Discourse on Rights in India

Debates and Dilemmas

Bijayalaxmi Nanda, Nupur Ray

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429827143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This book is a compelling examination of the theoretical discourse on rights and its relationship with ideas, institutions and practices in the Indian context. By engaging with the crucial categories of class, caste, gender, region and religion, it draws attention to the contradictions and contestations in the arena of rights and entitlements. The essays by eminent experts provide deep and nuanced insights on the intersecting issues and concerns of individual and group identities as well as their connection with the State along with its multifarious institutions and practices. The volume not only engages with the dilemmas emerging out of the rights discourse, but also sets out to recognize the significance of a shared commitment to a rights-based framework towards the promotion of justice and democracy in society.

The book will be useful to academics, social scientists, researchers and policymakers. It will be of special interest to teachers and students in the fields of politics, development studies, philosophy, ethics, sociology, gender/women's studies and social movements.

Part I
Theorizing rights

Diversity and difference

1
Dimensions of power and social transformation¹

Manoranjan Mohanty

The context of the new century

The last decade of the twentieth century and the early years of the new century saw momentous developments in India signalling intensification of political struggles involving class, caste, gender and ethnic identity. The launching of economic reforms in 1991 heralded a new stage of capitalist development in India. For global as well as domestic reasons the growing capitalist class acquired new privileges to lead the process of economic development. The challenges to the capitalist class continued to exist but in a much-reduced strength at this time. Several kinds of social conflicts got accentuated, many of which were manipulated by political parties for electoral purposes. The upsurge of the backward classes was sought to be neutralized by Hindu communal mobilization. Between the demolition of the Babri Mosque in December 1992 and the communal carnage in Gujarat in March 2002 a new pattern of communal mobilization engulfed the entire polity and society. All social issues got enmeshed with the Hindu nationalist challenge. While the economic reforms went ahead under all the regimes, the occurrence of violence in various parts of society including the militant challenges in Jammu & Kashmir provided the handle to the Indian state to become more and more authoritarian. Thus, in the early years of the twentieth century, three trends – globalization, authoritarianism and communalism – had become powerful currents affecting the entire gamut of social issues in India.

The decision by the V. P. Singh government in August 1990 to implement the Mandal Commission report giving 27 percent reservation to the Backward Class in all India public services was a landmark in the history of independent India. It caused violent uproar in the country, leading to anti-Mandal agitations by the youth. But the decision was not only upheld by the Supreme Court with some safeguards but also became a part of the consensus among political parties, all of whom decided to enforce it and compete for electoral support of this complex caste spectrum. In the same way, the rising momentum of the women’s movement of the 1980s resulted in institutional changes in the 1990s. The 73rd Amendment to the India Constitution in 1993 which made the three-tier Panchayati Raj statutory, gave one-third reservation to women at all the three levels: gram panchayat, panchayat samiti and zila parishad. Soon afterwards one-third reservation for women was also ensure in urban bodies, i.e., corporations, municipalities and notified area councils under the 74th Amendment. Subsequently, the campaign for a similar reservation in the State Assembly and Parliament gathered momentum. The delay in the passage of this 81st Amendment Bill was due to the fact that some parties such as Rashtriya Janata Dal and Samajwadi Party wanted a component of this reservation earmarked for the Backward Class women. They argued that since women of backward classes or castes were not as educated as those from the upper castes the latter would corner these reserved seats. These parties also demanded reservation for women from religious minorities, especially the Muslims. In fact, such demands got serious echoes within the major parties such as the BIP and the Congress-I which had otherwise stood by the bill. After withstanding physical obstruction in the Lok Sabha the BJP-led government with open support from the Congress-I managed to introduce the Women’s Reservation Bill in December 1998. Its reference to the Parliamentary Standing for considering reservation within reservation was not ruled out. However, since the Constitution did not permit reservation for backward classes and minorities in legislatures it was not clear how such a reservation could be worked out only within the women’s quota. In cases of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe, there was an overall reservation in the legislative –15 percent for scheduled castes and 7.5 percent for scheduled tribes in Parliament and specific numbers of legislators proportionate to their population in the States. These developments brought into focus interconnections among various kinds of demands. Thus a caste–gender linkage was put on the agenda. This also had a class dimension since the bulk of the backward classes came from the landless poor peasants or middle peasant classes. The 1980s also witnessed the rise of autonomy movements in various parts of India demanding political safeguards for ethnic identity. A militant spurt in the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir had a serious impact on the polity as a whole. The interface of class, caste, gender and ethnicity could be discerned clearly in India’s political life at the close of the twentieth century.

Since the introduction of economic reforms the process of liberalization and globalization was unleashed, touching practically every aspect of Indian society. How different sections of society responded to this process is an interesting subject of investigation. Congress lost power in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections, and the United Front formed the government which too collapsed leading to a BJP-led front coming to power in the 1998 elections. The reform process got enmeshed in the condition of political instability. But the main course of economic reforms persisted despite the change of regimes, thus indicting the consolidation of the Indian capitalist class and its increasing integration with global capitalist economy. Thus even though the CPM and Left Front returned to power for the sixth consecutive time in West Bengal in 2002 and Left Front also ruled in Tripura and there was a sprinkling of socialists in the non-BJP parties, the political economy of India saw a vigorous assertion of a capitalist class in the 1990s (Ghosh 1989; Kabra 1995). The legislative initiatives of the BJP-led government of December 1998 provided good evidence of the ruling-class consensus on liberalization and globalization. When the BJP-led government introduced the Insurance Regulatory Authority Bill in Parliament the Congress-I decided to support it. Their argument was that as the Congress-I had initiated the economic reforms in 1991, such a bill was also on the anvil of the Congress agenda. Resistance to this bill came from within the BJP from Sewadeshi Jagaran Manchi; BJP M.P.K.R. Malkani openly launched a public campaign against opening the insurance sector to foreign capital. He argued that this is one area in which public sector had performed well and together with the state, Indian private capital could also share the field profitably. This debate showed contradictions within Indian capitalist class. The big business houses of India wanted full integration with world capital, because they could then invest not only in India but in other third countries. A section of the capitalists, however, wanted a degree of protection for their operations in the Indian market. The major parties of India, however, more or less adopted the big-business agenda of opening the economy.

This trend was also visible in yet another legislation introduced by the BJP-led government, namely the Patents Bill. This was also requirement under India’s negotiations with the World Trade Organization. Interestingly enough, not only did the Congress support the bill but the BJP government accepted the Congress amendment, which should have logically come from the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch of the BJIR. Only the left parties opposed both insurance and the patents bills. But in West Bengal the Left Front took all possible steps to make the investment environment hospitable to foreign capital. At the national level the CPM was critical of liberalization and globalization. But in the states where it was in power it created conditions for open-door capitalist development. Since the CPM controlled the bulk of trade union movement in these states such a perspective ensured industrial peace and made the region attractive to entrepreneurs. They, of course, argued that as in the case of China it was necessary to focus on economic development with the help of foreign capital which would be of benefit to all including the workers.

The capitalist class in the new phase of Indian politics was not the typical anti-feudal secure, modern universalist social force that textbooks on European capitalism depict. It played politics of religion, caste and ethnicity from region to region to secure leverage in its operations. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Ram Janamabhoomi movement received support from businessmen within India as well as Indian entrepreneurs and professionals living abroad. The local non-Brahmin movements and Backward Class political groupings were also patronized by industrialists who simultaneously patronized upper-caste organizations. The regional identity movements in various parts of India exposed a complex dimension of India’s capitalist development. The post-colonial state of India had merged after a tortuous anti-colonial struggle. Its boundaries were historically determined by cultural geography but were redrawn in 1947 through a blood-soaked partition enforced by a departing colonial power. After Independence the Indian capitalist class developed an all-India market with the aid of the state apparatus – police, army and bureaucracy – and carried on development administration as well as the maintenance of law and order within the boundaries of the Indian union. After the first 20 years of Independence contradictions in the development process began to manifest. There were peasant and tribal uprisings in different parts of India together with indications of disenchantment of workers, lower and middle classes and the poor in general.

To respond to these tensions in the Indian political economy, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi began to devise some significant measures in the early 1970s. After a brief period of structural measures such as bank nationalization and preliminary land reforms she decided to resort to strong measures of maintaining power. Proclamation of Emergency, centralization of the polity and firm establishment of her personal leadership over the Congress Party were measures which transformed the democratic and federal character of the polity of the Nehru period into a centralized authoritarian system. The Janata Party rule of 1977–1979 and the rise of regional parties such as the Akali Dal in Punjab, Telugu Desam in Andhra Pradesh, Asom Gana Parishad in Assam and several others were the reactions to these. These developments intensified the contradictions in the societies and further weakened the capacity of the polity to cope with challenges of economic development on the one hand and demands of emerging social groups on the other. Hence in the 1980s, India experienced a democratic upsurge of Dalits, Adivasis, women, peasants and regional identity groups. The country experienced a series of economic crises during this period. It is in this situation that the Indian ruling classes decided to lean upon Western capital to cope with domestic crisis. In the meantime, there had been a revival of Western capital under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, whereas crisis had intensified in the Third World countries and the socialist states leading to the collapse of the latter. Hence the Indian capitalist class at the end of the 1990s had to absorb the challenge of regional autonomy movements as well as the social movements such as movements of women, Dalits and Adivasis. It sought either to co-opt these movements on the promise that capital would fulfil all their demands or firmly put them down to develop an unrestricted free market. Interestingly enough, liberal democratic practice in India allows it to do both. Through the state it seeks to appropriate the ideology of the social movements. At the same time, it carries out its investment plans on the rules of productivity and profit, thus isolating the poor and the struggling forces from the market-centred development process. The struggling groups are called upon to take advantage of democratic politics – participation in civil society affairs – while capitalism promotes a free market and accumulates profit in an increasing world framework. Wherever both the process fails and movements confront the state, they invite authoritarian repression. Hence we see in India the emergence of an advanced capitalist sector co-existing with declining small capitalist and persisting feudal forces and with vast sections of society that remain entrenched in poverty, underdevelopment and social oppression. It is this context of power dynamics in India at the end of the twentieth century which has to be kept in view to discuss social dimensions of Indian politics. The emerging ideology of the Indian capitalist class was partly shaped by the social dynamics within the country and partly by the global ideology of capitalism governed by competitive profit motive, commitment to technology and reliance on advanced communication. The swift expansion of satellite television and computer networks, especially internet, evolved what appeared to be a composite world ideology of capitalism (Kurien 1996a, 1996b) However, this was seriously interrogated by groups who had acquired new consciousness about the causes of their deprivation and inequalities. Thus the class politics of capitalist globalization got seriously entangled with politics of caste, ethnic, gender and such other categories. So it is extremely important to see the interface of caste, class and gender in politics and understand the specific form that they take in the particular context.

Interface of class, caste and gender

The complex interface of class, caste and gender is rooted in the way capitalism had grown in India. Originally, it was implanted by the British colonial regime as a dependent industrial sector to utilize local raw materials, such as jute in Bengal and cotton in Western India. Some units, such as TISCO, were set up by private entrepreneurs autonomously. In post-Independence India an attempt was made to develop agricultural production by improving irrigation and using modern technology with the hope that it would generate surplus to finance industrialization. This process, known as the Green Revolution, vastly expanded agricultural production generating surplus. But it did so only in some parts of India, mainly Punjab, Haryana and Western UP and pockets in other states. Vast stretches of Indian states remained underdeveloped and poverty stricken with persistence of semi-feudal relations in agriculture.² They include major parts of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Orissa. Thus, Indian capitalism in the 50 years since Independence grew on the foundations of pockets of Green Revolution and stretches of poverty. This is the foundation for the prevailing structures of deprivation and inequalities. Hence the bulk of the poor are not only landless, poor peasants and unorganized workers but also are from the scheduled castes, backward classes and scheduled tribes, and among the poor households women suffer more, and in general, women suffer more from poverty. Thus understanding of poverty is incomplete without seeing the interface of caste, class and gender. The most significant source of power is no doubt related to class or to the control over means of production such as land and industry. But social history had created patterns of relationship based on certain values and beliefs rooted in social conditions. Caste order and patriarchy embodied values and beliefs operating in the social structure. To treat them purely as ideologies which can be transformed with a change in consciousness is to ignore their social roots. The distinction among castes was also related to division of labour and its justification in ideological and cultural terms. The lower castes (shudras) engaged in manual labour on land, and the outcastes (atishudras) performed manual labour which was considered to be of a degrading kind. The upper castes performed activities – intellectual (Brahman), administrative (Kshatriya) and trade related (Vaishya); all three castes had control over means of production. Thus, caste and class were interconnected throughout history. The distinction between them, however, lay in the fact that the ideology of karma provided a justification for the caste order. It was said that those who committed sins in the previous birth were born into the lower castes. On the other hand, mode of production defined a class in terms of its control or lack of control over means of production. The actual social practice related the two. Gender too is related to class and caste. Division of labour between men and women evolved in the course of history. Along with power relations men performed crucial roles in the production system and acquired greater power in the society ov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: discourse on rights in India: debates and dilemmas
• PART I Theorizing rights: diversity and difference
• PART II Gender, religion, family, work, caste and community: issues and contestations
• PART III The ‘myth’ of conflicting rights: a critique of the Indian state
• Index