Are debate and decision-making mutually inimical?

A few years ago, I saw some students off on GN Chetty Road one night and went back in the morning to discover all the trees were gone. Perhaps there had been press coverage for months about the flyover that was scheduled to be built and I just did not notice. Infrastructural projects are not riveting news until their ecological and human costs become evident. And even then, not everyone stops to take notice.

Whether it is GN Chetty Road's trees, or Sethusamudram, or the Sardar Sarovar project, I think one of the really big problems is that discussion and debate begin after work on the project begins. You cannot return to the status quo ante and you cannot really proceed. So insult is added to injury as something is lost and yet, that which ostensibly could have been gained is delayed indefinitely.

Why don't we debate these things before we start? It would identify pitfalls or at least make them known. My point here is not to start a rant but to genuinely pose this question.

I tried to look at this from the other point of view and imagine the reasons officials would offer for not having town-hall debates and the like:

1. The issues are complex and cannot be debated by lay persons.
2. Nobody would care enough to attend. If they did care, they would have been vigilant enough to know already.
3. It is the role of civil society and the press to highlight these things.
4. We cannot keep debating things; decisions have to be made and every decision comes at a cost.

All of these are valid to some extent but still don't add up to a reason not to debate. My question is how do we set up these conversations?

Prajnya campaigns against gender violence every year primarily in order to bring the issue into everyday conversation. We want people to recognize that there is a problem, to use the words for which they invent euphemisms and to come around to having their own discussions about the root causes and solutions. Lasting change will come through this, we believe. We try to come up with creative, fun, different ways in which to nudge these conversations to start, but it is not easy even with an issue like gender violence which is closer to most of us than we will admit.

How much more difficult then, to get people to stop what they are doing to discuss infrastructure or energy projects whose impact most of them will feel only considerably further down the line! Take this article by Milind Deora today arguing for a new airport in Bombay/Mumbai. How do we take this out of the op-ed page, the talk show studio and the cocktail circuit into every space where conversations happen?

And if we did that would we find ourselves in perpetual debate mode, never calling a decision and carrying it out? I am also afraid of that. In fact, temperamentally, that bothers me more than lack of debate, I must confess.

Therefore, this is a serious question and I would love to hear some answers: How do we generate debate on important public matters and how do we do it so that debate does not derail decision-making?

Personal is political is personal is political is...: Review

I have been following V.V.Ganeshananthan on Twitter for a long time (@Vasugi) but did not know anything about her. Then somewhere, probably on Twitter, I heard she'd published a novel. I was curious but because South Asian diaspora novels have become so common, was not terribly interested. Then, the other day, I saw her book in Landmark and thought, "Oh, why not?" My scepticism was underscored by the very small print of the edition I bought.

It's a good book, folks! You should read it. And this is why.

The protagonist is a young Sri Lankan-American and as the book unfolds, she learns about the country her parents (Tamil) have left behind. Yes, like most of us, she knows what happened, when it happened, in a textbook sort of way, and being a Sri Lankan Tamil, she has seen graphic pamphlets and heard bits of stories. But what she learns as the book unfolds is what most of us never have a chance to do: to put face to headline, to put feeling into choice, to see the inevitability that personal relationships will have political dimensions. To see it all together.

Ganeshananthan braids two strands--the interior, familial, personal one of marriage and the exterior, communal, political one of conflict--into one young woman's journey of seeing. The story of each marriage is a gem in itself, complete, stand-alone. I want to share with you a passage that I found very moving and particularly memorable (page 114):

"...Then he hit her across the cheekbone, and Harini's mouth flooded with blood.

      This is the taste of a Marriage Dying, her Heart said. Harini had swallowed everything, all her life. Her spinster sister Mayuri's jealousy of a Marriage that had happened too neatly. Her mother's quiet disapproval. Her own self-imposed status as a perpetual shadow. Harini swallowed again, swallowed air and blood. Her beating Heart had grown pulpy and old with abuse. 

     But Harini bent double, bent down. She picked up her Go-On Forever Smile from where it had fallen on the ground, and went on."

As the protagonist's family nurses her uncle, a Tiger who's been allowed to get away because he is dying, old stories are finally told, and new ones too. In that community in Toronto, she discovers just how personal politics is: the Tigers have chosen her cousin's future husband. And she discovers that personal ties cross political lines as well.

This is a book lots of people should read. First, those who are looking for a good story, well-written should definitely read this. Second, those who are interested in Sri Lankan politics, will begin to glimpse the things that textbooks don't record about why people make the choices they do. Finally, those interested in conflict should read this because it illustrates how much more complicated conflict resolution is than textbooks would suggest; there are no templates because the human Heart (to continue the author's usage!) doesn't read them.

I will finish by noting that the author teaches English at the University of Michigan, and was teaching a course on political fiction last year. This would be a great book to assign as recommended reading for courses dealing with issues like conflict or migration or in South Asian Studies.

V.V.Ganeshananthan, Love Marriage, Orion Books, 2008.

Yardsticks to trip over?

NGO accountability is a huge issue these days. For funders, government and the public, good governance becomes a measure by which to praise or berate the social sector. For the social sector, trying to regulate its own affairs, it is becoming a set of rigid standards based on an essentialised model of what NGOs do.

Take a look at this article by Vijay Nadkarni, former deputy director of Credibility Alliance, in a special issue of Agenda on civil society in India.

This week, Indian Express has carried a few articles on this question, that I am blogging here mainly to bookmark for later and clip.

NGO non-governance, Indian Express, July 8, 2010.
Mandakini Devasher Surie, Watching the Watchdogs, Indian Express, July 10, 2010.
Ratna Sudarshan, Learning to ask, Indian Express, July 17, 2010.

Standards for NGO governance appear to be derived from existing standards in government and the corporate sector, both of which, if truth be told are not always stellar examples of upright accounting or transparency. In principle, this is a wonderful thing, and the reason many organizations have sought out affiliation and accreditation.

However, there are two self-defeating aspects to this. First, the checklist of standards is rigid across different kinds of organizations in different stages of development. As Ratna Sudarshan points out, the rubric "NGO" includes a wide range of organizations: think-tanks from IDSA to Prajnya; welfare organizations from a village SHG to a PRIA, etc. The same standards of integrity must apply, but apply in different ways. For instance, in Prajnya, we really have no employees who could take leave or have travel allowances, nor an office where they could sign a register. What would we do with a personnel policy we could not apply? Of course, we should have one, and there should not be arbitrary human resources standards in our organization, but for that standard to apply, we should have both humans and resources first!

The second, more worrisome thing, is that rather than developing an optimistic approach that assumes NGO boards want to do things properly and then mentoring them in that direction as they grow, the growing community of governance monitoring agencies and consultants seems to carry with them the "guilty until proven innocent" assumptions of the government and the general suspicion about NGO motives that the corporate sector has.

To whom can NGO boards turn for help in the circumstances, even as these standards are becoming influential in funding circles?

As a non-profit founder, a citizen with a vested interest in good governance anywhere, and a political scientist who is fascinated by how regimes of different sorts acquire the backing of a consensus and then move forward, these are matters that concern me profoundly.

Founder's Blues: What's my story?

I do not understand why such a fine idea as our Education for Peace Initiative is so hard to talk about. I have spent a lot of time (as I usually do) wondering about what we (I) say and do not say that is so uninspiring.

I got to thinking about the campaign against gender violence for which it is possible to at least raise individual donations. People are not moved as much by what we say as by the memories of a person or an incident that it evokes. I think. It is certifiably a good cause.

So is peace education. And lord knows, it should take no marketing outside of the news headlines. Why would 14 year olds elect to fight in violent insurgencies? Why would high school kids pick up the gun on small playground disputes? And short of the gun, think of the many verbal hostilities children learn by the time they leave school. We should all be seriously upset by this. But we are not.

It is hard to narrate these things as a story, I think. Yes, it's true these things happen, but I don't know if I can narrate the teenaged suicide bomber's life as a familiar anecdote. And if I say, children are carrying guns, is that a child that lives in my building?

I could come at it from the experience of the two people whose brainchild this has been, but we are the very fortunate. We come at peace education from a sense that we who have been so lucky as to have grown up around farsighted educationists and very liberal parents need to share this privilege. We share two convictions: 1. We can make a difference through our efforts and 2. The way to do that is by teaching children peaceful ways of relating to each other and living with differences. 

We could come up with a variety of personal anecdotes about the peace-teaching people and experiences we have had, and we have to some extent in our occasional blog: http://prajnyaforpeace.wordpress.com/. But it's not the same as Abc, aged 8, beat her little sister, aged 4, to pulp because there was cream in her milk.

So now I am going to embark on a search for the story. And test some of them here, bewarned.