Friday 2 August 2019

Negotiating Rights in Neoliberal India



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!