Human Rights as Social Service: Vernacular Rights Cultures and Overlapping Ethical Discourses at an Indian Child Rights NGO

ABSTRACT

The state of India acknowledges the rights of children as a guiding national policy principle, but also outsources much rights implementation to private actors such as NGOs. This article asks what happens to the concept of ‘rights’ when their implementation is dependent on the voluntary sector. Based on ethnographic material from one NGO-dependent child rights programme, and with the conceptual framework of ‘vernacular rights cultures’, it finds that for ‘semi-governmental’ social workers, the concept of samāj sevā (social service or social work) was merged with the concept of rights to the extent that rights were conceived as things to be given and mediated by social workers, and not only claimed from the state. I argue that if we want human rights theory to reflect actual practice, we should undertake serious conceptional study of ethical discourses that mix with and influence the concept of rights on the ground.

KEYWORDS:

• India
• child rights
• samāj sevā
• NGOs
• vernacular rights cultures

1. Introduction

In February 2019 in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India, a social worker named Sonali sat on a mattress in her back room, which doubled as a district branch office of India’s 24-hour helpline for children, CHILDLINE. She received a meagre salary from the organization and said that she worked there because she wanted to serve: ‘A social worker is someone who sees problems. Whether they get paid or not, whether they profit or not, someone who will help anyone—that is true social work.’¹

In Hindi, Sonali used the term samāj sevā, which has a conceptual history and connotations far wider than those of social work. Sevā invokes selfless service for a community, religious asceticism, Gandhian constructive work, Nehruvian developmentalism, and Hindu nationalism. Political theorist Srivatsan has summed up the ‘moral-economic content’ of the act of doing sevā as such: ‘What you need, I have chosen to give.’² In Sonali’s and Srivatsan’s conceptions, the choice to serve a group more unfortunate than oneself is central to samāj sevā. The implicit voluntarism and hierarchy of sevā stands in opposition to human rights discourse, which emphasizes rightsholders rather than the act of giving or providing rights—meaning that a citizen is not dependent on anyone’s goodwill and a political system is duty-bound to ensure justice for everyone. When I asked Sonali about rights, she immediately said that children have the right to life, participation, development, and protection. And as social workers, Sonali said, it is our responsibility to give children these rights and to ensure that government schemes actually function, rather than only existing on paper. When Sonali and her colleagues spoke to me using a mixture of two ethical languages—that of selfless service provided by voluntary organizations³ and that of rights to be claimed from the state—the discourses seemed to fit effortlessly together.

If they seem to fit effortlessly together empirically, conceptually the fit is at first glance harder to justify. Surely a rights discourse is the opposite of a social service or charity discourse? Does a rights-based approach in voluntary organizations not mean appealing to a stable duty bearer (most often the state) rather than relying on individuals’ goodwill? What happens to the concept of rights when their implementation is dependent on the voluntary sector? Here, I ethnographically analyse the overlapping discourses of samāj sevā and child rights at a child rights NGO, and argue that the two discourses can overlap seamlessly in this case because the Indian state is far from being the stable duty bearer we meet in philosophical and legal human rights theory. I use Sumi Madhok’s conceptual framework of ‘vernacular rights cultures,’ according to which we should take vernacular rights expressions seriously on an epistemic level and not simply treat them as local versions of a global rights concept.⁴

The political context I examine is India, which is known for having an expansive legal rights regime but also for having been on the path of neoliberal policy since the late 1980s,⁵ and, in particular since the government change in 2014, for a move towards ‘electoral autocracy’⁶ that is significantly shrinking the space in which NGOs can operate.⁷ These seemingly contradictory characteristics mean that many of those in ‘semi-governmental’ jobs—those who can be characterized as both NGO volunteers and state employees—become important producers and shapers of rights and rights-related concepts. I apply an anthropological understanding of the state as a ‘relational set of practices’⁸ and a ‘fractured ensemble of institutions’⁹ that is produced bureaucratically and experienced and reproduced both individually and collectively.¹⁰ In this conception, voluntary organizations are not interpreted as neatly separable from the state, but as parts of governance institutions that may work with or against the state’s representation of what ‘good’ welfare and rights implementation is.¹¹ I focus on the part of the voluntary sector that enters into partnerships with the state. The heterogeneity of NGOs in India is well captured by activist Aruna Roy, who has articulated a spectrum from ‘service’ to ‘struggle’:

When you work with people there are three kinds of work: seva, nirman and sangharsh. Seva is welfare or service—providing food to those who are starving or caring for those who are ill. Nirman is development—running schools or a women’s skill programme. [… Sangharsh] is almost always political work in its broadest definition—that of asking for constitutional rights within the framework of democratic participation.¹²

This study concerns an NGO that functions somewhere between sevā and nirmaṇ, but which still uses the vocabulary of rights.

The article proceeds as follows: In the next section, I present my ethnographic field study. Then I articulate the conceptual and methodological framework of vernacular rights cultures as I adopt it, before analysing the concept of sevā and its intertwinement with the rights discourse in my case study. I end by discussing how my ethnographic findings around sevā and rights can contribute to refining our conceptualizations of human rights.

2. The field: A voluntary organization that implements a state child rights programme

My field site for the research presented here, carried out in 2019, was a voluntary organization in India’s Madhya Pradesh charged by the central Indian government with implementing the national helpline for children, CHILDLINE. A characteristic of CHILDLINE, before drastic changes in 2022–23,¹³ was its multi-stakeholder partnership model: it was financed by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, managed by the CHILDLINE India Foundation in Mumbai, and implemented—providing help to the children who call—by hundreds of small NGOs across India. CHILDLINE was known for its radical notion of children’s participation.¹⁴ Children in CHILDLINE’s promotional material, like the happy child calling on a phone in its logo, were not presented as victims but as agents, which made CHILDLINE a unique participatory rights-based programme in India.¹⁵ This perception of children is far from the sevā concept, but as I will demonstrate, the NGOs that implemented CHILDLINE had their own values, histories, and credos, and so in one of these small NGOs a particular vernacular meaning of rights emerged.

How did the helpline work? When someone called the free number 1098, the call went to a regional call centre. If the call only required phone counselling, it was handled by the person who answered. If it required physical intervention by a social worker (such as picking up a child on the street or stopping a child marriage), it was transferred to a partner NGO based at the relevant district level. One such NGOs was Suraj, a voluntary organization located in a district capital in the state Madhya Pradesh, which I chose as my main field site.

Suraj was founded in 2007 by Jagadish, a masters of social work (MSW) graduate from Indore, which is the state’s largest city and next to the more rural districts where the organization worked. I followed Suraj and its implementation of the CHILDLINE programme for three months in 2019. At the time, Suraj had nine employees, all working as case workers for the helpline. They had various official designations, but they all answered calls, conducted case work and family visits, collaborated with the local authorities, and performed community outreach. Jagadish was the NGO’s director, but since he lived in Indore, he only visited the premises once or twice per month. Jagadish told me on several occasions how difficult it was to run an NGO in a remote area because of the scarcity of staff really committed to social work. The nine employees, all in their 20s or early 30s, either had or were pursuing a masters degree in social work, child protection, or a similar field. All of them (except one who was from an impoverished family himself) explicitly distinguished themselves from the families they came in contact with through CHILDLINE, describing the latter as unaware or as victims of poverty. Although only one of the employees characterized himself as ‘tribal’, they described the district in its entirety as such. The district’s rural areas have a large population belonging to what is known as adivasis or ‘schedules tribes’ (STs). ST is a constitutional category alongside ‘scheduled caste’ (SC), which provides positive discrimination for people belonging to these discriminated categories. Only one employee, whose designation was ‘volunteer,’ who was paid 4000 Rs (about 44 Euros) per month for looking after the office at night, was actually from a tribal background. For me, these characteristics I observed in the NGO workers at Suraj demonstrate that the employees considered themselves distant from the child beneficiaries in terms of age, income, and ‘tribalness’. I would like to underline, however, that because CHILDLINE was a national programme implemented by hundreds of NGOs all over rural and urban India—NGOs with incredibly diverse histories of activism, voluntarism, or struggle—it is not my aim to generalize about CHILDLINE’s workers, but rather to demonstrate how one particular NGO with values rooted in sevā merged such discourses with child rights discourses.

My research data includes my semi-structured individual and group interviews with Suraj employees; my participant observation of the organization’s work; and documents relating to its internal management and external communication.¹⁶ Methodologically, I wanted to examine the concept of human rights within this NGO. However, I also tried not to privilege it above other ethical concepts used in the context. In the following, I will show that it is beneficial for human rights theory to study concepts that exist within the same discursive terrain as human rights. Before going into the concepts of child rights and sevā in detail, I will outline the article’s methodological and conceptual framework, which centres around ethnography and ‘vernacular rights cultures’.

3. A conceptual framework of vernacular rights cultures

Human rights has been studied from a myriad of disciplines and perspectives. Here, I apply conceptions developed within anthropology and political theory of human rights, in particular Merry’s framework of ‘vernacularization’,¹⁷ Madhok’s framework of ‘vernacular rights cultures’,¹⁸ and Goodale’s work on ethical theory as social practice.¹⁹ While these scholars’ approaches differ in significant ways, as outlined below, they are all based on the assumption that ethnography is valuable for refining our understanding of the human rights concept.

The idea of a ‘human rights ethnography’ is part of a larger tendency in human rights studies, which has developed from what was primarily a sub-field of international law and political philosophy into a vast multi- and interdisciplinary research field. Within this field, ethnography is seen as a useful research method for three main reasons: because it can bring out contextual evidence of how social actors practice and understand human rights,²⁰ because human rights values can inform ethnography,²¹ and because ethnography can highlight the bureaucratic intricacies involved in human rights work.²² The literature has focused less on how ethnography has potential for contributing to more empirically grounded human rights theory. This is not to say that ethnography has never been a theoretical practice, but rather that outside anthropology it is often considered mere contextualization.²³ In cases where anthropology has contributed to human rights theory, it has often specifically concerned the concept of culture.²⁴ This article explores how we can go about using ethnography to refine and ground human rights theory. I intend to demonstrate that if we take the conceptual histories and meanings of political concepts that are used in the same semantic fields as rights in a certain context seriously, we can do more than highlight shortcomings of a ‘universal’ rights concept. More importantly, we can contribute to refining the way we conceptualize human rights.

Goodale is one of the few anthropologists who has questioned whether anthropology has potential to ‘reconceptualize the analytical terms through which the idea of human rights is understood’.²⁵ He points out that when legal or political philosophers or political scientists study human rights, they intend ‘to expand or modify the idea of human rights itself’, while anthropologists have primarily contributed ‘either detailed descriptions of human rights practice or impassioned arguments for employing anthropological knowledge in the course of human rights struggles.’²⁶ This might be, as Cowan writes, ‘a division of labor between anthropology’s descriptive project and political philosophy’s normative one’, but there are mutually beneficial potentials in putting the disciplines more in conversation than at they are present.²⁷ Following Goodale, the ethnographer interested in human rights must find and analyse, in the context they are studying, that ‘broader category of ethical theories’ in which human rights are embedded. This means that we need tools to specify which balance between the inductive and the deductive is most useful for making valuable contributions to human rights theory. The challenge is tracing and analysing the concept of human rights without losing ethnography’s inductive virtues and without treating other concepts as mere translations of a ‘global’ rights concept, while still speaking meaningfully back to human rights theory.

On the more inductive side of the spectrum, write Simmons and Feldman, the ethnographer should actively ‘resist the imposition of models or theories into the field to be tested’ and only work with a ‘loosely formulated set of research questions [that] help to frame the project, and are then fleshed out, contradicted, or expanded on by the empirical data’.²⁸ The risk of being too inductive, if we want to contribute to human rights theory building, is that we might end up not speaking about human rights at all; I will return to this point in the discussion below. The risk of being too deductive, on the other hand, is that human rights might be taken for granted as a predefined and unchangeable universal or global concept. Cowan has highlighted that such a ‘hegemonic human rights model crowds out alternative ethical visions, such as those based on need, well-being, care or responsibility’.²⁹

For an example of how the balance between the inductive and deductive might be approached, I look to the work of Merry and her colleagues. They have skillfully shown, through transnational ethnographic work on women’s rights, how local activists adapt and transform the human rights concept to have effect in their contexts. Levitt and Merry call these processes the vernacularization of human rights on the ground.³⁰ The scholarship on vernacularization has had significant impact on human rights studies. Using this framework, the ethnographer would work deductively to the extent that she deliberately ‘looks for’ whether and how human rights are vernacularized in a certain space (beginning with theory, albeit a theory that itself took shape from ethnography) and inductively to the extent that the field and the data will provide the answers. However, while many concepts and practices may be well characterized as vernacularizations, we should not limit ethnographic human rights work to looking for vernacularizations. We should look more broadly, as Goodale writes, for

the different registers through which the idea of human rights is conceived, including the philosophical traditions that human rights are most closely associated with as well as all of the different ethical traditions that the anthropologist encounters in the course of tracking human rights in practice.³¹

To use ethnography for building human rights theory, I suggest an approach that is deductive to the extent of imposing theories of human rights into the field yet still gives more attention to a broader category of concepts in the field than those that can be interpreted as vernacularizations of human rights. To reach this middle way, I look to Madhok’s critique of the vernacularization approach, namely that it ‘operates within and actively reproduces the binaries of the epistemic—authorial global versus the non-epistemic translating local—and thereby forecloses agency and authorship of rights from elsewhere, not least from the margins’.³² Her critique recognizes expressions for rights claims not as ‘vernacularizations’ of a global concept, but as claims in their own right and with their own conceptual histories and political meanings, demonstrating that these are not just local articulations of a global concept but have themselves travelled and become different vernacular versions in different contexts. Madhok has developed the concept of ‘vernacular rights cultures’ to mean ‘non-elite, particular and unprivileged sites of rights articulation and politics’.³³

This article is not a study of vernacular rights cultures in Madhok’s sense, since the site I explore is not particularly non-elite or unprivileged. Rather, I use Madhok’s conceptualization to establish that hegemonic and vernacular conceptions of human rights coexist within hierarchical and geopolitical power relations.³⁴ I therefore avoid taking the norms in United Nations Conventions as an ‘origin source’ of rights, and ‘local expressions’ as comparatively ‘replicated’ or ‘hybrids’ of this origin. Categories are needed other than ‘global’ and ‘local’, a dichotomy that continues to be used despite critique within the field.³⁵ In an attempt to avoid such simplifying dichotomies, Goodale treats the result of people’s mixing of ethical languages (one being that of human rights) as the production of ‘ethical theories’ prevalent in different contexts. As he writes, ‘the impact of human rights is never separate from the swirl of other sources of normative inspiration’.³⁶ I also take from Madhok the idea that rights cultures should not be treated as pure or authentic, because that could lead to orientalist dangers of treating empirically observed concepts (the inductive) as static, localized and pre-existing and rights (the deductive to be tested) as dynamic, traveling and imported.³⁷ As stated above, the rights culture I will thickly describe in this article is one where sevā discourses and rights discourses intermingle.

Inspired by Merry and Goodale, and taking into consideration Madhok’s critique, I suggest applying the same type of analysis to the rights concept that is to be deductively tested and to other ethical concepts that are inductively discovered. I demonstrate this below by taking my point of departure in two concepts: samāj sevā (social work, social service) and children’s rights. I treat samāj sevā not as a translation of any ‘outside’ concept or as something pre-existent to be contrasted with an imported rights concept, but as a concept that, like ‘child rights’, has been shaped by various political and historical forces and is now in active use in this voluntary organization within the same semantic field as child rights. I first ask what these two concepts mean for the organization at the empirical level and then what their combination means for the rights concept at a theoretical level.

4. Notes from the field: Samāj sevā and child rights

Samāj sevā was a key concept I observed, in the inductive part of my ethnography, being used in the voluntary organization Suraj within the same semantic field as ‘child rights’.³⁸ This section aims to understand the concept by conducting both diachronic and synchronic analyses, that is, looking at its historical development and at its various meanings at a given time. I will therefore first briefly trace the sevā concept from its connections to a Christian religious discourse, to its anti-colonial use in Gandhian nationalism, to Nehruvian developmentalism, and finally to its more recent appropriation by the Hindu right.³⁹ I will then discuss its at Suraj and its relation to the rights concept.

4.1. Samāj sevā: a brief conceptual history

An English dictionary translation of sevā from Hindi contains the words ‘service’, ‘attendance,’ ‘care’, ‘employment’, and ‘worship’.⁴⁰ Samāj sevā translates as ‘social service’ and is often used to mean ‘social work’. In Hindi, sevā is commonly used as a noun denoting ‘a service’ (such as ‘the CHILDLINE emergency service’). The modern use of sevā is said to have developed in 19th-century colonial India and was then closely connected to Christian religious discourses.⁴¹ Bhattacharjee argues that Hindu reformers ‘emulated Christian missionaries by establishing parallel institutions of social service’.⁴² It later became a central concept in Hindu reform movements and anti-colonial projects, significantly Mohandas Gandhi’s nationalist one.⁴³ Gandhi integrated sevā in his ideas on constructive work; to him the concept implied a commitment to self-suffering and an opposition to consumption, growth, development, and modern civilization.⁴⁴ Srivatsan argues that the ‘moralizing language of “seva” [was …] driven by an element of appeal rather than assertion,’ and was based in a language of duty rather than of rights.⁴⁵ In Gandhi’s terms, Skaria writes, sevā was also something you met your subordinate with, as opposed to your equal, who was met with friendship (mitratā) or your (antagonistic) superior, who was met with civil disobedience (satyagraha).⁴⁶ Sevā thus implied a hierarchy between those less fortunate and those in a position to help them. For Gandhi, sevā was located in Indian villages, which left the state as a marginal actor.⁴⁷

If sevā for Gandhi was a non-state service that would make government irrelevant, for his contemporary Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, it was a framework for the postcolonial welfare state.⁴⁸ Nehru appealed to (again, implicitly more fortunate) Indians to do ‘service [for] the millions who suffer’, calling it ‘the service of India’.⁴⁹ Similar formulations made it into the country’s first Five-Year Plans.⁵⁰ Srivatsan argues that sevā further became an ‘implicit governmental principle’ in the new nation-state’s policy orientation, as evidenced by the Constitution’s section on Directive Principles of State Policy.⁵¹ These principles represent what today might be called social and economic rights, and in the Indian Constitution they are framed as the state endeavouring to do its duty. The Directive Principles stand in contrast to the Constitution’s section on Fundamental Rights, which are enforceable in a court of law. According to Srivatsan, the Directive Principles implicitly framed welfare in newly independent India as an expression of sevā, an ‘act of charity that is not accountable to the beneficiary’.⁵²

In contemporary India, the term sevā has become part of the self-promoting discourse used by Hindu nationalist groups such as the voluntary paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Bhattacharjee has argued that the rise of Hindu nationalism can in fact be partly attributed to a grassroots work strategy centered around sevā, and that using the sevā discourse is a way for the Hindu right to clothe its mobilization in humanitarianism.⁵³ A large part of the RSS’ work is framed as voluntary activism, often invoking Gandhian sevā ideals.⁵⁴ In RSS terms, deś sevā (literally ‘service of the country’) refers to the work and care for specifically a Hindu nation.⁵⁵ The notion of deś sevā links RSS voluntarity to a national citizen duty.⁵⁶

The diversity of the belief systems of groups that claim sevā serves to illustrate how any social or political concept always contains a dynamic and complex genealogy. The idea of ‘selfless service’ is, however, one that spans across all conceptualizations of sevā. I will now turn to how the concept was used at Suraj, where I carried out my field study.

4.2. Sevā as a guiding professional value for ‘semi-governmental’ workers

This section will demonstrate that sevā was a guiding value for the NGO workers at Suraj. Being a concept linked to both state-centred and voluntary mindsets of helping, as shown above, it was well-suited for ‘semi-governmental’ workers who implemented the national child helpline, but still identified with doing a kind of social work that the state would not do.

4.2.1. A semi-governmental identity

The employees at Suraj identified themselves as ‘semi-governmental workers’, meaning that they were employed by a voluntary organization, but their job was to implement a project sponsored by the central government. When I asked whether they saw CHILDLINE as an NGO or as governmental, one employee said, ‘It’s semi-government.’⁵⁷ Similarly, when I was traveling with the CHILDLINE coordinator, Pradeep, for an exposure visit to another NGO, our driver asked what I was doing in town and Pradeep began explaining what CHILDLINE was. ‘Is it the government’s?’ the driver asked. ‘It’s government-private,’ Pradeep answered. ‘Meaning, it’s an organization, NGO, it gets funds from the government.’⁵⁸

This ‘semi-governmentness’ seemed to cause a tension within the professional identities of the frontline CHILDLINE workers. On the one hand, they represented the state and had its authority when trying to convince parents that, for instance, child marriage was wrong and education was right. On the other hand, they were field workers of a private organization which had to work hard to maintain good relations with the district authorities. The tension is shared by a vast array of other semi-governmental workers in the local state apparatus,⁵⁹ who are commonly labeled ‘volunteers’ or ‘activists’ by the state, and who represent the state in their professions yet lack the job security, pension, and prestige that comes with a government job. For instance, Rai and Madhok describe the tensions that arose when local women engaged by a state-sponsored women’s empowerment programme had to negotiate between the identities of being both ‘one of the village women’ and state representatives.⁶⁰ By outsourcing a service to voluntary agencies, the state depends on professionals’ willingness to work for it without a government salary, and sometimes for as little as 8000 Rs (less than 90 Euros) per month, as was the case for Suraj’s case workers in 2019.

That tension and many of the challenges of being ‘semi-governmental’ result from the Indian government’s neoliberal outsourcing policies. Yet Suraj employees also emphasized that it was important to be half-NGO and half-state. For instance, only NGOs were seen as able and willing to meet beneficiaries in ‘the field’, being proactive, fast, and flexible. They thus utilized their position as semi-governmental workers to argue that their sevā was of a particular kind: that which the government did not do. I asked Bhavesh, the organization’s so-called volunteer, whether the government also did social work, and he answered:

As far as I have seen, only NGOs do social work. I haven’t seen it in government. The people working in government just do their duty. They just do their duty. Very little social work. Not samāj sevā, they do that very little.⁶¹

Being providers of sevā was part of the employees’ professional identity. Most of them had or were pursuing a masters in social work (MSW), where such a sevā mindset was encouraged. The MSW curriculum at the local college included classes on ‘Voluntary Action for Social Work in India’, ‘State Action for Social Welfare in India’, ‘Human Rights and Social Work’, and ‘Differences and Similarities between Gandhian Constructive Work and Professional Social Work’, which demonstrates an overlap of voluntarity, the state, rights, and Gandhian service ideals in the social work profession, and that sevā was part of ‘the philosophical traditions that human rights are most closely associated with’ in this context.⁶²

4.2.2. Samāj sevā – a concept in active use

So in what situations did the employees explicitly use the concept of sevā? When I asked what kind of work they did, they described it as samāj sevā or used the English terms ‘social work’ or ‘service’ interchangeably. Some said that samāj sevā was something they did regardless of whether they were at work or not; it was part of their identity. Kunal, a CHILDLINE team member, said he would continue to do sevā when he left the office: if he saw a child in need on the street he would be in the same helping mindset as when at work, and he would help old people in his village by carrying things for them or giving them a lift on his motorbike. He framed these acts of everyday help with the same words as his paid job that secured children their legally guaranteed rights, without distinguishing between the two.⁶³ One employee defined a samāj sevak (social worker or social servant) as someone who solved the problems they saw,⁶⁴ while another explained that CHILDLINE existed ‘in order to give service’ (sevā dene ke lie).⁶⁵ These are examples of how sevā was a key ethical concept for the NGO workers in describing their work with children.

4.2.3. Hindu-nationalist entanglements

If sevā operated as a guiding professional value for these semi-governmental employees, what about the Hindu nationalist spillovers on the concept? Bhattacharjee’s scholarship has shown that sevā is used and appropriated by Hindutva as an entry point for RSS to appeal to those families who may not subscribe to Hindutva but do subscribe to sevā’s social work meanings.⁶⁶ My case study did not evince any particular Hindutva conceptions of sevā, but the town demonstrated an almost ubiquitous support for the RSS-linked Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This was especially evident because I conducted my field study during the 2019 elections, when Narenda Modi, BJP leader and Indian prime minister, visited the town; going to listen to his speech was a staff outing for the social workers. Most of the staff at Suraj were BJP voters, but only one was active in the party. I found it curious that the sevā concept existed in both Hindu nationalist organizations and in small organizations with no apparent ties to the BJP or RSS, working under larger NGOs that were critical towards the BJP government’s policies. People who work for NGOs on the ground are evidence of this entanglement because they have to maneuver between various influences.

The difficulty of placing the concept of samāj sevā within a discourse of either selfless voluntary service (as per Gandhi), the developmental state (as per Nehru), or a contemporary Hindu nationalist project (as per the RSS) makes it intriguing and contested. In the official sense, Srivatsan argues, the underlying charity principle in sevā represents the state’s function of redistribution as charity.⁶⁷ This is where sevā is distinct from rights: regardless of whether one understands sevā as something to be given by the government or by voluntary workers, it is to be given. Both understandings imply an active sevak and a passive recipient of sevā, while the discourse of rights implies an active rights holder and a duty bearer to appeal to. As I will show in the next section, however, this distinction is not always so clear-cut in practice.

4.3. Giving children their rights as samāj sevā

If sevā was a concept I inductively ‘discovered’, child rights was the concept I came to test as a human rights ethnographer. This section will demonstrate how the social workers at Suraj worked with the child rights concept and effortlessly connected it to samāj sevā. I argue that this mixture of ethical languages led to a view of child rights as a loosely defined list of what children ought to have; that social workers were key duty bearers of these rights; and that they found no contradiction in perceiving children as both objects of charity and subjects of rights.

4.3.1. Rights are what children ought to have

Although the word ‘rights’ (expressed as ‘rights,’ adhikār, or haq) itself only occasionally entered the vocabulary of the district-level NGO workers in their day-to-day work, they heard it in trainings, read it in laws and documents, and considered it a part of what CHILDLINE worked with, alongside ‘child protection’ (bāl surakśā) and ‘child welfare’ (bāl kalyāṇ). When I asked, all the employees defined ‘child rights’ as the accumulation of ‘the four rights of the child’: the rights to survival, development, participation, and protection (jīvan jīne kā adhikār, vikās kā adhikār, sahabhāgitā kā adhikār, surakśā kā adhikār)—a direct listing of the UNCRC’s categorization of rights and their Hindi translations. When I asked why he thought his employees listed those four rights, the director replied with a rhetorical question:

Do you think that [the coordinator] Pradeep will go through the CRC? […] Our so-called master trainers taught us that there [… are] four child rights. […] Nobody was […] in condition to read and to understand the fifty-six [articles of the UNCRC]. So how to make it simple?⁶⁸

This could be interpreted as the type of vernacularization known as ‘simplification’ from the global to the local concept.⁶⁹ However, deeper discussion led most of the NGO workers into arguing that child rights did have particular, not superficial, meanings. First, rights were whatever children ought to have (what honā cāhie or milanā cāhie). As Pradeep said:

A good childhood is that children have a right [haq] to live the lifestyle they want. They should get education. They should get good food, they should get good clothes, their care needs to be good […], whatever children want to participate in, they should. Whatever their right is, they need to get it.⁷⁰

The workers also connected most of the four rights to non-discrimination: ‘In the right to development, all the children of the community, it shouldn’t be like, “he is Hindu or Muslim, Christian or Sikh,” everyone, all the children, have rights.’⁷¹ Another said: ‘In the right to life […] girls have just as much the right as boys.”⁷² Thus the idea of rights did seem important to the social workers; it was not an empty signifier or window dressing.⁷³ It had content related to education, government schemes, leisure and play, family, and non-discrimination.

4.3.2. The self-imposed duty of the social worker

If children’s rights were defined in terms of what ‘should be there’ (honā cāhie), social work was defined in terms of what ‘needs to be done’ (karanā cāhie), placing the social worker as a key deliverer or giver of children’s rights and connecting back to the giver-beneficiary logic of sevā. According to those I spoke to at Suraj, social workers needed to tell children what kind of work they should and should not do and which habits were good and bad, spend time with them, counsel them, show them good values, and help parents who were not in a position to let their children study. One employee told me that we, meaning those who are literate (paḍhe-likhit), have a special responsibility for this.⁷⁴ This resonates with the Gandhian idea sevā being hierarchically structured duty that the more fortunate do for the less fortunate.

One specific duty that employees at Suraj identified for social workers was being constantly attentive to the problems of the children they interacted with. The director’s motivation for opening an NGO had come from seeing leprosy patients and wanting to do something for them, mirroring the origin stories of other NGOs I encountered in the area: seeing a need and opening an NGO. The Suraj director actively mentored his employees in how to see problems and find solutions. At one point we saw a child working on a construction site, and he told his employees, ‘You should do much more here. If you don’t help these people, you may as well hand in your resignation tomorrow.’⁷⁵ In a coaching session at the office, he said, ‘As social workers, we are watchdogs. Our job is to be attentive.’⁷⁶ I will argue below that this idea provides an interesting window into grounding human rights theory, which mostly frames rights as something to be claimed. The NGO director emphasized that a duty bearer of rights should not only listen for claims, but also be attentive to needs.

Another central part of their sevā was to link people to government schemes and ensure that structures were in place. For instance, when one team member had invited the rest of the office for dinner in her village, the NGO director found out that her father was the secretary at the main village governance body (the saciv at the paṃcāyat) and began asking if all the state institutions were functioning in the village: Was the village ‘ODF’ (Open Defecation Free) under the Clean India Campaign? Did all the family members have their government identity (Ādhār) cards? It seemed that even on private occasions the director donned his social-worker identity. In a coaching session, he mentored:

Why don’t you say, ‘this is wrong with this Act, it doesn’t work in practice’? When do we get to the advocacy level? Why don’t you think about what you can do for each person you meet? Look at the Delhi rape case. Laws were made because people fought after this. They didn’t say ‘that is not my duty, it is someone else’s duty.’⁷⁷

He wanted the NGO to play not only a service-implementing role through the CHILDLINE programme but also the role of advocating for new rights.

The social workers thus appeared to take pride in their identity as ‘professional volunteers’: they were trained, through their masters degrees, to detect social problems, take responsibility and initiative, and solve problems either through NGO-run projects, linking people to state services, or by advocating for the improvement these services (some of which they might implement themselves). The idea that children had a right to certain services, such as education, fed into their credo because rights were seen as one of the many things they could ensure, even if those rights depended on their own voluntary spirit. This perception of children’s rights, which casts voluntary social workers as important duty bearers, does not fit hegemonic human rights theory, which casts the state as duty bearer. Instead of seeing voluntary organizations that act as duty bearers as a non-ideal reality to put up against ideal theory, I see Suraj as one of many authors participating in the ongoing work of conceptualizing rights: as a vernacular rights culture.

4.3.3. Objects of charity or subjects of rights? Overlapping understandings of children’s rights and agency

NGO work with children, especially young children, lends itself well to a sevā discourse because there is always a need for a mediator between rights holder and duty bearer. This does not mean that the sevā-rights overlap I observed at Suraj is a generalizable characteristic of children’s organizations in India. Some NGOs work with a very different conception, one that clearly sees children as ‘subjects of rights’ and not ‘objects of charity’ (Haq and CHILDLINE India Foundation are examples). In child rights literature, these are often said to be two nearly incompatible child perceptions,⁷⁸ but my fieldwork provides evidence of how these two perceptions of children can overlap in practice. Social workers at Suraj attributed to children agency and decision-making power in their own lives; they were considered rights-holders in accordance with Indian national law, but also as being in need of a voluntary sector that defined how those rights should be mediated. They were not considered participants to the extent that they were expected to bring inputs to the running of the helpline, something which the CHILDLINE programme otherwise emphasized (see above).

During my interviews with Suraj employees, a complex view of children emerged which cannot easily be categorized as a rights- or charity-based view. At times, children were considered innocent victims of parents’ prejudices and vices, such as when Kunal blamed alcoholic parents for most of children’s problems and said that was why the children needed CHILDLINE’s help.⁷⁹ At other times, the social workers placed more agency with children. When I was interviewing Radha in the office’s back room, CHILDLINE had just received a case of a young boy selling tamarind, i.e., a ‘child labour case’. Radha pointed in the direction of the room where the boy was, and said: ‘Like that boy out there, he was saying that he was hungry, but maybe his sister did not serve him food, maybe his father ate all the food and left, so the boy is hungry. So he thought that, I’ll take some tamarind, it’s free, then I can earn some money and I will eat.’⁸⁰ Here, the social worker put herself in the child’s shoes and highlighted that systemic issues such as poverty can lead children into rights violations, and that children are compelled to take action within this systemic injustice.

But while children’s agency was acknowledged, I did not see at Suraj a reflection of the way in which CHILDLINE at its inception in Mumbai in the 1990s had developed a model of street children’s radical involvement in shaping the helpline. At Suraj, individual children were listened to and their views taken seriously during counselling, but children as a group were not used as input to frame or improve the CHILDLINE service.

This overlap of child perceptions, where objects-of-charity and subjects-of-rights approaches are both discernible, is a significant example of what happens when different ethical discourses mix, as discussed above. I will now turn to the last section of this article, which will use the above ethnographic examination, of how samāj sevā and child rights were understood and employed by CHILDLINE’s on-the-ground workers, to discuss their semi-governmental vernacular conception of rights.

5. Overlapping discourses in practice and human rights in theory

What does the discursive overlap of samāj sevā and child rights in this semi-governmental NGO programme mean for the rights concept at a theoretical level? Above all, it is evidence that the conceptual production of human rights takes place in numerous spaces – not only in hegemonic spaces of international law or vernacular spaces of subaltern struggle, but also in semi-governmental spaces like Suraj. Such spaces are interesting because they are the consequences of India’s neoliberal privatization policies, yet are also affected by the sevā discourses that exist in a particular type of organization.⁸¹ In other words, a service-centred NGO discourse meets a state-centred rights discourse. As Suraj, the staff employed ‘service’ (sevā) in the same semantic fields in which they employed ‘rights’ (adhikār and haq). Both concepts defined their work as social workers and government-scheme implementers. Doing sevā was equivalent to giving children what they needed, which was equivalent to ensuring that their rights were fulfilled. Social workers were people who could be counted on to provide such services, as opposed to the state, which was seen in need of a push—by social workers—to do so. Sevā thus demonstrates a conflict that exists in much rights-based NGO work between charity discourses and rights discourses. The hierarchy of helping in such NGO work does not exist in ideal rights theories, but exists in practice as soon as someone takes it upon themselves to ensure others’ rights.

Returning to the inductive-deductive dilemma introduced above, a critical question one might ask of the framework of vernacular rights cultures is, ‘are we still talking about rights?’ I have shown that sevā and rights, in the context of a state’s neoliberal outsourcing model, can mix to the extent that rights gain a different meaning from the hegemonic understanding. Is what is left then a diluted version of rights? Can we even call it human rights? The boundaries of talking about rights are indeed blurry, but I believe it is more of a slippery slope to seek to hold on to some ‘original’ version of rights which would constrain us in characterizing the diverse practices we meet in the field. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to identify an ideal human rights practice that fits one-to-one with ideal theory, because every type of human rights practice is affected by a mix of contextual conceptual influences. While the normative question of what rights should be ideally is left open for philosophical enquiry, this article provides some empirical evidence of the complexity of rights in practice, which such normative philosophy could engage with reflexively.

I am not making the theoretical point that hegemonic ideal human rights conceptions should be altered because I found a vernacular that differed from it. I could have found thousands of different vernaculars; for instance, had I studied a voluntary organization with roots in Dalit struggle,⁸² its conception of rights would differ both from Suraj’s and from the hegemonic. My point is that the meeting of different ethical theories in a historical, geographical, and political nexus affects the rights conception that emerges from a given context, and that the hegemonic human rights conception is only one such context, albeit an epistemically powerful one. To acknowledge the dynamic nature of the concept and expand our understanding of the many different rights conceptions that exist, such types of ethnographies are needed.

On a methodological level, this article has shown how ethnographic insights can prompt us to seriously consider discourses that affect rights discourses. It also shows that using ethnography to inform human rights theory can move us further away from considering gaps between theory and reality as simply unfortunate. Consider the role of NGOs in human rights practice. In both international law and human rights philosophy, NGOs and other so-called non-state actors are usually considered marginal in rights claims, an add-on to the main definition of human rights, which in much analytical philosophy centres around the relationship between rights and duties.⁸³ But in the government-NGO partnership studied here, as in many similar partnerships across the world, governmental and non-governmental are not neatly defined sectors: they mix practically and discursively when it comes to responsibility for rights. This is not just a gap between international human rights law and local practice, but an empirical reality of what rights are. The mix of the sevā and rights discourses makes CHILDLINE a version of rights that challenges the dominant paradigm of human rights as state-centred, and thus can expand the way we think about rights.

A particular rights and duty conception comes out of such discursive overlap. Conceptually, as discussed, a rights discourse can be argued to be the opposite of a sevā discourse: rights appeal to the state as a duty bearer, while sevā implies a moral and ‘voluntary’ duty of the social worker. The former relies theoretically on stable institutions while the latter relies on the goodwill of individuals. Yet when a state is not stable, but neoliberal and autocratizing, and rights implementation is handed over to NGOs, the two understandings of duty mix, which results in practices and discourses that move easily between rights claimants and welfare beneficiaries, professionalism and voluntarism. If we want human rights theory to reflect the ground, we should acknowledge that the complex relations between a far-from-ideal state and that state’s outsourced or subsidiary duty bearers, such as service-providing NGOs, affect the concept of rights.

Here, one might ask whether the mediation of NGOs absolves the state of its responsibility. The theoretical framework applied in this paper suggests that there would be two types of answer to this question. A normative ‘ideal-theory’ approach would argue that the state is responsible for implementing human rights and nothing absolves it of that (even if such responsibility is outsourced, the state is the ultimately accountable agent). But an approach that is skeptical of the ideal notion of the state as capable of and willing to fulfil human rights (because such a state has never, does not, and will never exist) would answer differently: NGOs taking on this role is an empirical reality, and whether ideal or not, it results in a representation of the state as more absent from citizens, and a state that is able to promote a discourse of ‘responsibilization’ where citizens and communities must take rights into their own hands.

6. Conclusion

This article has demonstrated how ethnographic insights can complicate but ultimately strengthen human rights theory. I have argued that ethnography a method not only brings out local contexts, but also the intricacies of those concepts that intertwine with the rights concept, and that an analysis of these intertwinements can speak meaningfully back to human rights theory. In particular, I posit that we can examine ‘vernacular rights cultures’, a term coined by Madhok, in order to take ethical discourses other than the hegemonic human rights framework seriously and thus contribute to a thoroughly cross-cultural study of human rights. I examined discourses around the Hindi concept of sevā and related it to rights discourses, not to exemplify a local articulation of rights or welfare but to show the wealth of concepts that intertwine with rights and how they affect the way rights are conceptualized. In the case examined here, if theory is to reflect the ground, it is necessary to acknowledge the complex relations that exist between a real, non-ideal state, that state’s outsourced or subsidiary duty bearers such as service-providing NGOs, and the personal and moral imperatives of NGO workers to do service.

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork was supported by the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET). The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Interview with Sonali, CHILDLINE Coordinator (Madhya Pradesh 17 February 2019). Names of interviewees and organisations in Madhya Pradesh are pseudonyms. CHILDLINE is not a pseudonym.

2 R Srivatsan, Seva, Saviour, and State: Caste Politics, Tribal Welfare and Capitalist Development (Routledge 2015) 3.

3 In this article, I use ‘voluntary organization’ and ‘non-governmental organization’ (NGO) interchangeably, reflecting the way in which the study’s informants used the terms. While ‘voluntary organization’ can seem misleading because workers were actually employed and thus (however poorly) paid, the common use of the term captures the perception that people working for these organizations were conducting a ‘voluntary’ and selfless service, which will be a theme throughout the paper.

4 Sumi Madhok, Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (Cambridge University Press 2021).

5 For one of several excellent studies on the relation between neoliberalism and rights in India, see Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and its Discontents: An Indian History (Harvard University Press 2013).

6 Sten Widmalm (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Autocratization in South Asia (Routledge 2022).

7 Soumi Banerjee, ‘Performing Agency in Shrinking Spaces: Acting Beyond the Resilience-Resistance Binary’ (2023) 11(2) Social Inclusion 147.

8 Nayanika Mathur, Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India (Cambridge University Press 2015) 5.

9 Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton University Press 1999) 26.

10 See also Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Duke University Press 2001); Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Theories of the State in an Age of Globalization’ in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (eds), The Anthropology of the State: A Reader (Wiley-Blackwell 2006).

11 See James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’ (2002) 29(4) American Ethnologist 981.

12 Aruna Roy, as quoted in Sneha Philip and Smarinita Shetty, ‘Interview: Aruna Roy on how she has successfully campaigned for people rights for four decades’ Scroll (31 January 2022) <https://scroll.in/article/1016243/interview-aruna-roy-on-how-she-has-successfullycampaigned-for-people-rights-for-four-decades> accessed 12 December 2023

13 The ethnographic material on CHILDLINE for this article is from 2019, when CHILDLINE was a state-NGO partnership. In 2022, the Indian government issued Mission Vatsalya, an overarching child protection policy that mandates CHILDLINE to be merged with the state-run emergency number 112 (Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India, Mission Vatsalya. Savdhanta Sanrakshnam: Implementation Guidelines (New Delhi 2022) <https://wcd.nic.in/sites/default/files/GUIDELINES%20OF%20MISSION%20VATSALYA%20DATED%2005%20JULY%202022.pdf> accessed 12 December 2023. This policy is strongly criticized by NGOs (See for instance Jagriti Chandra, ‘Cloud over child helpline 1098 as government mulls merging it with national emergency helpline 112,’ The Hindu (16 April 2022) <https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/cloud-over-child-helpline-1098-as-government-mulls-merging-it-with-national-emergency-helpline-112/article65327177.ece> accessed 12 December 2023; Ambika Pandit, ‘Child helpline to be integrated with 112 emergency response system,’ Times of India (14 September 2022) <https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/child-helpline-to-be-integrated-with-112-emergency-response-system/articleshow/94187843.cms> accessed 12 December 2023. Due to the timing of my fieldwork, this paper’s empirical basis does not allow me to consider this highly relevant ongoing development in my analysis.

14 See for instance Jeroo Billimoria et al., Listening to Children: An Overview of CHILDLINE (Mumbai 2001) <https://www.childlineindia.org/uploads/files/20200316113734_Listening-To-Children.pdf> accessed 12 December 2023.

15 Jeroo Billimoria, ‘Genesis of Project Childline (NGO Interventions)’ (1997) 58(3) Indian Journal of Social Work 456; Interview with Jeroo Billimoria, CHILDLINE Founder (Online 15 September 2020).

16 Prior to the study, the data was reviewed and approved by the Swedish Ethics Review Board (Etiksprövningsmyndigheten) with the approval number 2019-00107 (2018/1059). All participants gave informed consent. Due to the high level of child protection within CHILDLINE, the vulnerability of the children with whom it comes into contact, and my objective of studying NGO workers’ perceptions of children’s rights, I decided not to include children as research subjects. The analysis in this paper is therefore focused on how NGO workers mix different ethical languages, not how these ethical languages are affected by children themselves—which would provide for a fascinating but different study.

17 Peggy Levitt and Sally Engle Merry, ‘Vernacularization on the ground: local uses of global women’s rights in Peru, China, India and the United States’ (2009) 9 Global Networks 441.

18 Madhok (n 4).

19 Mark Goodale, ‘Ethical Theory as Social Practice’ (2006) 108 American Anthropologist 25.

20 See, among many, Richard A. Wilson, Human Rights, Culture and Context (Pluto Press 1997); Jane K. Cowan et al, Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press 2001); Mark Goodale (ed), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (Wiley-Blackwell 2009); Sally Engle Merry, ‘The Potential of Ethnographic Methods for Human Rights Research’ in Bård A. Andreassen, Hans-Otto Sano and Siobhán McInerney-Lankford (eds), Research Methods in Human Rights: A Handbook (Edward Elgar Publishing Limited 2017) 141.

21 See for instance Ann-Belinda S. Preis, ‘Human Rights as Cultural Practice: An Anthropological Critique’ in Mark Goodale (ed), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) 332; William P. Simmons and Lindsay R. Feldman, ‘Critical Ethnography and Human Rights Research’ in Lee McConnell and Rhona Smith (eds), Research Methods in Human Rights (Routledge 2018) 114.

22 See Julie Billaud, ’Keepers of the ’Truth’: Producing ‘Transparent’ Documents for the Universal Periodic Review’ in Hilary Charlesworth and Emma Larking (eds), Human Rights and the Universal Periodic Review: Rituals and Ritualism (Cambridge University Press 2015) 63; Joshua Clark and Miia Halme-Tuomisaari, ‘Introduction: Anthropology, Human Rights, and Three (Miniature) Generations’ (2016) PoLAR Virtual Edition; Ronald Niezen and Maria Sapignoli, Palaces of Hope: The Anthropology of Global Organizations (Cambridge University Press 2017).

23 For excellent arguments on why ethnography is more than simply contextualizations, see Allaine Cerwonka and Liisa Malkki, Improvising Theory. Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork (University of Chicago Press 2007); Laura Nader, ‘Ethnography as Theory’ (2011) 1 HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 211.

24 See e.g. Jane K. Cowan, ‘Culture and Rights after Culture and Rights’ in Mark Goodale (ed), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) 306; Sonia Sikka, ‘Rights and Relativity’ in Ashwani Peetush and Jay Drydyk (eds), Human Rights: India and the West (Oxford University Press 2015) 19.

25 Goodale (n 19); Goodale (n 20).

26 Goodale (n 19) 26-27.

27 Cowan (n 24) 325. Some scholars are already connecting the two fields in relation to human rights. See Sikka (n 24), Goodale (n 19) and Cowan (n 24).

28 Simmons and Feldman (n 21) 130.

29 Jane K. Cowan, ‘An Obligation to ’Support Human Rights’ Unconditionally is Misguided Moralism’ in Mark Goodale (ed), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) 204, 204.

30 Levitt and Merry (n 17).

31 Goodale (n 19) 32.

32 Sumi Madhok, ’On Vernacular Rights Cultures and the Political Imaginaries of Haq’ (2017) 8 Humanity 485, 501-502.

33 Madhok (n 4) 35.

34 ibid 51.

35 Sally Engle Merry, ’Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle’ (2006) 108 American Anthropologist 39.

36 Goodale (n 19) 29.

37 Madhok (n 32).

38 A semantic field is a cluster of concepts within a discourse, obtaining meaning from the concepts around it (Jan Ifversen, ‘Text, Discourse, Concept: Approaches to Textual Analysis’ (2003) 7 KONTUR 60, 67).

39 For a thorough history of the concept, see Srivatsan (n 2) and Carey Watt, Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association, and Citizenship (Oxford University Press 2005).

40 Ronald Stuart McGregor, Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (Oxford University Press 1993).

41 Srivatsan (n 2) ix; Malini Bhattacharjee, ‘Sevā, Hindutva, and the Politics of Post-Earthquake Relief and Reconstruction in Rural Kutch’ (2016) 75 Asian Ethnology 75, 80.

42 Bhattacharjee (n 40) 80.

43 Srivatsan (n 2) 3-4.

44 ibid 4; 14; Ajay Skaria, ’Gandhi’s Politics: Liberalism and the Question of the Ashram’ (2002) 101 The South Atlantic Quarterly 955.

45 Srivatsan (n 2) viii.

46 Skaria (n 44) 957; 976.

47 ibid 982.

48 Srivatsan (n 2) 4-5.

49 Nehru, as quoted in Stuart Corbridge et al, Seeing the State: Governance and Governmentality in India (Cambridge University Press 2005) 55.

50 Corbridge et al (n 49) 55.

51 Srivatsan (n 2) 4.

52 ibid 5; 17.

53 Bhattacharjee (n 41).

54 See also Hansen (n 9).

55 Devika Bordia, ‘The ethics of des seva: Hindu nationalism, tribal leadership and modes of sociality in Rajasthan’ (2015) 49 Contributions to Indian Sociology 52, 53.

56 Bordia (n 55) 66.

57 Interview with Roshan (CHILDLINE Team Member), Prashant (CHILDLINE Team Member) and Radha (CHILDLINE Team Member) (Madhya Pradesh 29 March 2019).

58 Field notes, 8 February 2019.

59 Shirin Rai and Sumi Madhok, ‘Agency, Injury, and Transgressive Politics in Neoliberal Times’ (2012) 37 Signs 645; Sharma, as quoted in Merry (n 34) 46; Krishnamurthy, as quoted in Sally Engle Merry, ‘Legal Transplants and Cultural Translation’ in Mark Goodale (ed), Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader (Wiley-Blackwell 2009) 282.

60 Rai and Madhok (n 59) 653-54.

61 Interview with Bhavesh, CHILDLINE Volunteer (Madhya Pradesh 28 March 2019).

62 Goodale (n 19) 32.

63 Interview with Kunal, CHILDLINE Team Member (Madhya Pradesh 3 March 2019).

64 Interview with Basanti, CHILDLINE Team Member (Madhya Pradesh 26 February 2019).

65 Interview with Kunal (CHILDLINE Team Member), Pradeep (CHILDLINE District Coordinator) and Basanti (CHILDLINE Team Member) (Madhya Pradesh 23 April 2019).

66 Bhattacharjee (n 41) 77.

67 Srivatsan (n 2) 32.

68 Interview with Jagadish, Director of the NGO Suraj (Madhya Pradesh 24 April 2019).

69 N Rajaram and V Zararia, ‘Translating women’s human rights in a globalizing world: the spiral process in reducing gender injustice in Baroda, India’ (2009) 9(4) Global Networks 462.

70 Interview with Pradeep, CHILDLINE District Coordinator (Madhya Pradesh 28 February 2019).

71 Interview with Aditya, CHILDLINE Team Member (Madhya Pradesh 4 March 2019).

72 ibid.

73 Merry (n 35) 39.

74 Interview with Prashant, CHILDLINE Team Member (Madhya Pradesh 27 March 2019).

75 Field notes, 3 March 2019.

76 Field notes, 16 February 2019.

77 Field notes, 5 February 2019.

78 See for instance Michael Freeman, ‘Why it remains important to take children’s rights seriously’ (2007) 15(1) International Journal of Children’s Rights 5; Didier Reynaert et al., ‘Between “believers” and “opponents”: Critical discussions on children’s rights’ (2012) 20(1) International Journal of Children’s Rights 155; Eugeen Verhellen, ‘The Convention on the Rights of the Child: Reflections from a historical, social policy and educational perspective’ in Wouter Vandenhole et al. (eds), Routledge International Handbook of Children’s Rights Studies (Routledge 2015) 43.

79 Interview with Kunal (CHILDLINE Team Member), Pradeep (CHILDLINE District Coordinator) and Basanti (CHILDLINE Team Member) (Madhya Pradesh 23 April 2019).

80 Interview with Radha, CHILDLINE Team Member (Madhya Pradesh 27 February 2019).

81 As I have shown elsewhere, those voluntary organizations working closer to sangharṣ (see above) than to sevā are likely to affect the rights conception in a different direction (Therese Boje Mortensen, ‘NGOs as child rights implementers in India: How NGO workers negotiate human rights responsibility in “partnership” with a neoliberal and restrictive state’ (PhD thesis, Lund University 2023).

82 Mortensen (n 81) chapter 6.

83 The few accounts that take NGOs seriously in human rights claims usually still refer to them as ‘non-state’, assuming the state as the ‘original’ duty bearer. See for instance Philip Alston, Non-State Actors and Human Rights (Oxford University Press 2005); Andrew Kuper, Global Responsibilities: Who Must Deliver on Human Rights? (Routledge 2005).