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!

The Age of Rhizomatic Revolutions

Manuel Castells (2015). Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Second Edition). Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 316.

Manuel Castells is an eminent sociologist who has revolutionized the way we understand communication in societies, especially through his study of social movements. An emeritus professor with the University of California Berkeley and a visiting professor with Oxford, Cambridge and MIT, he has penned over 25 books, the most celebrated of which are The Information Age and Communication Power. In this refreshing work on new social movements, originally a product of the CRASSH lecture series of Cambridge, Castells dwells on the eruption of Arab uprisings, indignadas of Spain, occupy movements of the US, and the social protests in eastern Europe and Turkey that have shaken the world in recent times. He attempts to understand what these movements imply, in the context of our nebulous times.

Castells examines the nature and scope of these social movements and asks whether the qualification ‘new’ is apposite. He brings out the common characteristics of these seemingly unrelated events. He argues that these movements initiated new trends by ignoring political parties, often going beyond the hype of ideologies. They also distrusted the traditional media and rejected formal organization. These uprisings eschewed traditional leadership and relied on the internet and local assemblies for collective debate and decision making. In short, these social movements, according to Castells, used ‘autonomous networks of communication’ that differentiated them from traditional social movements that were embedded in societies.

Counter Power and Communication

Castells, then goes on to delineate the power of ‘occupation’ that the new social movements have consistently used. He argues that physical occupation of a town square or a street, that was the central symbolic act of these movements, were also symbols of invasion of state or financial power of institutions and an affirmation of right to public and collective use of these spaces. Drawing historic parallels between the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Glasgow strikes of 1915, he demonstrates how the new social movements derive strength in solidarity and togetherness as a weapon against risk, uncertainty, fear and exploitation. Castells’ core argument is that although there are structural causes of institutions and individual causes of emotion that makes social movements possible, the new movements are a prescient sign of passionate politics and not a traditional type of political program and strategy.

The implications of Castell’s arguments are two-fold- (i) that the new social movements are a product of a ‘networked’ society, and that (ii) these are symbols of ‘counter power’. By employing a grounded theory approach to new social movements, Castells demonstrates that the formation, dynamics, values, prospects and enquiry into the new social movements bring out the facets of a ‘networked’ society with different nodes of operation. Social communication in these networked societies has taken the form of ‘mass self-communication’, where an individual can program and switch on networks of power because of her/his reach through the new types of media. These communication strategies then emerge as a form of counter power, against the coercion, legitimization and communication of traditional power.

Whether the new social movements have resulted in victories and concessions, or armed repression and civil wars, they are rhizomatic (coming from the ground) and have a democratic and radical appeal. The framework of communication and examination of the power politics is an important and interesting lens with which to evaluate these new movements. An exciting way to begin the new year with a voice of our times!