An American helped IAS officers like me ask the right questions—why James Scott is important

Scott looked at the State as it is—based on its functions rather than through the prism of Kautilya's Arthashastra, Machiavelli’s The Prince, or the Marxist concept.

Illustration by Manisha Yadav | ThePrint

How do I begin this tribute to American political scientist James C Scott? Though I admire part of his diagnostics, I disagree with his prescription and prognosis. With a 36-year career as an Indian civil servant, I do not share his inherent distrust of the State and his “two cheers for anarchism”. However, his writings have helped me understand the “origin and working of the State” and listen to “the voices of protest” outside formal representative platforms. Scott has certainly helped me tone down “my own hubris as a zealous administrator” and made me realise that “marginal farmers, industrial workers and even those who work in brick kilns” cannot be treated as “passive beneficiaries, waiting for deliverance by an altruistic NGO patron or a conscientious officer of the paternalistic state” but are “active participants who negotiate rational choices based on an empirical risk assessment calculus”.

As the ex-director of Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy Of Administration (LBSNAA), the top civil services training institution in India, and as an academic council member of the National Centre for Good Governance (NCGG), I am convinced that good governance is not only desirable but also eminently possible. Moreover, I believe that fierce electoral contests in India’s three-tier democracy have actually given us a fairly robust strategy for maintaining and improving livelihoods, food security, and social empowerment.

It is true that the system is far from perfect, but progress has been substantial for the State in India (which, for me, includes all the three tiers) that has listened to and engaged with stakeholders at the bottom of the pyramid. Thanks to reading Scott, many of us, who consciously chose to work in the domain of rural development, agriculture, and cooperatives panchayats were able to evolve a better strategy of listening,  communicating, and engaging in participatory research and action.

Some of Scott’s greatest insights

My introduction to Scott’s work dates back to 1999 when I joined Cornell University as a Hubert H Humphrey fellow and took a course on political ecology under Ronald J Herring. He asked me to share my impressions of the book with the cohort, for he said, with some exaggeration, that the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) represented the ‘State’ in India. Thus began my introduction to James C Scott whose examination of the State and its principal actors—bureaucrats, planners, engineers, and politicians—is truly insightful and can certainly help these actors understand their own pre-conceived notions about the nation-building project quite implicitly, even without realising the long-term implications of their plans and actions. Seeing Like a State was a very good read, and I followed it up with Weapons of the Weak, which was published in 1985, and a review article on his  1976  book The Moral Economy of the Peasant.

What struck me was that he looked at the State as it is — on the basis of the functions it performs rather than through the ideological prism of  Kautilya’s Arthashastra, Machiavelli’s The Prince, the Weberian hierarchy, or the Marxist (communist) concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Scott’s view, all states—from army dictatorships to theocratic regimes, monarchies and republics—had some common distinguishable traits. All measured land, taxed agriculture, minerals, and manufactures counted their citizens, enforced their linguistic preferences, produced annual budgets, laid down targets, enforced discipline, ran prisons, and maintained registers (or data banks in the era of e-governance) of their citizens.

Almost like the “categorical imperative” of Kant, a State needed “categories to mark its legibility” (and legitimacy). Those at the helm were convinced about their infallibility and failed to take alternative viewpoints into consideration, whether it was about farming techniques or blueprints for new settlements.  He termed this “high modernism” with examples ranging from scientific forestry in Germany to collectivisation of farms in the Soviet Union, the villagisation in Tanzania, urban settlements like Brasilia and the large river projects for hydropower and irrigation that disrupted the natural flows of rivers. When this was coupled with a weak civil society and an abject judiciary, those on the other end of the spectrum did not rise in immediate revolt, for the costs and consequences were too high. Nevertheless, they found ways to express their angst—through song, slander, deliberate procrastination, exaggerated praise or just abandoning their station of duty on one pretext or the other. This was the key point in Weapons of the Weak. They would not confront but circumvent, and it was for the State to “listen” and “see” this point of view as well. But, to be fair, he did support State intervention in the immunisation and vaccination programme for children and could not find too much fault with Chandigarh, one of the better-planned cities in India.

I told the cohort that Seeing like a State was a powerful commentary that held some great insight. But the Southeast Asian experience could not be universalised. I shared my own experiences with participatory and state intervention in the state of West Bengal, where I started my career in the poverty-stricken, tribal-dominated, perpetually starving, rice-deficit district of Puruliya. Within a decade, the district had been ‘uplifted’ on account of three crops — Kharif, (monsoon) Rabi (winter), and Boro (early summer) — along with the development of motorable rural roads and introduction of near-universal school enrolment. To my mind, this was actually a fine example of ‘high modernism’ working in close collaboration with folk wisdom and political mobilisation that saw the emergence of grassroots leadership.

When I look back at Puruliya, I note that there was a groundswell of support for improving the peasant condition — the Krishi Vigyan Kendra, funded by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research as well as the Ramakrishna Mission — which was only grudgingly accepted by the Left Front government. The Principal Agriculture officer of the district worked together with the irrigation and the agriculture department to introduce the second crop of pulses or potato and a third crop of Boro rice, thereby transforming a perpetually drought-prone area into a vibrant agriculture production zone.

One experience can’t be universalised

Twenty-four years down the line, when  I look back at the defence of the Indian State, I have to admit that like Scott’s experience, mine, too, cannot be universalised. While agriculture interventions have been fairly successful in West Bengal, there has been an exodus of farmers from many villages in the highlands of Uttarakhand, for increasing fragmentation has made conventional farming unviable. Punjab’s Green Revolution left in its wake a trail of carcinogenic substances, highly contaminated air and water, a fractured society and a political economy that insists on providing free power to tube wells (which is detrimental to the economy) to extract more water (which is detrimental to ecology ) even as the state’s fiscal deficit is at a whopping Rs 3.45 lakh crore.

With this, I humbly close my tribute to one of the finest scholars on agrarian studies who based his political theory on empirical insights drawn from groundwork rather than ideological dogma. He questioned every accepted notion—that of the State as a benevolent institution, of Marxist historiography, as well as Karl Polanyi’s argument in The Great Transformation that market forces are driven by invisible hands. Last but not least, he gave only “two, instead of three, cheers to anarchy”. Disagree you may, but you must read James Scott, for he asks the right questions. And good questions are the foundation for better understanding.

Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was Director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.

(Edited by Humra Laeeq)