Session #2: Friday, 9 January, 15.45 – 17.30 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Niraja Gopal Jayal, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU (niraja.jayal@gmail.com)
Chair/discussant: Manoranjan Mohanty, Institute of Chinese Studies at CSDS and Council for Social Development (dr_mohanty@yahoo.com)
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
This article analyzes the increased used of the Courts and rights- framed discourses as political tools. It studies different types of legal mobilization strategies that are taking place in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica and Mexico and the way social actors are using these strategies. The article demonstrates the ambiguous political impact of this form of intervention. It shows, on the one hand, how it is used to readdress public policies, to halt the implementation of certain decisions and to overcome collective action restrictions. And, on the other, how its use displaces political debates from representative bodies, places social actors beyond the representative linkage and weakens the representatives' authority. The article concludes that legal mobilization has become an additional tool for making politics and that its consequences- social disorder, maintenance of the status quo or expanded social integration- depend on specific contingencies of political processes.
The idea of the secular and the practice of secularism in post-Independence India are regarded by influential critics of modernity as signs of elitism. Taken further this critique has divided citizens along the axes of the secular-religious, civil society-political society, elites-subalterns, nation-people, capital-community. The divide emerges as the aporia of democracy in the postcolonial secular state. In this paper I wish to put political theory and the literary text in English in India in conversation with each other with a view to showing: one, that they are in conversation with each other; and two, that the literary is a site in which this confrontation may be worked out with more ambiguous outcomes than those we are likely to encounter in the more tendentiously directed theory.
For the most part Indian writing in English is secular in orientation, secularism being the ideology that goes with the territory. Its major concern has been to deplore religious intolerance and its consequential violence, attributing both to a breakdown of secular rationalism. A different trend, however, new and still incipient, is beginning to emerge, one that would acknowledge and give credence to the religious beliefs of the non-elite, as in Amitav Ghosh’s Hungry Tide and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (in the Ayesha episode). Respect for popular religion is one of the possible ways in which the secular English-language novelist is likely to seek to identify with, or at least approach, the ‘people’. Despite its openness to the people in this way however, this new trend could be problematic at two levels at least. We might wonder if subaltern faith can be represented by the secular writer without condescension, or in a mode that is other than merely ethnographic. Ghosh’s novel, I think, fails to, although it is an interesting failure. At another level-- we might call it the political-- we could legitimately question the bad faith, literally, of the intellectual who espouses the irrationalism of the other, whether as sentimental cultural relativism or as political radicalism, without counting its costs for the other. At the empirically observable level, religion and non-religion-- or however we term religion’s other, as secularism, atheism, rationalism, skepticism, or materialism-- are more mixed among the Indian classes than the schema proposed by critics of Enlightenment thought would suggest. Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri, coming out of a conjuncture and literary background different from the novels above, is an interesting English-language text to consider in this context. Kolatkar’s irreligious irony owes something no doubt to Enlightenment thought and English education but is not reducible to these sources. It signals a secular attitude that is native to and comfortable with an ‘Indian tradition’ in ways that reveal something of the heterogeneity of Indian secularism(s).
This paper is about two closely related categories of citizenship claims that would normally be uninteresting to the political theorist, for these are claims that fulfil the conventionally prescribed threshold conditions for initiating a debate about citizenship only partially or not at all. The citizenship claims discussed in this paper emanate from migrant refugees in the border districts of western India: from those who have been denizens of the country for several years, and are awaiting the grant of formal citizenship, and also from those among them who have been granted legal citizenship but remain disappointed with its inability to afford them access to basic needs and rights. At issue here therefore are claims to legal citizenship and juridical personhood, but also to the more substantive rights, including the claim of moral personhood, that citizenship is presumed to entail.
The case of the Rajasthan migrants speaks to two debates that have dominated theorizing about citizenship in recent times Firstly, it draws our attention to the sterility of the civic universalism vs cultural particularism way of casting the citizenship debate. Second, contrary to the assumption that social citizenship renders citizens into passive recipients of welfare, the fieldwork suggests that social citizenship does not necessarily encourage a depoliticised notion of citizenship, or of passive dependence on the state.