Historical Hurdles in the Course of the People’s Planning Campaign in Kerala, India

Abstract

The Indian state of Kerala has become well known for human development and democratisation, based on what Amartaya Sen has called ‘public action’. Most recently, the effort at democratic decentralisation and a massive Peoples’ Planning Campaign (PPC) has been looked upon as Asia’s equivalent of the successful participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre. Below the surface, however, serious problems have occurred in Kerala. This review of the experience draws attention to the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the expectations that a radical programme for social change would take root within extensive civil society-based movements and compensate for the previously limited mobilisation of marginalised sections of the population, and, on the other hand, the historically generated party-politicisation of associational life. The People’s Planning Campaign was conceived as a ‘top-to-bottom’ programme with the expectation that it would take root within civil society and thereby be turned into a ‘bottom up’ programme for social change. This expectation of favourable synergies between left-oriented parties and social movements has not proven valid. Instead clientelistic party-politicisation of civil society and limited mobilisation of marginalised social groups have emerged as historically rooted hurdles in the course of deliberative planning in Kerala.