688756

research-article2017
CRS0010.1177/0896920516688756Critical SociologyJaoul

Article

Critical Sociology

Politics Against the Grain: The

2018, Vol. 44(4-5) 611­–627
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0896920516688756
https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920516688756
in the Throes of NGOization journals.sagepub.com/home/crs

Nicolas Jaoul
CNRS/IRIS, France

Abstract
The ‘empowerment’ approach to development adopted by international institutions has recently
enabled the Indian Dalit movement to avail itself of western funds. This case study of a network
of Dalit NGOs in Uttar Pradesh highlights how these funds are being used and to what political
effect. It shows that in such a previously politicized context, politicized actors of the NGOization
process actively defend a radical agenda that links up caste, class and gender, while pursuing
under the label of women’s empowerment a pre-existing trend of mobilization of the rural poor.
Their political work, however, requires tactical adjustments so as to fit exacting and costly norms
of management imposed by funding agencies. While pointing to certain radical experiments
that show the political resilience of the Dalit movement in spite of a depoliticizing pattern of
‘professionalization’, this article also highlights the economic precariousness encountered by the
activists.

Keywords
social movements, NGOization, India, Dalits, Ambedkarism, empowerment, political
ethnography, women’s participation

Introduction
The ‘human rights-based approach’ to development, which was officially endorsed in 2003 by the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP), has paved the way for the NGOization of social
movements in the ‘global south’. This article examines the manner in which the anti-caste Dalit
movement in India has been affected by NGOization. What results from the official agenda of
‘empowerment’ of international institutions once it enters the domain of social movements? Have
the activists who took the new opportunities of funding been helped at all to pursue their political
aims?

Corresponding author:
Nicolas Jaoul, IRIS, EHESS, 190 Avenue de France, Paris, FR 75244 cedex 13, France.
Email: Jaoul.nicolas@gmail.com
612 Critical Sociology 44(4-5)

By putting forward the notion of ‘empowerment’, the official discourse has recast targeted
populations as fellow citizens asserting their rights rather than as passive recipients of develop-
ment aid. The discourse of empowerment thus boasts of introducing a democratic package for
the poor whose participation is valued for making the technocratic ideal of ‘good governance’
a reality.1 Ironically, the concept of ‘empowerment’ was developed 25 years ago by Ferguson,
who criticized the ‘powerful depoliticizing effect’ (Ferguson, 1990: 21) of the politics of eco-
nomic development and advocated an alternative political vision – ‘empowerment’ – asserting
that better power-sharing might be all it takes to allow affected populations to effectively com-
bat poverty. Nowadays, having entered the neo-liberal vocabulary of international institutions,
‘empowerment’ subordinates subaltern politics to purposes of ‘good governance’, ‘develop-
ment’, etc., thus paradoxically fulfilling the anti-political functions of development that
Ferguson denounced. In this neo-liberal world view, mobilized actors of civil society at the
margins of global capitalism are designated as ‘stakeholders’, a term whose linguistic proxim-
ity to ‘shareholders’ cannot be overlooked. This altered version of ‘empowerment’ typically
illustrates the ability of neo-liberal jargon to digest critical thought and to neutralize it. Can
social activism be harnessed to create political stability from the fringes? This is the tendency
that Johanna Siméant denounces when she describes NGOs as ‘administrative and management
structures’ whose work she equates to ‘the setting-up of pockets […] of rational-legal bureau-
cracy in unstable contexts’ (Dauvin and Siméant, 2002: 86, my translation). The NGOization of
social movements could therefore simply consolidate what Escobar denounced two decades
ago, i.e. that instead of solving the problems of underdevelopment, the developmental approach
merely succeeded in creating a ‘politically and technically manageable’ version of it (Escobar,
1995: 47). Concerning the relationship between NGOs and social movements in contemporary
India, Ray and Katzenstein have pointed out that ‘economic liberalization has been accompa-
nied by the massive NGO-ification of civil society, arguably crowding out some of the more
protest-oriented forms of organizing within the social movement sector.’ (Ray and Katzenstein,
2005: 9).2 My case study confirms that there is recruitment to previously existing movements
but also shows that activists sometimes use NGOization as a way to overcome certain limita-
tions of these movements. The present case study deals with an attempt by grassroots Dalit
NGOs to politicize the rural poor. It is premised on the assumption that this kind of political
experiment needs to be acknowledged and therefore researched ethnographically instead of
being turned down from the start. Identifying a grey area, Rucht proposed to consider the pos-
sibilities of an alternative approach, lying ‘beyond dominant forms of “civil society”, interven-
tion and NGOization’ (Rucht, 1999: 8). We need, therefore, to reassess ethnographically the
relationship between NGOization and depoliticization that critiques of NGOization tend to take
for granted.
The case study takes place in the poverty-stricken state of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) in northern
India where the rise to power of the BSP (Bahujan Samaj Party)3 in the 1990s has politicized
local Dalit communities to a great extent. Once a bastion of caste orthodoxy, this state, with a
population of 200 million in 2011 and where Dalits comprise 21.5 % of the population, emerged
as a new bastion of Dalit activism.4 The sudden availability of western funds is something
entirely new for the Dalit movement, which had previously never indulged in any developmen-
tal activities and had remained focused on the defense of Dalit rights through electoral means
and street politics.
I will show that, in spite of the difficulties it brings, NGOization has nevertheless enabled activ-
ists from the Ambedkarite and Marxist traditions to carry this movement beyond some of its former
limitations, especially by encouraging rural Dalit women to join new forms of radical action based
on an intersectional agenda of caste, class and gender.
Jaoul 613

From the ‘Structural Adjustment of the Political’ to ‘Political

Resilience’
The new tendency of protest-oriented organizations to rely on transnational sponsors who impose
technocratic conventions on them has given rise to a paradox. Sangeeta Kamat notes on the one
hand that in India ‘the NGOization of bottom-up struggles’ has had the effect of ‘transforming the
culture of politics as we know it, engendering a “structural adjustment” of the political space that
is not unlike the structural adjustment of the economy’ (Kamat, 2002: 154). On the other hand she
emphasizes the political vigilance in Indian civil society of this tendency. From the outset
NGOization has been the subject for debates and criticism in intellectual, left-wing circles. She
notes the importance of left-wing activists (socialists, communists, liberation theologians) in the
grassroots movements. While setting up development projects to tap into available funding from
the state and/or overseas development funds, these grassroots organizations remain wary of ‘how
capitalist institutions deploy various mechanisms to control and regulate radical popular initia-
tives’ (Kamat, 2002: 153). Kamat concludes that ‘this attempt to structure political culture at the
grass roots to better fit with neo-liberal imperatives is by no means a finished historical project’
(2002: 167).
The struggle against caste-based exploitation and discrimination inflicted on the ‘untouchables’
or ‘Dalits’, who represent one sixth of the Indian population, has mostly been the preserve of Dalit
activists.5 The anti-caste ideology of what I will refer to as the ‘traditional’ (i.e. the existing, non-
NGOized) Ambedkarite movement combines a strong sense of Dalit communitarian identity and
autonomy with ideological references to political modernity. Politically it can be summarized as
the Dalit struggle for a classless and casteless democratic society, as emphasized by its historical
leader Ambedkar (1891–1956), whose influences combined liberal thought with Buddhism as well
as a critical engagement with Marxism (Jaoul, 2016).
In U.P., non-electoral Ambedkarite organizations were sidelined by the BSP during its rise to
power in the mid-1990s (Jaoul, 2007). The BSP chief, Mayawati, wanted a free hand to form politi-
cal and social alliances which were sometimes contrary to the movement’s ideological and ethical
principles. In contrast, these non-electoral, agitational outfits that criticized her opportunism reaf-
firmed their ideological commitment to the Ambedkarite legacy by fighting anti-Dalit violence,
organizing commemorations of Ambedkar as well as conversions to Navayana Buddhism, thus
carrying forward his religious legacy (Jaoul, 2016).
The NGOization that has been affecting this heterogeneous and fragmented movement for the
past 15 years entails negotiations and adjustments within a political tradition firmly rooted in the
Dalit social milieu. Ambedkarites insist on a Dalit movement run by Dalits. As a consequence of
their autonomy, but also because of the lack of support and even hostility from the rest of society
(from the left as well), the movement has always been financed exclusively by the Dalit commu-
nity. Funding is by way of donations and collections. The movement’s economic self-reliance goes
hand in hand with its ideological insistence on autonomy. Therefore most Dalit organizations con-
tinue to function without seeking funds from foreign donor agencies. It is therefore important to
bear in mind that within the movement there is strong resistance to, as well as a lack of interest in,
the recent trend for NGOization, which remains relatively marginal.
Recent French studies on the NGOization of Palestine are helpful for understanding the global
nexus between NGOization and depoliticization. In his book Julien Salingue argues that ‘here
depoliticization equates to the expectation that NGOs will retreat from the domain of national lib-
eration in order to focus on development, thus forsaking their role in Palestinian de-development’6
(Salingue, 2015: 131, my translation). In his unpublished PhD (on which Salingue’s argument
relies extensively), Sbeih shows that ‘the refusal to finance NGOs which are deemed political
614 Critical Sociology 44(4-5)

effectively becomes part of the battle against the “politicization of development”’ (Sbeih, 2014:
370, my translation). Sbeih highlights that the NGO Development Center was first conceived by
the World Bank in 1997 and eventually set up in 2006 in order to monitor Palestinian NGOs. ‘[I]n
the event of success, the World Bank’s idea was to repeat this experiment in other developing
countries’ (Sbeih, 2014: 363). It is therefore tempting to consider the World Bank’s experiment in
Palestine as a template by which to study the issue of politicization in the ‘global south’. However,
the high degree of censorship on political activities in Palestine contrasts with less sensitive regions
where the connection between NGOs and grassroots political movements is not being curbed so
drastically.
One common feature of the NGOization process across regions concerns the ‘professionaliza-
tion’ of activism, which Sbeih characterizes as the introduction of ‘new modalities of struggle that
are so-called rational’ (2014: 45). Sbeih insists on expanding and problematizing this notion, which
it is important to contextualize according to local political realities for the sake of comparative
knowledge. Applied to India’s ‘political society’ (Chatterjee, 2004), the term ‘professionalization’
becomes tricky without a proper contextualization of social and political activism. From an occupa-
tional point of view, many political and social activists are already ‘professionals’ in the sense that
they are full-time activists who earn money from mediating on a daily basis between the people and
the administrations (by facilitating low-level corruption, getting access to officers, obtaining admin-
istrative services, pensions, scholarships, etc.). For those providing such services, activism already
constitutes a lucrative activity, if not a salaried profession in the conventional sense. In this context
‘professionalization’ means the transition from benefiting from the informal economy of social and
political activism to earning a salary as an NGO employee. On the other hand, it also represents a
shift in political culture (understood to mean ideological discourses and practices in the domain of
political activity) from following local political traditions to adopting the management standards
and global linguistic norms of the transnational NGO sector. In the case of Palestine, Sbeih observes
that in addition to corporate patterns of the evaluation processes, the donor agencies’ methods of
funding individual projects rather than financing the NGO structures themselves, also contribute to
the adoption of an ethos of management (Sbeih, 2014: 239). Therefore, to what extent can this neo-
liberal framework coexist with a tradition of plebeian assertion?
As an example, Steven Robins points out, as regards the NGOization of the social movement in
South Africa, that to associate rights-based activism with the sometimes unintentional pursuit of a
neo-liberal agenda would be to misinterpret local realities and struggles (Robins, 2008). However,
to what extent can the political agency of NGO activists really curb this powerful agenda of inter-
national institutions? Siméant argues that mere intentionality cannot overcome certain structural
effects: ‘Does not subscribing to an ideology or economic program prevent one from sharing cer-
tain aspects of it in practice?’ (Dauvin and Siméant, 2002: 86, my translation). Bearing both of
these views in mind dialectically, one needs to be sensitive to developments and events as they
unfold, sometimes unexpectedly, when small, marginal NGOs with a base in oppressed communi-
ties practice ‘empowerment’.

The Dalits’ Transnational Breakthrough and its Consequences

The recent limited trend of NGOization of the Ambedkarite movement was not simply imposed
from above. The connection with transnational civil society was prepared by repeated attempts to
highlight the Dalit question internationally against the wishes of the Indian government. From the
early 1980s Dalit activists based in India and the diaspora (mostly in the UK) started sending del-
egates to the United Nations Human Rights Council (Jaoul, 2006). The first international recogni-
tion occurred in 1996 when the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Radical
Jaoul 615

Discrimination (CERD) finally agreed to include caste discrimination as discrimination based on

lineage. These initiatives that led to this recognition were political in nature, since they were a
means to contest the Indian state’s negligence towards its duty to protect Dalits. The Dalit move-
ment never took part in any development activity: it was only when the human rights approach to
development was officially adopted that a link between donor agencies and this movement could
be made. It is nevertheless true that developmental NGOs have been present in southern India
among Christian Dalits since the 1980s, whose connections to the Ambedkarite movement have
been highlighted (Mosse, 2012). Those Dalit NGO activists took a lead role in the National
Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), which initiated the process of NGOization. In 1997
Human Rights Watch announced a survey on Dalit oppression. The Ford Foundation supported the
initiative on the condition that the forthcoming report should involve Dalit organizations and take
into account the way that they perceive the problems they face. Under the pretext of improving the
efficiency of a movement fragmented regionally and caste-wise, the Ford Foundation also offered
to provide a platform for national coordination among Dalit organizations (Clifford, 2007).
However, enrolling and making Dalit organizations accountable to its foreign trustees meant made
it possible for the latter to exert a discrete but powerful influence over the former. Unlike the
Palestinian NGO Development Center, however, this initiative was not commissioned directly by
the World Bank or any other international institutions but emanated from two major actors of trans-
national civil society based in the US (a human rights organization and a donor agency), thus
introducing an additional layer.
The NCDHR was founded by two Dalit activists from Christian communities. At the time its
National Convener was Martin Macwan, an activist from Gujarat who has campaigned against
caste violence. Paul Diwakar, who held the post of International Secretary, comes from Andhra
Pradesh. He is a former Marxist-Leninist who later held positions of responsibility in Christian
NGOs and came late to Ambedkarism. His involvement in both the Dalit community and the NGO
sector made him a spokesperson who was both legitimate socially as a Dalit and reassuring for
western NGOs. This is what I concluded from discussions with him in 2011 and with French NGO
representatives who explained that they felt less comfortable with political activists of the
Ambedkarite movement, whom they argued were much too political.
In 1998, in accordance with the wishes of the Ford Foundation, Human Rights Watch called a
meeting of Dalit organizations with a view to drawing up its report. This initiative led to the crea-
tion of the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), commissioned by 300 organiza-
tions across India. The NCDHR was officially inaugurated on 10 December 1998 on the 50th
anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A petition denouncing violence against
Dalits was delivered to the Indian president, K. R. Narayanan (himself a Christian Dalit), at
Rashtrapati Bhawan, the presidential palace in New Delhi. A public campaign was launched that
same day, which ended symbolically on 14 April the following year on Ambedkar’s birthday
(Hardtmann, 2003). By choosing these two symbolic dates, the NCDHR sought to reconcile an
international human rights approach with a local political tradition that places emphasis on dates
and symbols.
The final consecration of the NCDHR was achieved on the fringes of the World Conference
against Racism (WCAR) in 2001 in Durban. It was opposition by the Indian government against
the inclusion of caste discrimination in the conference’s agenda that created controversy during the
event and therefore enhanced the NCDHR’s visibility at the conference. Its 180 delegates cam-
paigned alongside 15,000–20,000 representatives of transnational civil society and distributed a
‘black paper’ on caste. However, whereas legitimacy was achieved in transnational civil society at
Durban, the NCDHR’s legitimacy was never really achieved in the Dalit movement itself. There it
remains loosely linked to established regional Dalit organizations and therefore contested, as any
616 Critical Sociology 44(4-5)

claim to national leadership is bound to be. But the NCDHR’s performance at the World Social
Forum in Mumbai in 2004, where Dalits converged on Mumbai from different regions, gave for-
eign participants of transnational civil society the impression that this truly represented the Dalit
movement, as several foreign participants visiting Mumbai for the occasion testified to me.

Reconfiguring the Dalit Movement?

The ‘traditional’ (non-NGOized) Dalit movement can be characterized by its emphasis on the
anti-caste ideology of Ambedkar and other ideologues. Their cultural critique of Brahmanism as
well as their political culture of informality stand poles apart from the standardized norms of
management promoted by international institutions and donor agencies. As a political culture the
Dalit movement values precisely the opposite of this attempt at ‘professionalization’ and ‘ration-
alization’. As well as strongly defending the liberal, philosophical values of enlightenment and
rationality, Dalit political culture, and Indian political culture more generally, is based on volun-
teering, sociability, caste and religious-based identities and networks, devotional ways of paying
homage, emotions and theatricality, etc. (Jaoul, 2008a, 2008b). Thomas Hansen thus character-
ized the urban political culture of Maharashtra as ‘the politics of permanent performance’
(Hansen, 2004).
The NCDHR’s strategy for linking up with the Dalit movement consists of organizing training
courses and making them accessible to all Dalit activists in India, paying attention to the existing
practices of Dalit activists before attempting to standardize and ‘rationalize’ them. However, the
very idea of ‘rationalizing’ social movements betrays certain prejudices against political culture,
implying that only technocratic management is ‘rational’ (as was also argued in the Palestinian
case by Sbeih (2014)). I attended one of the NCDHR’s ‘recapacitation’ courses – a term which, in
spite of its technical appearance that makes it seem politically neutral, illustrates how condescend-
ing the technocratic vocabulary of transnational civil society can be towards political activism.
Dedicated to the legal battle against anti-Dalit violence, the workshop took place over several days
in New Delhi in March 2011 at the Indian Social Institute, a Jesuit institution which is a key venue
in Indian civil society. First participants listened to delegates from different provinces who shared
their expertise of existing activist practices. This was followed by a general discussion. In the next
step, the practical know-how collected was then to be collated by a communications specialist into
brochures to be distributed to Dalit organizations as guidelines. The distribution of these brochures
was entrusted to provincial branches of the NCDHR, whose task was to coordinate the various
existing local organizations, gather available statistics on caste violence and set up a network of
activists, lawyers, journalists and civil servants sympathetic to the cause.
Sometime later in Lucknow, the capital of U.P., Ram Dular, the NCDHR representative I had
met at this event, explained the difficulties he had in obtaining the cooperation of ‘traditional’ local
Dalit organizations. From an economic point of view what made things difficult was that he did not
have the budget to financially assist the local organizations and activists he sought to persuade to
campaign on behalf of the NCDHR. In addition to this economic obstacle, the bureaucratic nature
of the NCDHR could hardly compete with the local political culture’s theatricality. Moreover, by
virtue of the legal restrictions of the Foreign Currency Registration Act, international funding pre-
vents the NCDHR from participating in protest movements or publicly criticizing the authorities.
Deprived of the flamboyance of protest, at a local level the NCDHR has thus been reduced to a
bureaucratic vigilance network whose aim is to gather information and try to reorganize the move-
ment in a ‘rationalized’ manner. However, as I will now illustrate with my case study of the
Dynamic Action Group, local struggles by grassroots Dalit NGOs can diverge strongly from this
agenda.
Jaoul 617

The Dynamic Action Group of U.P

The case study is based on fieldwork conducted in March/April 2011 in U.P, where BSP campaigns
and politics have been increasing popular participation in the Ambedkarite movement since the
mid-1980s. This study thus deals with NGOization in a highly politicized milieu.
I came into contact with a network of Dalit NGOs, the Dynamic Action Group (DAG), whose
main organizer, Ram Kumar, I had met previously. The DAG was formerly associated with the
NCDHR but it now operates independently, which does not rule out cooperation. Having set up its
headquarters in Lucknow, the state capital, it is not an NGO in the conventional sense but rather a
centralized network of small Dalit NGOs spread all over the state with a common program and
shared resources. In practical terms, this means that the DAG redistributes the funds that it collects
from donor agencies to tiny local grassroots organizations. Apart from redistributing these funds,
the DAG coordinates them from its headquarters in a simple Lucknow apartment where meetings
are held regularly.
The head and founder of this network, Ram Kumar, is a Dalit from U.P. and a former member
of the CPI-ML (Communist Party of India – Marxist Leninist) or Naxalite party, which was clan-
destine and engaged in armed struggle at the time when he was part of it.7 He left the party in the
mid-1980s because he felt that it didn’t attach enough importance to the question of caste and
because of the various forms of caste domination and exploitation of Dalits inside the organization,
which was controlled by upper-caste intellectuals. Like many former ‘comrades’ from the Naxalite
movement, he has moved into the professional NGO sector, which gave him an opportunity to
organize the rural poor. He organized a mass movement of forest dwellers in a district in northwest-
ern U.P. and then in 1991 helped set up a federation of grassroots organizations (U.P. Voluntary
Action Network, UPVAN), united in the goal of opposing the rise of Hindu nationalism in work-
ing-class communities. He distanced himself from the UPVAN following a conflict that, according
to him, once more revealed internal caste prejudices against Dalits. In 1998 he founded the DAG,
a network of 30 Dalit organizations in U.P. (it now represents 75 organizations spread across 35
districts), along with Sujit Ghosh, a middle-class, upper-caste Bengali from New Delhi and former
comrade of the CPI-ML. At the time my fieldwork was conducted, the DAG was funded by
Christian Aid (75%) and Human Rights Global Funds (25%), constituting a total budget of 3.3
million rupees per year (approximately US$74,000 in 2011).
The DAG’s blog presents its main objectives as being ‘to reinforce the concept and philosophy
of Dalit emancipation’ and ‘to procure training and education in order to create a new leadership’
(DAG, 2005). It thus organizes regular public hearings (jansunvai) where Dalit villagers can air
their grievances, giving women and the poor a voice and highlighting issues rarely discussed in
public, even in the ‘traditional’ Dalit organizations where the domination of educated men and
government employees is felt. Ram Kumar explained to me that his aim was to use foreign funds
to reorganize the Dalit movement from a grassroots perspective, by enhancing the participation of
the most deprived sectors, and to simultaneously address caste, gender and class oppression. The
DAG focuses primarily on the question of caste and gender violence faced by Dalits in the coun-
tryside as well as on their economic grievances as the agricultural proletariat (effective implemen-
tation of agrarian redistribution measures, minimum wages, etc.).
In our conversations Ram Kumar described the difficulties of working on the fringes of the
NGO community due to the temporary, renewable, insufficient and exacting nature of contracts
with western donor agencies in New Delhi. Not being an English speaker, he described the diffi-
culties of communicating with funding agencies, explaining that too much of the allocated budget
went on hiring professional writers specialized in drafting NGO reports and projects in English.
Furthermore, competition between different organizations for grants had led to factionalism,
618 Critical Sociology 44(4-5)

forcing one of his former associates, Kapil Dev, also a Dalit, to break away and set up a rival
network, the Dalit Action Group. Both networks now competed with each other to obtain funds.
Considering these drawbacks, he was not ruling out shifting to a traditional career in electoral
politics by standing as a candidate in local elections. The Congress Party had made him offers. In
addition to the local power conferred on a Member of Legislative Assembly (provincial assembly)
or Member of Parliament (national assembly), the development funds made officially available to
elected political representatives were also substantial in comparison with the scant resources
offered to him by donor agencies which he described as ‘greedy and exacting’. He said that he had
always been interested in politics, explaining that his father, an armed CPI-ML activist, was killed
by the police and that from an early age he had been shaped by his father’s political education and
by the memory of his martyrdom. While calling on his political past to justify his temptation to
join politics, he was well aware that the climate of revolutionary politics in which he grew up and
participated was totally different to the kind of institutional politics that the Congress offered him
now. The many compromises and arrangements with local elites and the economic interests that
he could foresee as inevitable explained his reluctance to join this party and why he still preferred
to carry on his radical politics under the NGO label.
Moreover, external funding allowed the DAG to escape some of the political limitations
imposed on the ‘traditional’ non-electoral Dalit movement by its economy. This movement relies
on an informal economy of donations, often in return for mediation services with the local
administrations. Obtaining welfare benefits from and getting things done by more or less unco-
operative and corrupt officers is what activists generally spend their time doing, as well as organ-
izing protests and celebrations. As a consequence of the greater purchasing power of the urban
middle class, activists have learned to tap into the Dalit middle and lower middle classes, whose
individual donations can be substantial in comparison with the arduous and unproductive task of
collecting small bank notes from the have-nots in slums and villages. The expectations of the
urban middle class in return for their donations are also easier to meet than the demands of the
rural poor in class terms with the status quo. Any claims by the rural poor that upset the agrarian
class structure can result in violent backlashes from the dominant castes who have the support of
the police and local administrations. This is potentially dangerous for the activists who defend
them. As I saw from my earlier research into the Ambedkarite movement in Kanpur region,
becoming financially dependent on middle-class Dalit civil servants has had the effect of dis-
tancing these local organizations from the rural poor. Their interventions with the administration
on behalf of Dalits depend on the discretion of sympathetic Dalit officers who are expected to
convince recalcitrant (generally upper-caste) officers to pick up files and respond to administra-
tive demands that otherwise tend to be blocked, ignored or simply stalled further down the line.
‘Traditional’ Dalit organizations have therefore become increasingly caught up in the practice of
back-scratching within administrations. This paradoxically reduces the chances of countering
the administrative malpractices of corruption that mostly harm the poor who do not have the
financial capacity to bribe and whose chance of being heard by the administration therefore
depends on the activists. Moreover, the patronage of non-electoral Dalit organizations by Dalit
officials in the high administration results in an ambiguous form of indirect state control over the
movement itself. Activists have had a tendency to internalize these restrictions on their militancy
in order to avoid alienating those powerful patrons whose support and interventions their local
power relies upon (Jaoul, 2008b). In contrast, the small organizations affiliated to the DAG
encourage radical actions against local administrations. Hence, while leading to dependence on
external sources of funding, NGOization has also enabled activists to escape certain subtle forms
of social control over their movement that prevents them from fighting local administrations in
a straightforward manner.
Jaoul 619

The Radical Politics of Self-Help Groups in Jaunpur District

During a state-level meeting of the various local organizations of the DAG, Ram Kumar intro-
duced me to several local organizers of the network. I asked two of them, whom Ram Kumar
pointed to me as among the most dynamic among the latter, if I could visit them to see their work.
Their two separate organizations worked side by side and operated from the same building in a
small rural town of Jaunpur district, Eastern U.P. There, I stayed with a handful of activists who
worked and stayed there most of the time while their families lived in the surrounding villages.
Usha Devi and Motilal Behtu, whom I had met in Lucknow, were employed by DAG which paid
them a regular salary of 3,000 rupees a month. This represents a slightly higher income than that
of the rural proletariat, whose minimum daily wage is fixed at 100 rupees per day of labor but who
do not get work every day. Women also tend to be paid less. In addition to their salary, the DAG
provided them with logistical support (rent, laptops, scooters and running costs). They also had two
assistants and a cook. Motilal Behtu, who was in his mid-40s, started his activism in the non-
electoral Ambedkarite movement. His present organization specialized in agricultural labor trade
unionism. The other organization was run by a 30-year-old woman, Usha Devi, who organized
women’s self-help groups in villages. Married as a young girl and the mother of two daughters, this
local figurehead of Dalit women’s liberation divorced her husband after discovering that he had
secretly married another woman in Mumbai where he worked as a builder. She had a secondary-
school education and started out as an activist for a local NGO before being spotted by Sujit Ghosh,
co-founder of the DAG, who saw in her a promising Dalit leader. Sujit Ghosh continues to promote
Usha in his private capacity, encouraging her to travel and take part in national events in order to
build her network, sporadically lending financial support to her organization, thus supplementing
the support she gets from the DAG. Her organization, Savitri Baï Phule Dalit Mahila Sangharsh
Morcha (Savitri Baï Phule Dalit Women’s Liberation Front), is named after a historic female char-
acter from the 19th-century movement against Brahmanism and caste. During my visits I noticed
a preponderance of female inhabitants in the villages, which was explained to me by the fact that
it was the low season for farming and therefore many of the men had migrated far away for employ-
ment. The women in the organizations appeared to be strongly mobilized to obtain the benefits of
the government’s social and development schemes, thus challenging those local officials and
employees who were pocketing a significant proportion of the public money that was supposed to
reach them.
Although I noticed a greater participation by women and the rural poor compared with ‘tradi-
tional’ Dalit organizations, certain similarities could also be observed. These self-help groups were
dominated by Chamars. In U.P. about 60% of the Dalit population are Chamars and they have
traditionally dominated the Ambedkarite movement. Usha and Behtu were themselves Chamars. I
also noticed their desire to gain financial independence from the DAG by cultivating alternative
sources. Indeed, to avoid being totally dependent on the DAG, whose subsidies had decreased
lately, Usha and Behtu had set up a ‘government-registered organization’, named Sankalp Samajik
Vikas Samiti (literally ‘determination social development committee’), allowing them to be part of
the implementation process of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act8 and therefore to
obtain government funds. However, since the registered status of this organization was legally
incompatible with any protest against public authorities, the campaigns against the local adminis-
tration and government policy were organized separately, a tactical division of political labor also
noted by Kamat in her study on Maharashtra NGOs (Kamat, 2002: 75).
Interestingly, these organizations also retained, symbolically, a form of traditional financing
consisting of donations of cash or agricultural produce. In the rented house I stayed in with the
activists, there was a tin container for storing grain at the entrance. Usha explained to me the
620 Critical Sociology 44(4-5)

symbolic value of these donations in kind by the peasants: ‘People need to feel that this is their
organization’ (my translation). Rather than entirely subsidizing the village self-help groups, activ-
ists also asked villagers to raise funds locally to hire buses to take them to meetings and demonstra-
tions in order to avoid passivity. As demonstrated by Usha’s explanation above, involving villagers
in fundraising was a way to retain the organic relationship with the people. In the ‘traditional’ Dalit
movement the link between the organizations and the people is based on this moral economy of
donations which entails personal visits by activists to their supporters, thus sustaining a political
sociability. This organic political link between the Dalit organizations and the Dalit communities
is firmly rooted in a moral economy of reciprocal commitment. In return for these donations there
is a moral obligation on local leaders to show support for their well-wishers in the event of oppres-
sion, caste-related violence and special needs (financial assistance for the sick and for weddings
and cremation rituals, etc.).
Besides retaining the moral economy of the Dalit movement, DAG activists were also careful
to avoid falling into the trap of becoming dependent on external funds, which, according to Behtu
and Usha, had happened to one rival Dalit NGO in the district. In their words, the risk it presented
was one of ‘funds nahi, to kam nahi’ (‘no work without funds’). Indeed, they dreaded seeing the
mood of protest replaced by the passivity of salaried employment and by bureaucratic dullness.
Similarly, they shied away from any aspirations of comfort which might distance them from the
daily lives and preoccupations of the poor. They associated such comforts with the professionaliza-
tion of the social movement in India and so with leading NGOs, which they called ‘air-conditioned
NGOs’. On an ideological level, they also insisted on keeping the traditions of the anti-caste move-
ment alive by commemorating the birthdays of Ambedkar and Savitri Baï Phule.
Above all, their vigilant and reflective approach to NGOization insisted on a bottom-up, grass-
roots perspective of politicization which characterized an earlier phase of the Dalit movement and
therefore precedes the international campaign for ‘empowerment’. The politicization of Dalit vil-
lagers started in the 1980s and early 1990s with agitations by the Dalit Panthers (Jaoul, 2013), the
DS49 and subsequently with the BSP’s electoral campaigns. However, once the BSP came to
power, it started dissociating itself from this grassroots movement of rural Dalits and quashing it.
Mayawati, the Dalit Chief Minister, felt unable to control the sudden initiatives for economic and
social change from below, whose subversion of the social order and potential for violence ham-
pered her prospects of making political alliances with mainstream parties. Having once encouraged
villagers to set up Ambedkarite committees during its earlier phase, the BSP thus dissociated itself
from the latter’s local struggles once it came to power (Jaoul, 2007). Mayawati’s governments
chose instead to focus on a top-down strategy of social change. She thus demanded the uncondi-
tional and obedient support of the Dalits whom she treated merely as an electoral vote bank.
However, this conflict between grassroots Ambedkarite organizations and the BSP has not pre-
vented a form of division of labor between them (Jaoul, 2007).

From ‘Empowerment’ to Dalit Women’s Insurgencies

Like other activists of the Ambedkarite movement, DAG activists emphasize the importance of an
autonomous Dalit movement immune from electoral opportunism. At village level, their strategy
focuses on Dalit women and their emergence as public actors. Dalit women’s electoral participa-
tion was already an important aspect of the BSP. Dalit women identify with the BSP Chief Minister
Maywati, whom they admire for her boldness and whom they call ‘behenji’ (‘respected sister’).
However, in spite of their emotional involvement and participation in mass meetings and elections,
Dalit women remained excluded to a large extent from more active forms of participation in the
party. This reflects both the traditional division of social roles as well as the higher rates of
Jaoul 621

Figure 1.  Cover of a Dynamic Action Group report. Copyright: Dynamic Action Group.

illiteracy among women in a context where participation in public life is premised upon literacy,
even though the Dalit movement has produced many noticeable exceptions.
This previous politicization of women by the BSP explains the enthusiasm generated by wom-
en’s empowerment schemes, whether by the state (such as their involvement in elected local bod-
ies) or by NGO campaigns for participation (Figure 1). Dalit women have seized this as an
opportunity to take their political participation further. Although this change is now being orches-
trated and tentatively monitored by empowerment programs, I will show that the results can chal-
lenge the way ‘good governance’ is envisioned and promoted by international organizations.
This contrast is dramatically illustrated by the local notoriety gained by Phulpatti Devi in
Jaunpur district. This middle-aged Dalit widow and member of a self-help group set up by Usha
622 Critical Sociology 44(4-5)

Figure 2.  Phulpatti Devi at a meeting held by Savitri Baï Phule Dalit Mahila Sangharsh Morcha (The Savitri
Baï Phule Dalit Women’s Liberation Front). Copyright: Usha Devi.

Devi owes her local celebrity to the fact that she cut off the penis of an upper-caste man close to
the village Pradhan (municipal council leader). After swindling her under the pretext of obtaining
a bank loan for her, which he then embezzled, this man blackmailed her sexually with the promise
of a second bank loan in order to repay the first loan. However, one night, instead of rejecting his
advances as usual, she pretended to acquiesce and followed him to the outskirts of the village.
There she asked him to undress and instead of performing fellatio on him, as she had promised, she
cut off his penis with a knife. She then went straight to the police to confess her crime, leaving her
persecutor-turned-victim in a state of unconsciousness. Since the police did not believe her she
returned with the cut-off penis to prove her act. He survived his castration and they were both
jailed: her for the mutilation and him under the Scheduled Castes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act,
which punishes sexual exploitation of Dalit women by non-Dalit men. It is one of the 22 legally
recognized ways of practicing untouchability.
A journalist from New Delhi working for the reputed Tehelka magazine heard the anecdote.
This in itself is important. It shows that in contrast with the ‘traditional’ Dalit movement, whose
reliance on caste and regional networks has kept it isolated from the progressive circles of the intel-
ligentsia, Dalit NGOs are able to more easily communicate their struggles to a national audience,
especially in left-wing circles, which have historically remained cut off from the anti-caste move-
ment. The journalist went to Jaunpur prison to interview Phulpatti Devi and asked her how she had
mustered the courage to act. To this she responded bluntly: ‘I thought, now Mayawati is in power,
she’ll save me’10 (Vij, 2007b). Interestingly, her justification reveals the local perception of sup-
porters of the DAG that there is a consistency and a complementarity between the BSP leadership’s
strategy of empowerment through the acquisition of state power and their grassroots movement’s
focus on empowerment from below.
Far from condemning or dissociating themselves from Phulpatti Devi’s violent act, local activ-
ists celebrated her boldness by organizing a public meeting on her release from prison (Figure 2).
Jaoul 623

Inviting her to speak on stage, they offered her greater responsibilities in the organization, which
she turned down on the grounds of her shyness and lack of interest in activism.
I discovered, while leafing through the organization’s ‘archives’ (which contained articles
from the local press, leaflets, copies of police ‘first information reports’, photo albums, etc.),
that Phulpatti’s story of castration was simply the most spectacular among a host of collective
protests and individual acts of rebellion in which Dalit women played a key role. The local
protests were mainly directed against everyday forms of administrative corruption (bribery,
embezzlement of funds, commissions taken on pensions, scholarships, etc.). Furthermore, they
were straightforward compared to the negotiations and maneuvers often favored by the ‘tradi-
tional’ Ambedkarite activists before engaging in protests. Over the past few years various local
government officials have been gheraoed (‘besieged’) by DAG activists contesting the embez-
zlement of welfare and development funds. Admittedly, the gherao represents a radical form of
collective action in India. It often tends to be ritualized and therefore superficially radical with
established local personalities courting arrest for the sake of their popularity, meanwhile being
assured of VIP treatment by the police during their arrest which lasts only a few hours. But once
appropriated by marginal, unauthorized actors, the gherao takes on a new flavor of spontaneity
and subversion. For instance, local leaders Usha and Behtu took pride in one such incident
whereby an elderly woman slapped a block development officer in his office. The officer had
showed her a lack of respect by telling her to get off her chair and squat on the ground.
Responding to this derogatory remark, she got up and slapped the government officer in the
face, warning him that he ought to honor her like he would his own mother instead of insulting
her. Just like Phulpatti Devi’s act of castration, her words were reported to me several times by
the local people during informal chats. She seemed to have become a local legend. It is common
for the poor and illiterate to spontaneously squat when they come to government offices, only
timidly taking a seat if they are invited to do so, sometimes two to a chair even when other
chairs are free. These forms of subordination do not mean that there is not a strong cultural
claim to human equality in North Indian popular culture, especially in religious cults popular
among Dalits, whether in Ambedkarite Buddhism or in Dalit devotional (Bhakti) sects. What
made this woman suddenly ask to be treated as an equal by a high-ranking officer? Although I
could not meet her and ask her directly, my impression is that her assertiveness was probably
the result of her pride in being part of a sangathan (‘people’s organization’) that had made a
name for itself locally. Security guards immediately arrested her but other women who were
present at the scene used their mobile phones to mobilize a crowd of villagers who instantly
‘gheraoed’ the building, sequestrating the officer and securing the release of their comrade.
Eventually, the officer was transferred out of the district. One of my respondents, a local shop-
keeper, argued that the hierarchy had transferred him because it would have been impossible for
him to continue to wield public authority after being humiliated in this manner by an elderly
Dalit woman who represented the lowest of the low.
At the organization’s premises, small groups of women would turn up each day, smartly dressed
in brightly colored saris and wearing make-up, in a euphoric mood. This new role in public life was
obviously generating excitement, fun and pride. They often came to the office to seek advice from
Usha Devi before going on, as a group, to local government offices. Instead of accompanying
them, Usha told me that she insisted on them going by themselves so that they would learn to deal
with the administration without an intermediary. Equipped with mobile phones that enabled them
to consult her if need be, they therefore managed to bypass the usual process of mediation with
party activists and other self-proclaimed ‘samaj sevaks’ (‘social workers’), who were of dubious
intent. This thus curtailed the trade of petty local leaders who demanded payment for their inter-
vention or sometimes even sexual services, as testified by the case of Phulpatti Devi.
624 Critical Sociology 44(4-5)

Conclusion
‘India Should Be Proud of Phulpatti Devi’
‘India Should be Proud of Phulpatti Devi’ (Vij, 2007a), wrote journalist Shivam Vij on his blog
following the publication of his article in Tehelka (Vij, 2007b). The publicity given to an individual
violent act of rebellion, apparently disconnected from any existing political repertoire or discourse,
shows the potential for an NGOized grassroots movement to garner support beyond local society.
After decades of complete isolation and mutual defiance, the ‘traditional’ Dalit movement has only
recently started generating sympathy from India’s left-wing intelligentsia.11 According to J.
Rancière, it is the wider identification of society at large with their certain voices that generally ‘do
not count’ that is symptomatic of a broader politics of collective emancipation. This emancipatory
process of ‘political subjectivation’ or ‘dis-identification’ presupposes a renewal of the actors of
political action and the shape it takes (Rancière, 1998). His assumption highlights the political
significance of the emergence of a new category of mobilized actors who were formerly assigned
a subordinated and passive role in the ‘traditional’ Dalit movement.
Phulpatti Devi’s explicit way of tackling phallocracy illustrates in an unexpected and spectacu-
lar manner Laclau’s populist argument that ‘truly political thought and practice would consist in
liberating the political moment from its enthrallment to policed societal frameworks’(Laclau,
2005: 245). This case study shows more generally that ‘empowerment’ has been radically reinter-
preted or ‘resignified’ (Butler, 2004) by a new set of grassroots activists who have applied for NGO
funds. The official discourse of ‘empowerment’ of international institutions is thus reinterpreted,
and redirected by the grassroots movement.
However, the possibility of a radical politics within the NGOization process does not just
depend on the bottom-up renewal of actors and repertoires, as both Rancière and Laclau argue. My
case study highlights the major role of seasoned activists with previous experience in political
organizations in devising strategies to sustain the radicalism of participation. The past political
affiliations of NGO activists like Ram Kumar and Behtu qualify Laclau’s statement that globalized
capitalism ‘makes traditional institutionalized forms of political mediation obsolete’ (Laclau,
2005: 231). Indeed, my case study highlights the recycling of previous political experiments in
Ambedkarite and Marxist Leninist organizations in the process of NGOization. For many former
underground activists of the Naxalite movement in India, NGOization represents an attempt to
sustain their full-time activism as well as pursue radical agendas legally without being repressed.
This has enabled activists like Ram Kumar to live a secure life (with a salary that enables them to
raise their families in the relative comforts of the lower middle class) while pursuing their political
agenda of democratization from below. The DAG president’s background in underground Marxist-
Leninist politics has helped to equip his organization with the intellectual tools to approach
NGOization critically and to restart the Dalit movement with a grassroots perspective, seeking
participation from the most underprivileged Dalits. By pushing forward a radical, intersectional
agenda of caste, class and gender, NGOization has meant an opportunity for this network to pursue
a political trajectory of subaltern assertion. Far from leading to depoliticization, in this case
NGOization has carried forward a history of proletarian upsurge within the Dalit movement, which
started in the 1970s with an attempt by the Dalit Panthers to conciliate Marxism and Ambedkarism.
The kind of grassroots radicalism described in this paper shows conflictual, unsolicited and
subversive interpretations of institutional norms of ‘empowerment’ by subordinated groups attack-
ing local hierarchies. One way to describe the phenomenon is as a resilient political culture of
emancipation despite attempts from above by international institutions and funding agencies to
‘professionalize’ it and ‘technicize’ it and therefore neutralize it. Whether depoliticization is inten-
tional or not on the part of international institutions and donor agencies is not the subject of this
Jaoul 625

article. Documenting how popular politics is apprehended at this level would require a specific
enquiry. What the perspective from below has shown is that the fact that it is implemented on the
ground by politicized activists represents one of the great paradoxes of NGOization, which can
potentially bring unplanned political developments.
Nevertheless, the resources put at the disposal of these local organizations by funding agencies
in the form of salaries, logistics and networks, remains double-edged for local activists, partly
because of the insufficiency of funds but also due to constant uncertainty regarding the renewal of
contracts. On my visit to the NCDHR’s headquarters in New Delhi in 2011, its leaders were wor-
ried that funding from the Ford Foundation would not be renewed because of a current refocusing
on domestic poverty in the United States. DAD activists in U.P. were stressed about the precarious-
ness of this funding program, which is why they also cultivated alternative resources from the state.
They were aware of the risks posed by a psychological dependence on western funds and so they
stigmatized the comforts of bigger, often foreign NGOs, referred to as ‘air-conditioned NGOs’.
Similar remarks have been made regarding the professional NGO sector in Palestine where the
elitist lifestyles of NGO professionals are completely out of touch with the living conditions of
villagers under Israeli occupation (Sbeih, 2014). However, in contrast with the disparities between
people’s assertions at a local level and those of NGOs based in Palestine, I have been able to high-
light certain consistencies between current NGOization and previous political mobilizations of
Dalits in U.P. While refusing the co-option entailed by career opportunities in the NGO sector,
DAG activists appear to be haunted by the uncertainty of their venture and aware of its contradic-
tions. The political nature of their work means there is a constant risk of being sanctioned by donor
agencies and yet obtaining additional funds means potentially being co-opted into the affluent
middle-class lifestyles of the more affluent NGOs, thus becoming cut off from their social base.
These anxieties place a question mark over the future sustainability of practicing radical politics
against the grain of the NGO sector’s neo-liberal guidelines.

Acknowledgements
This article is dedicated to Usha Devi, Motilal Behtu and Ram Kumar.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
  1. UNICEF’s official document clarifying this approach, adopted in 2003 following Kofi Annan’s decla-
ration of principles, states that it is a question of strengthening the ability of rights-holders to protest
with the help of bottom-up empowerment strategies, participation and accountability, coupled with other
unspecified top-down measures (UNICEF, 2004).
  2. While most authors talk of ‘NGOization’, others have coined the term ‘NGOification’. I prefer the first
term, to the second one, which has connotations of reification. NGOization instead indicates a process,
which resonates better with my view of an open-ended historical process.
  3. The BSP, or Bahujan Samaj Party (the party of the multitude), is led by Mayawati, a Dalit woman. It
mostly represents Dalits but also mobilizes the lower castes and the minorities on the basis of caste iden-
tities and plebeian rhetoric.
  4. This case study does not claim to represent India in general. There are great regional variations in terms
of the influence of the NGO sector and social movements and Dalit movements vary regionally in spite
of their common acceptance of Ambedkar as a national symbol. This case study’s particularity is that it
takes place in a previously politicized context with a weak NGO sector. In economic terms eastern U.P.
626 Critical Sociology 44(4-5)

where the fieldwork was carried out is one of the poorest, least developed and most populated regions in
India. The rural poor mostly depend on labor migrations for their livelihood.
  5. Gandhi’s ‘Harijan uplift’ movement took up the same goal in the 1930s but it was confined to upper-caste
social reformers and was resented by the Dalits as being patronizing. After independence the Harijan
uplift movement became paradoxically institutionalized (despite Gandhi’s insistence that it would not
be) and so it gradually lost its appeal.
  6. On the issue of Palestinian ‘de-development’, see Roy (1995).
  7. The revolutionary Naxalite party, founded in 1969 following the peasants’ revolt in Naxalbari, went legal
in 1992.
  8. A policy introduced in 2005 by the federal government guaranteeing each family 100 days’ work a year,
the implementation of which relies on the participation of officially registered civil society organizations.
  9. The DS4, an experimental political outfit, was founded in 1981 by Kanshi Ram in order to launch agita-
tion campaigns and test the electoral strength of the movement. It preceded the launching of the BSP in
1984, which stuck to electoral politics.
10. Mayawati, who rules the BSP in an authoritarian manner, has occupied the post of Chief Minister of U.P.
on several occasions. Although she has no feminist agenda, she has encouraged a process of identifica-
tion among Dalit women and therefore encouraged Dalit women’s assertion.
11. This process of identification by non-Dalits, however, remains marginal and confined to a metropolitan
left-wing public sphere, which also supports the Maoist-led insurgency of Tribals (Jaoul and Dequesnes,
2012).

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