Same Goal, Different Causes

Contrary to Dhanya's view, the locals had a cause—but their cause was not the solidarity organizers' cause. Here, building on Dhanya's use of the term, I understand a cause to be some further ethical purpose in relation to which a campaign goal is important—an ethical motive for pursuing a goal. Action Council members and solidarity organizers constructed the goal of shutting down the gelatin factory as important in relation to different and ultimately incompatible causes, and these differences had implications for their approaches to organizing. From the solidarity organizers' perspective, leadership of women and democratic meetings were

mechanisms for promoting gender equality and democracy, respectively, and alliances with party politicians were taken to hinder broader challenges to the political system. But Action Council members did not take themselves to be responsible for nor capable of making these kinds of change.

As a scalar distinction, the difference between locals' and solidarity organizers' causes is well-represented by the contrast between Figures 2 and 4. From a bird's-eye view (Figure 2), all particular struggles are encompassed by and equivalent within the broader politics of people's struggle and its aims of social transformation. The solidarity organizers move from struggle to struggle seeking to further these broader aims, and any one struggle is valued insofar as it contributes to their vision for geographically-dispersed transformation of a wide range of social hierarchies. In local organizers' use of the term nāṭ, we have another kind of map (Figure 4).

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Here also, the relative importance of goals is diagrammed spatially, but space has a community-centric shape. The gelatin factory campaign is still situated within a "broader" politics, but the perspective is one of core and periphery (to repurpose a famous scale (Wallerstein, 1974)). The campaign goal is important because it is situated at the center, the focus of responsibility.

Campaigns in other places, or efforts to address broader social concerns, are beside the point.

Note that both diagrams represent scales of ethical value, and it is the spatial configuration of value, or importance, that makes them incompatible. In purely geographic terms, as two ways of mapping space, there is no necessary disagreement between them. We might imagine, for example, a map of all people's struggles similar to that in Figure 2, but within which each dot is a set of concentric circles similar to that in Figure 4; each dot is a nāṭ for somebody. But because these are scales of relative value, framing the importance of the

campaign from a birds-eye perspective commits one to a cause that is opposed to the nāṭ-centric view of cause. One cannot have it both ways.

These scales of value can also be understood as different perspectives on the

insider/outsider relationship itself. As ways of diagramming people's struggle, both depict "the people" as localized, but they configure the relation between the local and the non-local differently. For the solidarity organizers, being local puts the people on the map, positioning them as claimants and contributors within a broader cause. For the local organizers, being local puts the people at the center, and the "broadness" of the solidarity organizers' vision for people's struggle only makes it more peripheral. In other words, like Rivera and Erlich's diagram in Figure 3, these can be taken as views of the appropriate roles of relative insiders and outsiders in the organizing process. These two scalar perspectives do not stipulate precisely who ought to do what, but they are opposed in the importance they give to insider and outsider roles. It is not hard

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to see how this difference would contribute to conflict between the Gandhamur Action Council and the solidarity committee.

The difference between the configuration of these two scales is at the heart of our story about Jaison and Ravindranath. Despite being seen by solidarity organizers as an instrument of the ruling political party (i.e., an outsider of the worst sort), Jaison managed to position himself as one of "the people" as far as local organizers were concerned, and he did this by framing his motives as having the same scalar configuration as their own. Ravindranath, on the other hand, came to be seen by both Action Council members and solidarity organizers as working at a scale configured with a birds-eye perspective. Moreover, the two groups' different scales of purpose led them to value Ravindranath's contribution in opposite ways. Thus, Ravindranath became a casualty in the broader conflict over whose approach to the campaign would prevail.

To what extent are these conflicting perspectives specific to the cultural and

sociopolitical context of the Gandhamur campaign? Malayalam categories like nāṭ are clearly important to the insider/outsider dynamics described here, and ethnographic studies of Indian environmental justice campaigns describe tensions in collaborations between locals and non-locals that resonate with the Gandhamur case (Baviskar, 2004; Fortun, 2001). Nonetheless, local/non-local collaboration also appears to be characteristic of environmental movements globally (Rootes, 2013; Tsing, 2005), not to mention other place-based organizing traditions (Fisher, 1994). While the relevant scales of ethical value will likely differ, there is good reason to think that scaling would be important to insider/outsider collaboration in other contexts.

To recognize the full relevance of scaling to insider/outsider distinctions, we need to look beyond spatial scales. Consider Figure 3 once more. Rivera and Erlich's diagram presents a particular scalar perspective on ethnic belonging, similar to the nāṭ-centric perspective of

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Gandhamur Action Council members. This is a normative model, used to make a case about how organizing should be done. What the analysis above should help us see is that this is not the only way of scaling insider/outsider relationships. Different scalar configurations would provide different normative perspectives on the relative importance of insider and outsider roles and purposes. Whether these scales are used to organize relationships based on space, ethnicity, or some other criteria, they are always also scales of value—not only models of the world, but also normative models for the world (Geertz, 1973, pp. 94-95).

Is one of these perspectives better than the other? As noted at the outset, different

organizing traditions have addressed this question in different ways. In addition, the Gandhamur case illustrates that even within a single tradition there may be multiple irreconcilable positions.

In American social work, one might argue that the core ethical principle of community "self-determination" (Hardina, 2004) makes resolution of such conflicts more straightforward;

whatever their perspective, non-locals should accede to local purposes. However, it is also true that practices of consciousness-raising are a major feature of American organizing traditions (e.g., Sarachild, 1970/2000). And as in India, the desired forms of consciousness emphasize understanding of broader social issues and commitment to the purposes they entail.¹⁹ Our analysis of the conflicts of scalar perspective in Gandhamur highlights a tension between these two points of view, but it does not tell us how to resolve that tension. Indeed, it may be that such tensions are inherent to the different positions set up by the very process of distinguishing insiders from outsiders. Rather than proposing a wholesale solution, I recommend that attending

19 Indeed, Indian and American practices of consciousness raising share a common genealogy.

Concern with transforming consciousness as a part of social transformation has precedent in Indian philosophy as well as in Marxist, Freirean, and feminist influences on Indian organizing (Halliburton, 2002; Steur, 2011).

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to scalar perspectives in organizing can help us to better assess the stakes in insider/outsider distinctions, improving our ability to negotiate such tensions, whether or not they can be overcome.