State of Tourism and the State in India: Civil Society Perspectives

Dr. T T Sreekumar In Cabbages and Kings , the original context of origin of the notion of the banana republic, O Henry s character Goodwin meets William Geddie, the unresponsive American Consul in Coralio and says: "I shall complain to the civil service department, .or is it a department?--perhaps it's only a theory . State and/or Governance can also become a theory, theory as in its Goodwinian version as a mere notion-, when its constituent elements are disproportionately endowed and the power haves are allowed to invest the authoritarian surplus in quirky whimsies of their own. India during the internal emergency of 1975-1977, not only civil service department, but all assortments of the State, became theory, theory as in Goodwin s/citizen s imagination. Was internal emergency in India a state of an exception, as in Carl Schmitt, based on the State s transcendent ability to eschew the rule of law in the name of the public good or as Agamben would wonder, a wily contrivance that deprived people of their civil rights, and to add to this, used as an excess by a dictatorial state? Each country has its own legacies, demarcations, delimitations and expressions of freedom and democracy and it is increasingly becoming difficult to provide international comparisons. The benchmarks acceptable and applicable in Europe may not be a universal. Within Asia itself, there are diverse forms of the State with varying degrees of democratic governance. Comparisons are possible on what works and what does not, but across the board comparisons for example between India and China or for that matter any set of Asian republics would be meaningless and ahistorical. In a country like India, with a long history of anti-colonial upsurge and unsuccessful but yet not failed decolonization, the parameters of democracy s functional episteme have to be understood in terms of its own history and accomplishments. Again, Asian experiments with democracy vary considerably and there is no ideal average of democracy against which each can be compared. If in the Indian polity, political society has been able to amass powers that far surpass what would pass as normal procedure of governance; the problem deserves close attention and analysis within the historical trajectory that gave shape to its ideals and goals. When the East European totalitarian regimes crumbled, stories similar to post emergency disclosures in India sprouted in the international media. A discussion on the development projects in India, particularly projects which involve large scale takeover of land from farmers and displacement of their families cannot ignore the stark reality of the changing political economy of governance which has increasingly become unresponsive, opaque and unaccountable. Immediately after independence, when the ideology of development was more or less uncontested, masses were asked to sacrifice for nation building. During several decades of state-led development and import substitution regime, development orthodoxy which believed that national interest should be paramount in arriving at decisions on resource allocation reigned supreme in media and public discourses. It was impossible to successfully raise questions of injustices and iniquities that marred the decision-making processes with regard to issues such as land acquisition, distribution of compensation to displaced villagers, indigenous people and other marginalized communities as there was practically no space to mob ilize voices of the oppressed, independent of the State and the political parties who more or less shared similar notions of democracy and development. It took several decades in post -colonial India for a credible space of people s opposition beyond the political blocks that vie for State power, to take shape. The

environmental movement, the human rights movement, the farmers movement, the dalit (lower castes) movement and the women s movement emerged in India challenging the hegemonic notions of development and the political process that supports it. As a consequence of these political developments, issues of development, fairness, justice, democracy and freedom began to be scrutinised from the perspective of people and communities whose voices and views were marginalized by the mainstream political process and media in India. The new social movement turn in Indian politics provided a new social space where the whole set of notions and beliefs held by post-colonial State and its apologists were successfully challenged. The hegemonic ideology of development had to retreat to a defensive stand. Major debates began to centre on the nature of state-society relations, democracy, governance, freedom and human rights of marginalized sections and communities. Their role in the process of democratization, modalities of participation, and limitations of party based representative democracy also became important issues upon which the hegemonic consensus was interrogatedand rejected. For the first time ever, crisis of governability and legitimacy of the state and its institutions were brought into political debate. All the stock-in trade scorn for the alternatives to hegemonic process of modernization began to disappear from the official discourses. There was recognition that the new material force unleashed by the emerging coalition of civil society movements in India with its relationship with similar processes elsewhere in the first world and also in many other third world regions cannot be ignored any more. The major issues that mainstream development ideology had to address as a result of the new political awakening pertained to the plights of displaced tribal communities, workers and peasants who were the new development refugees in post-colonial India. Tourism came into the focus of closer attention and scrutiny of civil society activists and organizations around the same time although most visible articulations of the realization that it has to be discussed as a unique domain where questions of rights and citizenship are paramount emerged in the 1980s. One of the reasons for this relatively delayed response to problems of tourism had to do with its lack of importance in the macro economy during the pre-liberalization era although issues such as resource exploitation, child labour and child abuse, environmental degradation, human rights violations and displacement were still regular features of early tourism development in India. The case of Kovalam beach resort in Kerala, India which began to attract tourist attention in the 1970s is a typical example. The displaced native community was never adequately compensated, the local resources were channelized for the hotel industry s use without proper valuation and pricing, the traditional livelihood of the local community was wiped out, child labour in the newly emerged informal economy surged and child abuse became rampant and environmental squalor contributed by the hotel industry began to threaten public health. The surge of liberalization of the Indian economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s exacerbated the problems the nascent tourism had created. The liberalized economic regime provided a new ideological umbrella for the demagogues of the tourism industry. Tourism emerged in the development discourse, as a prominent sector contributing to the growth of the economy. Emboldened by the new economic climate, tall claims and exaggerated projections about tourism s contribution towards employment creation, foreign exchange earnings and development of local entrepreneurship became the hall mark of official reports and industry propaganda. Tourism was varyingly consecrated as a growth engine and a panacea for maladies of local underdevelopment. Even a breath of criticism against this growing ideology of tourism development seemed impermissible.

Scholars, activists and civil society organizations, who argued for more transparency, accountability and democracy with regard to decision making in tourism were instantly labelled as antidevelopment. State often took recourse in violence and coercion, intimidation and harassment and manipulation and malpractices to protect the interests of the tourism industry besides promulgating a series of new set of regulations and laws that diluted the stricter scrutiny prevailed in the import substitution period. Further, the industry clamoured for several sops and concessions and emerged successful in obtaining them while the common good that tourism claimed to bring in remained elusive at best and non-existent at worst. It was only reasonable, against this backdrop that the protest against unjust and inequitable tourism practices began to emerge in various parts of India. Indigenous communities and fishing communities, two important groups of people who suffered most from the negative impacts of major tourism projects in India, living in the forest region and along the coast line respectively, the hotbeds of action for the industry, revolted against decades of mistreatment and exploitation in the name of tourism development. Their loss of identity, cultural distinctiveness, agricultural land and descent livelihood practices, triggered by tourism development became the central plank of civil society agitations against unbridled growth of tourism industry in India. There is a wide spread misconception that activists who talk about democratization of tourism and cultural identities of indigenous communities are card holders of primitivism. The opposition is not merely to the hollow presumptions of the mainstream ideology of development, but also to the nature and procedures of forced development which violates the human rights of displaced and exploited communities. The growing discontent is justified if we look closely at some recent examples of State action and inaction that favour the industry and violate people s rights. It was following a protracted legal battle that the fishing communities became successful in highlighting the necessity of strictly implementing the coastal zone regulation; a strong environmental law which helps reduce damages to the coastal eco system due to non-traditional activities. Hotel and tourism industry had been in the forefront of a campaign that sought to dilute this regulation or replace it by more lenient legislation or preferably do away with any legislation that offered checks and balances and made them accountable for their actions. The Indian state more or less succumbed to this pressure and has now come up with a proposal that seeks to jeopardize the existing regulatory regime favouring conserv ation. Similarly, several land struggles in India, in the hill tracks and forest areas are triggered by attempts of the tourism industry to grab land from farmers and indigenous people. With the industry continuing its offensive and the state either becoming an accomplice to their assaults on people and ecology or turning its face away from this massive market violence, it is understandable that the agitations have intensified in different parts of the subcontinent. Radical ideologies, particularly neo-Maoist politics have taken deep roots among the masses in many parts of India. The democracy s crisis, manifested in the emergence of this new radicalism has to be seen in a proper perspective. Violence of the State as well as capital has engendered and nurtured the ideology of counter violence. Further, the global contradictions have also aggravated the complexity of the political situations. MNCs and global capital have also become increasingly interested in real estate setting their eyes on vast agricultural lands in the third world for development speculation. Tourism often becomes a mere veneer that covers up the true speculative interests of the land mafia operating at the global level. The neo-colonial economic pressures upon the state, is thus immense and promotes the view that state is a mere auxiliary of the international capital and its interests.

Immanual Kant, in his Theory of Right , argues that a state of civil society is desirable over state of nature where violence is the rule. A situation devoid of justice has to be changed with one where there is arbitration based on consensus. Nevertheless, the constitutive institutional setting should be predetermined by public distributive system of justice and guaranteed by a system empowered to exercise this right. Or else, he believed, the civil state would itself be impossible. Hence, he defined the state of union as an aggregate of individuals under rightful laws. The activists, organizations and leaders of the civil society in India have to stand up to the twin challenge of opposing the statecapital combined and upholding constitutional and democratic principles in struggles against the excesses of the state. Mobilization against undemocratic practices in the domain tourism will also have to follow this enduring path. The passage of the marginalized communities from a state of passive citizenship to an active one, in the Kantian sense, has to be mediated by constitutional and democratic means. Stricter regulations and their unflawed implementatio are preconditions for n achieving this ideal.