Zoya Hasan
(2018), Agitation to Legislation, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp.178
We live in an age of social movements that connect
local political demands of small communities to global movement of production
and consumption. From Occupy Wall Street in the United States to Indignados
in Greece and Spain, these movements articulate demand for rights based on
claims of inequity and injustice. Beyond political resonance, they are tied by
the same structures that they seek to transform- the withdrawing state, privatized
services and coalition politics of neoliberal capitalism. These movements are
vehicles of new discourse of politics as increasingly the old vocabulary of ‘class’
seem reductive as groups grapple with fragmented and multiple identities. In
this context, this work explores rights movement in India through three prominent
case studies.
The author of the work, Zoya Hasan is Professor
Emerita at Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of India’s best universities for
social science research. This book is a collection of three lectures she presented
at the National University of Singapore. The work presents an overview of the
campaign for right to food, the campaign against corruption and the campaign
for women’s reservation bill for political representation. Woven within the
history of contemporary India, Hasan contextualizes the narratives within the
fold of neoliberalism. She explores the relationship between public protests,
political mobilization and policy making.
Formal and Informal Politics
Hasan places the public movements for rights against
the neoliberal paradigm of development that has made social entitlements to
basic services such as food, health, education and employment legally
enforceable. She specifically examines what makes some social mobilizations
more successful in turning into laws than others. For analyzing this question,
she explores the process through which public protest interacts with formal
political mechanism, prioritizing itself, negotiating the specifics and
competing with demands for rights forwarded by other movements. This framework
pits the interaction between social movements and political parties as a site
of competition, contention, dominance and resistance.
I found this work illuminating on two counts. One,
Hasan deals with social movements in conjunction with party politics and traces
the journey of a demand from the ground into the wells of the Parliament. Two,
she compares the competing dynamics of various social movements that push some
forward at the expense of others. For example, as she points out, the right to
food campaign in India was successful in becoming an enforceable law because it
was ensconced in a gamut of a group of ‘rights’ that gave it a sense of
coherence and urgency that something like women’s reservation bill lacked. This
type of insight makes it interesting to know what makes public protest click or
fizzle out.
If you have been following contemporary social
movement literature as a scholar, this is a great introduction to Indian case
studies. If you just want to make sense of the politics of public protests,
then this is a great first step!
