Session #1: Friday, 9 January, 13.30 - 15.15 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Niraja Gopal Jayal, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU (niraja.jayal@gmail.com)
Chair/discussant: Professor Neera Chandhoke, Department of Political Science, University of Delhi (neera.chandhoke@gmail.com )
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
The text discusses the different meanings that citizenship has assumed in Brazil in the last few decades. Its main argument is that, in the situation of a perverse confluence between on the one hand, the neo liberal project established along the last fifteen years and, on the other, a democratizing, participatory project that emerges from the resistance to the authoritarian regime and the struggle for the deepening of democracy, the common reference to citizenship, used by different political actors, installs an apparent homogeneity, obscuring differences and diluting the conflict between those projects.
In this paper I focus on both the exercising of agency by citizens – claiming and operationalising citizenship - and on an assessment of the costs that are attached to this exercise in specific political contexts and modes of struggles. I argue that when analyzing or measuring citizen agency we cannot afford to overlook the risks that are accrued in so doing. All of us take risks in our everyday lives and when we choose to exercise our citizenship rights in moments of struggles in and against the state. A plethora of state and non-state led programmes are being developed daily where citizens are mobilized in the name of empowerment. In this paper I argue that when developing programmes that might empower citizens seeking change, we must not overlook the perils of participation. When encouraging civic agents to act to bring about social change their vulnerabilities, which can make them victims as well as actors in their struggles for empowerment, need to be carefully assessed. By insisting upon counting costs, we can also insist upon the recognition of structural barriers to empowerment. In so doing, we can re-politicise how we regard agency as well as the empowerment that might accrue as a result of exercising it. This would then allow the focus of civic-driven strategies of social change to include not only individuals but also contexts in which individuals and groups function; not only recognition of disadvantage that needs to be overcome but also the redistribution of advantages that are needed to shift inequalities in our societies. And finally, we will then see structures of power (states) and agency and agents (citizens) as binary opposites but as co-constitutive.
At the constitutive juncture known to us as Independence, which forms the temporal starting point of the paper, a tacit revolution surfaced as a particular version of the Indian nation state abruptly carved out space by simultaneously consuming and alienating antagonistic narratives and subject positions. Alongside the attainment of sovereignty and the demise of colonial rule, the enactment of universal citizenship was a momentous element of Independence. As the paper endeavours to demonstrate a range of exclusions was, however, inscribed into the idea and definition of citizenship. In order to explore the form, content and connectedness of these exclusions the analysis revisits the Constituent Assembly debates that took place between 1946-1949. The debates offer a chance to reconstruct conceptualisations and depictions that enveloped the nation state at the time of its formal inception. A scrutiny of the debates opens up the possibility to investigate the way in which the discursive bifurcation of tradition/modernity, the ideational nexus between the past, the present and the future as well as the conceptual intersection between sameness/difference were delineated and embodied. One argument advanced in the paper is that citizenship was one of a number of key nodal points that became entwined and filled with the deliberations on these three themes; another that the concept of citizen was fractured in its innermost kernel. It did not, in other words, principally depend on the other or an outside for its completion.
It is conventionally argued that the independence of India foremost represented continuity. A tenable demur to most accounts exploring the immediate aftermath of decolonisation is that ‘the new’, in spite of the contemporary assertions that freedom came incomplete, did arrive. Coeval with the transition from one order to another, a definite and radical break transpired—both of the institutional framework and of what it meant to be a subject within, and a member of, the novel polity. It is equally noteworthy that certain trajectories and sensibilities as regards identity formation, which have come to demarcate the parameters of power and the contours of regulatory regimes throughout the postcolonial period, were articulated and laid down already in the early years of independence. The sedimentation of exclusions and fractures was primarily marked by two currents. On the one hand, the exertion to define citizenship was coeval with the ongoing process of both deliberate and insentient amnesia. From August 1947 to early 1950, there was a seeming move away from attempts to allow the colonial experience to overtly influence the present. Effort was devoted to the ‘undoing’ of it; state operations and modalities bore witness to an endeavour to infuse novelty and to demarcate by way of forgetting. On the other hand, the initial discursive closure, coinciding with the promulgation of the Constitution in 1950, entailed multiple fissures as it silenced a range of identities, hence, signifying them as alien and as abject entities. The potential plasticity and diversity that, to a certain extent, had defined the discourse on the nation prior to Independence abated. Notions of universalism, community and the popular that failed to harmonise with dominant and sanctioned rationalities were silenced.
The figure of the citizen as it emerged with modernity was not only constituted legally and politically as the autonomous and sovereign self, it also produced the ‘constitutive outsiders’ denoting differential or layered inclusions. The code of citizenship marks out the other, reproducing and re-inscribing it continually through legal and judicial pronouncement, in a relationship of contradictory cohabitation. From 1947 to 2005, when the latest amendment in the citizenship laws in India were put in place, there have been several layers of expansion and simultaneous/synchronous contraction of the substantive basis of citizenship in India. In this paper one wishes to slice off from the trajectory of citizenship in India, three alephian moments, to unravel the manner in the past weaves into the present and also captures in it projections for future. These three moments are: citizenship at the commencement of the Indian Republic and the enactment of the Citizenship Act of 1955, the amendment in the Citizenship Act in 1986 following the Assam Accord and focusing on the specific contexts of the ethnic struggle in Assam, and the amendment of the Citizenship Act in 2003 and 2005, resulting in the insertion of the category of the overseas citizen of India. Since each alephian moment projects a space-compressed coalescent present, the process of unravelling will show how the changes in citizenship laws are imbricated in the politics of place-making. In each case it will examine the cartographic anxieties associated with the delineation of the national-space, the assertion of specific of ethno-spaces, and the manner in which extra-territoriality of citizenship marked out in 2003/2005, is inextricably wound up with the consummation of a process of formalisation of citizenship based on blood and descent.