximizing regime was articulated through tradition that, on the one hand, strengthened religious identities, and, on the other hand, intensified the differences between classes.

Third, there was a relative absence of intermediary organizations and a middle class that could provide them with leadership, which may help explain the widespread concentration of peasant uprisings in the eastern part of Bengal as compared to West Bengal. Peasant authority did not extend beyond local religious leaders (pirs). To the bureaucrats and the administrative class, the pir and the peasants didn’t matter, since neither pir nor peasant could influence their status and power. This disjuncture opened a space for “class” consciousness to emerge as a form of peasant resistance. When recalcitrant pirs and peasants disturbed the flow of revenue, Mughal authorities directly intervened in rural settl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: Theorizing Social Change—Beyond the Impasse
• 1. The Emergence of the Unified Nation-State: Precolonial NGOs in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
• 2. Welfare State to National Security State: Post-Independence NGO–State Relations in Sri Lanka, 1948–2010
• 3. Secularism, Religion, and Parallel States: Post-Independence NGO–State Relations in Bangladesh, 1971–2010
• 4. The NGO Industrial Complex: Modernizing Postmodernity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index