Abstract:

The paper looks into the pitfalls and promise of double majority voting as one element of a comprehensive reform package to enhance the voice of developing countries and countries in transition in the governance structure of the World Bank. It is argued that in order to effectively fulfil a mandate that is dramatically different from the one envisaged when the World Bank was created, the Bank must refashion its decision-making structure. Since there are, however, tremendous obstacles and reservations to the introduction of double majority voting, notably the legal requirement to amend the Articles of Agreement of the World Bank, I argue that a two-year pilot phase approach should be pursued. This would leave time to inform others about the promise of the idea and to gather support from key constituencies. Very much like the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) in its initial phase, a pilot phase approach would lower the resistance against ‘definite’ commitments, while also leaving a chance for agreed upon revisions in the light of lessons learned after a defined number of years.

Double majority voting is essentially a concept pioneered in the GEF over the last decade in the sense of a true North-South partnership. Ownership and ‘voice’ of all sides involved are an inbuilt feature of this innovative voting structure. Different stakeholders' claims are appropriately respected, including donors without whom the GEF could not function and recipient countries whose cooperation and participation is required to enable the institution to achieve its objectives.

Abstract:

Sixty years after their creation, the Bretton Woods institutions face a crisis of legitimacy that impairs their credibility and limits their effectiveness. At the roots of this crisis lies the unrepresentative nature of their structure of governance, which places control of the institutions in the hands of a small group of industrial countries. These countries consider the developing countries and economies in transition as minor partners, despite the fact that they now account for half of the world's output in real terms, most of the world's population, encompassing the most dynamic economies and the largest holders of international reserves. Over time, the effects of the unrepresentative nature of the governance of the BWIs have become aggravated by two trends: First, a growing division among member countries, on the one hand, industrial country creditors who do not borrow from the institutions but largely determine their policies and make the rules and on the other, developing country debtors or potential debtors, subject to policies and rules made by others. Second, the rapid increase in the economic size and importance of developing countries, particularly, emerging market countries in the world economy. This has made the governance structure of the institutions, which reflects the political accommodation reached at the end of World War II increasingly obsolete.

The first part of the paper reviews the existing governance structure of the institutions, the foundations on which it rests, the main formal proposal to reform quotas, its shortcomings and major issues that were not addressed by it.

Speaking on ‘The Future of Indian Cities: National Issues and Goals’ at a 1960 conference organised by the University of California at Berkeley, Asoka Mehta, then a Member of Parliament, noted:

Since then, India has witnessed wide-scale urbanisation. The urban population has grown from 61.6 million in 1951 to 285.3 million in 2001. The proportion of the urban population to total population has risen from 17.6 per cent to 27.8 per cent during the same period, and the number of urban centres has increased from 2,795 to 5,161. The populations of large cities like Kolkata and Mumbai top 10 million. Indeed, the size of the urban population of India is more than the total population of the United States. According to United Nations' estimates, India will have an urbanisation level of 40.9 per cent in the year 2030.

Introduction

This essay investigates the nature of urban governance in a rural market town in India in order to understand the process of what political scientists often call the crisis of governability. The choice of a rural market town in this study is deliberate, as existing studies on urban governance in India generally focus on large cities. According to the 1991 census, nearly 34.8 per cent of urban dwellers in India reside in towns comprising populations ranging between 5,000 and 99,000 people. Most of these populations live in dispersed rural market towns. Politically, these towns constitute the lowest nodal point of the hierarchy of diverse types of institutions of the Indian state. Even panchayat (rural government) offices are located in these small market towns. These institutions link rural market towns with larger urban centres such as district towns, regional capitals and finally the national capital. Economically, rural market towns act as emporia of indigenous export-import trade: exporting rural products into the vast national market grid comprising larger urban centres and importing finished industrial products for rural consumers. Thus such towns constitute the crucial interface between rural areas and large urban political, administrative and economic centres.

These political-economic links are also informed and influenced by social and cultural nexuses between urban and rural areas through rural market towns.

Introduction

This essay discusses aspects of political integration in south India, focusing on the last quarter of the 20th century. In it I attempt to link issues of personal and group identity to discourses on a moral community which are implicit in the language of politicians.

The observation that ideology does not play a major role in political dynamics has often been found in both scholarly writing and journalistic commentary on Indian politics. In the early 1980s, Narain and Mathur noted that factional conflicts and party desertions, among other phenomena, had led to the widespread belief that ideological elements were negligible in political practice. James Manor, for example, went so far as to argue that political anomie, or ‘normlessness’, was evident from the years 1973–4 onward. He defined anomie as:

Atul Kohli characterised political developments in the 1980s in terms of the widespread focus on the personalities of political leaders in the midst of processes of deinstitutionalisation. In their article from 1984, however, Narain and Mathur took exception to the reigning opinion, arguing that ideology was a significant force in Indian politics. Even before the striking emergence of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party on the national stage, they found that nationalism, of various sorts, was a common theme throughout the country.

In this concluding essay I make no claim to originality. As I did in essay two, I shall selectively revisit earlier work by other scholars, but this time not to raise questions so much as to show how these scattered findings may be integrated into the model that I have suggested.

The chapter on The Brothers Karamazov shows that it is perfectly possible to read Dostoevsky convincingly through the prism of the Epstein model, once this model has been translated into synchronic terms and modified to take account of the fact that the Soviet experience had not yet occurred. In fact, this rather significant modification is less damaging than it might seem at first sight, since it explains why Dostoevsky is often said to have anticipated, or even prophesied, Soviet Russia and other atheistic totalitarian states of the twentieth century. The novel gives clear hints of that originary silence of darkness that may lead to the fullness and tranquillity of faith on the one hand or the desolation of the abyss of nothingness on the other; it puts the conflict between these two outcomes at centre stage in the persons and philosophies of life of Ivan and Zosima, and to varying degrees in those of their acolytes. It also presents us with evidence that the two responses are not necessarily polar opposites, but may interact and overlap, and that any individual may flip uneasily between the two.

On 28 February 2002, in Godhara, a little known railway station of Gujarat, in an unprecedented case of arson nearly fifty-eight passengers on the Sabarmati express lost their lives. Many of those who perished in this dreadful fire were volunteers of a militant Hindu nationalist organisation namely Vishwa Hindu Parishad (translated as World Hindu Council and popularly called VHP). These volunteers were returning home from a rally in Ayodhya where the VHP was trying to construct a Ram temple on the site of a sixteenth century mosque named after India's first Mughal emperor Babar.

The temple agitation, periodically orchestrated by Hindu nationalist organisations from 1989 onwards, has unfailingly provoked communal eruptions in the country resulting in large casualties. The February 2002 agitation was no exception to this trend: only this time the stakes were higher. As soon as news of the murderous arson spread, the VHP cashed in on the tragedy by calling for a total strike in Gujarat. The strike escalated into widespread wellorchestrated attacks on Muslim minorities, worsening – in the process – the relationship between India and Pakistan, already tense in the wake of the Kargil war, nuclear tests, and terrorist assaults in New Delhi and Kashmir. The Indian media, and politicians opposed to Hindu nationalist organisations, and human rights activists alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling political party in Gujarat and a sister Hindu nationalist organisation of the VHP, had used state power to assist the attacks on Gujarati Muslims.

This essay focuses on particular aspects of ‘public individualism’: autonomy and political rights. It analyses the significance of political rights in conditions of subordination and argues for a non-individualist formulation of moral agency. By ‘public individualism’, I refer to the public view of the person that informs the functioning and maintenance of political institutions that defend or guard specific rights of the individual. Political institutions informed by public individualism presuppose the autonomy of individuals or of (public) citizens who are expected to exercise the ‘rights’ maintained by these institutions and be responsible for the choices that they make. However, this public individualism is often in conflict with social doctrines that sanction private freedoms. There is thus a tension between individualism as a public view of the person informing the rights of persons, and the narrow agreement on social freedoms that characterise the private person.

Feminist theorising has shown the inadequacy of conventional philosophical conceptions of autonomy for both feminist philosophical practice as well as feminist politics, and has offered reconstructed accounts of autonomy. This essay builds on these reconstructed understandings while contributing an additional argument. It asks how we can understand agential capacities of persons within conditions of subordination. It suggests that ‘free action’ accounts of autonomy, i.e. the accounts of autonomy that privilege an agent's ability to commit free action, constitute the principle obstacle to this exercise. We argue that action does not exist in a social vacuum, and that there are reasons why people act in certain ways which are not always expressive of one's preferred judgements.