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print versionCreating suspicion about civil society undermines its robustness and contribution to nation building
by Bharat Bhushan
November 15, 2021
Painting civil society organisations as anti-national is not new for illiberal regimes. What is new, is the attempt to raise the confrontation between the State and civil society to the level of “war” by India’s National Security Advisor (NSA).
In his speech to Indian Police Service probationers at their graduation parade at the National Police Academy, NSA Ajit Doval claimed, “The new frontiers of war, what you call the fourth generation warfare, is civil society.” Wars, he claimed, had become ineffective instruments of achieving political goals because they were costly and their outcomes uncertain, but civil society could be “subverted, suborned, divided, (and) manipulated” to hurt national interest.
If one views civil society as a network of interactions composed of the intimate and unorganised sphere, particularly informal networks, voluntary initiatives and associations and social movements, then the NSA’s speech suggests that this entire sphere of debate, discussion and public action has become a new war zone. The theory of “war” he propounds, justifies viewing civil society as a potential enemy of the State, to be put under surveillance and its activities restricted.
This is a “hard” repackaging of the antagonism that the Narendra Modi regime has shown towards civil society organisations. Suspicion of civil society in itself is not something new. After all, the celebrated case of Binayak Sen arrested under sedition law occurred much before Prime Minister Modi’s election in 2014. However, the 1870 colonial sedition law has been used to an unprecedented extent under the Modi regime. Sedition charges have been slapped on students for raising slogans that the government and the ruling party consider anti-national; on civil liberties activists participating in the Bhima-Koregaon meeting and allegedly for conspiring to assassinate the prime minister; against critics of the Citizenship Amendment Act from eminent writer and critic Hiren Gohain to students and others; against public intellectuals and film stars for a letter to the prime minister against the mob-lynching of minorities (subsequently withdrawn) and against 30,000 tribals from Jharkhand who restated the special rights enjoyed by them under the Constitution on stone plaques placed outside their villages.
The distance and distrust between State and civil society has been taken by the NSA to another level by formalising it as war. Doval’s speech justifying the securitisation of the discourse about civil society flows from a grand “historical” narrative of warfare.
Fourth generation Warfare is a theory developed by William Lind and others in an article written for the Marine Corps Gazette in 1989. According to them, first generation warfare was defined by the use of massed manpower; second by firepower; third, by manoeuvre; and now the fourth generation, by insurgency using political, economic, and social networks to demoralise the adversary.
Critics of the concept such as Antulio J. Echevarria II of the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, have pointed out that the concept of fourth generation warfare is bogus with no analytical value. He argues that the several forms of warfare have always coexisted. For example, insurgency predates second and third generation warfare (firepower and manoeuvre) suggesting that there is no evolved fourth generation quality about it.
He argues that throughout history, terrorists, guerrillas and other insurgents have tried to erode the opponent’s will to fight through non-military means. The only difference today is that with access to information and communication technologies and global travel, terrorists and insurgents can strike wider and deeper into society.
Terrorist groups (Hamas, Hezbollah and, to some extent, even Al Qaeda) no longer use civil society as their Trojan Horse, and have instead integrated themselves into the fabric of the societies they want to control. Instead of blowing apart these societies, Hamas and Hezbollah have turned them into their constituencies by forging social, political and religious ties with them, Echevarria argues.
This seems to apply to South Asia a well. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh with its amoebically growing fronts is the largest civil society network in India. The current dispensation in India has achieved its ideological hegemony through such ‘civil society organisations’. But clearly the NSA did not have them in mind.
Except for Jammu and Kashmir and parts of the Northeast, most of the violence in India — beatings and punishment lynching of minorities, harassing the critics of the government and even ideological gangs on rampage in university campuses — is today located in radical Hindutva ‘civil society’ orgnsations. So it is clearly the non-Hindutva civil society organisations that the NSA wants to target.
How has this targeting of civil society been operationalised and justified? Initially this happened through what experts call “policy laundering” – where international policies to curb terrorism were extended to cover measures which would normally not get approved by domestic political processes. The initiative of the G-7 countries in 1990 to prevent money laundering and drug trafficking led to creation of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Its guidelines became part of the good governance agenda of the 180-odd countries who joined FATF. In 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the development of standards to counter terror financing was added to the FATF mandate. Member countries promulgated domestic laws to comply with the FATF guidelines – India did so in 2010 by bringing in a law to restrict and regulate foreign funding of civil society organisations. The governments’ restrictions on funding and curbing the activities of civil society organisations has been thus “laundered” along with checking terror funding.
With the new laws and the thinking drving them, the role of civil society in the formation of values, norms of social behaviour, reaffirmation of collective beliefs and values can be stifled. ‘War’ can be declared against those who differ with the dominant identity and values being propagated by the State. In effect, the public sphere where civil society creates a bulwark against the systemising efforts of the state and the economic system is sought to be homogenised, depriving it of autonomy. Creating suspicion about civil society and, equating it with sedition undermines its robustness and contribution to nation building.
