The Indian state has responded to demands made by
civil society campaigns that are sometimes supported and sometimes
initiated by the Supreme Court. But we are definitely not in the midst
of a social revolution. This, in large measure, is due to the nature of
civil society interventions.
Actually existing democracies are imperfectly just, and
institutionalised democracies inevitably fall well short of the idea of
the concept. If this is the first lesson that we have learnt from
history, the second is that the idea of democracy can be realised to an
extent in and through political practices, more specifically through
collective action initiated by trade unions, front organisations of
political parties, social associations, professional groups,
non-governmental organisations, and citizen activism in general. Think
of women’s struggles in England in the early 20th century to expand the
scope of a franchise labelled “keep out, men only”; or of workers’
struggles to emancipate the right to vote from property qualifications
in most parts of Europe; or of Afro-American struggles to achieve racial
parity in the United States; or of trade union struggles to make the
workplace a more humane one across the world.
In India, where trade unions yoked to political parties and
representing a very small percentage of the workforce have shown little
interest in the welfare of non-members, and where political parties tend
to think of social rights more as an electoral/populist ploy and less
as a task that government has to shoulder with some seriousness, civil
society activism has sharply foregrounded the responsibility of the
state to its citizens. In a society where huge numbers of people are
wracked by poverty, diminished by malnutrition, ill-health, illiteracy,
and ill-being, and condemned to live their lives much below the level of
what is considered human, civil society campaigns for the delivery of
social goods have tried to bridge the sizeable lag between
institutionalised political equality and social and economic inequality.
The Indian state has responded to the demands made by these
campaigns, which are sometimes supported and sometimes initiated by the
Supreme Court. But we are definitively not in the midst of a social
revolution. This in large measure is due to the nature of civil society
interventions. Civil society is politically significant insofar as it
enables citizens to come together in all manners of projects,
particularly those of monitoring the state, and engaging in collective
action that strives to realise the idea of democracy.
1 The
irony is that the precondition of this particular project is a
democratic state, which enables its own citizens to challenge
institutionalised power through the grant of rights such as the right of
freedom of expression, freedom to join associations, and the freedom to
assemble peacefully and without arms. It follows that the practices of
civil society, like other practices, unfold in an institutional context
shaped largely by the state. Admittedly, civil society organisations
enable the articulation of popular aspirations, but at the same time,
these are necessarily restricted by notions of what is politically –
and, more often than not, legally – permissible. There are, to put it
bluntly, defined limits to civil society activism. The boundaries of the
system can be pushed back by civil society activism, but to assume that
these boundaries can be transcended or reworked is to expect too much
of the concept and of its practices. For these reasons and more, civil
society may not be the best way to tackle the ills of modern India, but
in a post-revolutionary world, this is the best we have on offer. We
simply have no choice. It is with this caveat that I begin to discuss
the significance and drawbacks of collective action in India.
Democracy and Inequality in India
The Great Indian Poverty Debate, structured in the main around
methodological disputes on how to measure poverty and the poor, has
acquired highly technical overtones, and most of these subtleties tend
to escape non-economists, or, more precisely, non-statisticians. But
even a non-economist can figure out that there is something very
specific about poverty in India. On balance, poverty entraps huge
numbers of citizens.
Inequality has risen sharply in recent years in India. Brazil,
Indonesia, and on some indicators Argentina, have recorded significant
progress in reducing inequality over a period of 20 years, according to a
2011 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
report on inequalities in emerging economies. China, India, the Russia
Federation, and South Africa have become less equal over time. India, in
particular, has experienced a significant increase in earnings
inequality. The ratio between the top and the bottom deciles of wage
distribution has doubled since the early 1990s, with growth in wage
inequalities between regular wage earners, that is, contractual
employees. Income inequality in the casual wage sector, that is, workers
employed on a day-to-day basis, has remained more stable. The doubling
of income inequality over the past 20 years, continues the report, has
made India one of the worst performers in the category of emerging
economies. Of the 1.21 billion Indians, 42% live on less than $1.25 a
day, and India has the highest number of poor in the world (OECD 2011).
Notably, poverty is concentrated mainly in two communities, the
scheduled tribes (STs) and the scheduled castes (SCs), and some groups
in the Other Backward Classes. The 2010 United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report affirms that 81% of the STs,
66% of the SCs, and 58% of OBCs belong to the category of the
multidimensionally poor (UNDP 2010: 99). A majority of the SCs and STs
who live and work in backward regions of central and eastern India
belong to the category of the absolutely poor, and are condemned to live
a life much below the threshold of what we recognise as distinctively
human (IAMR and Planning Commission 2011: 2). And they are so condemned
because of a contingent and hence morally arbitrary factor – that of
birth. People are not poor because they do not possess the basic skills
that enable them to participate in profitable transactions; they are
poor because they have been born into communities that have been
historically stigmatised by the caste system as the (former)
“untouchable”, the “polluting”, or as the outsider. The rigid caste
system had historically banished the STs and the SCs to the spatial as
well as social margins of society. Children born into these two groups
have been handed down as their patrimony nothing but deprivation, social
discrimination, rank indignities, and responsibilities for performing
menial tasks. The relationship between lack of caste/social status and
material deprivation is indisputably causal.
Let us now clarify the two counts on which Indian democracy can be
categorised as deeply flawed. One, there exists a substantial gap
between political equality and social and economic equality. Two, some
groups have to shoulder more than their share of the burdens of society,
and are barred from partaking in the benefits of this society because
of morally irrelevant reasons such as caste or tribal affiliation.
The coexistence of political and civil freedom alongside social and
economic unfreedom in India is cause for some degree of regret. The
leaders of the freedom movement had understood as early as the 1920s
that the task of attaining political freedom is necessarily hampered
unless it is accompanied by social and economic freedom, and vice versa.
Consequently, it had conceptualised an integrated agenda of political,
civil, social, cultural, and economic rights in the 1928 Nehru
Constitutional Draft, and in the Karachi Resolution on Fundamental
Rights adopted by the Indian National Congress in 1931. This integrated
agenda was, however, split into two units in the Constituent Assembly.
Whereas the grant of political, civil and cultural rights in part three
of the Constitution are backed by legal sanction, social and economic
rights, which are placed in part IV under the title Directive Principles
of State Policy, are not backed by such sanction. It is precisely this
downgrading of social rights that civil society organisations took up at
the turn of the 21st century, and inaugurated thereby a new phase of
activism.
Notes on Collective Action
At the turn of the 21st century, the advent of campaigns that sought
to upgrade the Directive Principles of State Policy to the status of
fundamental rights marked a new phase in civil society in India. In
2001, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) filed a public
interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court on hunger and starvation
in the country. This was at a time when the highest court in the land
had succeeded in acquiring a distinctive reputation for upholding the
cause of the poor, the illiterate, the hungry, and the shelterless. This
was in direct contrast to the early years of post-Independence India,
when the Court had privileged fundamental rights over the Directive
Principles. In the 1970s, the judiciary was deeply complicit in the
internal Emergency (1975-77) declared by the then Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi, and the consequent suspension of civil liberties.
Post-emergency, the Court, determined to reverse its image and acquire
legitimacy in the public eye, began to concentrate on pro-people issues.
Justice Bhagwati, in the Minerva Mills case, famously argued that
social rights are substantive rights, and that a rule that imposed an
obligation on the state or an entity was still a legal rule because it
prescribed a norm of conduct to be followed by an authority, even if the
rule was not enforceable in court (Shankar 2009: 127).
He stated,
Today a vast revolution is taking place in the judicial process; the
theatre of the law is fast changing and the problems of the poor are
coming to the forefront. The Court has to innovate new methods and
devise new strategies for the purpose of providing access to justice to
large masses of people who are denied their basic human rights and to
whom freedom and liberty have no meaning. The only way in which this can
be done is by entertaining writ petitions and even letters from public
spirited individuals seeking judicial redress for the benefit of persons
who have suffered a legal wrong or a legal injury or whose
constitutional or legal right has been violated but who by reason of
their poverty or socially or economically disadvantaged position are
unable to approach the court for relief (ibid 2009: xiii).
In the 1980s and 1990s, Supreme Court pronouncements on a host of
measures from health and education, to shelter and the environment, were
specifically designed to ameliorate the condition of the poor.
In response to the PIL filed by the PUCL, the Court issued a number
of strictures. It was of utmost importance, instructed the highest court
in the land, that food should be provided to vulnerable sections.
In case of famine, there may be shortage of food … but here the
situation is that amongst plenty there is scarcity… distribution of the
same amongst the very poor and the destitute is scarce and non-existent
leading to mal-nourishment, starvation and other related problems (Legal Action for the Right to Food 2004).
These censures bore some results, and the government responded by
initiating a massive programme of employment generation via the
Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana, streamlining
the public distribution system in foodgrain and mandating mid-day meals
for school children. The campaign culminated in the National Food
Security Act of 2013.
Despite all the caveats that have been entered regarding the Act, the
right to food campaign has undeniably come a long way since 2001.
Several achievements can be credited to it. In response to Court orders,
most state governments proceeded to introduce mid-day meals in
government and government-aided schools. The programme has been
transferred to state governments, which are given an annual grant by the
centre to run the programme. The Supreme Court has set in place
mechanisms that monitor the implementation of various food and
nutrition-related schemes of the Government of India, by appointing food
commissioners who are responsible to the Court. On numerous occasions,
the Court has pulled up both state governments and the central
government on this front. The campaign for food rights holds public
hearings in various areas, and highlights corruption and mismanagement
in matters relating to the identification of below poverty line
families, functioning of ration shops, and diversion of foodgrains to
the open market, and establishes the complicity of local administrators,
politicians, owners of ration shops, and contractors in denying poor
people access to food. The Court has accorded legal backing to the right
to food. And the campaign for food rights has led to the formulation of
the right to work.
The campaign for the right to food realised fairly early that assured
employment is an essential precondition for food security, simply
because it liberates people from dependence on outside agencies for
satisfaction of their basic needs. The demand for this right (distinct
from the demand for food-for-work programmes) has not raised a new
entitlement onto policy agendas. Several employment generation schemes
were in existence in some form or the other. But when, in December 2005,
the long-awaited National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA, now
MGNREGA – Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) was
adopted by Parliament, new hope was infused into rural areas that have
been stagnating in recent decades.
Evaluating Civil Society Activism I
Have these campaigns contributed to the development of transformative
politics in India? One, have they managed to change the way in which
the state conceptualises its responsibilities towards the citizens of
India? Two, have they succeeded in prising open doors for future
political interventions that can build on the successes of previous
campaigns?
Certainly legislation on social issues that campaigns have raised
marks a new phase in Indian democracy, that of paying attention to
substantial zones of ill-being, the marginalised, and to the ordinary
individual, or rather, the ordinary man. All four campaigns discussed
have generated legislation and this has been, and indeed can be, seen as
a civil society success story. Yet, in most of these cases legislation
falls noticeably short of the demands, and of agendas. For instance, the
right to education campaign had demanded that early childcare, which is
of crucial importance in shaping the personalities of little children,
be included in the right to education, and that the age bar should be
raised so that girls who are forced to stay at home minding siblings
while their mothers work can enter the educational system after the age
of 14. This was simply not heeded, despite the fact that educationists
had posted critical reservations on the website of the human resources
ministry.
Moreover, there is little virtue in granting a constitutional right
to education when schools set up by the government have gained notoriety
for non-performance; a high degree of teacher absenteeism; involvement
of teachers in other tasks set by the state – such as conducting census
operations, election duty, and preparation of mid-day meals for the
children – absence of infrastructure such as classrooms, blackboards,
toilets, playgrounds, electricity and computers; lack of extracurricular
activities; and general indifference towards teaching, or inculcating
in the student a love of learning. The Right to Education Act had laid
down an elaborate scheme to improve the state of primary education in
the country by 31 March 2013. Little has been done on this front;
allocations to the education sector have not exceeded 3.5% of the gross
domestic product (GDP), even though the Common Minimum Programme of the
coalition government at the centre had recommended at least 6%
investment of the GDP in education.
The lag between demands and state action illustrates to a nicety a
basic problem with the discourse of rights that civil society
organisations have embraced with great fervour. A right is not just a
right; it is a right to some good. It is the democratic state that is
obliged to ensure that the good that the right is a right to is made
available to the citizens. The provision of the good falls squarely
within the provenance of the state. But the Indian state appears content
with legislating a right and allocating funds, accompanied by media din
and acclaim by civil society organisations. In the process, to continue
with the example of education, the state seems to have absolved itself
of the responsibility of ensuring the establishment of an educational
system that can open doors to structures of opportunity for every child.
No systematic attempt to streamline the system of education, and make
it competitive with the expensive public school system, has been made to
date. The lesson: civil society organisations can ensure the enactment
of legislation, they can monitor the administration of these laws, but
there is little they can do about deep-rooted flaws in the system.
Although legislation has been enacted on some social issues, that
this amounts to a coherent and comprehensive social policy package is
debatable. Much of the rhetoric of the political class amounts to
political posturing, and the leadership seeks to glean every drop of
political/electoral capital from centrally sponsored schemes in food,
employment and education. Little attempt is made to systematically
follow up legislative initiatives, or even the enactment of a
constitutional right – the right to elementary education, for instance.
Nor has a mechanism to enforce accountability or to redress grievances
been established. Lack of attention to details of implementation and
institutions to monitor the right reflects poorly on the way the state
has responded to the discourse of rights.
It is also instructive to note that in India, most campaigns for the
delivery of social goods have either originated from a Supreme Court
decision, or succeeded in their objectives when the Court has intervened
on their behalf. Although Court interventions have helped campaigns to
achieve their goals, the need for the Court to intervene at all
illustrates the paradox of civil society mobilisation. In much of the
literature on civil society, it is assumed that civil society groups
have the capacity to address the state, and to oblige the latter to heed
demands made by these groups. However, the Indian state has proved more
responsive to Court injunctions than to popular representations,
compelling more and more groups to invoke judicial activism. On some
occasions, the Court has acted on its own, notably in the case of the
right to information and the right to education. In the case of the
right to food, and later employment, the Court cracked the whip on the
government when a group of activists filed a petition in the Court.
Much concern has been expressed about judicial activism because the
judiciary is non-representative, and because it tends to tread on the
toes of the executive and of elected members of Parliament (Mehta 2007;
Rudolph and Rudolph 2008a, b). Some scholars even dismiss such activism
as populism, and a mere attempt to refurbish the image of the Court
after the Emergency, as Baxi (1985) does. Moreover, as Madhav Khosla
(2010) points out, the Court pushes a model of conditional social rights
insofar as it instructs the state to remedy a particular grievance, or
remedy a particular lack: “The existence of a violation is
conditional
upon state action” (p 751). Unlike the South African Supreme Court, the
Indian Court has not elaborated a doctrine of systemic social rights in
the form of an entitlement for everyone.
In part, the Court has adopted a proactive stance because the agenda
of contemporary civil society mobilisation is self-limiting. Social
movements that demand a radical restructuring of power relations in the
country have just not fetched the required response from the judiciary.
This is most evident in the case of the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
Campaigns for the delivery of social goods have sparked off legislation
and propelled judicial activism on this front, but whether these
campaigns have transformed the state and tilted it towards the needs of
the poor is debatable. Certainly a number of initiatives to remedy the
sorry plight of the poor are on offer; for example, cash transfers. Most
of these initiatives border on what, in political theory, has been
termed sufficientarianism. This is certainly not what the Preamble of
the Constitution promises Indian citizens – justice, not if we interpret
justice as the equal right of every citizen to share in the benefits
and burdens of a society.
It would of course be political foolhardiness to dismiss all
government initiatives to improve the condition of the poor as
meaningless. But structural barriers to well-being, and half-hearted
attempts by the state to ensure minimal well-being, neutralise the full
impact of the allocation of resources and enactment of legislation. What
we see is minor tinkering with the symptoms, rather than with the cause
of the malaise of ill-being in India. Civil society activism is
self-limiting, and state response to these self-limiting demands is
sadly deficient. Expectedly, poverty and inequality continue to plague
the lives of millions of the poor in India.
Evaluating Civil Society Activism II
In the late 1990s, a number of civil society organisations
perceptibly shifted their strategy: from opposing and critically
engaging with the state, to advocacy, and to partnership with the state.
The number as well as the influence of groups that have opted for this
strategy has increased over time, and many of them advise political
parties on the shape of their agenda; others are consulted by the
government, and leaders of some campaigns have been incorporated into
the National Advisory Council (NAC)headed by the president of the
Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi. The NAC has proved instrumental in the
passage of several laws, but such legislation from above breeds its own
reverberations. For one, membership of the NAC has become a benchmark of
success for civil society organisations. As one activist remarked
ironically at a meeting, ever since the NAC was set up, all that civil
society organisations dream of is drafting a law and getting it passed
by Parliament. Two, the implications of either partnering the state or
being a part of the state reverberate on how we conceptualise the tasks
of civil society. One can hardly expect civil society to take on the
state, when all that some organisations want is to be part of the
decision-making institutions set up by the state, while others are
dependent on the state for funding. That the system remains in place,
and superficial remedies are evolved for the symptoms of a deeper
malaise, is not surprising.
If partnership agreements with the state tend to blunt the edge of
civil society activism, the strategy these campaigns adopt to further
the objectives they have decided upon is hardly conducive to generating
transformative politics. Expectedly, demands that stifling and
oppressive social relationships grounded in unequal landholdings, and
the monopoly of resources held by corporate houses be broken, have come
from outside the frontiers of civil society – the Maoist movement. This
is the irony of social mobilisation in India. Within civil society,
organisations have been tamed by aligning them with the state. One can
hardly expect them to critique the state when they are part of
decision-making structures and beneficiaries of state largesse. And
movements that have raised issues fundamental to democratic justice,
notably that the benefits and burdens of society should be distributed
as equally as possible, are banished to the space outside civil society,
and outside the protection of the rule of law and fundamental rights.
Can this genre of collective action generate other forms of activism
which build on the achievements of an earlier generation of activists
and avoid the mistakes of early activists? It is precisely here that the
distinction between campaigns and social movements emerges sharply.
Take the women’s movement, which in the 1970s coalesced around protests
against custodial rape and dowry deaths. Today the movement has been
pluralised, with different sections taking on different tasks, from
counselling and providing legal aid to victims of sexual abuse to
struggles against liquor barons in some states, to making out a case for
women’s right to property, for participation in decision-making in all
forums, from the household to local self-government and the national
government, to arguing for reservations for women in elected bodies, to
defending gay, lesbian and transgender rights, to fighting against child
sexual abuse, to arguing for women’s right to their own bodies, to
reclaiming public spaces, to raising issues of domestic labour, to
catapulting concern for the informal sector. In response to the
challenges of religious and caste identities which have often divided
the movement, feminism itself has been transformed. Deepa Reddy (2005)
writes that feminists have fashioned a broad multicultural project in
response to the rise of religious nationalism, which is responsive to
the needs of local communities and draws upon global networks to
facilitate grass-roots initiatives for social change. The plural,
decentred, and often divided women’s movement has had a “spillover”
effect, and has progressively widened the analysis of patriarchy and
expanded the domain of struggles against this benighted system, even
though it has suffered setbacks on a number of occasions.
Whether campaigns for the delivery of social goods will be able to
generate transformative politics, or whether groups in the future will
take up the issues raised, broaden them, and build on prior
mobilisation, is debatable. No social movement dies out completely,
memories of the successes or non-successes of the movement remain to be
excavated and tapped by later generations of activists, who move in
other directions to deal with the basic problems confronted by people.
But that can happen only when the movement or the campaign catapults to
the forefront of political consciousness the structural constraints and
institutional contexts that have to be tackled for any meaningful change
to come about in people’s lives. This current civil society
mobilisation simply does not recognise this point. That is why civil
society campaigns have never attained the status of social movements.
In a significant intervention in social movement literature three
decades ago, Manuel Castells (1983) had argued that most urban-based
social movements are not about restructuring the production relations
that lie at the core of social relations. Urban social movements combine
struggles over collective consumption with struggles for community
culture and political self-determination. Although his analysis
reflected the dynamics of urban movements in the 1960s and 1970s in
South America – the Squatters movement for land, for instance –
Castells’ analysis of the nature of contestation remains valid.
Struggles for collective consumption are not over power relations in
society, but about the capacity of the state to deliver social goods to
the people, or the lack thereof. The state is not seen as a condensate
of power that has to be battled, or as a necessary institution for the
reproduction of an exploitative capitalism, but as a benign provider of
social goods. And citizens become consumers. These social goods may not
reach the constituency they are meant for, but that is generally
attributed to a mega phenomenon termed corruption, a term that has been
granted the status of an explanatory concept by civil society agents.
That the fault may lie in the Indian state’s inability to conceive and
administer a comprehensive programme to ensure well-being is not even
called into question. Intrinsic to urban-based campaigns in civil
society is a deep inability to deal with power relations or undermine
social hierarchies. Leaders of these campaigns have become stakeholders
in the system of power, and civil society has forgotten that it is
supposed to critically engage with the state, hold it to its
obligations, but desist from seeing the existing state as the prime
remedy for the ills of the human condition.
Above all, the fact that the demands made by civil society
organisations have been easily incorporated into the agenda of political
parties, and even made the “unique selling point” of the Congress
Party, should cause some disquiet. These organisations are consulted
when parties draft their electoral agendas, and they are incorporated
into the state structure if the party comes into power. This by itself
is testimony to their non-threatening claims. Consider that groups that
make claims that challenge the democratic credentials of the government
in some way, that protest land acquisition in resource-rich tribal
areas, for instance, are hardly likely to find representation in
consultative or policymaking bodies established by the government.
The uncomfortable fact is that once civil society leaderships become
partners in policymaking, their capacity to critically engage with the
state, never too sharp at the best of times, is further blunted. The
limits of current modes of civic engagement are sadly apparent. Civil
society organisations, or, more specifically, non-government
organisations, have been around for at least 25 years, and the problems
of the poor in India continue to mount. All that the state has done is
pacify the poor through a handout here and a handout there.
There was a time when social movements challenged the Indian state.
There was a time when the relationship between this mode of politics,
which concentrated on mobilising people, and the state was antagonistic
and sharp. This was a time when the institutionalisation and
professionalisation of civil society organisations was low, and emphasis
was placed on the mobilisation and conceptualisation of alternatives.
Today, the neo-liberal state pays attention to campaigns routed through
the Court, its heart bleeds for the poor and the marginalised, it drafts
strategies to incorporate civil society leaders and transform them into
stakeholders of the system, and concentrates on social legislation from
above. Opportunities for critical engagement with this mode of dealing
with intractable political problems have weakened dramatically. The
state now steers partnerships with the third sector to address poverty,
and foster welfare dependency. Even as the discourse on poverty and
sufficiency captures the attention of the media and of other civil
society organisations, it is forgotten that it is not sufficiency but
equality that lies at the heart of democracy. Whatever challenge civil
society is capable of producing within the limits of what is politically
permissible has been, in effect, further tamed.
Perhaps civil society campaigns are fated to disappear into the
twilight of politics because parties have begun to pay attention to the
concerns voiced by them. If not, what is the legacy that will be passed
on to subsequent forms of social protest? The uncomfortable truth is
that campaigns lose their identity and their critical edge the moment
they become institutionalised, and are forced to bargain for piecemeal
social reform within the existing political system, with its warts and
its flaws left intact.
Conclusion
Liberal democratic theorists, always suspicious of the proclivities
of the state to expand power at the expense of citizens’ freedom, and
equally sceptical of the ability of political parties to represent the
popular will, have argued that citizens must exercise constant
vigilance. This is the basic precondition for a thriving democracy,
because the best of democracies degenerate in the absence of
participation and accountability. Moreover, the right to participation
in public life is arguably a basic political right. In India, a number
of campaigns in civil society have striven to raise the status of
Directive Principles of State Policy to that of fundamental rights. In
the process, however, both the state and civil society organisations
have come to concentrate on the provision of minimal social measures,
rather than take on inequality. It is little wonder that they lack what
Amitabh Behar terms “a big idea”.
Notes
1 This article is part of a larger comparative project on the
experiences of India and Scandinavian countries in the field of
transformative politics. The results of the project are currently being
written up under the joint co-authorship of Olle Tornquist, John Harriss
and Fredrik Engelstadt.
2 Democracy is a protean concept and theorists tend to disagree on
what the fundamental presuppositions of democracy are. Let us therefore
take the mode in which democracy presents itself to the collective gaze:
As embodying the principle of universal adult franchise as our
conceptual anchor. And let us then interpret the principle of
one-person-one-vote as a metaphor for a deeper concept that is the
mainstay of democracy, that is, political equality. It follows that each
person, irrespective of gender, caste, class, or ethnic origin, has to
be treated equally by the state and, by implication, by society, the
market, and the household, unless there is justifiable reason to treat
her/him otherwise, historically handed down disadvantages, for instance.
This is a negative right, the right not to be discriminated against.
The positive avatar of this right can be read as follows: Each person
has the right to participate in the multiple transactions of society –
from voting in elections, to accessing structures of opportunity, to
joining in a public debate, as an equal. It follows that background
inequalities should be addressed by the democratic state with
seriousness. The assumption is that the burdens and the advantages of
society must be distributed as equally and as fairly as possible among
citizens. This is a necessary precondition for realising the idea of
democracy.
( Neera Chandhoke (neera.chandhoke@gmail. com) retired from the Delhi University after four decades of teaching political science)
