Politics, Morality, Identity: An Intimate Quest

Nonetheless, the fact remains that today enormous power is wielded by actors and organisations operating from the non-national, global space. Even though lacking in democratic and often even legal legitimacy they are able to enforce their will – thanks to the support and sponsorship they enjoy of the world’s economically and militarily most powerful nation-states – over the world’s vast majority of less powerful (semi peripheral) and (peripheral) powerless nation-states. (Santosh 2002) In defining global governance it is therefore necessary to take account of disarticulation of power between the old inter-state system and the new global power. In brief crucial issue of global governance today is the unlegitimate and undemocratic nature of the existing structure of global power. Giving this structure the label governance in fact obscures this basic issue.

It is perhaps this concern about legitimacy of global governance that has prompted the NIGD to undertake the exercise of identifying and evaluating a variety of initiatives – in the global civil society movements as well as the reform proposals emanating from within the existing institutions of global ‘governance’– which in their different ways address the issue of democratisation of global power. However, the criteria for assessing the degree of democratisation achieved by an initiative and for ascertaining the directionality in which it moves seem to be derived, as we shall presently see, from the conventional theory of liberal democracy, now adapted for its global-level application in terms of cosmopolitan democracy. (Held 1999)

The framework of evaluation implies certain (pre)-conceptions of global governance and democracy by using which the evaluatory exercise seeks to judge and prioritise the initiatives. To put it more bluntly, the types of initiatives the project identifies as relevant to global democratisation depend largely on the conceptions of global governance and global democracy on which the evaluating exercise is premised. The given framework (besides the various evaluators’ perspectives) will also influence the evaluation and ranking exercise. It is therefore important that these conceptions are explicated, in normative as well as analytical terms and the evaluatory exercise is conceptually and valuatively situated as clearly as possible in the "disputed terrain" of globalisation. (Vergas V., 2002) For, evaluation, in however neutral or positive(ist) manner its terms of reference are stated, constitutes an intervention in the process of determination of norms and standards of behaviour for the relevant actors/subjects and influences the terms of discourse on issues, which the investigation seeks to assess.

Equally important in the evaluation process is the account of the actor’s or the subject-organisation’s own perspective on the issues involved (in this case democratisation and globalisation) and the vantage point that the subject-organisation occupies (North or South, East or West) and from which it sees its relations of power vis-à-vis the other organisations and the evaluator, either as acceptable or unacceptable. It is for this reason that an interactive and dialogic method of evaluation is often preferred to the one that is premised on the positivist assumption of subject-object distinctions between the evaluator and the evaluated. (Sheth, 1999) IP.

It is with the above concerns in mind that we shall elaborate below two different but overlapping perspectives within and between which various conceptions of global governance and global democracy are articulated. For the sake of convenience we shall characterise these perspectives respectively as (i) the Institutional Perspective and (ii) the Movement Perspective.

In this perspective the issue of global governance is problematised in terms of creating economic and political conditions compelling the existent (dominant) global power structure to acquire institutional legitimacy. It however sees the emergence of this power structure as a historically given condition of life contingently brought about with the end of the cold war. It also sees it as an imperfect condition, which can be and ought to be reformed and improved, so that it becomes accommodative to a variety of concerns, interests and aspirations of a much wider population of the emerging global society. In this process, the institutionalists see an unprecedented opportunity not only for establishing democracy as a universal norm, but also as a form of governance that could be uniformly realised at all levels—global, national and local—and everywhere in the world. It is assumed that with democratisation of the global economic and political power, globalisation will grow to become a positive historical force, uniting the present economically, culturally and politically divided world.

This perspective thus sees institutional power as a driving force for creating a One-World Community and producing economic affluence for its members. But macro economic stability of the global economy is considered a necessary condition for the institutional power to remain productive. It is therefore crucial to maintain such stability in the process of democratisation of global power. It is in this context that the model conceives the role of the global civil society in the process of democratisation of global power, i.e., balancing the stability need of the global economy with that of securing for it a degree of democratic legitimacy. Thus the institutionalist politics is about subjecting the existing structure of global power to democratic control exercised by as large a number of participants as possible, from different sectors of the global civil society. In the course of exercising such control, however, the logic of institutional procedures will have precedence over the logic of popular sovereignty (a la, the self-binding Co-principle of Cosmopolitan Democracy).

The theory of democracy on which the institutionalist idea of global governance is premised is thus obviously of liberal-representative democracy – a model developed by the nation-state democracies. This being a state-centred model of governance the proposals for democratisation ensuing from it operate on the assumption that the diverse, really existing organisations of global power represented a global-state-in-the-making. For its democratic functioning and legitimation such a proto-global state would of course require, symmetrically, a global civil society and citizen-participants on whose consent and vigilance it is expected to be kept on the democratic course. Such concept of democratisation thus flows dually from the model. It is the familiarity of concepts of liberal democracy widely experienced at the nation-state level, rather than the model’s own intrinsic merit in bringing about global democracy, that make such (unwarranted) assumptions and expectations about global governance sound logical and even commonsensical.

Strange though it may seem, the model conceived by the institutional-realists assume what is non-existent as real; namely, the existence of a nodal centre of global governance (a proto-global state) and its will and need to function as a democratically legitimate authority. Even more, the institutional realists see democratisation of global power as a real historical process moving inevitably, even if in fits and starts, in the direction of its ideal: becoming a central political authority exercising legitimate power all over the world. It is to expedite this (teleological) process that the institutionalists want a largest possible number of citizen-participants and political activists to embrace this ideal and work for it, ie., making a liberal-democratic global state possible.

The politics of the institutionalist model is thus the politics of knowledge and advocacy in which funding constitutes a vital element2. It is aimed at making centralised (nation-state like) global governance – expected to be tempered and mediated by another faintly existing process, i.e., the making of a global civil society – a self-fulfilling prophecy. A liberal democratic theory, wedded as it is to positivist knowledge, is thus expected to generate the politics of making the ideal a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is hoped that the progeny of this marriage, i.e. the cosmopolitan democracy, will enable the institutionalist model to protect global decision-making from the unmanageable implications of the principle of popular sovereignty – a principle that is still invoked in legitimation contests within state-democracies. It is even expected to free global governance of the messy politics of popular representation. At least this is how the self-binding principle is likely to work in practice, for democracy at the global level.

It must however be admitted that the idea of cosmopolitan democracy is necessitated by the democratic over-stretch, i.e., democracy’s extension to ever enlarging scales, which threatens to make it unmanageable and, in the end, an unrealisable system of governance. The application of the self-binding principle of cosmopolitan democracy globally, however, enables the governance to privilege professional expertise over public opinion and allows it to establish the global power’s monopoly of violence, and its politically legitimated use against the deviant and dissenting groups and nations refusing to accept the macro-ideology and power of global governance. Further, it can help global governance to hide its other face of power represented by the world’s few economically rich and militarily powerful nation-states. This model of global democracy, it seems, is being empirically perfected in the creation and functioning of the European Union, the WTO and the re-launching of NATO after the end of the cold war. All these different types of organisations are at one level collectively seeking legitimacy for their role in global governance, and at another level each one of them is engaged in maintaining and expanding its hegemonic power globally. Similarly the principle of democratic control (authenticity), expected to be exercised by a vast number of the informed and vigilant global public (again an expectation premised on an assumed existence of a global state with its non-substantively, i.e., only symbolically, existing global citizens) is guaranteed to create in practice a small class of jet-setting and internet-savy intellectual-activist elites and their organisations, supposedly representing the voice of the global civil society. For, it is the idiom and language only of this class – whether of dissent or collaboration – that will be intelligible to their interlocutors/counter parts representing the global power structure – the bankers, the businessmen, the technocrats, and the politicians of the powerful (G-8) nation-states.

The global-level civil society actors would naturally claim authenticity for themselves, as sole translators and communicators on behalf of the globally submerged groups of social activists of many vernacular worlds. (R.B.J., Walkor…) The voices of the vernacular masses i.e., if they at all reach the portals of global democracy, will be heard as making such a racket that they may make it necessary to frequently invoke the principle of self-binding democracy. In brief the idea of global governance is although premised on the nation-state oriented theory of liberal democracy, its proponents are in reality unprepared and unwilling to devise institutional mechanising of popular representation. Thus while claiming democratic legitimacy for itself, global democracy will function as a site of competition and conflict, collaboration and co-operation among various types of globally active, metropolitan elites. Such global democracy albeit a formally legitimated structure of governance, can be characterised, at best, as metropolitan (and not a cosmopolitan) democracy. It however will keep the institutionalists constantly busy performing the challenging theoretical task of interpreting the real life-world of metropolitan hegemony as representing/approximating the ideal of cosmopolitan democracy.

Thus seen the institutionalist perspective invests global governance with enormous power to produce wealth and keep, albeit not necessarily just, peace. And this is considered to be a good enough reason for it to secure a degree of democratic legitimacy. This kind of democracy (global-liberal) however can hardly be expected to properly recognise, and deal democratically with such issues as gender justice, ethnic identities, cultural diversity, and ecological care. To this perspective of global governance belong such initiatives as related to taxation, instituting a world parliament, reforming the Bretton Woods Institutions and the WTO. They not only easily fit the structural-functional frame of evaluation, but also enable the vision of global governance as a network of liberal-democratic institutions producing legitimation for the elite rule. It is through the politics of this perspective that the unfinished neo-liberal project of globalisation can eventually be completed, i.e., by marrying global capitalist economy to global liberal democracy.

It however needs to be recognised that as a really-existing and widely prevalent form the liberal, institutional democracy requires an antidote to populism, which it inevitably gives rise to in moments of crisis. Just as human consciousness knows no limits when it takes positive and creative flights, it knows no bounds when it drifts. Hitler and Mussolini, or even the modern politico-religious identity in the form of fundamentalism, paradoxically, draw their strength from populism. For this reason, we believe that self-binding should be an integral part of democratic institutional arrangements. It is relatively easier for local, smaller scale, democracies to function on the basis of popular will but in large-scale democracies it becomes necessary to institutionalise the principle of self-binding or ‘maryada’3.

In this perspective the issue of global governance is problematised in terms of pluralising and deepening democracy and in the process building politics for creating competing and alternative forms of democracy vis-à-vis the singularly and the universally propagated, often even enforced, form of liberal representative democracy. The proponents of this perspective (for short, the alternativist) view the existing, post-cold war global power structure as exclusionary and hegemonic in practice and undemocratic even in theory. This is because any of its governing institutions is not meant to be responsible or accountable to constituencies outside itself. It is at best self-responsible, and accountable only internally to the professional scrutiny of experts. The politics involved is of knowledge and of movements, aimed at delegitimising the existing anti-democratic and dominant global power and building alternative forms of global governance which would privilege the idea of global citizenship over that of consumership. The theory of democracy on which this perspective is premised is of participatory democracy where economic and political power is shaped and legitimated through a bottom-up process of democratisation.

The alternativists thus conceive democratisation as a process of creating at all levels – from local to global – a system of multiple governances which are horizontally interlinked. These governing agencies are sought to be made responsible not only to each other, but accountable directly and generically to people in their different constituencies.

Interestingly, however, unlike the institutionalists, who by and large represent a coherent view of governance (vertically legitimated structure of political and economic power) and democracy (consented elite-rule), the alternativists are of different hues. Two broad types could be easily discerned: the maximalists and the minimalists. The maximalists, like the institutionalists, believe in increasing the democratic power of the governing institutions, but seek their democratic legitimation through popular participation which for them, unlike for the institutionalists, is not merely the form of eliciting democratic consent, but a means of involving people in the process of decision making. They however do not view the prevalent structure of global power as constituting any basis for global governance. In fact, they view it as unjust and anti-democratic power which must be replaced through democratic movements giving rise to alternative structures of global governance which are just, egalitarian and genuinely democratic. However in this model too, power is conceived as embodied in a central, state-like organisation, but it has to be derived from global citizenry and its use democratically controlled not just through rules and procedures but directly by the civil society. Thus global citizenship and global civil society are the two concepts crucial to this model particularly for ensuring democratic decision-making and accountability of governance. In so far as both, the institutionalists and the maximalists are enamoured by the role of state-power for achieving their respective economic and social objectives they share between them an attitude of govern-mentality with respect to their thinking about social transformations. The source of inspiration of this model, perhaps its origin, lies in the ideology and politics developed by the European Left during the cold war. The global democracy initiative represented by the World Social Forum when viewed in terms of its theory of power seems to belong to the maximalist alternative model.

The other, the minimalist model of alternative governance, does not occupy much space in the discourse of global governance and democratisation. It allocates increasingly minimum power to the higher levels i.e., respectively the national, the regional and global, and invests local governance with maximum power, because it is at this level that democracy is embodied in its true and primary form. Upper rungs of governance can function democratically in so far as they derive their legitimacy and power from this primary source. It provides for articulation of such system of upwardly diminishing power, horizontally in different domains of life – political, economic, ecological etc.– in the process, seeking to resolve dichotomous separations existing in today’s globalising world, between economy and society, politics and culture. The inspiration of this model is largely derived from the Gandhian vision of governance and democracy which emphasises non-violence as a precondition for civil life and celebrates diversity as manifestation of unity of all life – human and non-human. Such initiatives as Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam4  and perhaps at another level the North-South Truth Commission appear to be natural outcomes of such a vision.

Since the central defining feature for democracy is not elections only at the nation state level, but participation at all levels, the politics of redefining the present design of institutions of governance at local to global levels into a more participatory institutional design requires that there is direct democracy at the grassroots and participatory modes of linking it with higher levels. This kind of politics has profound implications for strategising the ‘alternative’ structures. The mode of intervention itself is perpetually open-ended and participatory. It starts from a critique of the given institutions. The critique, however, is not meant to reject or even undermine their democratic role in the present, but to link them with the long-term goal of participatory democracy. Democratisation, or any fundamental change of an enduring kind, has to be therefore conceived and effected by the people themselves, and the community of change activists has to see itself as a part of them. While attempting to understand all streams and

sub-streams of urges and aspirations for democratisation, it becomes necessary to chose those which we consider desirable for our time, place and collectivity. This has to be done with a sense of humility and also a sense of self-confidence, which will allow the possibility of listening to even the enemy. The democratic transformation can not take place if people who consider themselves as change agents have the self-image of a vangaurd class. Neither the ultimate utopian vision, nor the strategy for moving towards it, would be drawn up by the change agents through an exclusivist process, but would involve an open interactive process between different constituents of the ‘community’. Following upon this interactive process, whenever critique and alternative suggestions are put forward but not accepted by the entrenched interests and dominant thinking, a two-pronged strategy has to be adopted – (1) by insistence on one’s own truth by inviting self-suffering, called ‘satyagraha’5 , and, (2) create inclusive politics of constructive work and wider popular participation so that alternative models develop through an interaction with, and are acceptable to, people at large.

The American consumer paradise has phenomenal magnetic power for the elite and middle classes all over the world. Belief in the ability of modern science and technology to realise this ‘paradise’ for all, through the right kind of politics (socialist or social democratic) is universal, including among the radical political and other elites of the South. The Southern elite is willing to accept the northern elite’s goal of economic affluence if achieved democratically and with distributive justice. This temptation to have both the worlds has prompted the Southern elites to ignore/give up the life-styles practised by the majority of their societies, which have proved to be much more sustainable but an austere way of living. The peasants and tribals have known these ways of life. The global elite, including that of the South, has yet not managed to destroy it all. For an alternative movement globally we do not need to start from scratch. We need to rediscover our roots, making politics of life style and knowledge systems an important agenda. We will then realise the richness of available moral, spiritual, cultural and political resources that we have to build a better world.

The Green movements of the North, to a considerable extent, have realised these truths. Unfortunately, the entrenched Northern elite has been able to insulate the rest of their societies from this consciousness by representing the community of all shades of alternative movements including the Greens, as freak margins of modern society.

The urgent need therefore is to evolve a strategy that takes note of aspirations, visions and energies of the alternative movements that are trying to counter the hegemonic thrust of contemporary globlisation. It is the well-refined rigorous intellectual designs worked out by the top, at the top, for the top, in the name of institutions of global governance and global democracy that go a long way in legitimising the demonic dimensions of globalisation. This framework kills or at least greatly undermines the debates at the level where ‘people’ are engaged in a ‘survival’ battle. It undermines the possibilities of democratic urges asserting themselves in a bottom up manner.

The short point is if we are serious about the ideal of democracy, whose cardinal principle is participation, then we can not present any institutional design either for the movement sector or for governance structures, without focusing on participation as the basic principle of governance. Obviously, this is an abstract statement. The implication is that people are organised at different levels and at different locations through diverse principles of community organisation. No particular principle of community organisation has intrinsic political superiority over the other in terms of actual or effective participation of their people. It has to be demonstrated in actual practice.

Global governance, even when made responsive to a global civil society, will, at the best of times, remain only benevolent geo-governance (institutionally just but not necessarily humane). Globally, it is unrealistic to aspire for more. Being, in any event, a tertiary system of governance it should also not aspire for more power for itself.. We therefore visualise institutionally just global governance as a necessary condition for humane governances locally and nationally. We do not attribute to it any causal power. Humane governances will remain humane insofar as they are primarily organised in territorial contexts (not necessarily statal). Global governance (as a condition for territorial humane governances) will be organised in transterritorial-sectoral terms. Just and peaceful global governance need not be therefore conceived as ‘one-world’ governance/community. We prefer to view it as a consented constitutional order deriving its legitimacy primarily from the sectorally structured global civil society which in turn articulate needs and problems of local communities globally.. The sectors it may include are inter-state relations and markets as well as transnational movements with appropriate trans-territorial organisational forms articulating the ‘politics of democratisation’ on such issues as human rights, gender, ecology, accountability of global power structures and institutions. These movements and organisations will constitute a Global Civil Society. But that Global Civil Society will not order directly and vertically, state-society relations globally or nationally. Its relations with other territorial orders therefore need not be conceived vertically, in terms of sending impacts mainly downwards. Global governance functioning in tandem with Global Civil Society should be conceived as an umbrella of network institultions, not a super-ordinating global organisation for all human communities everywhere.

Put more concretely our concern is embodying the idea of Global Civil Society, which at present is an empty box. Let us elaborate this point. First, U.N. organizations like ILO, UNICEF, UNDP and myriad others will have to be detached from the inter-governmental system. They will have to derive legitimacy directly from transnational constituencies. Representation will have to be not through national governments but through electoral college-like mechanisms in various sectors. The constituencies of trans-national organisations will thus be identified not territorially but by transnational sectorality: e.g. women’s organisations, organisations for children and the handicapped, ecological and human rights organizations etc., which themselves may have member organizations with territorial bases. In brief, such U.N. organizations will by-pass states/governments and derive their mandate sectorally from specific transnational constituencies of organizations and movements in different parts of the world. Here the danger lies in domination by the more ‘organized’ North, but weightages and proportionalities can be worked out within such an arrangement. Second, non-governmental and non-UN, people-oriented organizations have to be promoted and recognized through a system of international law premised on Global Civil Society. They should be structurally incorporated in the global system of accountability of multi-national actors and institutions; through them the Global Governance could also be made accountable. The issue, in other words, is to give substantiality to a politics of global governance through privileging non geo-political structures/organizations/movements in the global civil society. In sum, the issue of substantiality/embodiment of the Global Civil Society needs greater attention.

Building a Global Civil Society thus need not be a top-down process of democratisation transforming state-society relations everywhere. It should be a lateral process, aiming at horizontalization of global structures of power, sectorally and legitimationally.

Such global level democratic governance based not on specific state powers but deriving its legitimacy from sectorally constituted Global Civil Society will, of course, enable the deepening of democracy at every site, but it should not be expected to hand out proposals addressed even to deepening of democracy. That task, in the ultimate analysis, belongs to processes within territorial orders. Democratisation of state-society and other relations within territories is a process that may give rise to different (not necessarily liberal) democratic forms.

The relationship between sectoral-global civil society and territorial organisations (statal and other autonomous ones) can be visualised in terms of simultaneously and multiple citizenships – i.e. global, national, local – such that they need not, in principle, exist in a relationship of conflict. Thus seen, the challenge, as yet unatttended, is how and in what terms the idea of global citizenship should be institutionalised. In this context, both politics of discourse and achieving sectoral-structural coherence of the global civil society must constitute important aspects of democratisation at the global level. By emphasising the institutional design of democracy, on the other hand, we may willy-nilly justify the current trend of equating democracy with the market and citizenship with consumership. The result is privileging a discourse which sees democratisation as a process which culminates in a world-order consisting of one World-Government with a Liberal (albeit federal) State. Such a discourse shuts out experimentation/formations of other varieties of democratic governances such as, for example, the Gandhian one based on the idea of village republics (at the micro level) and ‘trusteeship’ at the macro level or other communitarian consent-based democratic but non-elective forms of governance, or those which are happily self-governed but are not outwardly and ‘globally’- oriented. The search for one-world governance would thus end up in privileging the metropolitan over the vernacular. The pure liberal form of democracy has this inherent danger. Its institutions remain elite-oriented and imperious. In such a perspective other local democratic forms of governance are often seen as parochial or worse, undemocratic.

But if global conditions are right (i.e. democratic in form, strong on equity, just in practice and non-violent in the pursuit of collective interests), the effects for territorial or local sovereignties (of State and/or of communities) and for sectoral existences (children/women etc.) can not be but promotional in terms of democratisation and well-being. Of course, under conditions of minimalist and self-consciously limited global order, the resultant forms of democracy and economic organisations and cultural life-styles in the territories will be different and diverse among themselves. Tolerance, along with non-violence,thus becomes is a relevant category for democratisation undermining the current global politics of evangelism for integration. It allows not only for time-lags and rhythms of different peoples involved in the process of democratisation, but ensures open-endedness to the human future.

Democratisation should thus be premised on one’s recognition of differences as representing ‘partial truths’ of other people’s convictions, while recognising the partial truth-value of one’s own. Nevertheless privileging one kind of conviction can be argued in terms of ‘relevant’ truth in the given empirical-historical moment as against isomorphism of differences. The former makes it possible to argue for global constitutionalism as ‘manifest order’ – resting on general consent of the differing entities – within which differences are negotiated and conflict resolution mechanisms can work. The challenge is how not to see multiculturalism as a global or national prison-house of frozen identities but as a system of agreements about enriching differences in varying contexts and at different levels.

If the epitome of global governance is seen in terms of ‘one-world community’, – even if it is premised on human rights, gender justice, respect for international law, ecological balance etc. – then our vision of global democracy may also slide into a plea for another, culturally integrative global polity.

There is no doubt that the end of the cold war has created a historical moment for globalisation of democracy. But it offers an unprecedented, the biggest ever, opportunity to the geopolitical appropriators than to the promoters of the politics of democratisation. While the geopolitical ‘vision’ of globalisation is premised on establishing a world-power system (resting on state-power of a few rich, powerful, nations), it also seeks to bring about liberal state-democracies everywhere. Geopoliticians see the ubiquity of such democracies as a guarantee for economic and political stability globally under the prevailing global conditions of inequality (economic and political, military and technological) and a ‘non-war’, unjust, peace. Its legitimacy is sought through uniform economic aspirations of metropolitan (non-vernacular) elites and populations the world over for whom the promise of capitalist economic development is still alive and ‘reachable’.

The almost superstitious faith in the values of ‘industrialism’ and ‘scientific rationality’ underlines the notion of humankind as the victor over nature, a consumer without any ‘maryada’ - constraints or restraints. This consciousness is a by-product of the European renaissance, an important source of the imperialist politics of evangelical integrationalism. The anti-colonial struggle also had the same agenda, how to homogenise difference by establishing the hegemony of modernising elites of the society. The main thrust of the social energies realised by anti-imperialist struggles were thus directed at retailoring the politico-economic system and reshaping the socio-cultural consciousness in a manner that the values of renaissance and industrialism could be realised as quickly as possible for the entirety of humankind. In brief, the historical moment, it seems was loaded in favour of the world power system.

One important consequence of this politics of homogenisation of cultures and of establishing hegemonic rule of elites was colonisation of the knowledge systems of all receiving societies. As a result, a large part of human consciousness was dismissed as the most unscientific, non-rational, belief systems. This was tellingly illustrated by the convenor of Pani Chetna Samiti, Mr. Arun Kumar, during his march (‘padyatra’) through thousands of miles of in the Thar desert. He demonstrated to his co-marchers how the kind of nuanced knowledge the unschooled peasant boys possessed about their surroundings was beyond the imagination of the modern educated youth and even the ‘modern scientific’ ecological experts. The former knew thoroughly what the ecology is within their ecological zone of 10-12 miles radius, its implications for the rhythm of life, for agricultural operations and for the human beings, flora and fauna of the area. It was all understood in the traditional knowledge system of the Thar Desert and is still living knowledge constituting a part of everyday practice. But refusal to recognise and attempts to delegitimate it, will destroy most of such existing knowledge systems. The same applies to many institutions of (local) governance which are seen to exist today as anomaliles of the past.

Susanne Adahl, a Finnish researcher, who has observed the Bangladeshi fisher folk found that a lot of fishing taboos were forgotten after August’ 47 because of the creation of nation-states based on the religious division of Hindus and Muslims. After creation of East Pakistan these taboos were dismissed as Hindu religious beliefs. According to the Finnish ecology philosopher Olli Tammilehto, knowledge/belief systems were worked out by humankind all over the earth in the language of the sacred. Many of the sectarian believers in our part of the world may believe that such ideas of sacred forests, sacred groves and lakes were special features of the belief systems of the global South. But this has been the case all over the world. Finland has a notion of sacred forests similar to central Russia. The Thar Desert has a similar system of taboos for its commons. In Siberia one cannot fish in certain lakes at all. We in South Asia also have seasonal restrictions on fishing, which coincide with the breeding cycles of life in water. But renaissance superstitions about industrialism and the faith (born of an arrogant ignorance) in the possibility of realising the consumer paradise created conditions where all bonds of consciousness, awareness and emotions between humans and the rest of nature were weakened, in fact destroyed, in large parts of modern nation states. Human beings ceased to be part of nature, with only claims over Nature and no responsibility towards the larger whole, of which we are a small part.

The damage by renaissance ‘superstitions’ was reinforced by the imperial international world order. In this dispensation, continuing into the post-colonial era and upto the present times, the natural resources like gold, copper, petro-oil, other minerals, forests and agricultural produce were transferred from the third world to imperial Europe and North America at almost no price i.e. without even paying the dignified wages to those who had put their human sweat and blood in transforming Nature’s bounty into exportable commodities. The current hegemonic globalisation is attempting to resist the assertion of democratic urges and sustain the exploitative colonial legacy.

To realise the ideals of ecological democracy, the just use of and equitable control over environmental/natural resources, requires that the well worked out concepts of ecological debt and ecological footprint – the two elements together constituting the self-binding element – inform the life style of Northern people and the Southern elite. Campaigns for the return of ecological debt must be intensified.

Thus seen, the language of symbols and rituals, implied in the traditional knowledge systems may serve as a tool facilitating cognition and perception of complex, almost overwhelming, reality into comprehensible fragments. There come periods in the cycle of human consciousness when the analytical mode has to supplement its understanding through the synthetic mode and also through the language of symbols and rituals, which may not meet the criteria of our modernist notions of scientificity.

So, the combined impact of imperial plunder of natural resources, the soviet model of state driven development and corporate driven renaissance model of development have together contributed immensely to the degradation of nature, not only on earth but also its outer limits of the ozone layer. But the renaissance theology has created a structure of consciousness, which is almost incapable of seeing the oneness of this universe as a whole. It was through the language of rituals, symbols and complex set of belief systems that this understanding of oneness was communicated from one generation to another. Now, in this ‘age of reason’ we are bereft of these intellectual/emotional/spiritual tools of consciousness. For modernists like us it is almost impossible to perceive the deep and comprehensive crisis in which we are trapped. Since we can’t see the whole and its oneness, it is possible for us to perceive the multidimensionality and the comprehensiveness of the crisis. Our consciousness is shaped as if we are absolutely non-connected, without any past heritage or future links, an independent reality unto ourselves, we are non-connected/‘independent’ individual entities - whether a material entity, i.e. belonging to a material reality called class, or a speck of consciousness i.e. repository of ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ processed by our intellect through the filters of ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’. In this mode of consciousness it is but natural that all of us perceive the crisis from different perspectives and in partial ways. Some of us are concerned about the political crisis, others are concerned about degradation of nature, global warming, water scarcity etc. Some others are frightened about what will happen if the cultural plurality of humankind is destroyed by identity-fundamentalists. Yet others are attempting to fight the situation ‘when corporations rule the world’.

At the risk of some over-generalisation, it is necessary to appreciate that the exclusive use of our tools of modern consciousness neither allows us to appreciate the wholesomeness of the crisis nor its interconnectedness. The other related point is, again with a risk of some over-simplification, that it is the attempt at defining democracy holistically, the search for truth, insistence on truth even through self-suffering (‘satyagraha’), respect for the other’s truth and appreciation of the concentric circles of identity, appreciation of the life conditions of the most marginalised (the daridranarayan), which together can help us to perceive the crisis in its totality. And hence the possibility of strategising to respond holistically to the calling of our times.

It is in the context of the minimalist-alternative perspective elaborated above that we undertook the evaluation of the five initiatives presented by NIGD.

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