Specifying citizenship: subaltern politics of rights and justice in contemporary India

Abstract

This article uses the lens of development discourse to shed light on subaltern politics of citizenship and rights claims in contemporary India. It argues that battles for development entitlements allow subaltern subjects to meaningfully inhabit and simultaneously alter the contours of legal citizenship, which they have been formally granted by the Indian constitution, but, in effect, denied. Subaltern claims on citizenship, articulated from a position of subordination and difference, not equality, and through specific idioms, contest and radically transform the generic and universal slot of personhood that liberalism provides – one that is rational, secular, sovereign and individualistic. Their citizenship claims draw upon multiple discourses, extending well beyond the law, mixing morality and materiality, ethics and politics, and traditional and bureaucratic languages of power, and thereby muddy the very distinctions on which modern citizenship rests. Subaltern struggles over development, thus, force us to reconsider hardened, normative ideas of legal citizenship and to widen the scope through which we look at and think about rights claims, justice, personhood and, indeed, the state in the neoliberal era.

Cet article s'appuie sur le discours sur le développement pour analyser les politiques subalternes sur la citoyenneté et de revendications de droits dans l'Inde contemporaine. Les luttes pour des droits au développement permettent aux sujets subalternes d'habiter de manière significative, et dans le même temps d'altérer les contours de la citoyenneté légale, qui leur a été attribué par la constitution indienne, mais leur est de fait déniée. Les revendications subalternes de citoyenneté, formulées à partir d'une position de subordination et de différence, et non d'égalité, et par des langages particuliers, remettent en cause et transforment radicalement la vision générique et universelle de la personne fournie par le libéralisme, une personne rationnelle, laïque, souveraine et individualiste. Leurs revendications de citoyenneté s'appuient sur une multiplicité de discours allant bien au-delà de la loi, et mêlant moralité et matérialité, éthique et politique, des langages de pouvoir tant traditionnels que bureaucratiques, rendant par là même floues les distinctions sur lesquelles repose la citoyenneté moderne. Les luttes subalternes sur le développement nous obligent donc à reconsidérer les idées normatives et figées quant à la citoyenneté légale, et à élargir notre vision et notre pensée sur les revendications de droits, la justice, la personne, et de fait, sur l'état à l'ère néolibérale.

Keywords:

• citizenship
• development
• India
• rights
• subaltern

Keywords:

• citoyenneté
• développement
• droits
• Inde
• subalternes

Acknowledgements

This article draws on materials previously published in Chapter 5 of my book, Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender, and Governance in Neoliberal India. Sections of Chapter 5 – (Cross) Talking Development: State and Citizens Acts – are used here with the permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

Notes

 1. Uttar Pradesh is a state in northern India. The names of all other places and of all people have been altered in this article, following standard anthropological practice.

 2. Both Timothy Mitchell (2000) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002) provide excellent analyses of the complexities of colonial modernity and question the givenness and presumptions of normative modernity.

 3. Mahila Samakhya was initiated by the Indian government in partnership with women's groups and with Dutch government funds in 1989. It was the first national-level development program that had women's empowerment as its explicit goal. For a detailed analysis of the structure, workings and paradoxical effects of this part-state, part-non-governmental project targeted at poor, rural women belonging to Dalit and other lower castes, see Sharma (2008).

 4. The 72nd and 73rd constitutional amendments, passed in 1992, for example, reserve 33% of seats in local governmental bodies, like Panchayats, for women.

 5. The Hindi word ‘sarkar’ can mean either government or state. It is also used by the subaltern to refer to powerful individuals, such as upper caste people or landlords who might not be part of the formal state apparatus, but who are nonetheless connected, as far as the marginalized are concerned, to local structures of authority and oppression, and thus indistinguishable from the formal state. This fusing of the powerful in subaltern imaginaries has an older, colonial history, as Ranajit Guha (1983) has shown. It continues to be relevant today and is indexed by subalterns when they use the term ‘sarkar’.

 6. One does not have to endorse the global universality of neoliberalism in order to observe these similarities. I have previously argued, following Aihwa Ong (2006), that one needs to pay careful attention to how neoliberal logics sit with other histories and moral worldviews in various locations and what results these sometimes easy and sometimes uncomfortable layerings produce (Sharma 2006, 2008). It is only through such observations that one can see similarities and differences in how neoliberal processes work out in different places.

 7. For a classic statement on the market-based logic of neoliberal freedom, see Friedman (1982). For poststructuralist critiques of neoliberal projects and freedom, see Barry et al. (1996), Rose (1999), and Hindess (2004).

 8. Dalit, which literally translates as broken or crushed, is a commonly used term referring to oppressed or downtrodden people at the bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy. Until the rise of a self-conscious Dalit movement a few decades ago, this group was variously identified: outcastes which is a mistaken term because, although not belonging to the four main Hindu caste divisions [varnas], Dalits are very much a part of the caste system; untouchables, because they largely engaged in occupations deemed ‘polluting’, such as leatherwork and scavenging; Harijan or children of God, a term coined by Gandhi; and Scheduled Castes, a term invented by the British colonial state in 1935 and commonly used in postcolonial government documents. In contrast to the above labels, Dalit is a political and activist term of resistance, chosen by the people so identified, which aims to mark injustice and struggle and does not have the patronizing connotation that Harijan carries. Dalits in India today continue to suffer serious violence, social discrimination, economic marginalization and de facto disenfranchisement despite laws that abolish untouchability and protect against discrimination in public spaces and despite the state's reservation policies that institute quotas for Dalits in educational institutions, political bodies, and government jobs (see Human Rights Watch 1999).

 9. In seeing development as a teeming site for subaltern politics, I argue against those critics of development discourse who see it only as a means of control and violence (Sachs 1992, Escobar 1995). Instead, following Cooper and Packard (1997), I highlight development's heteroglossic nature, arguing that it more than a disciplinary regime imposed on passive subalterns. It is a productive and shifting discourse, shaped from above and below, that forms and informs citizen-subjects (see Sharma 2008). Subaltern politics is as much about redefining development as about accessing entitlements through using governmental categories and means.

10. Ajantha Subramanian (2009) also argues against such a separation in her ethnography of the rights politics of the Mukkuvar fisher community in Southern India. She argues for a processual understanding of rights: one that is not given a priori but is shaped in and through struggle.

11. This program is called ‘Indira Avaas Yojna’ after Indira Gandhi, the erstwhile Prime Minister of India.

12. Dipesh Chakrabarty makes a similar point when discussing narratives of widows in colonial India. He argues that they invoked material property not for its own sake but as a means to negotiate affection and protection from their kin (2002, pp. 107–108).

13. Sally Merry discusses the use of rights talk by the US battered women's movement and argues that the ability to see oneself as a rights-bearing individual is facilitated by encounters with the legal system (2003, p. 344). My argument is that in postcolonial contexts, like India, development serves as a critical site for the formation and articulation of a rights consciousness among subaltern subjects who may have little contact with the formal juridical apparatus.

14. I discuss this ‘development drama’ in detail in my book (Sharma 2008).

15. Also see Gupta (1995).

16. Recognizing the importance of information to their survival, a group of peasants and rural workers in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, organized as the grassroots movement Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, led the fight for a right to information and transparent and accountable governance. Their nearly fifteen-year struggle resulted in the passage of Indian Right to Information Act in 2005. My new project is an ethnography of the workings of this law.

17. Coutin (2003) argues that state discourses define citizenship in a generic manner, as a public identity that is shared by individuals who are seen as legally identical and equal units.