Uncovering a politics of livelihoods: analysing displacement and contention in contemporary India

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we use livelihoods as an organizing concept which brings together questions of production, social reproduction, and the conditions for these, to describe and reflect upon three ‘moments’ of displacement and contention in India. Our first moment, a massive flash strike by workers in the export garments industry in Bangalore, is located in the present neo-liberal context of jobless growth, increasingly unregulated and precarious forms of employment, and market-based forms of service provision. Our second moment concerns popular struggles in defence of the commons in settled rural fishing communities in south India, and the third, the tenacious efforts of pavement dwellers in Bombay to make place, the political condition for production and social reproduction. The originary context for these last two moments was the state-led, technology-driven, capitalist modernization of agriculture and fisheries of the early post-‘independence’ decades, tied to projects of state-building, self-reliance, and sovereignty. The three moments chart the long history of processes of precarization under postcolonial capitalism but, equally, a constant politics of livelihood, grounded in claims to rights earned through labour, and addressing itself to both state and capital as complicit in structuring access to livelihoods under capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Contentious politics
• India
• labour
• livelihoods
• precarity
• resistance

Acknowledgements

This paper has benefitted considerably from the comments of its anonymous reviewers, as well as from Alf Nilsen's thoughtful suggestions. We would also like to thank our colleague Rajesh Joseph whose help and insight have been invaluable for the section on garment workers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This section is based on ongoing work by the authors and other researchers in the Livelihoods Initiative at Azim Premji University, Bangalore.

2. Lankesh (2017) notes that a similar attempt had been made by the national government in 2000; then, too, women garment workers in Bangalore had come out in protest, and the changes had not gone ahead.

3. This section is drawn from Sundar (2010).

4. Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, one of the two major political parties in Tamil Nadu state, and in power in that period.

5. This section is drawn from Menon's (2009) doctoral research.

6. The Public Interest Litigation emerged as a legal facility in the late 1970s as courts attempted to make themselves more accessible to the nation's most vulnerable and exploited subjects: they relaxed the rule of standing so as to allow petitions for the court's intervention to be made on the basis of a third party report such as a newspaper article on a particular instance of injustice (Shukla 2006).

7. Olga Tellis and others v. Bombay Municipality Corporation and others, AIR 1986 SC 180; see also Vayyapuri Kuppusami and others v. State of Maharashtra and others, All India Reporter 1986 SC 180.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gayatri A. Menon

Gayatri A. Menon is a sociologist who works on the political economy of development, focusing on urbanization, displacement and questions of home and belonging. She is an Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University's School of Development. She is also a Research Associate at the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP), University of the Witwatersrand.

Aparna Sundar

Aparna Sundar is a political scientist with research interests in livelihoods, precarious work, and the politics of labour, citizenship, and democracy. She is visiting faculty at the the School of Development, Azim Premji University and a Research Associate at the Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP), University of the Witwatersrand.