Vernacular Rights Cultures

Vernacular Rights Cultures offers a bold challenge to the dominant epistemologies

and political practices of global human rights. It argues that decolonising global
human rights calls for a serious epistemic accounting of the historically and
politically specific encounters with human rights, and of the forms of world-making
that underpin the stakes and struggles for rights and human rights around the
globe. Through combining ethnographic investigations with political theory and
philosophy, it goes beyond critiquing the Eurocentrism of global human rights,
in order to document and examine the different political imaginaries, critical
conceptual vocabularies, and gendered political struggles for rights and justice that
animate subaltern mobilisations in ‘most of the world’. Vernacular Rights Cultures
demonstrates that these subaltern struggles call into being different and radical
ideas of justice, politics and citizenship, and open up different possibilities and
futures for human rights.
Sumi Madhok
Madhok isisProfessor
AssociateofProfessor of Transnational
Political Theory and GenderGender
Studies Studies at the
at the London
London
School ofSchool of Economics
Economics and Political
and Political Science.Science. She
She is the is theofauthor
author of Rethinking
Rethinking Agency:
Agency:
Gender, Gender, Developmentalism
Developmentalism and Rightsand(2013)
Rightsand
(2013), co-editor
co-editor of Gender,
of Gender, Agency
Agency and
and Coercion
Coercion (2013),
(2013) andSAGE
and The The Sage Handbook
Handbook of Feminist
of Feminist Theory
Theory (2014).
(2014).
 Vernacular Rights Cultures
The Politics of Origins, Human Rights,
and Gendered Struggles for Justice

Sumi Madhok
University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
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© Sumi Madhok 2021
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
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First published 2021
Printed in India
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Madhok, Sumi, author.
Title: Vernacular rights cultures : the politics of origins, human rights,
and gendered struggles for justice / Sumi Madhok.
Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020050762 (print) | LCCN 2020050763 (ebook) | ISBN
9781108832625 (hardback) | ISBN 9781108961844 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Human rights--Government policy. | Ontology--History. |
Social justice.
Classification: LCC JC571 .M3244 2021 (print) | LCC JC571 (ebook) | DDC
323--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050762
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050763
ISBN 978-1-108-83262-5 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
For Alaka Madhok, Ireel Jasmin and Tara Leichil
three extraordinary women …
 Contents
Contents
Contents

Acknowledgements ix
Acknowledgements ix
Acknowledgements
1. An Introduction: Vernacular Rights Cultures and Decolonising ix
1. Human
An Introduction: Vernacular Rights Cultures and Decolonising
Rights Vernacular 1
1. An Introduction:
Human Rights Rights Cultures and Decolonising 1
2. Human
Human Rights
Rights, Political Agency, and Refusing the Politics of Origins 1
34
2. Refusing the Politics
Human Rights, of Origins
Political Agency, and Refusing the Politics of Origins 34
2.
3. Human Rights,
Assembling PoliticalHistorical
a Feminist Agency, and Refusing
Ontology the Politics
of Haq in Southof Origins
Asia 34
71
3. Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 71
3. The
4. Assembling
Politicala Imaginaries
Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq
of Haq: ‘Citizenship’ in South Asia
and ‘Truth’ 71
99
4. The Political Imaginaries of Haq: ‘Citizenship’ and ‘Truth’ 99
4.
5. The Political
Resisting Imaginaries of Haq:
Developmentalism and the‘Citizenship’ and ‘Truth’
Military: Haq as a Cosmological 99
5. Idea
Resisting
and Developmentalism
an Islamic Ideal and the Military: Haq as a Cosmological 144
5. Idea
Resisting
and anDevelopmentalism
Islamic Ideal and the Military: Haq as a Cosmological 144
6. Idea and an Diversity,
Conceptual Islamic IdealFeminist Historical Ontology and a Critical 144
6. Reflexive
Conceptual Diversity,
Politics of Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical
Location 173
6. Reflexive
Conceptual Diversity,
Politics Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical
of Location 173
Reflexive
References Politics of Location 173
185
References
Index 185
211
References
Index 185
211
Index 211
 Acknowledgements

I write my acknowledgements at a time that moves in rhythm with the anxieties

and urgencies of the pandemic. In this radically rearranged time, life, living and
work, I am even more deeply appreciative of the innumerable acts of thoughtfulness,
kindness, encouragement, generosity and care that has enabled me to stay with
the book over the many years it has taken to write it. And it is with particular
joy and pleasure that I acknowledge my debts, and not least those that have been
accumulated during the most recent time of writing this book, a time that has
coincided with that of the pandemic
I must begin with a grateful acknowledgement of an Andrew W. Mellon
Postdoctoral fellowship in 2005, as that is when it all began. A couple of years later,
a small grant from the British Academy enabled fieldwork in India and Pakistan,
and this fieldwork was allowed to deepen through a grant from the LSE Annual
Fund. And, finally, a Leverhulme Research Fellowship during 2015–16, together
with some sabbatical leave from my teaching responsibilities allowed me to go
back to the field, and to also weave the different strands of the research together.
The book’s insistence on bringing ethnographic sensibilities to bear on theoretical
and conceptual work could only become possible through the attentiveness and
generosity of so many people. Over two decades, the indomitable, inspirational and
courageous Kavita Srivastava has unfailingly provided insightful and important
insights into my fieldwork, and also piercingly intelligent and astute conversations
on rights movements. For many other such thoughtful conversations both in and off
the field in India and Pakistan, I am also grateful to Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Hamseera
Bano, Amitabh Behar, Bharat Bhati and Marudhar Ganga Society Jodhpur, Kiran
Dubey, Mohini Devi, Bhanwari Devi, Harmi Bai, Napi Bai, Chandan Jain, Piyush
Javeria, Dharam Chand Kher, P. L. Mimroth, Aparna Sahay, Sunny Sebastian,
Sujit Sarkar, Bharat Vishakha, Kotra Adivasi Vikas Manch, Sister Alveena and
Sasvika Society in Ajmer,
Ajmer, and
and Sarpanch
sarpanch Tej Singh and Sarpanch
sarpanch Narayan Singh. I
am particularly grateful to the Centre for Dalit Human Rights in Jaipur for making
their publications and resource materials available to me.
I have been very privileged to have very generous and close readers of my work,
and, for this I am indebted to Robin Dunford, Mary Evans, Clare Hemmings,
Marsha Henry, Niraja Gopal Jayal, Kimberly Hutchings, Engin F. Isin, Shail
x Acknowledgements

Mayaram, Kate Nash, Diane Perrons, Anne Phillips, Shirin M. Rai, Leticia
Sabsay, Wendy Sigle, Kalpana Wilson and Sadie Wearing. As the book was
nearing completion, I had the wonderful honour of having two book chapters read
at two research workshops at the LSE in 2018 and 2019, one led by Sherene H.
Razack and another by Isabella Bakker. I am very grateful to both for their careful
engagements with the book, and also to the workshop participants, especially,
Emma Spruce, Ece Kobaciak, Jenny Chanfreau, Kate Millar and Georgina
Waylen. Some of the book’s arguments were also presented at the universities
of Nottingham, Edinburgh, Warwick, Delhi, Frankfurt, LSE, Lund, Uppsala,
Tampere, Helsinki, Oxford and Loughborough, and the book is richer for these
engagements. I have also been fortunate to receive research assistance from Azmat
Bashir, Billy Holzberg, Julia Hartviksen and Nazish Zahoor, all brilliant and
careful researchers.
careful researchersBilly HolzbergBilly
themselves. read Holzberg
the first fullread
draft, andfirst
the his insights andand
full draft, careful
his
reading and
insights madecareful
a realreading
differencemade to athe
realsubsequent
difference to ones.
the Hazel Johnstone,
subsequent Sarah
ones. Hazel
Quraishi, Olga
Johnstone, SarahNunez Miret,
Quraishi, OlgaAnia Plomien,
Nunez Miret,Lindsay Simmonds,
Ania Plomien, PriyaSimmonds,
Lindsay Raghavan,
Nour Almazidi
Priya Raghavan,and NourNazanin Shahrokni
Almazidi gave generous
and Nazanin Shahrokniadvicegave
andgenerous
encouragement
advice
at many
and crucial moments.
encouragement at many crucial moments.
The intense phase of writing the book coincided with a new MSc course on
‘Gender and Human Rights’ Rights’ that
that II introduced
introducedatinthe 2017.
LSE And teaching
in 2017. Andthe course
teaching
has been
the coursea real joy and
has been a privilege,
a real joy and mostly because
a privilege, mostlyof the wonderful
because of thestudents
wonderfulthe
course attracts
students every attracts
the course year. And thisyear.
every year,And
the extraordinary
this year, the acts of care, kindness,
extraordinary acts of
generosity
care, and generosity
kindness, critical thinking of mythinking
and critical studentsofleft mymestudents
quite undone,
left me and quiteI
acknowledge
undone, and Iallacknowledge
their generosity, and especially
all their generosity,the
andmusic playlists
especially thethey
musiccollectively
playlists
curated
they for me during
collectively curated thefor
pandemic,
me during andthewhich became and
pandemic, the soundtracks
which became for the
last stages offor
soundtracks writing
the lastthis book.
stages In particular,
of writing I want
this book. to thank IBemnet
In particular, want toAgata,
thank
Cecilia Cordova-Liendo,
Bemnet Tama Knight, Armand
Agata, Cecilia Cordova-Liendo, Azra binArmand
Tama Knight, Azlira, Ajoke
Azra binBodunde,
Azlira,
Paromita
Ajoke Bathija,Paromita
Bodunde, Isabel Medem,
Bathija,Kylie
IsabelAndrews,
Medem, Kylie Corina Rueda, Corina
Andrews, Erica Vigano,
Rueda,
Sofia Vigano,
Erica Ercolessi, Philip
Sofia Edge,Philip
Ercolessi, Emma Hossein
Edge, Emma and Valentina
Hossein and Contreras.
Valentina Contreras.
Qudsiya Ahmed and her team at Cambridge Cambridge University
University Press have been a gift, gift,
and II am
amgrateful
gratefultotothem
themforfor bringing
their this book
many efforts into thethis
in bringing world.
book into the world.
My family in Delhi, Jaipur and Sheffield have been wonderful pillars of
strength. My mother Alaka Madhok’s generosity of spirit, and unwavering
insistence on individual and collective action towards making a concrete and
material difference in the world, is an inspiration. Rajat Madhok and Deeva Singh
are the best friends and fellow travellers one could hope for. And, Jayanta, Jasmin
and Tara show me generous possibilities for living and loving in a kinder, equal
and a more just world every day.

Sumi Madhok
Sheffield, October 2020
An Introduction 1

1 An Introduction
Vernacular Rights Cultures and
Decolonising Human Rights

Haq is the Arabic word for a right. It is also the word for a right in Urdu, Persian,
Turkish and Hindustani. The first recorded existence of haq can be traced to
classical Hebrew and it is also found in the older Semitic languages such as
Aramaic and Mendian. Over the centuries, the word has travelled across the
globe to become the principal word to signify a right in South Asia, the Middle
East and North Africa. Haq or hukk appears in Hindustani and Urdu lexicon
through the influence of Persian in the Indian subcontinent where it cuts
across geographical, religious and linguistic boundaries to become the principal
word deployed to claim rights by subaltern groups in northwestern India and
Pakistan. Not surprisingly, in the course of its travels, it has gathered complex
meanings and iterations that inform political imaginaries, subjectivities and
political cultures of rights and rights claim-making. What can the presence
of haq in the vernacular and its use tell us about contemporary articulations,
practices and discourses of rights and human rights in ‘most of the world’? What
can it tell us about the different contexts of rights, meanings of rights, and about
the conceptual languages of rights in ‘other’ parts of the globe? What does an
attention to haq tell us about the forms of rights politics, subjectivities and the
processes of political subjectivation these engender? And, furthermore, what
can it tell us about the ‘other’ political cultures, imaginaries, contestations and
struggles for rights? How can scholarly investigations of contemporary struggles
for haq inform global human rights scholarship? And how useful is the global
human rights framework for conceptually capturing political struggles for haq?
In South Asia, haq is a key literal and conceptual term used to signify a
right or an entitlement in contemporary subaltern political struggles. Many
at the forefront of these multitudinous subaltern rights mobilisations in the
Indian subcontinent are engaged in struggles for their ‘life rights’. While
some are resisting precarity and dispossession heralded in by neoliberal
2 Vernacular Rights Cultures

developmentalism and its championing of privatisation of natural resources,

others are struggling to redefine the substantive content of existing formal
constitutional guarantees and are mobilising to put in place new and expanded
entitlements. What different stories of human rights would we tell if we
produced human rights scholarship from the standpoint of the stakes and
the struggles of these subaltern groups at the frontline of human rights
mobilisations demanding haq in ‘most of the world’?1 What difference would
such a standpoint make to the stories of human rights that we are accustomed
to telling and hearing? What would human rights scholarship look like? What
kinds of disciplinary and scholarly labours would it involve? And what kinds
of epistemic erasures of human rights politics would this disrupt and what
kinds of new possibilities for imagining and expanding rights and human
rights would it bring into view?
By asking these questions, this book produces a perspectival shift in the study
of human rights—a shift in standpoint that is explicitly oriented towards the
study of vernacular rights cultures. The vernacular political cultures of rights
documented in this book are neither ‘modes of literary’ (Pollock 2000: 593),
nor are they ‘print cultures’ (Mir 2011) or indeed, involved in ‘ways of doing
things with texts’ (Pollock 2000: 594). They are active sites of subaltern politics,
struggles and contestations over rights and human rights. And, although, there
is some literary production at these sites, 2 this book predominantly tracks and
documents the oral narratives of subaltern groups engaged in contemporary
struggles for rights entitlements in order to provide an epistemic accounting
of the political imaginaries, gendered subjectivities and critical vocabularies
of rights and political agency that inform these struggles. By all accounts,
these are non-elite, particular and unprivileged sites of rights articulation
and politics. They are therefore, not the ‘universal’, the ‘cosmopolitan’ and
the ‘global’ but rather signal the unequal epistemic power relations between
global human rights and the politics of vernacular rights cultures, and this
is why the latter are ‘the vernacular’ and not ‘the global’. Vernacular rights
cultures do not ‘emerge’ ‘but are “made”’3 through subaltern political struggles
that are intersectional, gendered and intensely conflictual. In the book, I refer
to the subaltern as a specifically material, gendered and epistemic location in
historically specific power relations that are ‘relational’, ‘intersectional’ and
‘dynamic’ (Nilsen and Roy 2015).4 As historically specific, gendered and
material locations and relations, the subaltern, as a group and as a politics,
have increasingly registered their presence as resistors, activists and also as
grassroots mobilisations5 but rarely as epistemic sites with their specific political
An Introduction 3

imaginaries, critical vocabularies of world-making and conceptual languages

of rights and entitlements. And therefore, even while subaltern historical and
political presence is increasingly noted, their epistemic presence is often actively
ignored or wilfully refused and erased.
A focus on vernacular rights cultures enables the following: First, to attend
to the urgent problem of the lack of conceptual diversity by facilitating the
production of conceptual work from and in different geographical and ‘non-
standard’ background contexts and conditions, that is, contexts outside those in of
which concepts are standardly produced, described and visualised. If anything,
building conceptual diversity is the key intellectual project of vernacular rights
cultures. Second, to shift dominant epistemic and methodological perspectives,
from telling mainly state-centric stories about histories of institutional and
legal progress of human rights and about the conduct of nation states and
large organisations in the international arena to examining the multiple and
differential circuits of geopolitical power within which global human rights
operate. Third, it allows a focus on the different conceptual languages invoked
by subaltern groups to articulate entitlements. Fourth, it facilitates assessments
of how rights operate politically and the political cultures they produce at
different geographical locations. And, finally, it allows to put in place serious
epistemic, conceptual and methodological attention to the different political
imaginaries, gendered relations and citizenship practices and subjectivities
that come into being as a result of subaltern rights politics. This book orients
this shift in perspective from exclusively institutionally focused studies on
human rights to the actual work that rights and human rights politics does
in subaltern settings in ‘most of the world’: a shift in perspective towards the
study of vernacular rights cultures.
The word haq provides me with my cue for studying vernacular rights
cultures. For nearly two decades, I have been tracking the deployment of haq
through the deserts of Rajasthan in northwest India where different subaltern
groups have been mobilising to demand rights to food, public information,
gender and caste equality and employment from the state, and Adivasi6 groups
are demanding rights to sacred and ancestral forests, streams and lands. The
word haq, however, does not recognise national borders and formations; if
anything, it undermines them. Consequently, I have been ethnographically
tracking the deployment of haq within subaltern mobilisations in India and
in Pakistan; from Rajasthan’s eastern regions, which are mostly rocky, thorn
scrub-forested sand-filled
scrub forested and sand terrainsto
filled terrains to the
the Aravalli
Aravalli hills
hills in
in its
its south, where
the dry tropical forests burst into thick lush undergrowth in the monsoons.
4 Vernacular Rights Cultures

And, tracking it further across the border and into the green fertile plains of
the Punjab in Pakistan, a land fed by South Asia’s five large rivers, where the
word haq is mobilised by very poor marginal peasants, who are taking on the
great might of Pakistan’s military over their struggle for land ownership to
emerge as the most significant working class struggle against the military in
postcolonial Pakistan.
Through
Through such such an an ethnographic
ethnographic tracking
tracking of haq across different subaltern
mobilisations in northern India and this
mobilisations in India and Pakistan, book puts
Pakistan, this together
book putsa conceptual
together a
account of haq
conceptual and tells
account a different
of haq and tellsstory of human
a different rights.
story This different
of human rights. story
This
of humanstory
different rights documents
of human rightsthe different the
documents political
differentimaginaries of haq that
political imaginaries
animate
of haq that rights struggles
animate of struggles
rights subaltern of groups in the
subaltern region,
groups in and
the the waysand
region, in
which
the ways these disrupt,
in which speak
these back, expand
disrupt, and also
speak back, help decolonise
expand and also help global human
decolonise
rights human
global talk. In rights
particular, it documents
talk. In particular, itthe political the
documents imaginaries of haq that
political imaginaries
underpin
of haq thatthe claims for
underpin the rights
claimsor forhaq articulated
rights by subaltern
or haq articulated by and very poor
subaltern and
women,
very poorincluding
women,Dalit 7 and Adivasi
including Dalit7 and women, within
Adivasi grassroots
women, withinmobilisations
grassroots
demanding
mobilisations rights to food,rights
demanding employment,
to food, public information,
employment, publicaccountability
information,
and land rights and
accountability in rurallandmovements in India
rights in rural and Pakistan.
movements Tracking
in India and haq across
Pakistan.
India
Trackingand haq
Pakistan
acrossallowsIndiausandto view the dispossession,
Pakistan allows us to view exclusion and privilege
the dispossession,
that uphold
exclusion andcontemporary power relations
privilege that uphold contemporary in thepower
regionrelations
and also in the
the nature
region
of
andresistance mounted
also the nature by subaltern
of resistance groupsby
mounted against
subalternthese. The deployment
groups against these. of
rights and humanofrights
The deployment rights byandthese
human subaltern
rights by groups
these show up the
subaltern groupslegalshow
and
political
up the legalpromise of rights
and political but also
promise their fraught,
of rights but also conflictual,
their fraught, gendered and
conflictual,
precarious
gendered and nature to reveal
precarious the specific
nature to reveal configurations of power within
the specific configurations which
of power
rights
withinand human
which rights rights
and operate,
human rightsand the particular
operate, and work they do inwork
the particular different
they
historical contexts.
do in different A gender
historical lens inAstudying
contexts. gender lensvernacular rights vernacular
in studying cultures is
vital,
rightsnot least because
cultures is vital,demands
not least for gender
because equalityfor
demands or gender
haq for women
equalityand for
or haq
those identifying
for women and for outside
those the binary gender
identifying outsidedivide is a question
the binary genderthat almost
divide is a
invariably
question that needs to be
almost begged needs
invariably separately
to beandbeggedseldom occurs and
separately organically
seldom
within citizen mobilisations.
occurs organically within citizen Moreover,
mobilisations.bringing a gendered
Moreover, bringingperspective
a gendered is
to demonstrate
perspective is tonot only an awareness
demonstrate not only an of awareness
the powerofrelations
the power thatrelations
govern
political
that govern struggles
political butstruggles
also of butthe also
intersectional and conflictual
of the intersectional nature of
and conflictual
rights
naturepolitics—a politics that
of rights politics—a for marginalised
politics groups is always
that for marginalised groups aismatter
alwaysofa
political
matter ofstruggle.
political struggle.

Decolonising Human Rights

In the last two decades, human rights have captured the scholarly imagination.
In some critical strands of this contemporary human rights discourse, however,
An Introduction 5

one is able to discern an unmistakable strain of wariness and reflexivity.

The wariness owes in large part to the paradoxical, alienating, exclusionary
and politically conservative effects of global human rights, and the growing
reflexivity can be traced to increasing calls for more empirical research on
human rights and for studying the different normative meanings and practices
of rights in different contexts. In some sections, this reflexivity has also led to
calls to decolonise human rights (Gilroy 2010; Suárez-Krabbe 2016; Dunford
2016; Maldonado-Torres 2017). The question of decolonising human rights
is part of a larger project to decolonise academia and academic scholarship.
There are different views on what decolonising might mean and involve. For
some scholars, decolonisation is a noun and is not a ‘metaphor’ for ‘social justice
projects’ (Tuck and Yang 2012: 1). Here, decolonisation is very clearly associated
with the question of Indigenous sovereignty and involves the ‘repatriation of
Indigenous land and life.’ Others understand decolonisation as challenging the
racialist and hetero-capitalist imperialist formations underpinning academia.
In this regard, their intervention is to produce ethical, epistemic and structural
transformations in the production of knowledge (Smith 1999; Wynter 2003;
de Sousa Santos 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2007, 2017; Gilroy 2010; Lugones
2010; Mignolo 2012; Connell 2014; Mbembe 2016; Mignolo and Walsh 2018;
Cusicanqui 2012). In recent years, the location of knowledge production has
emerged as an important question in debates that seek to decolonise knowledge
production with some scholars explicitly bringing their location in the ‘colonial
present’ under epistemic and ethical scrutiny to ask: ‘how do we understand
our locations in the colonial present, as we contemplate and work towards
the imperative of decolonization?’ (Vimalassery et al. 2016: 1). Others call
for a re-location of theory building to and from the Global South (Comaroff
and Comaroff 2012; Connell 2014) and the ‘third world’ (Mignolo 2018). I
acknowledge these important and critically significant interventions towards
‘doing theory from the global south’ but also suggest that the problem, however,
lies not so much at the level of theory production, for that simply reflects on
the patterns that one looks at and assumes, but at the level of concepts. In
other words, it is not so much the lack of diversity in theory production that
is the problem but the lack of diversity of conceptual production in different
parts of the globe which constitutes the difficulty at hand. There is a need for
different and a wide-ranging set of concepts that are able to describe different
worlds, practices and ethics and, therefore, different concepts need to be in
hand before the work of theory can proceed to describe the different patterns
of thinking that emerge from ‘most of the world’. For quite simply, there are
6 Vernacular Rights Cultures

not enough concepts in place to produce theorised accounts of phenomena and

of different and historically specific encounters with the world.
But what does it mean to decolonise human rights? In this book, I argue that
the work of decolonising human rights, which is mostly engaged in tracking
different genealogies and historical trajectories of rights, must be supplemented
by conceptual work aimed at capturing the gendered stakes and struggles
over rights and human rights in ‘most of the world’, without losing sight of
the global fields of power in which they operate and the power relations they
put in place and reproduce. This attention to conceptual work on rights and
human rights is crucial if we are to shift the epistemic centre of human rights
talk and politics. Now, of course, to produce alternative genealogies of human
rights is to produce a critique of the Eurocentered nature of historiography and
of philosophical discourses of human rights and their reflection within human
rights politics, laws and institutions (Gilroy 2010; Maldonado-Torres 2017).
These interventions are very important and significant in drawing attention
to the epistemic, institutional and normative power of global human rights.
However, we also require a theoretical framework that is able to capture the
generative and productive nature of rights and human rights discourses: to
produce not only political struggles on the ground but also particular political
imaginaries, subjectivities and gendered relations that contest and challenge
oppressive practices and relations and importantly, generate new visions of
justice. To insist on the conceptual descriptions of human rights in ‘most of
the world’ is to insist on the productivity of rights; the two are hardly separate
projects, even if they might have a slightly different focus.
But how to conceptually capture the politics of rights and human rights in
‘most of the world’? And how to undertake such a task and why does it matter?
Engaging these questions seriously is to commit oneself to telling those other
stories of rights and human rights; stories that fall outside of the hegemonic
institutionally focused accounts of global human rights. The feminist theorist
Clare Hemmings insightfully reminds us of the ‘importance of telling stories
differently’. Stories matter, she writes, ‘in part because of the ways in which
they intersect with wider institutionalizations …’ (Hemmings 2011: 1). This
book commits itself to telling different stories of rights and human rights
differently. The other stories of rights and human rights that appear in this
book are neither uncritically celebratory nor are they outrightly dismissive of
rights and human rights, but seek to excavate instead the power structures and
epistemic relations that produce such binary responses. These other stories
refuse originary frameworks and premises with their ascription of epistemic
An Introduction 7

and political agency to nation states and global human rights organisations
mostly based in the Global North. While recognising that nation states are
vital to meeting human rights obligations, they also contend that scholarly
judgements and narratives of rights and human rights do not begin and end
with accounts detailing with minute precision the myriad ways in which
nation states perform realpolitik over human rights. Instead, these stories
insist on holding nation states to account for their doing of human rights.
These are stories that refuse Eurocentric and originary discourses of human
rights to establish a different starting point: they bring into view subaltern
mobilisations that demand rights and human rights taking place in ‘most of
the world’. Through this epistemic standpoint, they engage in a serious and
sustained critique of Eurocentrism of global human rights discourse while
insisting on the productivity and creative dynamism of human rights struggles
and politics in ‘most of the world’. Finally, these other stories do not focus on
the ‘translations of global human rights’ alone but insist on documenting the
particular political imaginaries, gendered subjectivities and political cultures
of rights that come into being as a result of struggles over rights and human
rights. In short, these are the stories of vernacular rights cultures—and, are
also the stories that this book sets out to tell.
In particular, stories of vernacular rights cultures eschew three hegemonic
stories of human rights. Consider, for instance, how we have become
accustomed to speaking and hearing about human rights in terms of three
dominant visions: a particular temporality linked to their ‘origin’; of a particular
rights bearing subjectivity and legal personhood; and finally of particular
institutional structures
structuresand
andforms
forms of institutional
of institutional activity.
activity. That human
That human rights
rights originate
originate in the in the West and that human rights belong to, operate from
and perform for the West are a standard preoccupation of both celebratory
and critical human rights accounts. In effect, this politics of origins is the key
framework for thinking of human rights—shared by not only its celebrators
and detractors but also by critical and progressive scholarship on human rights.
The politics of origins is not without effects: it puts in place particular forms
of racial, epistemic and political erasures. The story of the politics of origins is
first and foremost a racial story. As scholars have noted, institutional histories
of racism haunt historical, philosophical and legal accounts of human rights.8
In more recent times, the politics of origins contributes to eclipsing the role
of anti-colonial movements against
anticolonial movements against imperial
imperial power,
power, preferring
preferring to
to focus on
the role of Western lawmakers and peacemakers,9 but also in epistemically
silencing the scale and momentum of contemporary rights mobilisations
8 Vernacular Rights Cultures

and claim-making across the globe. Its other epistemic effects include the
production of theoretical foreclosures and binary ‘cultural’ rights talk. These
are exemplified by the binary distinctions and hermetically sealed epistemic
borders that are readily sketched between what are seen as ‘Asian cultural
values’ and Western human rights, between universalist ideas of human
rights and culturally particularist preferences that do not rate human rights,
between choosing either economic development or human rights, and so forth.
The binarism of rights talk has led to a spectacular failure to pay attention to
the forms of rights politics, the political cultures and the modes of activism
engaged in by subaltern groups in ‘most of the world’—not least by nation
states who have deployed the binarisms of rights talk to silence democratic
aspirations to great effect. The lack of epistemic agency and authority accorded
to rights mobilisations in the Global South has led to a widespread time–space
provincialism in human rights scholarship with its predominant focus on
post–World War II Anglo-Euro-American stories of the growth and spread of
global governance, international law and international institutions and of the
‘global’ histories and politics of globalisation, neoliberalism and global non-
governmental organisations (NGOs), and, more recently, of accounts explicitly
focused on the pursuit of global justice and the growth of Western sponsored
international humanitarianism. These dominant stories of human rights that
populate conservative and liberal accounts but are also rehearsed by radical
democratic theorists (Balibar 2002; Rancière 2004; Brown 2015) have led to
a widespread acceptance of a depoliticisation thesis that not only silences and
eclipses accounts of the ongoing mobilisations for rights in ‘most of the world’
but has also resulted in the absence of at least two kinds of enquiries. First, it
has meant that (human) rights mobilisations in ‘most of the world’ have yet
to centrally preoccupy scholarship on human rights within radical democratic
theory and political philosophy, which continue to be predominantly focused
on the Euro-American experience of the ‘right to have rights’ and on the
paradoxes and aporias resulting from the founding or originary moments of
republicanism (that is, on the abstract theoretical and philosophical problems
set off by the French and the American revolutions). Second, despite the
growing awareness for a need for scholarly work on human rights and rights
in different parts of the globe, there exists a striking lack of scholarship that
is explicitly aimed at not only tracking alternative genealogies of human rights
but also producing conceptual work that captures the stakes and struggles over
rights and human rights besides being able to critically engage, challenge and
speak back to the scholarly field of global human rights. For instance, it is
An Introduction 9

certainly the case that, in recent years, there have been powerful critiques of
teleological and originary histories of human rights. However, these have not
opened the door to an acknowledgement of ‘other’ human rights stories and
struggles and, importantly, to how these other stories might expand theoretical
conceptual and empirical thinking on the meanings and work that human
rights do in different parts of the world.
Vernacular Rights Cultures sidesteps the politics of origins. As a conceptual
intervention, the lens of vernacular rights cultures refuses the theoretical
foreclosures and binary deadlock of mainstream discussions on human rights to
argue that vernacular rights cultures are not wholly derivative from or entirely
oppositional to Western notions and conventions of human rights or, indeed,
entirely discrete in form. This is not an argument of there being hermetically
sealed or ‘pure’, authentic and orginary rights traditions. In fact, quite the
contrary. These stories of vernacular rights cultures are made and remade
through interlocking relations that are historically, productively, intimately,
and coercively produced and experienced. They come into being within specific
historical encounters through which their contemporary meanings are forged,
including encounters with the the forms
forms ofof anti-colonial
anticolonial nationalism and legal
settlements of the postcolonial state, with developmentalism, bureaucratisation,
neoliberalism, and the proliferation of the non-state organisations advocating
‘human rights’. Therefore, the claims of vernacular rights cultures are not
claims to purity or authenticity.
If anything, the the ubiquitous use of haq, an Arabic, Persian and Urdu word,
invoked by subaltern groups who speak speak aa range
range ofof different
different languages—
languages—
Punjabi, Rajasthani,
Rajasthani, Hindi,
Hindi,Bhil
Bhiliand Bhilodi—renders
and Bhilodi—renders thisthis
claim to purity
claim and
to purity
authenticity
and somewhat
authenticity weak. weak.
somewhat I must Ihowever, make clear
must however, makehereclear
that although,
here that
the work on
although, thevernacular rights cultures
work on vernacular rightsdraws on important
cultures insights ofinsights
draws on important critical
Indigenous
of scholarship,scholarship,
critical Indigenous there are crucial
there aredifferences between them,
crucial differences betweennot
least because
them, not least they respond
because to respond
they very different
to veryhistorical
differentrelations
historicalof relations
coloniality.
of
Consequently,
coloniality. the critiquethe
Consequently, of the politics
critique of origins
of the politicsadvanced
of originsin advanced
this book inis
directed
this bookspecifically
is directed atspecifically
the storiesatthat
theglobal
storieshuman rightshuman
that global likes telling
rightsabout
likes
itself, and
telling aboutis, itself,
therefore, a different
and is, therefore,argument
a differentfrom those from
argument of ‘origin’
thoseand ‘prior’
of ‘origin’
theorised
and ‘prior’ by theorists
theorised by of Indigeneity
theorists and fromand
of Indigeneity their
fromcritiques of the settler
their critiques of the
colonialcolonial
settler state (Bruyneel 2007; Povinelli
state (Bruyneel 2011; 2011;
2007; Povinelli Simpson 2014).2014).
Simpson
Alongside the question of origins and temporality of human rights, a second
dominant strand of human rights storytelling focuses on a particular rights
bearing subjectivity and a sovereign legal and moral personhood that is meant to
embody the subject of human rights. But who are the subjects of human rights?
10 Vernacular Rights Cultures

Are the subjects of human rights individuals or are they nation states? Scholars
point out that while human rights offer protections for individual rights, it is
also the case that human rights have been ‘made empty words by the relentless
focus on the nation state as the only conceivable form of political community’
(Phillips 2015: 67, emphasis added). And, who is this individual or human
of human rights? The ‘human’ of human rights is often seen to correspond to
an eighteenth century idea of an unencumbered legal person who is a world
citizen and who owes allegiance not to parochial identities, attachments and
feelings but rather to cosmopolitan ideals of world citizenship. But as influential
feminist, postcolonial, anticolonial, Black, queer, and Indigenous scholarship
has shown, the concrete human of human rights is a binary and cisgendered,
heterosexual, unencumbered, possessive, propertied, able bodied, white male
abstracted from all relations and commitments, and predominantly located in
the Global North.10 Scholars have drawn links between this exclusive figure
of the human and the exclusionary histories and politics of human rights.
Powerfully noting that the history of human rights is a history of exclusions,
they point out that the routinely invoked self-evidence of human rights is, in
effect, aa fraught,
fraught, exclusivist
exclusivist and
and aa contested
contested claim,
claim, one
one that
that isis supported by
unsupported
by neither
neither historical
historical evidence( James
evidence (James1989;
1989;Trouillot
Trouillot1995)
1995) nor
nor philosophical
argument (Wynter 2003).2003). And,
And,furthermore,
furthermore,that
thatthe
thehistory
historyand or philosophy
of human rights has neither been universally applicable to all humans and, nor
has it actually ever been applied without qualifications (James 1939; Trouillot
1995; Wynter 2003; Phillips 2015; Suárez-Krabbe 2016). Indeed, ideas of
human rights flourished alongside colonialism, empires bankrolled by slavery,
indentured labour and unspeakable violence on slaves and colonial subjects.
And, they continue to flourish today amidst existing forms of coloniality,
settler colonialism and modern forms of slavery, imperialism and racism. If
anything, where human rights have been won, it has hardly been as a result
of the persuasive strength of their ideals alone or as a result of inevitable
historical progress set in motion by human rights but rather as the outcome
of long histories of struggles—histories that have been forced into silence
(Trouillot 1995).
Quite unlike the subjects of human rights, the subjects of vernacular rights
cultures are not ‘world citizens’, nor are they only nation states. They are
neither privileged nor propertied but are precarious, very poor, racialised,
bureaucratically marked and surveilled subjects many of whom are Dalit
and Adivasi groups. While the book documents the rights encounters and
experiences of these subjects mostly with the nation state, the latter is neither
An Introduction 11

the chief protagonist in this story nor are nation states the only subjects of
human rights here. By not centring the nation state as the only subject of
human rights is however, not to be led by a form of ‘state phobia’ (Dhawan
2015: 51) but rather to recognise those ‘other’ subjects of rights who have
been marginalised by the nation state and global human rights scholarship,
and who encounter and experience the state in myriad intimate, coercive and
agential ways.11
Finally, the stories in this book are not stories of humanitarian actors who
animate contemporary stories of human rights by enacting the rights of the
‘victims’ of human rights (Rancière 2004: 307). Humanitarianism, as a ‘moral
and political project’ (Ticktin 2014: 273), encompasses a range of actors,
events, spaces, violence, ethics and politics. Although a fragmented and a
heterogenous enterprise, the last 30 years have witnessed humanitarianism’s
moral project of care and rescue increasingly underwritten by military support
and intervention, leading scholars to describe the contemporary global context
as one of the ‘humanitarian present’ (Weizman 2011: 1), where human rights,
humanitarianism, international human rights law and military interventions
share aims and objectives for ‘calculating and managing’ contemporary violence
(Weizman 2011: 4). Together they constitute an ‘integrated’ humanitarian–
political–legal approach favoured by the United Nations (UN) and other
international NGOs (INGOs) which converts refugees from indistinguishable
‘victims’ and ‘objects of compassion’ into an indistinguishable mass of ‘unwanted
and undesirable’ ‘migrants’ to be confined, managed and administered in the
refugee camps that keep them at a safe distance from the West. A striking
consequence of these camps being set up and managed ‘outside’ Europe has
been the steady disappearance of the ‘refugee’ from Europe’s borders and from
its political discourse, and of the appearance of the figure of the ‘migrant’
in its place. This figure of the ‘migrant’ performs important symbolic, legal
and political work for Europe—of releasing Europe from structural and
political accountability for the humanitarian emergencies brought on and
worsened by its military interventions while at the same time also temporarily
discharging Europe from its responsibility under the refugee conventions.
These contemporary humanitarian assemblages are hardly critique-free zones,
and scholarly arguments rage on over the politics of humanitarianism that
refuses difficult questions to do with structural inequalities and injustices
(de Waal 1997; Ticktin 2014), preferring to engage instead in a politics of
‘moral sentiments’ focused on suffering and misfortune (Fassin 2011: 1).
Many of these critiques of humanitarianism mostly focus on the ‘antipolitics’
12 Vernacular Rights Cultures

(Ferguson 1994; Ticktin 2014: 277) of humanitarian interventions, and on the

operations of international aid and refugee administrations across different
sites. There are also however, other critical and politically generative accounts
of humanitarianism, which emphasise the ‘politics of the displaced’ (Weizman
2011: 61) and provide important insights into humanitarianism as a ‘condition’,
where refugees ‘enact the politics of living’ (Feldman 2012: 155), and negotiate
competing demands of humanitarianism and development (Gabiam 2012).
This book does not travel in the direction of either of these three dominant
narratives but rather shifts our theoretical, conceptual and empirical focus
to subaltern mobilisations on the ground that produce vernacular rights
cultures. These political cultures of rights arise as subaltern mobilisations
and movements make demands for rights that are inflected by their particular
literal and conceptual languages, cultures, histories and political contexts of
struggles. Vernacular rights cultures produce rights claims directed at the state
and through different modes of ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008:
2) change not only the forms of citizenship through which rights are enacted
but also the content of rights themselves.
To summarise, viewing rights politics in ‘most of the world’ through the
framework of vernacular rights cultures offers a lens through which the
complexity and dynamism of rights-based mobilisations might be analytically
captured—not simply as those which are mimetic and engaged in the
translation, enactment and localisation of ‘global
global human rights’
rights but
but rather as
those which have their specific languages of rights and entitlements grounded
in specific political imaginaries, justificatory premises and subjectivities. In
other words, vernacular rights cultures are productive and generative: they
generate both a distinct set of rights and distinct practices through which rights
are delivered, but also transform the rights that are inscribed in constitutions
and political imaginaries.
Accordingly, the study of vernacular rights cultures is the study of the forms
that rights politics takes in ‘most of the world’ and of the ways it disrupts
hegemonic global human rights talk. It is a conceptual, epistemic and empirical
project, which refuses the binary deadlock between triumphant universalism
and a regressive cultural relativism produced
produced bybythe
thepervasive
pervasive‘politics
politics of
oforigins’
origins
and the time–space provincialism that governs global human rights.
Instead, it enables a conceptual optic into the ‘active’ empirical, epistemic
and political life of rights and into the specific politics that drives struggles
for rights in different locations. At stake therefore, in displacing the politics of
origins and its time- space provincialism are questions of epistemic authority,
An Introduction 13

agency and democratic politics. Thinking in terms of vernacular rights

cultures enables us to do the following: first, to refuse originary discourses
of human rights and to insist on theoretical and empirical specificity—both
of rights subjectivities and of the political stakes and struggles over rights.
Second, to disrupt the binarism of nomenclatural politics of West and non-
West without missing either historical or political specificity and geopolitical
location or indeed mischaracterising their relationship to hegemonic human
rights discourses. Third, to underscore the importance of attending to forms
of meaning-making including ‘strategies’ of utilisation of rights, the precise
usage and meaning of which is linked not only to the historical and cultural
identity of the group making a rights claim but also to the particular kinds of
politics and institutional settings that they inhabit and strive towards. Finally, it
allows us to resignify rights politics, subjectivities and discourses as not simply
local variants of ‘global human rights cultures’ but as historically, socially and
politically located practices whose spatial, temporal and epistemic specificities
require careful theorisation.

The Vernacular of Human Rights and Human Rights in

the Vernacular
As would be evident by now, vernacular rights cultures put in place a multi-
perspectival shift in thinking about human rights that are temporal, scalar and
spatial on the one hand, and ethical, methodological and conceptual on the
other. First, they enable a focus on a different temporality of human rights.
Recent scholarship on human rights has engaged in producing a different
timeline for the emergence of human rights (Hunt 2007; Moyn 2010). However,
this shift in the temporality of human rights remains mired in a time-space
provincialism, that is, even though the temporality of human rights discussions
shifts, the geopolitical location of human rights enquiry remains firmly located
in the West. Second, this framework allows a shift in the scale of analysis from
a dominant nation-centric and institutionalist-statist one to a transnational one.
A transnational scale as opposed to an international one enables an analysis
of the different circuits and sites of power within which human rights operate
but also allows the examination of the different articulations and critical
engagements with rights and human rights by differently positioned subjects of
rights. Consequently, by refusing to accord privilege to only nation states and/
or international organisations as the principal actors in contemporary human
rights, deploying the framework of vernacular rights cultures brings into focus
14 Vernacular Rights Cultures

different actors as knowledge producers and stakeholders of human rights.

This scalar shift is essential as much of the progressive and critical scholarship
of human rights, even where it engages in producing temporal shifts (Hunt
2007; Bourke 2011; Moyn 2010; Jensen 2015), mainly concerns itself with
retracing the histories of the institutional embedding of human rights within
nation states and large international organisations. This begs the question as
to what might be the gains and the losses of exclusively centreing the human
rights deliberations, initiatives and lobbying of nation states in global forums
when it is, in fact, nation states which are the chief violators of human rights?
Furthermore, what might be the correspondence between these histories of
institutional discourses on human rights and the actually recognised rights
either enjoyed in and/or violated by those nation states? Third, vernacular
rights cultures signify an epistemic intervention into knowledge production
from the standpoint of subaltern groups declaring and struggling for rights and
human rights. The context of struggle is vital here, and, in this book, it is the
contemporary subaltern political mobilisations for rights in India and Pakistan
that provide the context of struggle. These rights struggles stand testimony
to the fact that human rights are not only the stuff of institutional and legal
rights talk but that they are productive and generative—producing particular
rights bearing subjects and also political cultures of rights.
These subaltern struggles tie rights firmly to gendered struggles for
economic, political, epistemic and ontological justice. An attention to these
rights struggles and to the ‘active social life’ of rights (Abu Lughod 2010)
clearly demonstrates that not only are human rights and rights politics
conflictual but they are also gendered and intersectional. It also highlights
that the subjects of rights that come into being through this rights politics are
not homogenous and interchangeable, sovereign and unencumbered subjects
of global human rights but vernacular subjects of rights who come into being
under existing intersectional power hierarchies. Consequently, the politics of
human rights in ‘most of the world’ is not one of simply enacting or reproducing
the global subject of human rights or indeed of local translations of ‘global
human rights’. The term ‘vernacular’ signifies two strategic interventions.
First, it crucially flags the fact that the exercise of ethical political agency that
accompanies demands for entitlements is not individualist, discrete or indeed
privately articulated, but one that is predominantly expressed in collective
and also in religious, caste and gendered terms, even if this demand for
expanded entitlements in the vernacular arises out of the failure of democratic
representative politics and state developmentalism. The key point here is that
An Introduction 15

the subject of rights is not the a priori subject, always already given, but comes
into being through particular institutional, policy, political and discursive
interventions and contexts. Second, a critical aspect of vernacular rights
cultures as a framework of analysis is an attention to the languages—both
literal and conceptual—of rights and human rights deployed by marginal
groups to articulate entitlements and rights, paying special attention to the
political imaginaries and subjectivities that these conceptual languages make
available. A key intervention of this book is to track the deployment of rights
in the vernacular across different subaltern citizen mobilisations in southern
Asia.
But how is the study of vernacular rights cultures to be undertaken? And
how is the conceptual work on human rights from the Global South to be
done? This book introduces and assembles together a feminist historical ontology
as a potentially enabling conceptual–empirical–methodological
conceptual–empirical methodological framework for
documenting the stakes and struggles over rights and human rights in ‘most
of the world’. Through deploying a feminist historical ontology, I show how
haq comes into being as the chief literal and conceptual term used to signify
a right/human right, acquires meanings, produces rights subjectivities, while
also putting in place possibilities for becoming a (gendered) subject of rights.
A feminist historical ontology is invested in producing accounts of the coming
into being of concepts in particular historical contexts but also how these
concepts make up people (Hacking 2002: 99) and produce particular political
imaginaries and political cultures of rights and human rights.
Readers will discern that through assembling together a feminist historical
ontology as a methodological device, I am not only drawing on but also
supplementing the work of the philosopher Ian Hacking. An important element
of Hacking’s historical ontology projects is the focus on words and concepts:
of how concepts come into being and acquire traction at particular historical
points. And, it is Hacking’s focus on words and concepts and their role in
‘making up people’ together with my longstanding interest in the gendered
processes of political subjectivation and in the self-fashioning exercises
undertaken by subaltern subjects (Madhok 2013, 2018) that draws me to his
work on historical ontology.
However historical ontology needs to be gendered and rendered more
awareof
sociologically aware ofthe
thepower
powerrelations
relationsthat
thatmake
makeupup and
and sustain
sustain concepts
concepts in
specific historical
in specific locations,
historical including
locations, includingof the
the kinds
kinds of work concepts do. Quite
simply, historical ontologies need to be read alongside a critical reflexive politics
16 Vernacular Rights Cultures

of location (Rich 1981; Mani 1990; Frankenberg and Mani 1993; Kaplan
1994; Hill Collins 2000; Probyn 2003; Mohanty 1996; see Chapter 3). A
feminist historical ontology is this fusion of the two—of historical ontology
with a critical reflexive politics of location. Accordingly, feminist historical
ontologies produce an orientation towards generating conceptual accounts of
encounters with the world that are responsive to a critical reflexive politics of
location, to gendered power relations and struggles, and to the coming into
subjects of rights.
being of gendered subjects.

Beyond Suffering Rights as Paradoxes: A Critical Productive

Lens on Human Rights
Vernacular rights cultures focus on the productive12 and generative nature
of rights. To draw attention to the productivity of rights and human rights is
neither to extol the virtues of rights nor to engage in a politics of despair. It is
instead to focus on the double-edged nature of human rights—at once aligning
with hegemonic power around the globe but also providing a language for
mobilising against hegemonic power relations on the ground. Their double-
sidedness produces the push and pull which characterises their operation: of
enchantments and the disappointments; the enablements that rights put in place
but also their regulatory effects; their mobilisational power and democratic
potential but also their civilisationalism; the unremitting northern pressure
behind their power but also their take up by the powerless and the precarious
across the Global North and South; the politically conservative effects of rights
and human rights but also the ‘insurgent imaginaries’ (Natera 2013) they
produce, which not only engender challenges and ‘interruptions’ to the business
of neoliberal politics as usual but also exceed the existing terms of recognition/
inclusion/justice and rights. Consequently, a key strength of the study of
vernacular rights cultures is to focus on this productive double-sidedness13 of
human rights politics and the intellectual resources they provide for forging
political claims and subaltern struggles on the ground. Furthermore, it also
enables analyses of the continuing, if contested, epistemic power of human
rights in scholarly contexts and brings to attention the inordinate focus on
specific privileged subjects who are always seen as paradigmatic subjects of
rights and human rights, and on those ‘others’ who are almost always left outside
of this academic scholarship on rights and human rights and, when incuded,
are always required to make the case for being subjects of rights.
An Introduction 17

And, finally, studying vernacular rights cultures attends to the possibilities

for but also equally the impossibilities of becoming subjects of rights within
and through particular normative conceptual repertoires of rights.
Influential critiques of rights and human rights sometimes allude to the
productivity of rights by drawing attention to the paradoxical outcomes that
result from the deployment of rights. As Joseph Slaughter (2007) reminds,
paradoxes are in effect the staple of critical scholarship on human rights.
While none has been more productive in generating influential interventions
on human rights than what is referred to as the foundational paradox of
republicanism or the paradox between the rights of man and that of citizen,
feminist scholars too have produced powerful critiques of the paradoxical
politics and outcomes of rights and human rights. They have pointed to their
contradictory, alienating, exclusionary and politically conservative effects,
arguing that human rights are not only politically expedient but also politically
retrogressive, that they are both inclusionary as well as exclusionary, and are at
once regulatory and identity fixing. As Wendy Brown notes, ‘to have a right
as a woman is not to be free of being designated and subordinated by gender’
(Brown 2000: 232). The double bind of human rights is that rights ‘must be
specific and concrete in order to reveal and redress women’s subordination,
yet potentially entrench our subordination through that specificity’ (Brown
2000: 238). But, of course, critical scholarship on human rights does more than
highlight their paradoxical outcomes. Queer theorists, for instance, note that
the liberal imaginary of autonomy and sexual rights actively excludes those
who do not ‘fit’ the normative lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex,
(LGBTIQ)) subject
and queer (LGBTQ subject mould
mould and,
and, by doing so,
so, upholds and maintains
unequal geopolitical relations by assiduously policing and converting national
borders into civilisational ones on the basis of recognition of sexual rights
(Puar 2007; Sabsay 2016). Scholars also highlight the ways in which human
rights constitute a ‘central’ element of United States (US)–led globalisation,
capitalism and world trade (Mignolo 2000) and, are thereby, implicated
invested ininupholding
and invested upholdingexisting
existingglobal
global power
power relations
relations and and racialised
hierarchies of
hierarchies of representation (Menon 2004; Kapur 2013).
representation (Menon 2004; Kapur 2013). They have been characterised asThey have been
acharacterised as a ‘global
‘global secular secular
religion’ religion’
(Meister 2002:(Meister 2002:
91) and 91) andanother
as being as beingword
another
for
word for neoliberal
neoliberal globalisation
globalisation and free and free economics
market market economics
(Badiou (Badiou 2012);
2012); human
humanare
rights rights
also are also critiqued
critiqued as a formasofa‘transnational
form of ‘transnational governmentality’
governmentality’ (Grewal
(Grewal
2005: 2005:
125), as a 125),
form ofas biopolitical
a form of biopolitical rights1998:
rights (Agamben (Agamben 1998:2014:
126; Cheah 126;
Cheahas2014:
215), 215), as(Chandra
‘biocultural’ ‘biocultural’
2016:(Chandra 2016:
xxiiii) and as axxiiii) and‘humanitarian
right to as rights to
‘humanitarian(Rancière
interference’ interference’
2004:(Rancière
298). 2004: 298).
18 Vernacular Rights Cultures

However, critique alone cannot account for the productive and generative
struggles over rights and human rights in their historicity, specificity, dynamism
and difference. As Ratna Kapur (2018) notes, the steady flow of critique upon
critique of global human rights has successfully mobilised despair but done
little to explore alternative epistemic routes through which to think of human
rights politics; and where alternative registers have indeed been considered,
these have invariably ended up in the altogether familiar staging of a chastised
return to the fold of human rights. The work of critique, of course, is vital; it
demystifies the workings of power to show why and how particular operations
of power produce the particular effects they do. However, the work of critique
can only ever be one part of the story, albeit an important and critical one.
Critique must also lead to the formulation of alternative social designs and
thinking that would not only enable the shift in perspective but also generate
a more expansive repertoire of conceptual and methodological tools with which
to think with. Therefore, the question is not only one of bringing new and
different experiences of rights and human rights to the fore but also to devise
different ways to think about these in ways that matter epistemically and take
into account the epistemic difference these make.14
This book builds on and owes a great deal to the critical interventions on
rights and human rights even if it uses their insights to construct a perspective
that focuses not only on the critiques of human rights but also on the political
cultures of rights. By shifting focus from the production of critique alone
and towards thinking about the productivity of rights and human rights,
this book draws, builds and critically engages with four different strands of
recent, critical disciplinary-based scholarship on human rights. In particular,
it brings together different geographically located ethnographic descriptions
of the politics of haq with the philosophical work on rights and human rights
on the one hand, and the anthropology and the political theory of a ‘global’
phenomena called human rights, on the other. It aligns itself with the recent
historiographies of human rights that critique originary timelines that forge a
long unbroken ‘Western tradition’ of international human rights (Hunt 2007;
Moyn 2010; Jensen 2016). However, it also diverges from these progressive
historiographies, which remain tied to investigating temporal questions
and establishing different timelines for the origins, ascendance, and the
breakthrough of human rights. It engages seriously with political philosophy
and critical political theory that concerns itself mostly with the logics of
equality, democracy and citizenship and in particular with the ‘right to have
An Introduction 19

rights’ (Arendt 1958) and, also with the productive and the regulative work
of human rights (Brown 2000, 2015; Slaughter 2007; Lefebvre 2018). In this
case too, vernacular rights cultures instigate the need for further complexity
and incite different questions. For instance, recent debates on the relation
between rights and citizenship have focused on the ‘logic of equality’ (Rojas
2013: 581–95) or on acts of citizenship through which non-citizens seek the
right to have rights that have already been declared (Rancière 1999; Balibar
2002). However, paying attention to the production of vernacular rights
cultures reveals that mobilisations of subaltern and dispossessed groups do
not just involve a logic of equality and inclusion through which these groups
demand already existing rights. Rather, these mobilisations seek to alter the
means through which rights are delivered but also transform the content and
meaning of the rights that are already in place while also demanding that
new rights are brought into being, as the right to food movement and also
those to forest lands described in this book will make clear. As I will go on
to illustrate through the rights ethnographies in this book, vernacular rights
cultures inhabit particular political imaginaries and arise as movements that
make demands for rights that are inflected with particular rights cultures,
histories and contexts of political mobilisations. Although they can be
transnational in nature—in terms of shared legal and political histories,
resonances and even active linkages with similar forms of oppression and
related historical cultural contexts, such as the newly developing links between
the right to food movement in India and the Via Campensina15—they are
rooted in an insistence that we do not lose sight of the historical, linguistic,
conceptual and political specificity of rights claims and also of the political
imaginaries that these inhabit. Finally, the study of vernacular rights cultures
draws on the anthropological scholarship that engages thoughtfully with the
limits of liberalism and legal constitutionalism in the post colony (Povinelli
2011; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012), on the ‘active social life’ of rights
(Abu Lughod 2010: 1), of their ‘vernacularization on the ground’ (Levitt
and Merry 2009: 441) and on the intersection of biopolitical technologies,
law and the market (Biehl 2013: 419). But these too are by themselves
insufficient for thinking about vernacular rights cultures and require further
supplementation. For instance, the recent efforts to study ‘vernacularization
on the ground’ (Merry 2006, 2009), where ‘vernacularization’ refers to the
‘process of appropriation and local adoption of globally generated ideas and
strategies of vernacularization’ (Levitt and Merry 2009: 441), is an important
20 Vernacular Rights Cultures

intervention into studying the ‘local uses’ (Levitt and Merry 2009: 441) of
global women’s rights in different sites. Ultimately though, it suffers from a
significant conceptual difficulty: it not only operates within and through the
binaries of the epistemic and authorial Global North versus the non-epistemic
and only ever translating local, that is, the Global South, but it also actively
reproduces these. Vernacularisation as a verb reinforces the work of ‘doing’
rights on others and for those others to have the work of rights done on them.
It does not allow for conversations on rights and human rights to flow in
both directions and, thereby, forecloses agentival activity and authorship of
rights from different and other epistemic sites, not least from the margins.
A key component of vernacularisation of human rights according to Levitt
and Merry is their ‘translation’ which is done by a ‘chain’ of ‘vernacularizers’
from the global to the national and all the way to the local. Levitt and Merry
are careful to point out the differential power relations and vulnerabilities of
vernacularisers that impact their effectiveness in different contexts to ‘talk
back’ to the ‘global values packages’. However, it is unclear from the examples
they provide how this ‘talking back’ displaces either the epistemic centre of
human rights, which they identify as the ‘West’ (and from where they travel
to other places and are vernacularised), or indeed their content or forms
and modes of expression. In other words, my point here is quite simply this:
vernacularisation or indeed vernacularisers leave epistemic hierarchies put in
place by global human rights intact. To think in terms of vernacular rights
cultures, on the other hand, is to refuse an insistence on the unidirectional
travel and simplistic translation of global right and human rights. Instead it
is to demand a non-linear, intersectional and materially informed thinking
arising from historically and politically specific struggles around world-
making taking place in different locations, while also accounting for the
transnational power dynamics in which these operate. Furthermore, while I
think it is important and interesting to track how ‘global rights’ transfer, and
‘translate’ in different contexts, it is, however, only one strand/aspect of rights
activism and must be accompanied by analyses of how not only certain rights
became global/universal but also how these in turn are undergoing expansion
and change under pressure from collective struggles. In other words, rights
and human rights activism need to be viewed beyond prisms of discrete
agent-based activism, even though individual agents play important roles in
‘transferring and translating’ rights.
An Introduction 21

Finally, the rights struggles described in this book are not only struggles
against inequality
inequality and for justice
justice,but
butsignificantly,
significantly, these are struggles that are
taking place in the high tide of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a ‘loose and
shifting signifier’ (Brown 2015: 20) that takes up different forms in different
parts of the globe (Rofel 2007). However, there are a few key characteristics
integral and common to the different forms that neoliberalism takes around the
globe: the downgrading of political arguments for economic and redistributive
justice, the elevation of market rationality as the governing rationality for all
social life, and consequently, the conversion of all social relations into market
and financialised relations, and the elevation of an imperial, racialised and
gendered homo economicus. An important feature of neoliberalism is its distrust
of politics (Whyte 2018) and the steady erosion of political life including the
steady demise of the political figure most associated with liberal democratic
life, the homo politicus (Brown 2015). An important set of political arguments
that have been considerably sidelined by the ascendance of neoliberalism
are those of global economic justice and redistributive politics. We not only
live in neoliberal times but also in the time of global human rights; the rise
of global human rights shares a temporal affinity with the rise of global
neoliberalism. Given that the overarching characteristic of the global present
is one of unprecedented and exponential levels of global inequality, the shared
temporality of the global ascendance of human rights and of neoliberalism as
the accepted, albeit not uncontested, economic rationality have inevitably led
to questions being asked about not only the nature of the relationship between
neoliberalism and human rights but also that between global human rights
and global inequality (Salomon 2013; Moyn 2014; Marks 2014; Brown 2015;
Whyte 2018; Slobodian 2018). In other words, what has been the role played
by global human rights in shoring up neoliberalism and also in politically
sidelining global redistributive politics of economic justice?
As is well known, the dominant storylines of global human rights
hierarchically organise global human rights into separate categories and
‘generations’ comprising civil, political and economic rights, and accords
generational and normative priority to civil and political rights over other
rights commitments endorsed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR, 1948). This categorical priority of civil and political rights can
be seen in their ready operationalisation by international human rights and
humanitarian organisations but is also evidenced in the fact that international
human rights instruments have often been much stronger on ‘status equality’
and against discrimination on the basis of one’s status, such as gender, race
22 Vernacular Rights Cultures

and sexuality, and somewhat less forthcoming on ‘vertical’ equality’, which

is that of income or wealth distribution (Balakrishnan and Heintz 2019:
396). Significantly, this generational story eclipses other stories of global
human rights that contest the justice deficit of individuated civil and political
centrism of the global human rights discourse and which have historically put
questions of global inequality and global redistributive politics at the heart of
international human rights law and politics. One such story spans the 1960s
and the 1970s and is about the attempts of non-aligned and newly decolonised
states to restructure the global economy via the establishment of a New
International Economic Order (NIEO). The NIEO sought to restructure the
critical vocabulary of international human rights by making economic justice
and global redistributive politics as its key pillars. As Anthony Anghie (2019)
explains, even though the NIEO used the language of rights, especially rights
of states over their natural resources, these rights were not the individual human
rights championed by human rights organisations. The advocates of the NIEO
in the UN argued that poverty and economic justice were a key question for
international human rights and that the prevailing global economic injustice
was an active legacy of the colonialist extractivist policies and unfair control
over natural resources, a legacy that was being actively carried forward by the
work of post–World War II international institutions such as the World Bank
and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (Salomon 2013). Hence, what
was urgently required was the setting up of the NIEO, which would provide
an international legal framework for reorganising the colonial, unfair and
unequal terms and rules of international trade agreements. The attempts by
the supporters of NIEO to have ‘economic justice reflected in international
law’ (Salomon 2013: 31) resulted in the UN General Assembly adopting
resolutions on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources, and the Charter
of Economic Rights and Duties of States (Salomon 2013:37). In the end,
however, the alternative vision advocated by the NIEO was short-lived and
it could not ride out the combined storm of different oppositional forces that
came its way in the form of the global debt crises of the 1980s, the exponential
rise in commodity prices and, perhaps the most significant of them all, the
oppositional strength of the conglomerate of the powerful industrialised
countries (Salomon 2013: 46), intent on driving forward the mantra of the
‘magic of the market’. If the ascendance of the neoliberal international order
rudely interrupted the prospects for a deeper relationship between global
distributive politics and global human rights, then what does this interruption
and also the demise of the NIEO tell us about the relationship between
An Introduction 23

neoliberalism and global human rights? There are different scholarly views on
this. While Samuel Moyn (2015) writes that there is no intrinsic relationship
between neoliberalism and human rights and that ‘parallel trajectories’ is the
most effective way of describing the temporal alignment of global human rights
and neoliberalism, scholars such as Susan Marks (2013) and Jessica Whyte
(2018) disagree. According to Whyte, neoliberals

saw in human rights the possibility of securing rights of investors and the
wealthy in the face of challenges to their property and power. The human
rights discourse they developed aimed to provide an institutional and moral
foundation for a competitive market economy and to shape entrepreneurial
subjects. In contrast to the anticolonialists who had fought to establish the
right to self determination, the neoliberals saw the promise of human rights in
constraining sovereign power, especially in the postcolony, and in restraining
politicisation of the economy.
economy (Whyte 2018: 24).24)

Now while these are very persuasive arguments, how do they enable us to
give an accounting of the rights struggles of subaltern groups contesting the
hegemonic power of neoliberalism and of global human rights through an
insistence on a politics of economic justice, redistribution and intersectionally
experienced citizenship? How to square the circle between the shared
temporal fortunes of the rise of global human rights and those of neoliberalism
without leaving out the struggles of subaltern groups against neoliberalism?
In other words, how to provide an accounting of the global ascendance of
neoliberalism without reproducing the power of the already powerful advocates
and beneficiaries of neoliberalism? And, equally, how to tell stories about
interrupting the juggernaut of neoliberalism without either advocating a
philosophical return to the provincial and racialised ideals of the homo politicus16
or indeed, by viewing the subaltern struggles against neoliberalism as the latter’s
radical other? This book argues that an accounting for the global ascendance
of neoliberalism must also attend to ongoing political struggles against
neoliberalism in ‘most of the world’. These political struggles are historically
and politically specific and reflect the push back against the different economic
and political forms that neoliberalism assumes in different parts of the world.
Paying attention to these political struggles is an important cautionary against
the tendency towards overgeneralisations declaring the death of the politics
of equality and justice everywhere. Importantly, however, it also brings into
view the ‘other’ subaltern critical political vocabularies and imaginaries of
24 Vernacular Rights Cultures

rights and justice and alternative ways of world-making. Having said this,
it is also important to guard against romanticising these political struggles
against neoliberalism as either egalitarian, non-hierarchical or indeed as waged
from outside of neoliberalism. If anything, these political struggles take place
within specific historical conditions resulting from particular encounters with
neoliberalism and are consequently, also shaped by it (see Chapter 4).
As a feminist
feminist scholar,
scholar,I Iam amacutely
only too
awareacutely
of theaware of theand
gendered gendered and
paradoxical
paradoxical
outcomes ofoutcomes of rights of
rights discourses, discourses, of their
their solely solely nature
mitigating mitigatingand nature
innate
and innatetoinability
inability resolve to resolve
harm on harm
their on theirofown,
own, beingof being
identityidentity
fixingfixing and
and also
also essentialising
essentialising (Brown(Brown
2000).2000).
And IAnd I amtoo
am only only tooofaware
aware of the dangers,
the dangers, injuries,
injuries,
asymmetricalasymmetrical power relations,
power relations, violence and violence and precarities
precarities surrounding surrounding
the ‘doing’
the ‘doing’rights
of human of human
around rights
the around
globe. I the globe. Iattentive
am deeply am deeply to attentive to feminist
feminist scholarship
scholarship that has demystified
that has demystified the gendered/exclusionary/culture-reifying/
the gendered/exclusionary/culture-reifying/ civilisational
civilisational
discourses that discourses
human rightsthat human rights lend to.
lend themselves themselves
In particular,to. Initparticular,
has shown it
has
howshown howform
a certain a certain form imperial
of racial of racial imperial politics
politics plays outplays
when outhuman
when humanrights
rights are deployed
are deployed as championing
as championing women’s
women’s rights—one
rights—one wherewhere
the the discourse
discourse of
of ‘saving’
‘saving’ the the natives
natives fromfrom themselves,
themselves, or indeed
or indeed Spivak’s Spivak’s formulation
formulation of
of ‘white
‘white men saving
men saving brownbrown
womenwomen from brown
from brown men’, men’,
comescomes in only in too
onlyhandy.
too handy.
And
And
yet, an yet, an important
important paradox paradox
of theofpolitics
the politics of rights
of rights is alsoisthat
also despite
that despite
their
their paradoxical
paradoxical outcomes,
outcomes, the disappointments
the disappointments and the anddespair
the despair
arisingarising
from from
their
their attachment
attachment to privileged
to privileged raced
raced andand gendered
gendered bodies,they
bodies, theycontinue
continueto to be
desired, claimed,
claimed, contested
contested and and fought for by by the
the marginalised,
marginalised, the precarious
and the powerless. A dilemma for our present, therefore, isis one one of how to
reconcile the often paradoxical
paradoxical conservatism of rights rights thinking,
thinking, including
their implication within imperial and racialised politics and in structures of
coloniality, with
with the
the articulations
articulations andand mobilisations
mobilisations around rights by subaltern
groups in different parts of the world? In In my
my view,
view, feminist intellectual work
on the politics of rights must be accompanied by an attention to the ways
in which rights languages
languages are put to to use
use differently
differently in in different
different political
political
contexts by subaltern groups. Rights are inherently political and must be seen
as operating within fields of power, and, therefore, therefore, the the task
task isis not only one
of examining the discursive formulations and the political use that rights are
put to but also also one
one ofof investigating
investigating the political
political cultures that rights create
and the new forms of subjectivities
subjectivities and subjection these produce. Given the
marginalised
marginalised contexts within which vernacular rights cultures operate, the
work of documenting
documenting rights talk talk and thinking
thinking in these contexts involves
undertaking
undertaking detailed ethnographic work that documents the conceptual
detailed ethnographic work conceptual
languages in which the gendered subaltern groups stake their wager as ‘active
An Introduction 25

claimants of modernity’ (Ram 2008: 145). In addition to the work of tracking

and documenting subaltern rights languages, there also need to be analytical
frameworks in place that allow for the conceptual capture of different political
and normative strategies and imaginaries of rights. The conceptual work on
rights from the margins is essential in order to not only stretch and dislodge
the existing normative boundaries of the universal (Butler 1997), expand the
existing languages of entitlements, impact and transform public policy but
also to provide different visions for equality and justice.

Vernacular Rights Cultures in South Asia

In India and Pakistan, several strands of rights discourses circulate, of which
three prominent ones are legal constitutionalism, developmentalism and
religious or ethnic nationalism, the latter expressed more in the language of
freedom and autonomy from the nation state than of citizen rights per se.
Although ‘divergent’ (Oldenburg 2010) in their experience of democracy,
representative government and citizenship, both countries guarantee
fundamental rights to citizens,17 albeit with qualifications18 and with varying
degrees of success and coverage. Both have superior judiciaries that have been
less reticent in referencing and upholding international human rights law,19
and while judicial activism is a recent phenomenon in the case of Pakistan
(Newberg 2012), the Indian Supreme Court in the post-Emergency era has
wrought a reputation for itself as a ‘torchbearer of human rights’ (Balakrishnan
2007: 157) even if ‘its impact on the ground is not consistent’20 and its recent
judgments have substantially weakened fundamental rights protections in the
country (Yamunan 2020). Moreover, both India and Pakistan have a visible
and vibrant women’s movement and an active institutional discourse on
gender equality.21 Finally, discourses of development and human rights have
a discernible presence on both sides of the border, particularly in the NGO
sector (Jaffrelot 2015).
The book tracks the deployment of haq across vernacular rights cultures in
India and Pakistan. I draw attention to the four different political imaginaries
and justificatory premises that underpin the deployment of haq rights within
contemporary subaltern rights struggles in India and Pakistan. Many of the
rights struggles I study, particularly in India, have had policy and legislative
successes and several pioneering and innovative legislative acts are now in place
guaranteeing citizen entitlements to information, food, employment and land
rights. There also exists now a growing and sophisticated scholarship analysing
26 Vernacular Rights Cultures

the functioning, shortfalls as well as the impact of these newly introduced acts
and policy measures (Drèze 2004; Shah 2007; Khera 2008, 2011; Bannerjee
and Saha 2010; Drèze and Khera 2017; Nilsen 2018). Within this burgeoning
scholarship and more generally, however, more attention could be paid to
the conceptual and epistemic languages of rights that underpin the struggles
by subaltern groups and of the nature of subjectivities and subjection these
mobilisations engender, or indeed to the forms of rights politics these generate.
In other words, we are yet to know of the justificatory premises of rights that
inform and activate demands for expanded entitlements, and of the nature of
rights languages that underpin ‘self-making’ exercises mobilised in becoming
a subject of formal rights, and of the traversal of rights and human rights, and
indeed of the ways by which statecraft, governmentalities and the market
intersect and facilitate the dissemination of particular rights subjectivities.
In short, we know very little of how rights languages are constituted and
articulated by subaltern subjects. This book argues that it is not only the case
that these questions spearhead the study of the emergence and operation of
rights cultures in subaltern contexts in ‘most of the world’ but also that their
study requires a different conceptual lens: one that is able to capture their
dynamism but also their difference.
The different justificatory premises of rights or haq that I document in this
book, and which span India and Pakistan, occur not in some conceptual bubble
but are articulated and negotiated in contexts of sustained encounters and
interactions with developmentalism,
developmentalism, colonial
colonialand postcoloniallaw,
or postcolonial law,militarism,
militarism,
statism and constitutionalism. By ‘developmentalism’, a term I prefer to
‘development’, I refer to not only a set of institutions, discourses and practices
but also a ‘condition’ or a ‘way of being’. Developmentalism is normative in
its aims and includes both state and non-state actors. It speaks the language
of self-empowerment and individual rights and has the transformation of
subjectivities as its explicit aim. And, it mediates the experience and knowledge
of constitutional settlement on postcolonial citizenship (Madhok 2013: 120).
In India, social movements are a variegated lot comprising ‘identity’ and
‘interest’ groups who more often than not practice a ‘dual level political
activism’ that engages the government in order to influence public policy while
also challenging societal norms and practices (Katzenstein et al. 2001: 267).
Although some social movements see the state as the main oppressor, others
participate in a much more ‘situationally developed politics’ (Katzenstein et
al. 2001: 247) directing their campaigns at the judiciary for legal and policy
reforms and for redressing injustices meted out by the state. I must hasten
An Introduction 27

to add here that while this book focuses on the claim-making by subaltern
mobilisations for rights, it is not a study of social movements in India or
Pakistan.22 In other words, it is neither a study examining the effectiveness
of social movements in either of these countries to bring about social change
or indeed reduce poverty23 nor one that examines to what extent these social
movements have ‘served the constituencies of the least advantaged’ (Ray and
Katzenstein 2005: 2). The social mobilisations covered in this book are instead
the key sites where rights talk takes place. They are dynamic, productive,
generative and conflictual sites where the potential of rights as well as their
limitations play out. To put it in another way: rights undergo transformation
and expansion when claimed by subaltern groups but it is also when rights are
claimed by subaltern groups that some of the particular limitations of rights
become visible.
In India, my fieldwork has over the years spread to five districts of
Rajasthan and has consisted mainly of recording narratives demanding haq
by development workers, grassroots political workers and participants of
various citizen mobilisations organising under the right to food movement
as well as the independent rights activism of women development workers
within a state-sponsored women’s development programme in Rajasthan.
The right to food movement is an umbrella organisation that includes a
number of citizenship struggles, including those to the right to information,
employment, forest rights and Dalit rights, among a host of others. Drawing on
ethnographic tracking of these subaltern mobilisations in Rajasthan, I identify
and document the political imaginaries but also three principal justificatory
premises that underpin the deployment of rights and human rights, which are
legal constitutionalism and citizenship; the cosmological, the historical and the
prior; and finally, a gendered normative moral order based on ‘Truth’ (Chapters
4 and 5). I show how these justificatory premises resonate with several ideas of
citizenship and rights or human rights within liberal democratic theories but
also identify the marked differences between the liberal imaginaries of rights
and citizenship and the political imaginaries of haq. Tracking haq further
northwest and into Pakistan, the mobilisations of the Anjuman Mazarain
or the AMP (Tenants Association Punjab) in rural Punjab, demanding the
restoration of their ownership and sharecropping rights to the land taken over
by the Pakistani military, provides yet another insight into the specific political
imaginaries which produce particular vernacular rights cultures (Chapter 5).
The justificatory premise of their deployment of haq is embedded in and derives
its justification from Islamic jursiprudentialism and Qur’anic meanings and is
28 Vernacular Rights Cultures

consequently tied very strongly to the idea of ‘right conduct’. It is interesting

to note that although haq in this context derives its mainstay from a popular
Islamic understanding, it is deployed outside of a strictly religious context and
towards what might be seen as secular ends.
The political imaginaries I document in Chapters 4 and 5 are produced,
articulated and negotiated within live political contexts of struggle and
precarity and provide insights into how vernacular rights cultures are mobilised
by filtering, mediating and interpreting rights through particular political
imaginaries of struggle and claim-making. Importantly, these ideas, too, are
not articulated in a discrete or an ahistorical way but emerge in particular
political, institutional, historical and activist contexts.
Before I bring this introduction to the book to a close, I want to underline
that there are at least six significant things to note about the contemporary
applications of rights language or haq that I will document. First, the
deployment of a right is not through a neologism but within the vernacular
and as haq. Rights articulations do not occur as singular or even odd prototypes
but draw on and are negotiated through existing moral vocabularies and the
political grammar of norms, law, rules, entitlements, rights and identities.
Second, vernacular rights cultures signal the overlapping and intersecting
nature of the languages of rights and those of human rights, rather than
insisting on either historical continuity or separation. In doing so, they
resist theoretical foreclosure by sidestepping the paradox between the rights
of man and the rights of the citizen that characterises much of the human
rights debates in the Anglo-American and European world. If anything,
vernacular rights cultures show that rights of man and rights of citizen are
co-dependent, intersectional, struggled for and intricately interwoven rather
than only paradoxical. Third, these rights cultures are co-produced through
and invoked within multiple and diverse encounters with developmentalism,
statism, legal constitutionalism, and activism; therefore, it is at the intersection
of these and not as some freestanding abstraction, that haq as a contemporary
idea operates. In fact, as the ethnographic descriptions demonstrate, these
intersections are integral to the formation of vernacular rights cultures.
Fourth, despite the extensive deployment of haq within citizen mobilisations,
individual rights regulate neither interpersonal relations nor social life in either
India or Pakistan. Fifth, the demand for gender equality or haq for women is
a question that almost invariably needs to be addressed separately and seldom
occurs organically within citizen mobilisations. Finally, the movements for
haq I am tracking in this book are precariously positioned live struggles. The
An Introduction 29

Anjuman Mazarain continue continuetotoprotest

protestininthetheface
faceofofheavy
heavysecuritisation
securitisationof
their
of lands;
their India’s
lands; forestforest
India’s communities face the
communities impending
face threat ofthreat
the impending a dilution
of a
of the hardofwon
dilution theinstitutional
hard won guarantees
institutionalandguarantees
increased state andviolence,
increasedcoercion
state
and dispossession
violence, coercioninand order to make wayinfor
dispossession easier
order to land
makeacquisition for private
way for easier land
investment and
acquisition also further
for private restrictions
investment on forest
and also furtherlandrestrictions
through their conversion
on forest land
into national
through theirparks; the right
conversion intotonational
food movement
parks; theis seeing
right toits food
legislative gains
movement
eroded
is seeingwith
itsthe ruling right-wing
legislative gains erodedBharatiya
withJanata Party (BJP)–led
the ruling right-winggovernment
Bharatiya
threatening
Janata Partyto(BJP)–led
cut back food security entitlements.
government threatening In to effect, the food
cut back four different
security
political imaginaries
entitlements. In effect,of the
haq four
that different
I document in thisimaginaries
political book—constitutional/
of haq that
Ilegal citizenship;
document justification
in this of rights on thelegal
book—constitutional/ basiscitizenship;
of morality and ‘Truth’;
justification
justification
of rights on based on the
the basis of entitlements
morality andof‘Truth’;
the prior; and justification
justification based on based
the
on Islam—areof reproduced,
entitlements the prior; and articulated andbased
justification negotiated within live political
on Islam—emerge within
contexts
live of struggle
political contextsand of precarity
struggle andand provide
provide insights
insights into how vernacular
rights cultures are mobilised.
mobilised.

Conclusion
Through a focus on the generative and productive nature of rights, this book
details how human rights are key sites of subjectification and conceptual
innovation. In a significant sense, vernacular rights cultures are concerned
with documenting political, epistemic and ethical agency. However, political
mobilisations are not only sites for political agency, and a focus on vernacular
rights cultures draws attention to the modes of subject formation set off by
human rights/rights discourses. And, even as rights/human rights talk provides
the site of subjectification (Rancière 2004), this subjectification does not
result in the production of a homogenous subject of global human rights but
a vernacular subject of rights.
The epistemic compass of vernacular rights cultures enables us to think
carefully about the conceptual and literal languages for rights in ‘most of the
world’. It does this through a focus on the other conceptual and normative
languages of rights. This focus on other languages of rights and of claim-
making is crucial if we are to disrupt the politics of origins and the time–space
provincialism it puts in place but also if we are serious about making epistemic
difference matter. Making epistemic difference matter is also to say that other
traditions and languages of rights must speak back to global human rights
thinking and must not be reduced to a study of ‘norm diffusion’ (Dunford
2017) —where norms
2017)—where norms travel
travel from
from the
the Global
Global North
North toto the South and are
sought to be translated into local idioms. In other words, a focus on vernacular
30 Vernacular Rights Cultures

rights cultures is a call to think carefully about the normative, ontological and
philosophical nature of the languages of rights that are deployed in ‘most of
the world’.

Notes
1. I am alluding in part to the subtitle of Partha Chatterjee’s book (2004) The
Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. I
find Chatterjee’s formulation of ‘most of the world’ a significant intervention
disrupting the
into disrupting the binary
binary ofofthe
the‘West/Western
West/Western and
and non-West/non-Western’.
non-West/non-Western.
This binary as I shall go on to argue in this book has crucial implications
not only for human rights politics but also for politics of gender and sexuality
in South Asia. Throughout the book, I shall be deploying this formulation
‘most of the world’ to refer to the epistemic and political worlds and thinking
outside of Eurocentred and European, Anglo and North American contexts.
2. Priya Raghavan (2020) assembles a subaltern archive from some formal writing,
mainly letters, petitions and rural newsletters that have been produced in the
wake of some of the subaltern mobilisations.
3. For an account of the ‘unselfconscious’ making of vernacular literary cultures,
see Pollock (1998).
4. For an important discussion on the subaltern and on subaltern groups, see in
particular Nilsen and Roy (2015).
5. There is a now a substantial, well acknowledged and growing multidisciplinary
scholarship on subaltern historiographies, geographies and politics. For a range
of debates, see in particular Guha (1983), Spivak (1988), Guha and Spivak
(1989), Prakash (1994), Rodriguez and López (2001), Chakrabarty (2002),
Chatterjee (2004) and Nilsen and Roy (2015).
6. The term ‘Adivasi’ is the ‘Indian language’ term for the Indigenous. There
is considerable nomenclatural controversy over the use of both ‘Adivasi’ and
‘Indigenous’ (Karlsson 2003; Sundar 2016). The term ‘Adivasi’ has associations
with ‘civilisational backwardness’ and also with very problematic institutional
terms and politics of recognition. In international circles, the recognition of
the rights of the Indigenous, which grants specific rights of self- determination
to Indigenous groups, has led the Indian government to oppose the term and
to deny the presence of Indigenous groups in India (Xaxa 1999). It is also
important to note that not all Indigenous groups identify as Adivasi; the
latter is mainly used to identify Indigenous communities in India’s mainland.
The administrative category established by the postcolonial Indian state for
governing all Indigenous groups is the Scheduled Tribe (ST). In this book,
I will be using the terms ‘Adivasi’, ‘Indigenous’,
Indigenous, and
and ‘ST’
‘ST’ as appropriate,
appropriate, the
latter mostly to refer to administrative and governance matters.
An Introduction 31

7. The Dalits or Scheduled Castes were also previously called Untouchables.

8. I am grateful to Sherene Razack for encouraging me to engage with the politics
of origins as a racialist discourse (personal communication, January 2019). See
in particular James (1938, 1989), Fanon (1952), Trouillot (1995), Wynter (2003)
and Suárez-Krabbe (2016). For an overview of the racism of human rights,
especially of human rights law, see Bradley (2019) and on ‘racially inflected’
humanitarian politics and interventions, see in
humanitarian in particular, Razack (2004) and
particular Razack
Wilson (2012).
9. See Barkawi (2018).
10. See in
inparticular
particular,
FanonFanon (1952),
(1952), BunchBunch (1990),
(1990), Charlesworth
Charlesworth (1994),(1994), Kiss
Kiss (1995),
(1995), Trouillot
Trouillot (1995), (2003),
(1995), Wynter WynterSimpson
(2003), (2014),
Simpson (2014), Suárez-Krabbe
Suárez-Krabbe (2016) and
(2016) and Bruce-Jones
Bruce-Jones (2015). (2015).
11. For a detailed ethnographic account of subaltern encounters with the state,
see Nilsen (2018a).
12. Although, not specifically on the productive nature of human rights politics
as such, Saida Hodžić’s book The Twilight of Cutting engages in ‘illuminating
the productivity and instability of repressive character of law’ (2017: 248) on
genital cutting in Ghana.
13. Rajshree Chandra (2016) refers to this double-sidedness of rights as the
‘cunning of rights’.
14. There is now an emerging body of feminist scholarship which scrupulously
locates theoretical and conceptual work in specific geographies, engages with
intellectual registers of those geographies to produce theoretical and conceptual
interventions on rights and human rights in productive and generative ways.
Ratna Kapur’s Freedom in a Fish Bowl (2018) positions itself in the aftermath of
human rights critique to argue that while the work of human rights must carry
on, this work must, however, be delinked from the epistemologies of freedom
that it is embedded in. It intervenes to uncouple the link between predominant
visions of liberal freedom and human rights, and to direct attention towards
different intellectual registers and resources for thinking about freedom. She
draws on non-liberal philosophical and agnostic spiritual traditions of Persian
Sufism and also the subcontinental episteme of no-dualism—advaita. In each
of these, Kapur argues that meaningful freedom becomes possible through self
transformation and self reflection, and that ethical self care can provide us
with a vision of what the futurity of rights might be. Located in very different
intellectual, historical and political registers, Audra Simpson’s book Mohawk
Interruptus (2014) firmly situates the colonial logic of liberal freedom in the
liberal multicultural governance of settler colonial states. Simpson argues
that the presence and workings of settler colonial states exemplify both the
operation of colonialism but also its failure. The insistence on and exercise of
political sovereignty by the Indigenous and their refusal to disappear points
32 Vernacular Rights Cultures

to not only that ‘sovereignty may exist within sovereignty’ but also that there
is an ethical alternative to liberal multicultural recognition, which is that of
‘refusal’. The
The ethical andand political
politicalalternative
alternativeofof‘refusal’
‘refusal’catapults
catapults questions
questions of
of sovereignty,
sovereignty, nationhood,
nationhood, citizenship,
citizenship, legitimacy
legitimacy and authority
and authority to the
to the forefront
forefront of settlerpolitics
of settler colonial colonial politics to
to demand andemand an ‘accounting’
‘accounting’ thatIndigenous
that deals with deals with
Indigenous
politics andpolitics
how theyand how they challenge
challenge the perceived
the perceived status ofstatus of ‘settled’
“settled” state
state
(2014:(2014:
11). 11).
15. Interview with Kavita Srivastava, Secretary General, Right to Food Campaign
(personal communication, Jaipur, July 2016). See also Dunford and Madhok
(2015).
16. See Sylvia Wynter (2003) for a critique of the homo politicus as a raced subject.
17. India’s constitution adopted in 1950 sets out fundamental rights in Part III of
the document, and while Pakistan’s constitutional history is more chequered
having gone through three enacted constitutions but it too guarantees
fundamental rights in Part II of the 1973 constitutional arrangement.
18. In the case of Pakistan, the establishment of Shariah federal courts qualifies
the nature of remedies available to citizens. The operation of Muslim Personal
Law in India similarly qualifies aspects of state civil law in relation to Muslims.
19. Pronouncing on gender equality, the Indian Supreme Court famously
referenced CEDAW in Vishakha vs State of Rajasthan to lay down legal
guidelines for the prevention of sexual harassment of women in the workplace
(All India Reporter of the Supreme Court 1997: 3011). More recently, the Delhi
High Court in Laxmi
Laxmi Mandal
Mandal vs vs the
the Deen
Deen Dayal
Dayal Harinagar
Harinagar Hospital
Hospital (W.P.C.C.
(W.P.C.C
8853/2008) drew on India’s commitments to various international rights
protocols in order to pronounce a legal basis for the protection of reproductive
rights of women. In Pakistan’s plural legal system, writes Shaheen Sardar Ali
(2012: 22), ‘human rights treaties appear to be invoked by the judiciary as
effortlessly as customary and Islamic norms as well as constitutional provisions
of equality and non-discrimination’.
20. Balakrishnan (2007) points out that this is due to the ‘ideological character
of the Court’s particular approach to human rights and its biases … in favor
of the state and development, in favor of the rich and against workers, in
favor of the urban middle-class and against rural farmers, and in favor of a
globalitarian class and against the distributive ethos of the Indian Constitution’
(2007: 158).
21. For discussions on the feminist and women’s movement movement in in India
India and
and Pakistan,
Pakistan,
see in particular
particular,Kumar
Kumar (1999), Gandhiand
1999; Gandhi and Shah
Shah (1992),
1992; RamRam2000;(2000), John
John 1996;
(1996), Menon
Menon 1999; (1999),
Sunder RajanSunder
2003;Rajan
Phadke(2003), Phadke (2003),
2003; Kalpagam Kalpagam
2000; Roy 2015;
(2000), Roy (2015),
Khan 2018; Khan andKhan (2018), 2018;
Kirmani Khan and Kirmani
Madhok 2010;(2018),
BasuMadhok (2010),
2005; Shaheed
Basu
2010.(2005) and Shaheed (2010).
22. The study of social movements, at least in India, has emerged as an important
and distinct area of study. See, for instance, Nielsen and Nilsen (2016).
An Introduction 33

23. Writing on social movements in India, Ray and Katzenstein (2005: 4) note
that scholars writing on the state and poverty ‘have not paid much attention
to the social movements as actors who may buffer, accelerate, ameliorate,
and challenge the shifting agendas of the state’ (2005: 4). Rather, they have
preferred to focus on the ‘failure of poverty remediation’, ‘capture of state by
elite interests,’
interests’, failure of state capacity, the relationship of political
political parties and
the state and also intra party democracy, or indeed ‘excessive democratization
of Indian polity’.
34 Vernacular Rights Cultures

2 Human Rights,
Refusing Political
the Politics Agency, and
of Origins
Refusing the Politics of Origins

The Haitian Revolution is marked by an ‘unthinkability’, wrote Michel-Rolph

Trouillot (1995). Its unthinkability was evident not only at the time of the
event but continues to inform historiographies of rights and human rights ever
since. But what makes this unthinkability, thinkable? The unthinkability of
Black slaves revolting against Europe’s colonial power has been systematically
produced through an erasure of the event in retellings of the past but also
in contemporary rememberings of the event. This unthinkability, a result of
the ‘entanglement of historicity with power’ (Carby 2015: xii), is put in place
by a particular racialised and imperial epistemic rationality—the rationality
of Eurocentrism. This logic of Eurocentrism or what is also known in
decolonial scholarship as ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano 2000: 533) produces
specific structures of polity, sociality, racialised humans, sexualities and
epistemologies. An important consequence of this coloniality of power is that
it institutionalises unequal circuits of intellectual labour production around
the globe and generates a range of different forms of epistemic erasures and
silences. An important form in which this silence and erasure manifests
itself is through the relative lack of theoretical and conceptual attention that
is paid to rights politics in ‘most of the world’, which are mostly viewed as
illustrative of and also a derivative of the unfolding of global human rights.
This logic of Eurocentrism robs rights and human rights struggles in the
Global South of epistemic and political agency. The epistemological power
and workings of Eurocentrism have been unpacked and discussed at length
by a range of scholars (Said 1978; Amin 1989; Wallerstein 1997; Chakrabarty
2000; Mignolo 2012; Lowe 2015) and my intention in this chapter is not to
rehearse the forms it takes or indeed its intellectual and political fallouts but
rather to draw attention to only one aspect of this Eurocentred discourse on
human rights which I call the politics of origins. Quite unlike the theorists of
coloniality who critique the coloniality of human rights and call for delinking
from Eurocentric frameworks of knowledge production, I am somewhat
Refusing
Human Rights,
the Politics
Political
of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 35

sceptical that we can ‘delink’, or produce a version of pure uncontaminated

non-Eurocentric scholarship or even produce a ‘third world perspective’
(Barreto 2014) on human rights—in fact, I refuse claims of purity and
authenticity for the principal reason that global human rights have permeated
all sorts of discourses and have become by a large degree the condition for
representation and voice, not least for subaltern groups, but have also been
taken up by the latter to make claims and demand entitlements. Moreover,
‘delinking’ is a hard epistemic, ontological and political position to sustain
in South Asia where colonial and postcolonial governmentalities led by the
political logics of bureaucracy and development have unleashed dispossession,
displacement, violence and coercion on subaltern groups on an unprecedented
manner. However, this scepticism towards ‘delinking’ does not mean, as I shall
go on to show later, that there is a singular, hegemonic human rights discourse
that is travelling in an authentic or pure way from the Global North to meet
other pure and authentic discourses in the Global South. In fact, quite the
converse; the coercive entanglements of the histories of colonialism together
with the penetrative capacities of state developmentalism and transnational
capital have not only rendered talk of authenticity impossible but have also
at the same time, laid bare the magnitude of epistemic and ontological
violence unleashed on subaltern groups. Developmentalism and dispossession
constitute important sites of subaltern rights talk in South Asia, and are also
the grounds on which subaltern groups resist and challenge the irresistible
power and the authority of the state.
The focus on vernacular rights cultures is a question of scale as it is of
temporality, subjectivity, subalternity and political struggles. National and
international institutions, their processes, rules, norms, discourses and
functionings are central interests of vernacular rights cultures, not least because
it is mainly at institutional structures—law, bureaucracy and the state—that
human rights politics in ‘most of the world’ is directed at. The preoccupations
of vernacular rights cultures, therefore, overlap with some of the concerns of
institutional accounts of global human rights, even if their politics, tactics and
actors are very different. It is worth stressing again that this is not to say that
institutional accounts are not significant or helpful but only that they are only
partial accounts, and therefore, to arrive at judgements, of either triumphalist or
the unremitting failure of human rights on the basis of institutional accounts is
to tell only one story, and it is often the story of those who occupy institutional
positions of power and privilege. One such epistemically powerful story of
human rights revolves around what I have called the politics of origins.
36 Vernacular Rights Cultures

In this chapter, I have a twofold aim: to draw attention to a specific effect

of this politics of origins, which is the pervasive time–space provincialism,
historiographical, philosophical and moral, that characterises human rights
scholarship. This time–space provincialism invests epistemic authority in
the Global North, thereby leading to a lack of theoretical, philosophical and
conceptual attention to rights struggles in the Global South.
If we are to decolonise human rights, I argue, then we will need to shift
the epistemic center of human rights talk and disrupt its politics of origins and
the time–space provincialism that it puts in place. This epistemic shift involves
identifying the prevailing forms of Eurocentrism informing current human
rights thinking but also generating scholarly work aimed at both tracking
alternative genealogies of human rights and producing conceptual work that
captures the stakes and struggles over rights/human rights in ‘most of the
world’. Consequently, the burden of the second half of this chapter, and also
its second aim, is to outline the elements of this framework, which will enable
this conceptual work aimed at decolonising global
humanhuman
rights. rights.

The Politics of Origins

Broadly speaking, theoretical and empirical discussions of global human
rights take place in a conceptually saturated and ‘over-determined’ discourse
characterised by the ‘politics
politics of origins’.
origins. Paradoxically,
Paradoxically, these
these can
can be entered
into only through a clearing exercise or a refusal; a refusal that ironically only
reproduces this originary discourse on human rights all over again. Keeping
this risk in my mind, I shall outline what I mean by a framework of a ‘politics
of origins’. By it, I simply mean that the guiding assumptions framing rights
debates and questions invariably begin with an orientalist and racialist
assumption common to both the celebrators and detractors of human rights,
mainly that the conceptual, philosophical and empirical experience of rights
across the globe owe their formulation to the three revolutions of the modern
West: the Glorious Revolution (1688), the American Revolution (1776) and
the French Revolution (1789). Not only are rights politics viewed as Western
derived, but they are also regarded as symbolic of this continuing Western
tradition of human rights. The politics of origins is trapped in the binary
and normative nomenclatural politics of assigning geopolitical and cultural
labels: either of and from ‘the West’ or not of ‘the West’ and thereby, of the
‘non-West’. The documentation of this global proliferation of human rights (or
indeed its refusal) is hardly a descriptive project; it is, if anything, a normative
Refusing
Human Rights,
the Politics
Political
of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 37

one. On the one hand, human rights represent civilisational progress to which
‘other’ nations and peoples must aspire, even if it means justifying the spread
or the protection of human rights through imperialist military invasions and
‘humanitarian’ interventions. On the other hand, there are powerful detractors
of human rights who similarly place rights on a continuum of modernity,
progress and linear historical time but prioritise economic development as a
necessary precondition in the progress towards political and civil freedoms
while refusing rights politics on the basis of cultural inauthenticity and non-
origin. Both these positions involve significant historical and intellectual
inattentiveness. Not only are global human rights a recent intellectual and
political project within the Global North, and, one that has been mired in
conflict and continues to be bitterly fought for, but discourses of rights and
entitlements are powerfully invoked in the Global South too.
There is nothing partisan about the politics of origins. It is a shared
discourse, partaken by the celebrators and detractors of human rights, by the
progressive critics of human rights as well as by those who seek to ‘vernacularise’
rights. It also underpins the binary distinctions sketched between Asian
values and Western human rights, universalism and cultural particularism,
authoritarian economic development and Western political and civil centred
human rights. These binary distinctions do the work of keeping epistemic
hierarchies intact by actively reproducing the binaries of native/other and
culturally authentic/foreign but also those of the epistemic-authorial global
versus the non-epistemic-always
non-epistemic always only everever receiving
receiving and
and translating
translating local.
local.
Crucially, they effectively foreclose agentival activity and authorship of rights
from different locations and repress democratic politics of claim making,
dissent, freedom and justice.
Consider three relatively recent examples of this politics of origins from
contemporary popular political discourse on gender and sexuality in India
and Pakistan where the politics of origins enjoys significant hold in the
subcontinent’s historiographical, philosophical and cultural imaginations. My
first example is from August 2016 when the Indian government announced
that the surrogacy laws in the country needed overhauling. Intriguingly, for
a country that has separate federal government ministries overseeing ‘health’,
and also ‘women and child development’, neither cabinet ministers heading
either of these departments were assigned to make the new surrogacy policy
announcement but it was India’s cabinet rank minister for foreign affairs
who appeared before a press conference called for the purpose, to make this
policy statement on the changes to the national surrogacy policy. The minister
38 Vernacular Rights Cultures

announced various changes to the surrogacy bill, many of which are explicitly
exclusionary and homophobic and proceeded to justify these in the following
way: ‘We
‘We dodo not
not recognise
recognise homosexual
homosexual oror live
live in
in relationships
relationships that
that is why
they
they are
are not
not allowed
allowed to commission babies through surrogacy, it is against
our
our ethos’
ethos.’(emphasis added]1 1
[Emphasisadded).
Or consider this example where Imran Khan, the then recently elected
Prime Minister of Pakistan, in a widely circulated interview to a Pakistan
news site, Hum News, had this indictment for feminism: ‘A mother has [the] (the)
biggest influence on a person ... a real mother, that is. I completely disagree
with this Western concept, this feminist movement ... it has degraded the role
of a mother ... when I was growing up, my mother had the most impact on me.’2
India and Pakistan are no strangers to the politics of origins, of course.
The two illustrations are paradigmatic of the manner in which the binary
originary discourse of the West/non-West plays out routinely on questions
of gender relations in the two countries. And, therefore, it is not that these
representations of gender, sexuality and women’s rights in India and Pakistan
as ‘Western’ and ‘alien’ and culturally inappropriate constitute a matter of any
surprise but rather they are the invariable lightning rods for mobilising the
powerful epistemic and political hold of the politics of origins in the region
and are routinely wheeled out to repress democratic claim-making.
Finally, consider this excerpted vignette from a speech on human rights
made by the home minister of India’s ruling BJP in 2019.

India and
India and the
the world have different concepts and situations
situations regarding
regarding human
rights. If we evaluate it with the world’s standards, then perhaps that is not
right …3 India has an inbuilt framework of human rights. Our family values
have special protection of women and children, and villages look after the
poor believing it to be part of their dharma …4 Ensuring a synergy between
our cultural values and the modern approach to rights would make India the
best in the world in terms of human rights.5

The
The politics
politics of
of origins
origins here is invoked to effectively discredit any critical
scrutiny of human rights violations
scrutiny violations by the Indian state on the basis that
human rights
international human rightsstandards
standardsarearedeficient
deficientand and lacking
lacking andand cannot
cannot be
be used
used to judge
to judge the workings
the workings of theofIndian
the Indian
state. state.
However, However, what
what is is striking
striking about
aboutmode
this the mode of reasoning
of reasoning on display
on display here is here
that itis does
that not
it does notandeploy
deploy outrightan
outright rejection
rejection of humanofrightshumanby rights
invokingby straightforward
invoking straightforward cultural
cultural relativist
relativism. Rather,
arguments. Rather,ititmobilises
mobilises originary
originary ‘cultural
‘cultural values’
values’ arguments
arguments to to reject
international human rights standards by demanding to substitute these with
Refusing
Human Rights,
the Politics
Political
of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 39

culturally appropriate ones. And, therefore, the argument here is not that
human rights are redundant or are not recognised in Indian culture, which it
tediously and erroneously refutes by insisting on India’s ‘inbuilt human rights
framework’, but rather that international human rights standards themselves
are in need of repair, retooling, and replacement by those which are culturally
appropriate. This is a dangerous argument for at least three reasons: The politics
of origins deployed here wilfully distracts from the deeply fragmented, fearful,
exclusionary and hostile political and institutional cultures that the ‘cultural
values’ discourse is embedded in but also reproduces and fortifies. In this case,
the ‘cultural values’ mobilised here are resolutely identified as hindutva, racist,
hetero-masculinist–patriarchal, anti-Dalit anti-Adivasi, and Islamophobic.
Invoking ‘cultural values’ here is to essentially locate ‘culture’ firmly against
politics of
the politics ofdemocratic
democraticdissent
dissentand
andjustice.
justice.
InIn refusing
refusing thelegitimacy
legitimacy of
of the
critical scrutiny of human rights violations of the Indian state, what is in
effect refused here is any political accountability or indeed responsibility for
democratic functioning and for upholding the legal constitutional status of
rights and entitlements. Finally, invoking ‘cultural values’ as the ‘framework’
for rebooting international human rights substantially undermines the political
and legal legitimacy of the Indian constitution as the guarantor of fundamental
rights and civil liberties of all citizens.
The politics of origins as played out in the three illustrations above remind
yet again of the need for hyper
hyper-vigilance
vigilance and caution in using categories of
the ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ in discrete binary terms. They evocatively illustrate
how the binary categories of the West/non-West produce disciplining and
essentialising discourses that erase specificity and difference while clamping
down on the democratic politics of dissent and justice. It is therefore, crucial
to remain hyper vigilant in
hyper-vigilant in respect
respect of the
the ways
ways in
in which
which these
these binary
binary originary
discourses reproduce not only particular gendered representations and power
relations that must be refused, but also how their deployment both rearticulates
and leaves unchallenged the hegemonic terms of global human rights talk that
privileges some and excludes other struggles. My call for exercising a cautious–
reflexive view in deploying the binary West/non-West while speaking of human
rights owes in some part to the hostile criticism and reception directed at the
women’s and feminist movement in India and Pakistan, which is besieged by
labels characterising it as foreign, alien and a Western import, and therefore,
inauthentic, culturally inappropriate and illegitimate. However, as I have noted
elsewhere (Madhok 2010), the argument that advocating women’s rights and
feminist politics constitutes inauthentic politics and an inauthentic social
40 Vernacular Rights Cultures

mobilisation because feminism happens to have its ‘originary’ moment in the

‘West’ is weak not least because women’s rights were mooted and supported
during the anticolonial nationalist movement itself (John 1996; Ram 2000).
Moreover, the difficulties with women’s rights in India and Pakistan are less to
do with their being ‘foreign’ or ‘out of place’ with culture/tradition and more to
do with their fragile and insecure inclusion into state legal constitutionalism,
the actual experiential failure of rights on the ground (Rajan 2003) and the
absence of accountability and non-individuation of citizen identities (Ram
2000).
Nevertheless, the irresistible power of the politics of origins has meant that
even where women’s rights have been explicitly under consideration, these are
required to be in alignment with dominant definitions of authentic culture/
scriptural tradition and ‘modern’ Indian and Pakistani identity. It is hardly
surprising therefore, that the debates on women’s citizenship in postcolonial
India and Pakistan have been circumscribed by an unyielding attention to
balance out demands for women’s equal citizenship rights with their religious
and cultural roles (Kapur and Cossman 1996). Perhaps, nothing illustrates this
constant accommodation of women’s rights better than the insertion of the
Hudood ordinances into Pakistan’s legal system in 1979, introduced as part of
the drive by the military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq to ‘Islamise’ Pakistan.
These ordinances restructured the entire legal framework in Pakistan ‘to
institutionalize discrimination against women and non-muslim citizens’ (Saigol
2004: 14). Among the new order of offences introduced by these ordinances
were those of zina, which criminalised sexual intercourse outside marriage
and conflated rape with ‘illicit sex’ and adultery. As scholars have noted,
‘thousands of women were arrested under charges of zina over the next 30
years and it became the most common reason for their incarceration’ (Saigol
2004; A. Khan 2018: 63). The feminist and women’s movement was one of
the few oppositional voices at the forefront of opposing the military rule of
Zia-ul-Haq. During this period, it entered into a period of open confrontation
with the
the military
militarystate
stateover
overthe
thedilution
dilutionofofexisting women’s
existing women’s rights andand
rights in its
to
countenance
opposition tothethe‘exclusionary
‘exclusionary Islamic
Islamic State’ (A. Khan 2018:
2018: 111).
111). However,
this confrontation also brought into sharp sharp relief
relief the
the difficult
difficult and fraught
negotiations over the binaries
binaries of secular
secular and religious feminisms, between
‘political’ and ‘non-political’ feminists, and also between elite metropolitan
and rural, provincial
provincial politics
politics of
of women’s rights. None of these binaries have
met with any resolution, andand ifif anything,
anything, have only
only intensified
intensified with the shift
in global politics since 2001.
Refusing
Human Rights,
the Politics
Political
of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 41

The challenge of resisting originary discourses on human rights is a pressing

one. How, do we resist the binary politics of ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ and also think
of the movements, rights claims and politics that take place in the non-Anglo-
North American-European worlds without losing either their historical and
political specificity or their geopolitical location and hierarchical relationship
with majoritarian human rights discourses? In other words, how do we go
about ‘worlding’ human rights without losing sight of their historical, linguistic
and political specificities including the very specific ways in which these are
mobilised? In my view, it is more productive to think of human rights as not
wholly derivative from the three major revolutions in the West—the American,
the French and the English—or entirely oppositional to Western notions and
conventions of human rights. It is not helpful to regard them as entirely discrete
in form, in that one would be hard pressed to find hermetically sealed or ‘pure’
rights traditions. Instead, human rights must be viewed as interlocked into
relations that are historically, productively, intimately, racially, intersectionally,
materially, and coercively produced and experienced. I must hasten to add here,
that to say that we must be cautious and reflexive towards categories such as
the ‘West’ when speaking of human rights is, of course, not to suggest that
we ignore the geopolitical power relations upheld and signified by the ‘West’,
nor that we lose historical specificity and the historically specific ways that
global human rights discourses and politics have emerged, evolved, travelled,
are translated and debated. It simply means that it is much more generative
and productive to think of human rights in a transnational mode, recognising
the unequal and uneven circuits of power in which they operate while also
acknowledging the historically specific, intersectional, geopolitically situated
and embedded political struggles for rights, with their particular conceptual
categories, languages (both literal and conceptual) and modes of world-making.

Time–Space Provincialism
The politics of origins haunts both the celebratory accounts and the recent
progressive critiques of human rights. If anything, it is reproduced and
resurrected through critique. In particular, the epistemic power of the politics
of origins is such that it sets up a particular paradox, a deadlock if you like, in
scholarly accounts of human rights. On the one hand, the originary impulse
enables different forms of time-space provincialism in human rights accounts.
On the other hand, the critiques of this time-space provincialism resurrect the
42 Vernacular Rights Cultures

politics of origins all over again. By time-space provincialism, I simply mean

that the epistemic centre of human rights intellectual thinking is temporally
and geographically located in the West. So even if the timeline of the originary
stories of human rights might shift, the location of the human rights story
remained steadfastly in place with the result that the geopolitical context of
epistemic enquiry remains stationary. To put it in another way, the politics
of origins not only informs the discourse on human rights in originary terms
but also frames its critiques. Through a critique of existing originary theses, it
reproduces the politics of origins albeit in a different form—this time through
refutation. The refutation itself can be either more straightforward—we know
that there are other human rights stories (Sikkink 2017)—or more complex—
presenting different timelines to show that human rights did not originate in
the West from time immemorial (Hunt 2007; Moyn 2010; Burke 2010; Jensen
2015). The politics of origins is hardly confined to particular scholarly and
disciplinary contexts and appears across different disciplinary sites where it
has particular empirical and epistemic consequences.
Not surprisingly, a key theme of the politics of origins revolves around the
question of temporality. In the last decade, this question of temporality has
dominated the landscape of human rights scholarship. Of course, it was not
that long ago that one would (and expect to) routinely come across teleological
histories of human rights, which would mostly consist of how human rights
made their appearance throughout the different epochs in the West from
antiquity to modernity and how from their originary location in the West,
spread to the rest of the world. In recent years, however, scholars have mounted
insightful and sharp critiques of the seamless temporal links drawn between
global human rights and Western civilisation. The key premise of these
projects is that human rights belong to a more recent history and therefore,
their work disputes the classical timeline of teleological histories. These recent
historiographies of human rights chart a different temporality of human rights
that fundamentally disrupts the originary impulse that aggregates a variety
of ‘Western’ rights talk in different historical periods under the umbrella
of global human rights (Hunt 2007; Moyn 2010). In her book Inventing
Human Rights, Lynn Hunt (2007) plots the timeline for the emergence of
human rights in the period from 1689 to 1776. It is during this time period in
France, Great Britain and the United States, she argues, that the term human
rights becomes operational as a ‘common term’, and a ‘self-evident’ one. The
burden of Hunt’s book lies in accounting for this emergence of ‘self-evidence’
(2007: 19) of human rights in these countries.6 She explains that the growing
Refusing
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of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 43

self-evidence of human rights emerges from the increasing popularity and

cultural circulation of the ideas of autonomy, bodily integrity and empathetic
selfhood in public exhibitions, newspapers and popular novels. Together these
forms of cultural production enable a ‘leap of faith’ and a particular ability to
‘imagine’ that ‘someone else is like you’ (Hunt 2007: 32). Now even though
Hunt is very careful to point out that this ‘self-evidence’ of human rights
applies to only a select few in society and does not include women,7 children,
colonial subjects and slaves, the inescapable question, however, is one of ‘self-
evidence’ for whom and also ‘self-evidence’ towards what? These questions
are essential
essential because
because Hunt’s
Hunt’s timeline
timeline for
of the
the emergence of the ‘self-evidence’
of human rights is also the high age of empire and colonial order. As has
been now powerfully documented, the enunciation of the declaration of the
rights of man and citizen in 1789 was followed by a furious denouncement
of the rights of all except propertied white men. And, the next decade and a
half in the immediate declaration of the rights of man saw France, Spain and
Great Britain send out their militaries in an all-out war to crush the greatest
argument and demonstration of human rights and equality that arose in the
wake of the originary and foundational moment of republicanism and human
rights. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot powerfully reminds us:

The Haitian Revolution was the ultimate test to the universalist pretensions
of both the French and the American revolutions. And they both failed. In
1791, there is no public debate on the record, in France, in England, or in the United
States on the right of black slaves to achieve self-determination, and the right to do
resistance (Trouillot
so by way of armed resistance. (Trouillot 1995:
1995:88).
88)

The Haitian Revolution powerfully and unequivocally refutes any idea

of the self-evidence of human rights (James 1934; Trouillot 1995). It also
underscores the point that human rights have not been extended through a
gradual recognition of the ‘self-evidence’ of human rights across the globe and
for all but rather where human rights have held up, they have done so as a result
of a long drawn and continuing political struggle for rights and human rights.
In an account of quite some contrast to that of Lynn Hunt’s, Samuel Moyn
(2010, 2014) writes that human rights do not emerge as a global imaginary until
the mid-20th
two centuries century.
later. In In fact,
fact, theyonly
they onlycome
comeinto
intotheir
theirown
ownas
asrecently
recently as
as the
1970s. Moyn links this global ascendance with the rise of international human
rights organisations such as Amnesty International during this period. The
reason for their emergence, Moyn argues, is less to do with their ‘self evidence’
but rather because they are the ‘last utopia’ left standing amidst the ruins of
44 Vernacular Rights Cultures

all other political imaginaries in the post war period in the West. In a searing
critique of the teleological accounts of human rights, Moyn argues that attempts
to insert human rights into a long and unbroken European civilisational
tradition—stretching from the Greeks to the European enlightenment—is a
mistaken endeavor. He suggests that no such tradition exists in quite this form
and points out that entitlements that were spoken about at different points
whether in the natural law and rights traditions or indeed among the Greeks
were hardly referring to a supranational framework of human rights that would
transcend national sovereignty and belonging. Other scholars of human rights
too have sought to locate the dynamism of human rights talk, not so much in
the rise of international organisations and the rise of civil and political rights,
or indeed in the efforts of Western lawmakers, peacemakers and lawyers but
rather in the diplomatic exertions of newly independent states of the Global
South. These scholars seek to shift the timeline of human rights from political
imaginaries, cultural aesthetics and the rise of civil and political rights in the
West in order to locate the rise of human rights in the human rights diplomacy
of the newly independent postcolonial nations in the Global South. These
accounts escape the time–space provincialism of their progressive peers as
they work to shift the timeline and place of ‘origin’ of global human rights,
even if they reproduce the framework of origins all over again. For instance,
Roland Burke (2010) notes that there was a robust and visible support for
human rights at the first ever significant meeting of the postcolonial nations
that congregated as a ‘third world entity’, at the Bandung conference in 1955.
Similarly, Steven Jensen (2016) writes that the 1960s laid the foundations for
groundbreaking and radical interventions on human rights, especially those
on race and religious equality which were led by the new postcolonial nations
who insisted on such equality as core human rights. These historiographical
accounts of human rights showing different timelines and actors are significant
and do important work, not least in disrupting the civilisationalism that lies
at the heart of the popular narratives of human rights. However, these critical
accounts also show how difficult it is to escape the originary framework of
human rights discourses. Even when they set out to refute the thesis, they end
up reproducing the terms of the politics of origins all over again.

Philosophical Talks on Origin

Now, the origin question I have been tracking is central not only to
historiographical accounts. Philosophical accounts of rights and human
Refusing
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Political
of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 45

rights are no stranger to the politics of origin either. While historiographies

of human rights are focused on establishing different timelines and actors,
key accounts of human rights within political theory and philosophy are
animated by the ‘originary’ or ‘foundational’ moments of Republicanism
and the declarations of the rights of man and citizen articulated during the
American and French revolutions. These scholarly engagements have generated
important interventions focusing on the aporias, paradoxes and the violent
exclusions inherent in the ‘interval’ between the rights of man and those of
the citizen; between the normative ‘we the people’ and the declarative ‘we the
people’; between those who make the laws and those who obey them (Benhabib
1994: 6).8 Hannah Arendt (1958) identified the most significant of these
paradoxes, that between the rights of man and those of citizen—namely, if one
did not have citizenship rights, then one did not have human rights. In recent
years, the ‘equivocal’ (Balibar 2017: 29) nature of the declarations of rights of
man and citizen have led philosophers to consider the democratic possibilities
and limitations of these ‘foundational’ republican enunciations. Étienne
Balibar (1994: 44) writes that there is a ‘double identification’ at the ‘core of
the revolutionary text’. The first identification is that of man and citizen—
they are one and the same, no gaps between them. The second identification
is between freedom and equality. It is this identification between freedom
and equality—of one being the ‘exact measure of the other’, that Balibar calls
‘equaliberty’ (1994:
‘equaliberty’ 46–7).9 9Equaliberty
(1994: 46–47). Equalibertysignifies
signifies aa ‘universal
‘universal right
right to
to politics’
politics’
and a permanent tension between universal political signification of the
rights of man and the ‘struggle’ and ‘social conflict’ required to construct the
‘politics of rights of man’. Contrary to Balibar’s equation of man and citizen,
Jacques Rancière identifies a ‘gap’ and an ‘interval’ between the two, which is
generative of what he calls ‘dissensus’. The question of the ‘political subject’,
writes Rancière,

is not caught between the void term of man and the plenitude of the citizen
with its actual rights. A political subject is a capacity for staging scenes of
dissensus ... a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which
we see something as given … the putting of two worlds in one and the same
world.(Rancière
world (Rancière 2010:
2010: 69).
69)

In conceiving ‘dissensus’, he takes Hannah Arendt (1951) and also Giorgio

Agamben (1998) to task for their negative reading of the paradox of the
founding moment of republicanism—that is, the interval between man and
46 Vernacular Rights Cultures

citizen in in the
thedeclaration
declarationofofthe therights
rights of ofman manandandcitizen;
citizen;
for confining
for confining the
subject
the of rights
subject to already
of rights determined
to already determined ‘collections of individuals’,
‘collections of individuals’, whowhoare
either
are already
either citizens
already and already
citizens and already enjoyenjoyrightsrights
by virtue of having
by virtue the ‘right
of having the
to have
‘right torights’ (Arendt
have rights’ 1979)1979)
(Arendt or those who are
or those who notareand,
nottherefore, only have
and, therefore, only
the rights
have of man,
the rights which
of man, in effect
which in effect amounts
amounts to to
having
havingnonorights
rightsatatall.
all. In
Rancière (2004) argues that the
contrast, Rancière the ‘subject
‘subject of of rights
rightsisisthethesubject—or
subject, or
more accurately
accurately the process process of subjectivation—that
subjectivization, that bridges bridges the the interval
interval
between the two forms of existence existence of thosethose rights’
rights’ and therefore,
therefore, the interval
between rightsrights of of man
man and and citizen,
citizen,neither
neithersignifies
signifiesaa‘theoretical
‘theoreticallock’,
lock’,nor
nora
a ‘void’
‘void’ oror
anan ‘abyss’but
‘abyss’, butrather
ratherthethe possibility
possibility of of political
political subjectivation
subjectivation andandof
of democratic
democratic politics
politics as dissensus’
as ‘dissensus’ (2004:
(2004: 302). Consequently,
302–04). Consequently, he proposes
that the question of the rights of man be reset as ‘the rights of man are the
rights of those who have not the rights that they have and have the rights that
they have not’ (2004: 302). Central Central to this recasting is the recognition and
the necessity of producing accounts of political political subjectivation
subjectivation and collective
collective
action of those ‘who have no no part’
part’ (2004: 305), and who are represented
as beyond accountsaccounts of of democracy
democracy or or anti democracy, justice or
anti-democracy, or injustice.
injustice.
Both Rancière and Balibar highlight the importance of political action in
developing forms of community able to enact rights through demanding a
right to have rights. For Rancière (1999: 30), 30), political action is necessary in
order to ‘reconfigure
‘reconfigure the the space
space where parties,
parties, parts
parts oror lack
lack of parts have been
defined’; it is through political action that the boundaries of exclusion—who
defined’;
is the subject of the rights of man man or or who
who isis included
included within
within existing
existing regimes
of rights—are contested and redistributed. redistributed. Similarly, for Balibar (2002: 6), the
‘democratization of democracy’ takes place through the ‘struggle ‘struggle to to enjoy rights
which have already been declared.’ declared.’ Contentious politics are are crucial,
crucial, then, in
providing accessaccessto toororinclusion
inclusionwithin
withinalready
alreadyexisting
existing rights.
rights. Three
Three things
things are
arenote
of of note
here:here: first,
first, it isitstriking
is striking
thatthat
thethe pre-eminent
pre-eminent philosophers
philosophers thinking
thinking on
on human
human rights
rights andand political
political action
action turn turn to events
to events fromtwotwo hundred
hundred years agoago
years in
order
in orderto to
ground
ground their
their arguments.
arguments.Manfredi
Manfredi(2013) (2013)writes
writesthatthat there
there is often
a tendency among left critics of human rights to contrast the contemporary
human rights politics politics with
with anan ‘older
‘olderrevolutionary
revolutionary rights rightstradition’
tradition’(Manfredi
(Manfredi
2013: 6). However, what interests me here is the philosophical philosophical and epistemic
erasure that this harkingharking back back to the originary
originary sites of human rights politics
Europe,entails,
located in Europe whichwhichare heldareup heldas up
theasnormative
the normative and the
and desirable but
the desirable
alsoalso
but as the corrective
as the corrective to to
contemporary
contemporary travails
travailsofofhuman
humanrightsrightspolitics.
politics.The
The
striking thing
striking thing in in these
these discussions
discussion isis thatthat ‘Europe’
‘Europe’ as as aa standard
standard background
background
Refusing
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of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 47

context remains stable and a constant normative referent, even in the midst
of a growing acknowledgement that the meanings of rights far from being
‘transhistorical’ (Manfredi 2013: 8) are historically located, f luid and
shifting. Second, even as Balibar and Rancière call upon the importance
of political struggles in obtaining and continually reaffirming purportedly
universal rights, there nonetheless remains an abstract, unchanging universal
in the form of an axiom of equality (Rancière 1999) or of rights that have
already been declared (Balibar 2002). Consequently, theirs is an analysis
which accommodates political subjectivation only in the regime of already
declared rights and focuses on those seeking inclusion into already declared
rights. Third and following from the above, could it really be the case that
the explanatory framework of human rights politics around the globe is
the originary founding Anglo–American-European republican moment?
Furthermore, how far can this overarching originary framework with its
linguistic and philosophical aporias, paradoxes and democratic possibilities
be used to explain the stuff of politics in ‘most of the world’? I would be
inclined to advance an answer in the negative. However, I am digressing
from my main point, which is this—there are consequences to the erasure
of empirical contexts of human rights mobilisations in ‘most of the world’.
Although tracking the present histories and experiences of rights and human
rights in the Anglo, North American and European worlds is an important
exercise, these are only ever ‘provincial’ accounts, and we have to work harder
at resisting wilful ignorance and erasures of the mobilisations for rights
and entitlements in ‘most of the world’ and also to produce conceptual and
theoretical accounts of these mobilisations. The latter is a crucial imperative
as it is only through conceptual descriptions of rights mobilisations in ‘most
of the world’ that we will begin to counter the existing mismatch between
the contemporary historical, theoretical and philosophical work on rights
and human rights and the growing mobilisations on the ground in ‘most
of the world’ (as the latter for most part fail to figure in this work). Finally,
undertaking conceptual descriptions will also enable explorations of the stakes
and struggles over rights in different parts of the globe.

Human Rights, Neoliberalism and the ‘Depoliticisation Thesis’

There is, however, yet another epistemic impact of the politics of origins and
its time-space provincialism that I want to draw attention to: I am referring
48 Vernacular Rights Cultures

here to the growing negativity, despair and epistemic erasure that characterises
critical progressive scholarship on human rights. This negativity is, of course,
not without good reason. A commonly occurring cause for this disquiet is
the growing depoliticisation of our life-worlds as a result of neoliberalism
and, human rights are often seen as deeply complicit in global ascendance of
neoliberalism. The ‘depoliticisation thesis’ has become the standard lament
and mode of critique within popular and academic imaginaries. It goes
something like this: under neoliberalism, ‘we’ have become depoliticised
subjects with little interest or stake in progressive politics of social justice or
in anything other than consuming products and being consumerist subjects.
Now this depoliticisation thesis comes in a number of forms, and the link with
neoliberalism is not uniform in all cases. Influential philosophical critiques,
for instance, link the growing depoliticisation to a philosophical turn to
‘ethics’. And radical democratic theorists of the European left often bemoan
the depoliticised nature of this theorising; critiquing it for being divorced from
economic and political materialities, and for the evacuation of the ‘political’
from its work. In this context, the ‘ethical turn’ is usually used to refer to the
writings of a number of theorists including, although, not only limited to,
Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, and also to some influential strands
of postcolonial scholarship, which are charged with inordinately focusing on
identifying the ethical practices required for a democratic polity.
Predominantly, though, a key theme driving the ‘depoliticisation’ thesis is
one of ‘antipolitics’ and especially the ‘antipolitics’ of humanitarianism. And,
as I noted in Chapter 1, human rights have now become near synonymous
with the practice of humanitarianism and with humanitarian actors who act
on behalf of those ‘victims’ who cannot claim rights on their own (Rancière
2004). And, we know that in practice the human of human rights is in effect
a citizen of a nation state who enjoys human rights as a feature of their
citizenship (Arendt 1958). Moreover, it is also increasingly the case, that as
human rights in the form of ‘new humanitarianism’ are assuming centre stage
in global governance, they have led not only to an increasing displacement
of international law but also to the depoliticising of rights and human rights
by actively disassociating human rights from national citizenship (Mamdani
2010). In other words, human rights are increasingly no longer seen as political
claims made by citizens but as a ‘responsibility to protect’ discharged by global
powers towards ‘populations’, which it sees as its ‘wards’ (Mamdani 2010: 54).
Furthermore, the strong predisposition of global human rights towards
civil and political rights and their championing of minimalist, individualistic
Refusing
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Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 49

rights counterposed to any collective politics of social justice has rendered

them eminently suitable for neoliberal projects. Accordingly, in recent years,
important questions are being asked of the neoliberal politics of human rights,
(Whyte 2017, 2018; Moyn 2015, 2018; Marks 2013), and especially about
their lack of strong and discernable distributive equality discourse. Scholars
point out that not only has the astronomical rise of global inequality coincided
with the global rise of both human rights and neoliberalism, and that human
rights have, under their watch, seen and are seeing the most egregious forms
of global inequality, but also that they have failed spectacularly to produce a
discourse of social justice to counter this trend (Moyn 2018). And, consequently,
there are now serious question marks hanging over the role of human rights in
supporting and promoting neoliberalism’s global designs and politics.
But perhaps, one of the most most powerful
powerful critiques of neoliberalism and its
‘antipolitics’
‘antipolitics’ is one recently
is the one recentlyadvanced
advancedby byfeminist
politicalpolitical
theoristtheorist,
Wendy Wendy
Brown.
In her book Undoing the Demos, Brown (2015)
Brown. In her book Undoing the Demos, Brown (2015) writes that writes that neoliberalism
has recast the relationship betweenbetween statestate and
and subject
subject on the model of the
contemporary firm, firm, thereby,
thereby, converting
converting all all political
political values
values into market values
and reducing all social relations to to commercial
commercial transactions,
transactions, including those
of political participation. Brown Brown argues
argues that this has serious consequences
for political
political equality
equality and for for citizenship.
citizenship. Essentially,
Essentially, the juggernaut of
the juggernaut
neoliberalism
neoliberalism marches
marcheson ononly
onlytotoresult
resultininthe
thedeath
deathofofthe
thehomo
homopoliticus.
politicus.
I am
am not
not disputing
disputing that
that neoliberalism
neoliberalism converts
converts social
social relations
relations into
commercial ones,
commercial ones, but I do do not
not think
think that
that neoliberalism
neoliberalism and and the
the specific
specific
historical forms it takes
historical takes inin particular
particular locations—Brown’s examples are all
located in the
the Euro-Atlantic
Euro-Atlantic world—is
world—is not replicated
replicated in quite
in quite thethe same
same wayway
in
in all
all locations
locations andand neither
neither doesdoes it essentially
it essentially replace
replace all all forms
forms of the
of the politics
politics of
of equality
equality andand justice
justice everywhere.
everywhere. To sayTothis
sayisthis
notistonot
denytothe
deny the undeniable
undeniable march
march
of of neoliberalism
neoliberalism but rather
but rather to saytotwosay things:
two things—if
First, if influential
influential theoretical
theoretical
and philosophical critiques of neoliberalism were to pay some attention to
the ongoing struggles in the Global South, far from showing the impending
death of the homo politicus they would reveal dynamic and bitterly fought
struggles about how to redefine and expand the scope and meaning of
citizenship. To draw attention to these struggles and mobilisations, however,
is not to suggest that they simply mount a struggle against neoliberal policies,
structures and institutions from an ‘outside’, as if they could. Instead it is to
say that contestations of neoliberalism take place within specific historical
conditions of neoliberalism in different locations and are consequently
shaped by these specificities. Second, if we are to take seriously the calls to
50 Vernacular Rights Cultures

‘theorise from the global South’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012) then we
not only need to be attentive to how under particular historical conditions,
certain subjectivities, subjects, precarities become routinely available and the
different forms that neoliberal prescriptivism—for example, ‘autonomisation’
and ‘responsibilisation’ (Rose 1999: 174)—takes in different parts of the world
but significantly, we must also pay attention to the forms of contestations,
conflicts and counter-conducts that are generated under historically specific
neoliberal contexts, and which work to disorient, destabilise and even interrupt
deeply unjust concentrations of political, social and technological power (see
Chapters 4 and 5).

Shifting the Perspective: Rights/Human Rights on a Different

Scale
So, what does haq have to do with this tracking and the critique of a politics
of origins? Quite simply, to focus on haq, as another language for rights and
human rights, is to reorient historical, theoretical and philosophical thinking
grounded in the politics of origins and to produce an epistemic shift towards
enquiries that are attentive to the political cultures of rights in ‘most of the
world’. A focus on vernacular rights cultures and their disruption of ‘originary
rights talk’, is to neither suggest that we divorce rights talk from how human
rights operate as a form of hegemonic discourse globally for that would be to
feign wilful ignorance or even worse, a ‘colonial unknowing’ and an ignorance
of the circuits of power—histories, discourses and institutional politics within
which all rights talk operates, and nor is it also to suggest that we deploy a
‘global/local’ framework for human rights or a global ‘network’ one for human
rights.10 Instead it is to suggest that we acknowledge the hierarchical epistemic
and geopolitical power relations that exist between global human rights
and vernacular rights cultures. Furthermore, this acknowledgment must be
epistemological and needs to be directed at countering the epistemic erasures
of human rights politics in ‘most of the world’. Acknowledging vernacular
rights cultures epistemically would mean avowing and responding to the forms
of world-making including to the particular ‘strategies’ of utilisation of rights
by subaltern groups which are linked not only to the historical and cultural
identity of the groups making rights claims but also to the particular kinds of
politics and institutional settings that they inhabit, critique and strive towards.
Moreover, such an epistemic acknowledgement would also consist of drawing
Refusing
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the Politics
Political
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Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 51

attention to the fact that these rights cultures exist in a relation of marginality
and subalternity in respect to majoritarian rights discourses associated with
the nation state, legal constitutionalism and developmentalism—even if these
are also the pivots around which vernacular political cultures of rights operate.
Not unsurprisingly then, the question of citizenship is paramount in these
rights struggles and the state is central in these accounts. However, does the
focus on the state not end up replicating the state-centric nature of human
rights scholarship, albeit in a different mode? If so, do vernacular rights cultures
simply rehearse and demonstrate empirically the paradox of human rights
discourse, which claims that human rights are in the final instance, citizenship
rights? Numerous scholars, following Hannah Arendt, have elaborated on the
philosophical implications of this paradox for human rights politics. Empirical
studies of human rights too have followed through on the implications of
Arendt’s paradox by privileging nation states as their object of analysis. In
contrast, I want to suggest that while it is certainly the case that vernacular
rights cultures can be state focused, that is, they direct their rights demands at
the state, it is also through paying attention to them that we can re-examine the
ways through which the global architecture of human rights privileges nation
states. By doing so, we can disrupt the particular form of nation state-centric
rights talk privileged in global human rights discourse in three ways: first, the
rights politics of vernacular rights cultures does not boil down to the Arendtian
paradox—that citizenship is the primary route to rights—chiefly, because
unlike the inclusionary impulse to demand already existing rights, mobilisations
for haq alter the means through which rights are delivered and transform the
content and meaning of the rights demanded (Dunford and Madhok 2015).
Second, the demands for rights and their practice in the vernacular shows up
the internally differentiated and intersectional subject of rights. It brings into
view not the undifferentiated human of human rights but one who is gendered,
raced and comes into being within existing caste relations. Finally, the evocation
of haq draws attention to the manner in which nation states respond to the
demands for human rights by subaltern groups. Therefore, rather than only
focusing on the speech practices and acts of nation states in the international
human rights policy making arenas, vernacularvernacular rights
rights cultures
cultures also
focusfocus on
on the
the stakes
stakes and struggles
and struggles driving
driving domestic
domestic human human
rightsrights
policypolicy
making.making.
This isThis
not
is not a matter of matter
a straightforward only identifying the matchthe
of only identifying and/or
matchthe mismatch
and/or between
the mismatch
international pronouncements
between international of states of
pronouncements committing to international
states committing human
to international
rights
humanand rightstheand
lack
theoflack
corresponding domestic
of corresponding policy
domestic at home.
policy at home.Instead, it
Instead,
produces
it producesa adifferently
differentlyoriented
orientedstyle
styleof
of institutionally
institutionally informed scholarship;
52 Vernacular Rights Cultures

not just of dominant actors entering into majoritarian and dominant networks
and conversations on human rights but one that includes the struggles, voices
and claims making by subaltern groups. Consider, for instance, how recent
historiographical accounts of global human rights have focused on the role of
states in the Global South in the development of international human rights
agendas, shining an important spotlight on the role of the Global South in
pushing egalitarian agendas at various human rights conferences (Burke
2010; Jensen 2016). It would be interesting to see the extent to which these
internationally expressed agendas voicing redistributive justice were reflected
in domestic policy making during the same time period. In this context it is
interesting to note that scholars working on rights and citizenship in India,
for instance, have pointed out out thethe absence
absence of ofany
anygrand
grandegalitarian
domestic egalitarian
agenda or
agenda or redistributive
redistributive rights talk rights
duringtalk the during
period the thatperiod
India was thatmaking
India was making
arguments
arguments for egalitarian
for egalitarian redistributionredistribution
in international in international
human rights human rightsand
circuits, circuits,
that
and thatand
welfare welfare and redistributive
redistributive measuresmeasuresthat werethat arguedwereatargued
‘home’atwere
‘home’ were
couched
couched
in terms in of terms
‘charity’of ‘charity’ to be bestowed
to be bestowed by the Indian
by the Indian state than
state rather ratherasthan as
rights
rights that citizens
that citizens were entitled
were entitled to (Jayal to (2013). 11
Jayal 2013). 11

Moreover, focusing
Moreover, focusingexclusively
exclusively on how
on how nation states perform
nation-states humanin
perform rights
the
in the international
international arenaarenadoes does
not nottell tell
us usmuch much aboutthe
about theinternal
internal contestations
over rights and human rights going on within those nation-states nation states or indeed
about the ways in which subaltern groups within those states have deployed
international humanhuman rights
rightslaw lawand andlegislations
legislations either
either to claim
to claim rights
rights fromfrom
the
nation states or or indeed
indeedtotocritique 12 An
critiqueit.state power. 12 Anintervention
important important intervention
which aims
which aims of
to fill some tothis
fill gap
someinof this gap
human in human
rights and policyrights and policy
scholarship scholarship
is by Mala Htun is
by
andMala
LaurelHtun
Weldon and Laurel
(2018). Weldon (2018). In
In their recently their recently
published published
book, the book,
two political
the two political
scientists ask the scientists ask the question—‘when
question—‘when and why do governments and whypromote
do governments
women’s
promote
rights?’ Inwomen’s rights?’ Instudy
a cross-national a cross-national
spanning 70study spanning
countries, they70 countries,
examine they
‘policies
examine
formally ‘policies
adopted formally adopted by
by governments, governments,
including includingsupreme
constitutions, constitutions,
court
supreme
decisions,court decisions,
and policy and policy
documents’ (Htun documents’
and Weldon (Htun 2018:and255)
Weldon 2018:
in order to
255)
explainin the
order to explain
‘variation andthe ‘variation
trends’ and trends’ in the institutionalisation
in the institutionalisation of gender equality
of
lawsgender
withinequality
and acrosslawscountries.
within and 13 One across striking13findings
countries.
of the One oftheythe uncover
striking
findings
is that inthey
‘crossuncover
nationalis that in ‘cross
patterns national
of policy on patterns
violenceofagainst
policy women
on violence
and
against women
legislation and legislation
promoting promoting equality
equality conformed’, the singleconformed’,
most importantthe single most
factor for
important factor
instituting for instituting
government policy on government
violence againstpolicy women
on violence against
was the women
presence of
was the‘autonomous
vibrant presence offeministvibrantmovements’.
‘autonomousInfeminist other words, movements’.
change came In other
from
words, change
feminist movements,came fromwhichfeminist
helped to movements,
‘consolidatewhich helped to
international ‘consolidate
norms, which
international
they leveragednorms, which for
to pressure theygreater
leveraged to pressure
changed for greater
in domestic changed
contexts’ (Htun in
domestic
and Weldoncontexts’
2018: (Htun
247). and Weldon 2018: 247).
Refusing
Human Rights,
the Politics
Political
of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 53

This is an important intervention as it identifies the key factors responsible

for the variation in institutionalisation of women’s rights across the globe.
The
However,focus the
on focus
public on policy
public legislation within states,
policy legislation w ithinwhile very while
states, important
very
and revealing,
important andessentially
revealing,tackles legislation
essentially tacklesonlegislation
already agreed ‘global norms’
on already agreed
around women’saround
‘global norms’ rights instituted
women’s rights in international
institutedinstruments
in international such as CEDAW,
instruments
among
such asothers.
CEDAW, Evenamongthoughothers.identifying
And,key even actors
thoughresponsible
identifying for the keypassage
actors
of legislations
responsible foronthegender
passage violence is very significant,
of legislations focusingison
on gender violence very end points of
significant,
struggles,
focusing on that
endis, points
on policies enshrined
of struggles, in law,
that is, ondoes not byenshrined
policies itself tell us in about the
law, does
contestations
not by itself around these policies,
tell us about not least within
the contestations around feminist
these movements,
policies, notand as
least
to why feminist groups
within movements, chooseand to pursue
as to why particular
feminist policies
groupsonchooseviolence to against
pursue
women,
particularorpolicies
as to which feministagainst
on violence voices women,
have most or power. Studying
as to which feminist vernacular
voices
rights
have mostcultures on the
power. other hand,
Studying opens rights
vernacular up the cultures
possibility onforthe policy
othermaking
hand,
on rights
opens andpossibility
up the human rights to notmaking
for policy only everon be about
rights andthe ‘vernacularisation’
human rights to not
of
onlyglobal norms
ever be about(Levitt and Merry 2009)
the ‘vernacularisation’ while norms
of global also acknowledging
(Levitt and Merry that
subaltern
2009) while groups
alsoare also not always
acknowledging ablesubaltern
that to enforce policyare
groups changes.
also not Subaltern
always
mobilisations
able to influence oftenpolicy
escapechanges.
full representation as rights-bearing
Subaltern mobilisations often subjects
escapesince
full
their demands often
representation exceed the possibilities
as rights-bearing subjects since and their
imaginaries
demands set often
out in exceed
global
human rights andand
the possibilities stateimaginaries
policy making. Therefore,
set out in global a focus
human on vernacular
rights andrights state
cultures also entails
policy making. the question
Therefore, a focus on of representation—and
vernacular rights cultures one concerning
also entails the
representational capacity of nationone
question of representation—and states to effectively
concerning therespond to the demands
actual representational
for rightsofand
capacity human
nation rights
states of subaltern
to effectively and marginalised
respond to the demands groups for within the
rights and
nation
humanstate.rights of subaltern and marginalised groups within the nation state.
TheThe representational
representational capacity
capacity of nation-states
of nation is further compromised by
states is inordinately
their willingness
willingness totorepresent
facilitatecorporate interests
dispossession andsuch as acquiring
corporate proprietorial
extractivism such
rights
as landovergrabsland,but minerals
also through andacquiring
natural resources
proprietorial belonging
rights over to subaltern
minerals
groups.
and naturalIndeed, the politics
resources of vernacular
that collectively belongrights cultures groups.
to subaltern shines light Indeed,on the
low representational
politics of vernacular rights capacity of states
cultures to light
shines representon the subaltern groups who
low representational
have
capacityhistorically
of statesborne the brunt
to represent of its security
subaltern groups and whodevelopment
have historically apparatus.
borne
Therefore,
the brunt ofthe paradoxand
its security of human
developmentrightsapparatus.
in relation to subaltern
Therefore, groups of
the paradox is
that
human although
rights in nation
relationstates are responsible
to subaltern groupsfor delivering
is that although human nation rights,
statesthey
are
are less andforless
responsible able to human
delivering represent these
rights, groups,
they are lessincluding
and less able their to demands
represent
for
theserights and including
groups, human rights. their All of thisfor
demands does not make
rights the nation
and human rights. state
Allany
of
less crucial
this does nottomake
the study
the nation of thestate
human rights.
any less It only
crucial shifts
to the study the of perspective
the human
on the It
rights. appearance
only shiftsofthe theperspective
nation stateonwithin global human
the appearance of the rights—as
nation state not
an undifferentiated
within global humanand fully representing
rights—as entity but one
not an undifferentiated that representing
and fully is internally
differentiated
entity but one that and iswhose
internallypolitical legitimacy
differentiated andis whose
under political
challengelegitimacyby various is
groups includingbysubaltern
under challenge various groupsgroups.including subaltern groups.
54 Vernacular Rights Cultures

Political Struggles and Rights in the Vernacular

Thus far, I have argued that studying vernacular rights cultures requires a shift
in our scale of analysis—in the direction of different forms of claim-making
by subjects of rights who are neither only ever nation states, transnational
organisations, nor ‘humanitarian subjects/victims’ of rights. These subjects
of rights are not privileged transnational interlocutors, vernacularisers or
translators of global human rights ‘norms’ or indeed global civil society actors
but subaltern groups organising for rights. While the claim-making of these
groups might invoke global norms and international human rights treaties,
vernacular rights cultures are neither the direct products of nor principal sites
of ‘global norm diffusion’. Instead, they are dynamic, productive, generative,
and conflictual sites where the democratic possibilities and the limitations
of human rights creatively play out; where rights are claimed by subaltern
groups and in the process get transformed and expanded, and where through
the deployment of rights, the limitations of rights become visible. As such
these grassroots mobilisations are key sites where subjectification takes place.
An intersectional gendered lens is crucial to study these forms of
subjectification as it helps reveal the limitations and exclusions but also the
intersectional failures of rights talk. A conceptual study of this rights talk
involves producing a feminist historical ontology (see Chapter 3) of this
conceptual language of claim-making while also showing how rights subjects
come into being. Through claiming citizenship rights and participating in
political mobilisations and struggles, it becomes evident that not all of those
claiming rights can easily become the subjects of rights that they wish to be
assigned as, even if they might be participating in a collective to demand these
rights. In short, these collective demands can also bring into sharp relief the
limits of collective struggles by highlighting their intersectional failures.
Political struggles are key sites for the articulation of rights in the vernacular.
As I noted earlier, these rights mobilisations and rights struggles are directed
at the nation state and even though these struggles invoke rights to demand
entitlements from the state, the study of vernacular rights cultures does not
accord authorship of rights and agency to the nation state alone. For it is the
case that these struggles frequently invoke sources and justificatory premises
of rights that are not informed by or limited to the state alone (I will examine
these justificatory premises in Chapters 4 and 5). While this political activism
is led by a concern for citizenship rights—and is primarily directed at the
state—the framework deployed is not only one that corresponds to that of the
‘right to have rights’, that is, one of inclusion into the already existing framework
Refusing
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the Politics
Political
of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 55

of rights but rather one which is also invested in bringing new citizenship
rights into existence. It justifies these new sets of rights not on the basis of
citizenship alone, but also through a different moral and political vocabulary
that is not derivative of the state or from citizenship rights. In directing
their rights demands at the state, these marginalised, poor and intersectional
subaltern subjects refuse the well accepted adage and conventional wisdom that
regards the existence of minimum economic baselines as necessary predicates
for political rights. More specifically, though, they encourage us to rethink
the Marshallian categorisation and separation of citizenship rights into civil,
political and economic rights as well as their hierarchisation. These subaltern
struggles demand political accountability from state developmentalism and
meticulously scrutinise the pervasive structural poverty and dispossession that
it has unleashed, while also questioning the exclusionary gendered logics and
differentially distributed vulnerabilities and effects it produces. For instance,
in my ethnographies, subaltern groups routinely asked as to why it was that
the money earmarked for poverty alleviation, drought relief and other welfare
assistance failed to find its way into the pockets of its intended beneficiaries,
that is, the poor? They interrogated why the state failed to uphold the minimum
wage legislation or make regular payments for wages accrued under the
rural employment guarantee programme. And they pointed to how the state
condoned rampant caste and gender bias within drought relief programmes
set up to provide employment to people in drought-affected districts and also
to the flagrant procedural inefficiencies and corrosive corruption practices
plaguing the Public Distribution System (PDS) and its network of fair price
ration shops. More recently, with the introduction of compulsory biometric
identification cards for accessing welfare, they have protested at the exclusion
of millions of vulnerable citizens dependent on welfare for their very survival.
All of these issues, they pointed out, were responsible for an institutionalisation
of endemic poverty. According to them, this institutionalised endemic poverty
was a result of an interlocking triad: a lack of transparency in procedural
rules of government and routinised official corruption, the general failure of
democratic accountability in political life, and everyday intersecting oppressions
that impact and impede the quality of citizenship.
The fluent, powerful and complex articulation of citizenship rights by
subaltern groups also questions the clear-cut divisions between ‘subaltern
worlds’ and those of the elites. The vernacular rights cultures they produce
disrupt the binary understandings of their politics by influential conceptual
formulations such as ‘political society’. Here, I am referring specifically to the
56 Vernacular Rights Cultures

distinction that Partha Chatterjee (2004) has drawn between political and civil
society in order to study the politics in what he calls the ‘rest of the world’.
‘Civil society’, Chatterjee writes, is constitutive of the elite, those who are
well-versed in and consequently operate in the light zones of constitutionalism,
freedom, equality, citizenship. In contrast, ‘political society’ is composed of
those who exist in the dark zones—outside of and in violation of the law. In
short, Chatterjee suggests a divide between citizens and populations. Drawing
on the distinction between formal and actual rights, Chatterjee argues that,
in terms of ‘formal structure’, everyone is a citizen and therefore member of
society, however, he writes,
civil society;

Most of the inhabitants of India are only tenuously, and even ambiguously
and contextually, rights bearing citizens … they are not, therefore, proper
members of civil society and are not regarded as such by the institutions of
the state … as populations within the jurisdiction of the state they have to be
both looked after and controlled by various governmental agencies … these
groups on their part accept that their activities are often illegal and contrary
to good civic behavior, but they make a claim to a habitation and a livelihood
as a matter of right
right.(Chatterjee
(Chatterjee2004:
2004:38,
38,40).
40)

Therefore, the question for Chatterjee is, ‘how can the particular claims of
marginal population groups, often grounded in violations of the law, be made
consistent with the pursuit of equal citizenship and civic virtue?’ (Chatterjee
2004: 64). Chatterjee is describing a form of politics in which some urban poor
are able to claim welfare entitlements through organising themselves into a
critical mass either as ‘associations’ that demand their inclusion into existing
citizen entitlements or nominate person(s) to ‘mediate’ on their behalf or
speak for them. Theirs is a politics of inclusion that is ‘contextual’, ‘temporary’
and ‘paralegal’ that takes place on a ‘political terrain, where rules may be
bent or stretched and not on the terrain of established law or administrative
procedure … here there is no uniform exercise of rights and citizenship’
(Chatterjee 2004: 60).
Chatterjee’s binary formulation of ‘civil’ and ‘political’ society has met with
not insubstantial critique (Sinha 2015; Nilsen 2018a). In contrast to Chatterjee’s
theorisation of political society, the vernacular rights cultures and the rural
political mobilisations described in this book display both a fluency in and an
insistence on legal constitutionalism and the importance of rights, not only for
purposes of inclusion into already existing entitlements but also for a politics of
transformation and justice. Their acknowledgement of legal constitutionalism
Refusing
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Political
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Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 57

as an important instrument and resource for the recognition of entitlements

exists alongside a clear recognition, particularly among Indigenous groups, that
they are not subjects without rights and jurisprudential ethics of their own, and
that they do not need to derive these from the legal constitutionalist doctrines
of the state. Having said this, the politics of vernacular rights cultures is linked
to the state in two ways. First, transformation is sought not on a ‘paralegal’
terrain but on the terra firma of citizenship rights. The mobilisation of a
subaltern rights politics is directed at the state to both hold it to account for
the lack of implementation of its welfare policies and to put in place a new and
expanded set of rights (see Chapter 4). In recent years, these expanded set of
rights have emerged in large part from rural mobilisations and have led to the
successful passage of six new legislations guaranteeing citizen entitlements.
These rural mobilisations have adopted a range of strategies in their push for
an expanded set of citizenship rights, including accessing the law courts which
have become ‘consolidated as a critical site of politics’ (Biehl 2013: 419). In
short, there is nothing illegal or ‘paralegal’ about these mobilisations—in fact,
if anything, they highlight the dynamic ethical engagements with rights and
citizenship that subaltern groups deploy for an expansion of entitlements and
for a politics of justice and equality that is not yet in place. In so doing, they
disrupt the rather straightforward binary that Chatterjee draws between the
civic politics of ‘culturally equipped citizens’ who deploy the language of rights
and citizenship and those of the subaltern populations who operate on the
‘terrain of political society’, or on the margins of the legal constitutional state.
The second way in which the politics of vernacular rights cultures is linked to
the state has to do with the self-making and forms of political subjectivation that
developmentalism (both state and non-state led) as a form of governmentality
and a technology of power engenders. Importantly, however, this rights politics
is not only that of a politics of inclusion or one entirely focused on demanding
relief in the face of state mandated exclusions (even though this is important
and has material effects on those who are excluded). Crucially, it also enables
the fashioning of particular forms of subjectivities and the coming into being
of particular gendered subjects of rights.

The Justificatory Premises of Haq

As I noted in the introduction, I have been tracking the etymological roots,
conceptual meanings and contemporary deployment of the Urdu/Arabic
word haq in grassroots people’s movements in India and Pakistan since 1999.
58 Vernacular Rights Cultures

Ever since I first began documenting the use of the term by rural women in
Rajasthan to demand their rights, I have been exploring the different kinds
of intellectual resources and political imaginaries that haq offers, both for
thinking about rights/human rights politics and also with respect to the
sources of self-making and the processes of becoming a subject of rights. What,
however, is the relationship between the contemporary meanings of the literal
and conceptual term haq and global human rights discourse? And, how do we
understand the conceptual meanings of haq? A useful way of documenting and
haq is
analysing rights languages and also the conceptual meanings of haq, is to locate
these within the political imaginaries that they operate in and to examine the
justificatory premises that underpin them. We need to ask what literal terms
exist for entitlements and rights, what are their justificatory premises, what
kinds of political and moral imaginaries they uphold and who are the subjects
that are ‘assigned’ to rights and human rights? Not unlike other concepts, the
conceptual meanings of haq are place dependent (Hacking 2002) and emerge
out of a politics of location (Rich 1984).
A great deal of philosophical scholarship on human rights has engaged
with what is sometimes known as ‘foundations’ for rights, and at other times,
justificatory premises. Justifications for human rights concern themselves
with the question of what the basis of rights should be or what human rights
ought to rest upon. Consequently, several grounds for human rights have
been offered. Among these, and not unsurprisingly, the justificatory premise
of the ‘human’ has become a preoccupation of a lot of human rights thinking
and consequently, has also come under serious theoretical scrutiny within
critical human rights scholarship. Scholars have questioned the ‘central
reference point for human rights’, which ‘depend on some claim about what
is distinctively human’ (Phillips 2015: 3) and queried as to who is the human
in human rights (Trouillot 1995; Wynter 2003)? The ‘distinctively human’
claims within philosophical discourse on human rights range from there being
an essential ‘human nature’ with its capacities for rational thinking, autonomy
and self-ownership to the crucial importance of human dignity. Grounding
human rights in the intrinsic idea of the ‘universal human’ has neither been
unqualified nor has it been universal in scope. If anything, the moral grounds
for being ‘human’ have always been political and marked by hierarchical power
relations and racialised, gendered and colonial worldviews. However, it is also
the case that the ‘human’ invokes the powerful sentiment of sameness, and
of being just like everyone else, and therefore, entitled to all that is accrued
to everyone else. This sentiment and moral ground was first voiced in the
Refusing
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the Politics
Political
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Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 59

eighteenth century declarations of rights of man and citizen and then two
centuries later in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)—a
reasonably long history of the sentiment by any account, and one characterised
by its spectacular ineffectiveness in either making a universally applicable and
a non-exclusionary philosophical case for human rights or for ensuring that
human rights operate as an actually existing empirical reality for all peoples.
However, not all grounds or justifications for human rights are based on
‘human nature’, even when they are principally humanist. Contemporary
scholarship on human rights and global justice have also introduced other
justifications such as ‘basic needs’ (Miller 2012), ‘capabilities’ (Sen 2005;
Nussbaum 2007), ‘emerging world order’ (Raz 2010) and ‘cultural diversity’
(Jones 2000: 33).14 In contrast to seeking justificatory premises for human
rights, Anne Phillips argues that the politics of the human is an ‘enactment of
equality’ (Phillips 2015: 19), where equality is a ‘political’ and not a cognitive
claim and crucially, one that is not dependent on a normative set of human
qualities. Grounding the human in anything other than equality only opens up
yet more grounds for exclusions and hierarchies, not least on the basis of ‘gender
coding’. Human rights are, Phillips argues, political and need to be claimed
and not bestowed on those considered to be deserving them. According to her,

It is not helpful to think of humanness as a reality that grounds our rights,

a set of shared characteristics that we deem in some beings but not others,
a list of characteristics we can use to work out who get the rights and who
doesn’t. Nor is it helpful to make our status as humans depend on not stressing
some of our characteristics … it is the language of equality, which is at the
heart of the issue when we talk about the human—the right to be regarded
as an equal should not depend on being able to prove one’s membership of
the category human … the very act of claiming to be equal should be enough
of a demonstration … recognizing others as our human equals is not best
understood as a process of recognition … what links us (or could/should link
us) is a politics of equality that refuses to attach hierarchical significance to
difference.(Phillips
difference (Phillips 2015:
2015:44–46).
44–46)

I agree with Anne Phillips that human rights require a political rather
than an abstract ontological commitment. However, it is also the case that
the various justificatory premises offered for rights and human rights reveal
interesting insights into their conceptual development and their exclusionary
histories while also shining a light on those subjects who have been assigned to
rights and are thereby regulated by them. Phillips (2015) is, however, right to
60 Vernacular Rights Cultures

insist that human rights have extended to others through political struggles for
equality, rather than through the gradual unfolding of the idea of modernity.
A focus on vernacular rights cultures accords a central place to the political
struggles for rights by the marginalised. Crucially, it also focuses on the
languages of rights and their justificatory premises deployed in these political
struggles. The focus on the justificatory premises of haq is not to think of
yet more justifications for human rights but rather to give an account of the
conceptual and normative structure of haq and the rights and entitlements
that it will allow itself to be assigned to. In short, I am less concerned with
the philosophical debates about what might be the ideal justificatory premises
(that is, what philosophical basis rights and human rights ought to rest on or
whether there ought to be justificatory premises for rights or not) and more
interested in documenting the actually existing justificatory premises of
rights. Documenting the actually existing premises and the deployment of
justificatory premises means to examine the nature of exclusions and the basis
on which they are justified. It also involves examining the kind of subjects
that get to be assigned to rights.
In my ethnographies, I have been able to identify and document four
different justif icatory premises of haq within contemporary political
mobilisations. While some of these overlap with the liberal justificatory
premises of rights and human rights, they are also different from these. The
striking feature of these justifications is their dynamic nature both in terms
of the subjects that they enable to come into being and the dynamic political
cultures of rights they produce. The justificatory premises of haq signify that
haq embodies particular imaginaries and discourses on ways of being. In
Chapters 4 and 5, I identify and describe the four justificatory premises of
haq and their ‘applications’ within contemporary struggles for rights in India
and Pakistan. I show how they produce vernacular rights cultures through
particular political imaginaries.
Thinking in terms of vernacular rights cultures enables us to consider
the different political imaginaries, subjectivities and languages of rights and
human rights that currently either fall outside the direct engagement of human
rights scholarship or are culturalised by it as a ‘local’ variant of global human
rights. The political imaginaries of haq produce particular rights politics and
cultures of rights including new forms of subjectivities and also subjection.
They produce forms of political subjectivation that do not map on easily with
the forms of rights subjectivities, politics and demands, which are often seen
to be the lifeblood of human rights politics. Significantly, they enable us to
Refusing
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the Politics
Political
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Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 61

track the manner in which these struggles enable the deployment of rights and
human rights in ways that expand not only the stories of human rights but also
the work these do. It also enables a transnational optic on how to think about
human rights and the political subjectivation these produce—as operating in
multiple and intersectional circuits of power and not simply either discretely
located at either only at the global and/or the local level.

Agency and Ethical Rights Talk: The ‘Coming into Being’ of

the Subjects of Rights
In a meaningful sense, vernacular rights cultures are concerned with political
and epistemic agency. The institutional histories of human rights, whether these
are of nation states or of large international non-governmental organisations,
either sidestep the question of political agency of those at the frontline of
political mobilisations demanding rights and human rights or erase this political
agency entirely. The agentival practices I draw attention to do not rehearse
the ‘action bias’ of mainstream agency accounts, which visualise agency in
terms of individual efficacy, ‘choice’ and the ability to produce unproblematic
free actions.15 Instead they focus on ethical conduct and ethical engagements
with rights and human rights, including the making and remaking of the self
that occurs through such moral and ethical encounters with rights. Here, I am
aligning myself with scholars who foreground the productive and generative
nature of discourse, including that of rights and human rights (Brown 1995;
Slaughter 2007; Hodžić 2017; Lefebvre 2018; Butler 2015; Ranciere 2004;
Mahmood 2005).
An attentiveness to the productive and generative nature of rights and
human rights, and in particular, to the ethical dimensions of rights talk, is
also sometimes known as the ‘constitutive thesis’. This ‘constitutive thesis’
draws attention to the ways in which human rights generate opportunities
for political subjectivation and incite particular kinds of ethical work on
the self. There are several areas of overlap but also clear areas of differences
between the scholarship on ethical subjectification and that of vernacular
rights cultures. These differences yield different conclusions despite sharing
similar starting points. The most striking difference concerns the identity of
the subject of rights. First, studying vernacular rights cultures draws attention
to the fact that while it is the case that rights/human rights talk provide the
site of subjectification, this subjectification however, does not result in the
production of a homogenous sovereign and free subject of global human rights
62 Vernacular Rights Cultures

or the homo juridicus but a vernacular subject of rights—one inflected by and

produced under historically and politically specific configurations of power.
Second and linked
linked toto the
the above,
above, the
the context
context of
and site of subjectification
subjectification is hardly
is hardly
only ever only ever international
international human rightshuman law rights lawtalk.
or policy or policy talk.
In fact, theIncontext
fact, the
of
context of isrights
rights talk not sotalk
muchis about
not sothe much one about
operation theinoperation
of rights of rights
abstract global in
spaces
abstract
but aboutglobal spacesgendered
concrete, but one of andconcrete,
embodied gendered
rights and embodied rights
entitlements, and
mostly
entitlements,
linked to the mostly
nation linked
state andto the nation to
its failure state and its
uphold failure
justice to to
and uphold
expand justice
and
and of the
reorient political
rights, thatstruggles
becomes to theexpand
site of and reorient rights.
subjectification.
Finally, the third arena of distinction from the ‘constitutive thesis’ on
human rights is that vernacular rights cultures posit that the subject assigned
to rights and human rights is a gendered subject and that the subject who
‘comes into being’ as a result of the processes of subjectification that human
rights/rights discourses unleash is an intersectional one. The rights subject is an
intersectional one, not only because gender is not a solitary category of analysis
and exists alongside a host of other markers of hierarchy and differentiation
but also because political struggles over rights and human rights are conflictual
struggles, where the intersectional location and identities of subjects come
to matter—and, becoming, in fact, primary sites of conflict. A case in point
is that not only do women’s rights need to be begged separately in political
mobilisations (at least those under study in this book) but also that for Dalit
and Adivasi women, these rights are actively refused (which is also the reason
why rights politics is so conflictual for visibly intersectional subjects). In short,
my point is that the ethical agency or the ethical rights talk and the work on
the self that it entails is collective and also individual but, in both cases, it is
also gendered. Making the gendered nature of social relations and rights talks
visible enables us to ask not only as to who can be a subject of rights but also
how these subjects are policed and regulated.
My interest in in this
thisbook
bookisisnot
nottotouncover
uncoveranaapriori
priorisubject
subjectofof human
human rights
but rather to attend to the processes of subjectification that rights and human
rights set off. Therefore, the question this book asks is not who is the subject
of human rights but instead: how do subjects of human rights come into
being? Underpinning this different question is quite simply the assumption
that human rights are a normative and ontological discourse. Human rights
produce particular subjects of human rights; they exhort ‘self-transformation’
(Lefebvre 2018: 9) and demand that rights bearing subjects in fact become the
subjects they are designated to be (Slaughter 2007). The ‘coming into being’ of
a subject of human rights presupposes particular kinds of ethical work done by
Refusing
Human Rights,
the Politics
Political
of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 63

the self on the self. The ‘socialisation’ and learning of the rules, conventions
and traditions of human rights require particular kinds of discourses, practices
and ethics through which individuals are turned into subjects of rights.16
Alexander Lefebvre (2018), for instance, writes that human rights discourses
set in motion an ‘ethics of the care of the self ’ (Lefebvre 2018: 9), or operations
on the self in order to become a subject of human rights. Ben Golder (2015)
addresses the work that rights do within a context of governmental power and
writes that they enable a ‘critical counter-conduct’ of rights. He writes that
Michel Foucault’s (2004) concept of ‘counter-conduct’

indexes a more nuanced concern with the ways in which practices of

government simultaneously perform both these (objectifying and subjectifying,
for want of better words) functions. We can readily perceive the relevance of
such a formulation in the context of rights claims: the assertion of a right
both functions to remake and contest relations with others but at the same
time establishes a particular relation to, and conception, of the rights holder
herself (Golder
herself. (Golder 2015:
2015: 57).
57)

According to Joseph Slaughter, UDHR law is marked by a teleological

and tautological structure—of already presuming the ‘legal person’ it wants
to bring into being. Or as Slaughter says, the UDHR law ‘presupposes that
the person is a person in order to effect the person as a person’; this person
is ‘both human rights’ natural premise and their positive promise’ (Slaughter
2007: 26). This ‘human rights personality pre-exists society and law and comes
into being through social interaction and the collective declaration of human
rights’ (Slaughter 2007: 79).
The question of socialisation is crucial, but not quite in the way that assumes
that people will become the juridical legal persons that UDHR designates them
to be. Rather, the socialisation into rights discourses results in the production
of a rights subject who
who isis neither
neither the
thehomo
homojuridicus
juridicusnor the homo
or the homo politius—both
are subjects allowed to appear as subjects of human rights, of course—but one
who is intersectionally gendered, constrained and forged not only through the
formal framework of the UDHR but rather in the vernacular. Consequently,
these vernacular subjects of rights come into being not through only a process of
global human rights socialisation but rather through conflictual and gendered
processes of political subjectivation set off by a range of rights discourses and
struggles, which can, at times, exceed and expand the terms set by global
human rights.
64 Vernacular Rights Cultures

As I noted earlier, in contemporary political philosophy, the question

of political subjectivation has emerged as a key site for thinking about the
democratic potential of human rights to enact claims/freedoms that are not yet
in place— and, in particular, about the potential of human rights to produce
forms of political subjectivation that could reconfigure and disrupt existing
power relations (Rancière 2004; Butler 2015).
However, in order to think about political subjectivation of gendered subjects
of rights and human rights in ‘most of the world’, theoretical accounts of
political subjectivation will require three different kinds of supplementation.
This supplementation becomes crucial because influential accounts of political
subjectivation do not necessarily work with intersectional subjects or with
a carefully calibrated account of the fields of power that makes political
subjectivation possible. For instance, Rancière gives little account of specific
contexts of power (also see McNay 2014) in which political subjectivation occurs
and addresses next to none of the specific forms it might take for differently
raced and gendered subjects. Moreover, while this political subjectification
cannot be thought of outside specific contexts of power, it must not only focus
on the modalities and sites of protest but also on the imaginaries, vocabularies
and strategies of resistance, collective action and also its exclusions. The three
kinds of supplementation I suggest are – First, to think more carefully about
the ‘other’ human rights contexts within which political subjectification occurs.
Second, in addition to producing a shift in the location, site and politics of
theoretical thinking, this also means that the philosophical grounds for this
political subjectivation cannot only be a politics demanding inclusion into
already existing rights or only on the ‘right to have rights’. In other words, in
order to account for the political subjectivation that rights and human rights
put into place, we will need to examine other political imaginaries in order to
provide accounts of how rights not only materialise within different political
contexts but also of the work they do in setting off new modes of political
subjectivation. Finally, we will need to bring careful theoretical attention to
the forms of differential distributions of rights that come to be attached to
differently racialised and gendered subjects. This fact alone has significance
for who can appear in public and in ‘assembly’ to participate in political
mobilisations and also who can become the subject of rights.
Judith Butler (2015: 168–9) highlights situations where ‘people engage in
acts of self-making or self-constitution by appearing together in assembly.’ By
appearing and acting alongside others in public, they enact the right to appear.
This right to appear may or may not be vocalised and for Butler, ‘sometimes it
is not a question of first taking power and then being able to act, sometimes it
Refusing
Human Rights,
the Politics
Political
of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 65

is question of acting and then laying claim to power’ (Butler 2015: 58). Butler
further writes,

When bodies assemble on the street, in the square, or in other forms of

public space they are exercising a performative right to appear … showing up,
standing, breathing, moving, standing still, speech and silence are all aspects
of a sudden assembly … that puts livable life at the forefront of politics …
where the legitimacy of the state is brought into question precisely by that
way of appearing in public, the body itself exercises a right that is no right; in
other words, it exercises a right that is being actively contested and destroyed
by military force, and that, in its resistance to force, articulates its way of
living, showing both its precarity and its right to persist … it is, in fact, the
right to have rights, not as natural law or metaphysical stipulation, but as
the persistence of the body, against those forces that seek its debilitation or
eradication
eradication.(Butler
(Butler 2015:
2015: 83).
83)

Here, political subjectivation may or may not require an articulation in the

existing language of rights to inaugurate or to announce the ‘right to appear’
(Butler 2015: 25), but it is bodies acting in concert with others by assembling
in public that produce possibilities for political subjectivation. Questions
remain in Butler’s account in relation to which bodies can occupy public
spaces and of what the risks of appearing in public might be, as well as the
nature of claims allowable in these public spaces. However, performing the
‘right to appear’ as a collective in public does effectively draw attention to the
absence of actually existing freedom and justice, while also underscoring the
possibilities of freedom yet to come. For both Rancière and Butler, it is the
enactment of rights in concert with others in a public space that enacts what is
not yet in place. Both theorists use the discourse of the rights of man and the
rights of citizen as the standard background context for theorising moments
of political subjectivation. Vernacular rights cultures, on the other hand, focus
on the everyday moral, legal and political encounter of subaltern subjects with
the nation state and consequently, it is the institutional and discursive power
of the national state and especially its developmental apparatus that provides
a potent site of political subjectification. I will examine these encounters and
the processes of subjectification they set off in Chapters 4 and 5.

Political Subjectivation and the ‘Right to Development’

Development constitutes an important site for which ‘rights talk’ in different
parts of ‘most of the world’. In international development policy making, the
66 Vernacular Rights Cultures

high point of human rights is marked by the passage of the right to development
agreed in 1986, which coupled human rights and development to potentially
activate modes of political subjectivation associated with human rights, not
least through declaring ‘the people’ as rights-bearers of development along with
nation states.17 The human right to development has in the last three decades
since its passage, become the framework of choice for global and national
development bureaucracies and frames international action on poverty and
inequality. But herein lies the paradox: while it is the case that development
facilitates human rights talk, it is also through developmentalism (although
not through it only) that human rights become govermentalised. As we know,
however, governmentalised power is productive power. In this context, it is
somewhat curious that even though ideas of rights and human rights now
standardly accompany development, less scholarly interest is paid to the forms
of political subjectivation these put in place and the democratic possibilities
they set off in development contexts. For instance, whereas the adoption and
implementation of the right to development and rights-based development
is extensively studied, there is little written about the forms of political
subjectivation these produce, including how subjects deploy rights/human
rights to demand better and/or different forms of development. These demands
for better or different development are not technical claims but political ones
demonstrating, thereby, that human rights are not neutral and apolitical but
contested and conflictual, and that they put in place, not only ‘democratic
possibilities’ but also new forms of regulation and subjection (Brown 2000).
In short, the right to development produces forms of political subjectivation
and functions as a form of governmentality—transforming individuals into
subjects and ‘agents of development’. In keeping with all social phenomena,
however, the forms of political subjectivation engendered by rights discourse
are gendered, and when rights are ‘seized’ to make political claims by gendered
subjects, these do not simply involve instrumental claim-making; what is
claimed in effect, is also a particular subjectivity and relation to the self. It
is for this reason that when gendered subjects engage in claim-making, it is
almost always conflictual; their claim-making is more often than not read as
oppositional to and/or disrupting of an established normative gender order.
For nearly two decades, I have been tracking the ‘life trajectories’ of
developmentalism and of subjectivation in five rural districts of Rajasthan,
northwestern India—of how individuals are transformed into ‘agents
of development’; and, how the ‘technologies of power’ associated with
developmentalism, particularly rights function as a form of governmentality,
Refusing
Human Rights,
the Politics
Political
of Agency,
Origins and Refusing the Politics of Origins 67

with an explicit aim to shape, subaltern women’s subjectivities. The paradoxical

outcome of this rights-based developmentalism is that while it sets in motion
new selfhoods, it also renders marginalised subjects even more vulnerable to
conflict, intimidation, injury and to actual/threat of violence.
As I shall go on to show in Chapters 4 and 5, this form of rights-based
governmentality releases new modes of political subjectivation and also political
action. The mobilisations in South Asia, for instance, predominantly operate
within imaginaries of developmentalism, whether as calls for a different form
of development or as active resistance in the face of it.

Conclusion
The critiques of global human rights have by now been firmly registered. My
aim in this chapter has thus not been to rehearse these critiques but to focus
instead on the productive and generative nature of rights and human rights
and to outline the elements of vernacular rights cultures that enables us to
conceptually capture the productivity of rights in ‘most of the world’. I have
argued that the framework of vernacular rights cultures makes it possible
for us to sidestep the politics of origins, which is the shared premise of both
celebratory and critical positions on human rights—a politics of origins that
erases and silences rights politics that falls outside of its remit. While one way
to disrupt this politics of origins is to tell a different story of human rights,
but there are important questions over how to go about telling this different
story. I have suggested that this different story cannot be one of only drawing
equivalences, translations and correspondences with majoritarian rights talk
but must be one that is able to produce conceptual descriptions of deployments
of rights talk in different contexts.
These conceptual descriptions are not meant to exaggerate differences or
similarities but instead to shift the epistemic centre of human rights talk.
While there are now growing calls for more empirical and theoretical work
on human rights from different parts of the globe, and also for decolonising
human rights, I have cautioned that this work cannot be seen as merely ‘local’
and always in translation. Global human rights scholarship needs to shift the
direction of conceptual travel movement from the ‘global to the local’, which
keeps the ‘West’ as the epistemic centre of rights/human rights thinking in
place, to a more historically specific, intersectional and located, meanings and
politics of rights and human rights.
 1. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/surrogacy-bill-
sushma-swaraj-married-couples-can-now-opt-homosexuals/ (accessed on 20
October 2020).
68 2. https://w w w.thequint.com/neon/social-buzz/imran-k Vernacular han-feminism-
Rights Cultures
motherhood-social-media (accessed on 20 October 2020).
3. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/expand-definition-of-
Notes
human-rights-amit-shah/article29669758.ece (accessed on 20 October 2020).
1. See Indian Express (2016).
1. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/surrogacy-bill-
4. https://thewire.in/politics/western-standards-on-human-rights-cant-be-
2. sushma-swaraj-married-couples-can-now-opt-homosexuals/
See Bansal (2018).
blindly-applied-to-india-amit-shah (accessed on 20 October (accessed 2020). on 20
October
3. See The 2020).
Hindu (2019c).
5. https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/time-to-redefine-human-rights-violations-
2. https://w
4. See The Wire w w.thequint.com/neon/social-buzz/imran-k
(2019).
in-indian-context-home-minister-amit-shah-2115927 (accessed han-feminism-
on 20 October
5. motherhood-social-media
See NDTV (2019).
2020). (accessed on 20 October 2020).
3. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/expand-definition-of-
6. Lynn Hunt does not specify the location where this ‘self evidence’ of human
human-rights-amit-shah/article29669758.ece
rights emerges but I have deduced this from the (accessed
placeson of 20 October 2020).
publication of the
4. https://thewire.in/politics/western-standards-on-human-rights-cant-be-
texts she discusses in her book. Not having to name the location is the privilege
blindly-applied-to-india-amit-shah
only powerful stories of human rights (accessed on 20 October
can afford—other 2020).
stories of rights and
5. human
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/time-to-redefine-human-rights-violations-
rights are insistently asked to locate themselves as local derivatives of
in-indian-context-home-minister-amit-shah-2115927
the hegemonic global human rights discourse. (accessed on 20 October
2020).
7. The active exclusion of those who were central to the forging of autonomous
6. and
Lynnempathetic
Hunt doesselves, not specify thewhite
that is, location whereclass
middle this women,
‘self evidence’
in theofimperial
human
metropolises who mostly read these novels is altogether incongruous. of the
rights emerges but I have deduced this from the places of publication
texts
8. In she discusses
a critique publishedin herin book.
the earlyNot1990s,
having to name
Seyla the location
Benhabib is the privilege
faults Jacques Derrida
only Jean-François
and powerful stories of human
Lyotard rights can afford—other
for privileging the ‘originarystories of rights and
or a ‘foundational
human rights
political are insistently
act’ (1994: 5) and forasked theirto‘formalistic’
locate themselves as local
‘fascination withderivatives
the aporiasof
the hegemonic
and the paradoxes global human
of this rights discourse.
foundational republican’ (Benhabib 1994: 6) which
7. they
The active
seek toexclusion
stage through of those who were central toanalysis
a ‘linguistico-political’ the forging of autonomous
(Benhabib 1994: 9)
and empathetic selves, that is, white middle class women,
rather than through an analysis of the ‘content of the acts of the declaration in the imperial
metropolises
and who mostly
independence’ read these
(Benhabib 1994:novels is altogether
11). According to incongruous.
Benhabib, the two
8. philosophers
In a critique published
focus oninthe the violent
early 1990s, Seyla Benhabib
exclusions inherent faults
in the Jacques Derrida
foundational
and Jean-François
moment—And ‘thisLyotard
violencefor at privileging
the origin, this the violent
‘originary or a ‘foundational
exclusion is concealed
political
in act’ (1994: foundation’
every republican 5) and for their ‘formalistic’
but returns in the ‘fascination with thebetween
form of disjunction aporias
and thewho
those paradoxes
speak of in this
the foundational
name of ‘we’republican’
and those(Benhabib
who are 1994: spoken 6) about’
which
they seek to stage
(Benhabib 1994: 10). through a ‘linguistico-political’ analysis (Benhabib 1994: 9)
rather than through an analysis of the ‘content of
9. According to Balibar, the declaration of the rights of man and of citizen the acts of the declaration
andintegrally
‘… independence’identifies(Benhabib
the rights 1994:
of man 11).with
According
politicaltorights’
Benhabib,
(Balibarthe1994:
two
philosophers
45) focus which
or ‘equaliberty’ on theis,violent exclusions
in effect, inherent of
the ‘affirmation in athe foundational
universal rights
moment—And
to politics’ (Balibar ‘this1994:
violence49).at the origin, this violent exclusion is concealed
Human in every
10. I Rights,
find bothrepublican
altogether
Political foundation’
Agency,unhelpful.
and Refusingbut
Seereturns
Goodale
the in the
Politics of form
(2007) of disjunction
for
Origins a critique ofbetween
‘global/
69
those who speak in
local’ and ‘network’ frameworks.the name of ‘we’ and those who are spoken about’
11. (Benhabib 1994: 10).
Personal communication with Jayal (June 2018).
9. According
12. In South Asia, to Balibar, the declaration
for instance, women’s of the have
rights rightsbeen
of man and ofthrough
expanded citizen
‘… integrally
legal identifies
claim-making. As the rightsinofchapter
I noted man with political
1 (see rights’
note 19), (Balibar
a notable 1994:
example
45) or ‘equaliberty’ which is, in effect, the ‘affirmation
is Vishakha vs State of Rajasthan (All India Reporter of the Supreme Court 1997: of a universal rights
to politics’
3011) More(Balibar
recently,1994: 49). High Court in Laxmi Mandal vs the Deen Dayal
the Delhi
10. IHarinagar
find bothHospital
altogether unhelpful.
(W.P.C.C 8853/2008) See Goodale drew(2007) for ainternational
on various critique of ‘global/
rights
local’ and to
protocols ‘network’
pronounce frameworks.
on reproductive rights of women. To my knowledge,
this is also the first time that the term ‘reproductive rights’ enters the legal
lexicon in India. More recently, the Indian state was taken to court on the
matter of extrajudicial killings in the Indian state of Manipur (Extra Judicial
Execution Victims Families Association (EEVFAM) & Anr. v. Union of India
Human Rights, Political Agency, and Refusing the Politics of Origins 69

11. Personal communication with Jayal (June 2018).

12. In South Asia, for instance, women’s rights have been expanded through
Humanlegal
Refusing the claim-making.
Rights,Politics
Politicalof Agency,
OriginsAs and
I noted in chapter
Refusing 1 (see
the Politics note 19), a notable example
of Origins 69
is Vishakha vs State of Rajasthan (All India Reporter of the Supreme Court 1997:
11. Personal
3011) More communication
recently, the Delhi with High
Jayal Court
(June in 2018).
Laxmi Mandal vs the Deen Dayal
12. Harinagar
In South Asia, Hospital for(W.P.C.C
instance, 8853/2008)
women’s rights drew have been international
on various expanded through rights
legal claim-making.
protocols to pronounce As onI noted in chapter
reproductive 1 (see
rights of note
women. 19),To a notable example
my knowledge,
is Vishakha
this is also vs theState
firstoftime
Rajasthan
that the (Allterm
India‘reproductive
Reporter of the Supreme
rights’ enters Court
the 1997:
legal
3011)
lexiconMore recently,
in India. More therecently,
Delhi High theCourt
Indian in Laxmi
state was Mandal
takenvstothecourt
Deenon Dayal
the
Harinagar Hospital (W.P.C.C
matter of extrajudicial killings8853/2008)
in the Indian drew on various
state of Manipur international rights
(Extra Judicial
protocols
Execution to pronounce
Victims Familieson reproductive rights of women.
Association (EEVFAM) & Anr.To v. my
Union knowledge,
of India
this
(UOI) is &also
Ors. the first WP
(2016) time(CRL)
that the term ‘reproductive
129/2012 PIL-W (Supreme rights’Court
entersofthe legal
India, 8
lexicon in India. More recently, the Indian state was
July 2016), 86), which has been under military laws that authorise the right to taken to court on the
matter of extrajudicial
kill to any non-commissioned killingsofficer
in theofIndian state ofand
the military Manipur
police. It(Extra Judicial
is important
Execution
to note here Victims Families
that the Writ Association (EEVFAM)
Petition explicitly & Anr.
deployed v. Union ofhuman
international India
(UOI) & Ors.
rights law, such (2016)
as The WP (CRL) 129/2012
Minnesota ProtocolPIL-W (Supreme Court
on the Investigation of India, 8
of Potentially
July 2016), Death
Unlawful 86), which(2016) has (OHCHR,
been under military laws that
2017 [1991]), and authorise
also drew the right
on the to
kill to any non-commissioned officer of the military
InterAmerican Court for Human Rights and the European Court for Human and police. It is important
to note for
Rights here that the
specific caseWrit Petition Loitongbam,
law (Babloo explicitly deployed personal international
communication, human 1
rights
October law,2017).
such as The Minnesota Protocol on the Investigation of Potentially
13. Unlawful
The authors Death (2016) (OHCHR,
put together a comparison 2017 [1991]),
across and also
a typology drew on
consisting the
of four
InterAmerican
categories: status Court for Human
politics, doctrinal Rights and the
politics, classEuropean
politics andCourt for Human
non-doctrinal
Rights
politics.for specific case
Uncovering lawbehaviour
policy (Babloo Loitongbam,
by states alongpersonal
these four communication,
categories, their1
October
research 2017).
is able to identify the key actors and ideas responsible for adoption
13. The authors
of gender put together
equality policies.a comparison across a typology consisting of four
14. categories:
According status to Peter politics,
Jones doctrinal
‘both the politics,
foundation classandpolitics and non-doctrinal
the content of a theory
politics.
of human Uncovering
rights haspolicyto bebehaviour
of a kind by states
that makesalong theseagainst
sense four categories,
a background their
research is able to identify the key actors and ideas
of diversity. But we can ask for more than that; we can also require that it responsible for adoption
of gender
should equality
provide for policies.
that diversity’ (2000: 33).
14. According
15. See Madhok to (2013).
Peter Jones ‘both the foundation and the content of a theory
16. ofThe human rights of
assumption, hascourse,
to be draws
of a kind
on thethat makes
later workssense against Consequently,
of Foucault. a background
of
thisdiversity.
scholarship Butpays
we can ask forto more
attention than that;
the ethical work we can also
of rights andrequire
human that rightsit
should provide for that diversity’ (2000: 33).
covering a range of sites, from exploring the ethical work on individuals that
15. See Madhok
rights discourses (2013).
incite, to analysing the particular assumptions of the rights
16. The assumption,
subject that underpins of course,
the draws
UDHR, on to
theexamining
later worksthe of Foucault.
democratic Consequently,
potential of
this
human scholarship
rights and pays attention
forms to thesubjectivation
of political ethical work ofthese rights and human rights
produce.
17. covering a range of sites,
See the Declaration
Declaration on the from exploring
Right the ethical work
to Development, adopted on onindividuals
December that
4
rights discourses incite, to analysing the
1986, G.A. Res. 41/128 U.N. GAOR, 41st Sess., at 3, Annex, particular assumptions of
Annex, U.N. Doc. A/the rights
subject
Res/41/128that underpins
Annex
Annex (1987), the UDHR,
(1987), to examining the democratic potential of
https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/RtD/
https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/RtD/
human rights and formsThe
RTD_at_a_glance.pdf.
RTD_at_a_glance.pdf. of literature
For political subjectivation
helpful discussions
on the right ontothese
the produce.
right
developmentto development,
is vast. My
17. thinking
See the Declaration
on the righton to the Right to Development,
development draws in particular adoptedfromon theDecember
writings of4
1986, G.A. Res. 41/128 U.N. GAOR, 41st Sess., at 3, Annex, U.N. Doc. A/
Res/41/128 Annex (1987), https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/RtD/
RTD_at_a_glance.pdf. For helpful discussions on the right to development,
70 Vernacular Rights Cultures

Baxiin(2007),
see particular
Cornwall
Sengupta
and(2002),
NyusembiCornwall
(2004),and
Sengupta
Nyamu‐Musembi
(2002), Marks
(2004)
(2004),
and
Baxi (2007). (2012)
Fukuda-Parr The literature on the(2006).
and Ilumoka right to development is vast. My thinking
on the right to development draws in particular from the writings of Baxi
(2007), Cornwall and Nyusembi (2004), Sengupta (2002), Marks (2004),
Fukuda-Parr (2012), Ilumoka (2006).
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 71

3 Assembling a Feminist Historical

Ontology of Haq in South Asia

How to study vernacular rights cultures? How to do conceptual work on human

rights from the Global South? In this chapter, I assemble a feminist historical
ontology as a potentially enabling methodological apparatus for documenting
the stakes and struggles over rights and human rights in ‘most of the world’.
Driving my methodological investment in a feminist historical ontology of haq
is a bid to take seriously a two-fold refrain that often accompanies progressive
human rights talk: first, an empirical plea for a need to study human rights in
different contexts, and second, a theoretical plea for a more sustained study
of the normative meanings and practices of rights in different parts of the
world. These are important goals, however, they shed little light on how to go
about engaging in this work. In other words, how to actually do this work of
documenting the normative meanings of human rights in different contexts?
And how to conceptually capture the productivity, ideational energy of rights
and human rights in different locations? Finally, how do normative meanings
and practices of rights in different parts of the globe disrupt or facilitate
epistemic encounters with human rights scholarship and politics in ‘most of
the world’? The questions I set out to answer in this chapter are: how to study
conceptual, normative meanings as well as empirical practices and politics of
human rights in ‘most of the world’, and further, how do these interact and
speak back to the epistemic, political and normative drives and assumptions
of global human rights discourses?
My contention here is that a feminist historical ontology might enable us
to engage with these questions. Quite simply, a feminist historical ontology
brings together the critical insights of historical ontology with those of
feminist critical reflexive politics of location. In this chapter I will assemble
key elements of a feminist historical ontology and lay out the theoretical
and conceptual mechanics of the methodological investigations of haq that
drive the work of this book. In what follows, I will first offer an outline of a
feminist historical ontology of haq. My aim is to show how a feminist historical
72 Vernacular Rights Cultures

ontology informs a particular reading of haq. In assembling key elements of

a feminist historical ontology in this chapter, my aim is not to enter into an
exegesis of ontology or indeed of the ‘ontological turn’. Instead, my intention
is to show some of the intellectual connections and disconnections that a
feminist historical ontology encounters as it sets out into the world to forge
an intellectual path for itself.

A Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq

How does haq come into being as the principal word for a right in contemporary
South Asia? What sorts of meanings does it acquire, how does it make up
people, aid the production of subjectivities and produce new possibilities for
relating to oneself? What kinds of political imaginaries does haq operate in
and accords intelligibility to? What ethical commitments does it produce?
What forms of subjectivities does it engender, and what are the kinds of people
that haq ‘makes up’? And, in what ways does haq enable but also constrain
possibilities for being a (gendered) subject of rights? In Chapters 4 and 5, I
will examine the subjectification processes where haq is implicated in ‘making
up people’ (Hacking 2002: 99) but also how people actively make themselves
up through deploying haq. The constitution of selves and of ‘people’ as moral
and political agents is a historical, political, racialised and gendered exercise
located in a specific time and place with its own particular sets of intellectual
tools for ‘making up’ people. Furthermore, this ‘making up’ is not outside of
authority or discipline or coercion but takes place in its shadow and light. In
this book, the acts of subjectification and those of ‘making up people’ take
place under the direction of the state and non-state directed developmentalism,
statism and dispossession, legal constitutionalism, political struggles, ‘military
business’ (Siddiqa 2007) and military siege, and it is at the intersection of
these and not as some freestanding abstraction that haq as a contemporary
idea operates. A feminist historical ontology of haq enables us to see the
gendered lives of concepts and to produce shifts in theoretical descriptions
of how concepts are described but also of the work they do. It enables us to
examine the coming into being of a gendered subject of rights and the forms
of self-fashioning that gendered subjects take up. Accounting for conflict
and struggle is central to feminist historical ontologies. Not least because
the recognition of intersectional gender relations demand an attention to the
gendered nature of conflict and struggles. The struggles by poor subaltern
women for haq in subaltern mobilisations, for instance, prise apart the edifice
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 73

of collective struggles and formations that purport to speak for collective

interests to show not only that these ‘collective interests’ are strongly gendered
but also that when gender equality is raised as a basis of collective solidarity,
more often than not, it is refused. Strikingly, these struggles show that the
question of gender equality needs to always be begged separately and engaged
with separately, as it almost never arises as an organic part of the overarching
frame of collective struggles.
Since 1999, I have been tracking the etymological roots, conceptual
travel and contemporary deployment of the Urdu and Arabic word haq in
subaltern movements in India and Pakistan. Haq or hukk appears in Hindi
and Urdu lexicon through the influence of Persian, which was the language
of administration in most of precolonial India (Mir 2011). In the book, India
in the Persianate Age, Richard Eaton writes that ‘… by the fourteenth century
Persian had already become the most widely used language for governance
across South Asia … as a result, a wide range of Persian words infiltrated the
vocabulary of many of South Asia’s major regional languages’ (Eaton 2019: 17).
In contemporary times, haq cuts across geographical, religious and linguistic
become the
boundaries to become theprincipal
principalword
worddeployed
deployedtoto
makemake rights
rights claims
claims in
northern
in India India and Pakistan.
and Pakistan. Remarkably
Remarkably cosmopolitan
cosmopolitan andwith
and withanan extensive
hinterland, haq is the predominant word used to signify a right in South Asia,
Middle East and North Africa. A pre-Islamic term also available in the older
Semitic languages, haq’s roots are said to lie in the classical Hebrew term
hkk1 and its earliest use in Arabic can be traced to pre-Islamic poetry where
it means ‘something right, true, just or “proper” and real’. In the Qur’an, its
fundamental meaning is ‘established fact’, ‘reality’, ‘justice and that which
is true’ and these meanings are also upheld in modern Arabic and Persian
dictionaries.2 It also means ‘the divine’ and as al-Haqq, it is one of the names
for God (Smith 1971; Rosen 1980). In early dictionaries of the ‘Hindustani’
language, haq is translated as ‘right’ and as ‘due’ but later dictionaries record a
much more expansive meaning of the term imputing qualities of ‘equity and
reason’ (Fergusson 1773), and describing it as ‘just, proper, right, true, correct,
rectitude, right, title, privilege, claim, lot, portion, truth, true and God’ (Platts
1884). The constellation of normative, ethical, moral, empirical, ontological and
divine meanings that attach to it effectively signify that haq, in fact, embodies
particular imaginaries and discourses on ways of being. In Chapters 4 and 5,
I will be looking at political imaginaries of contemporary struggles for rights
in India and Pakistan that produce vernacular rights cultures together with
the justificatory premises that underpin these including their ‘applications’.
74 Vernacular Rights Cultures

However, here let me briefly explain what I mean by political imaginaries and
what role they play in feminist historical ontologies.
By political imaginaries of haq, I refer to a set of dynamic gendered relations,
ideas, practices, discourses, institutions and subjectivities, which attach to
haq and in turn, those which it mediates, justifies, accords meaning to and
upholds. By the plural imaginaries, 3 I am referring not to a single articulation
but to a multiplicity of mediations of haq, each produced within particular
political contexts of struggle; each stipulating a ‘sense of how things usually
go … interwoven with … how they ought to go’ (Taylor 2002: 106). Thus,
haq orients proper ordering of relations among persons, contains within it an
image of a gendered moral order and mediates citizenship, political discourse
and political struggles. Ian Hacking (2002: 17) defines a concept to be nothing
other than a ‘word in its sites’. Therefore, to focus on how concepts come
into being in specific historical contexts is to focus our attention on a variety
sites: ‘the sentences in which the words are actually (not potentially) used,
those who speak the sentences, with what authority, in what institutional
settings, in order to influence whom, with what consequences for the speakers’
(Hacking 2002: 17). However, we also know that concepts bring into view
particular historical and moral worlds. Deploying a particular concept means
deploying a particular worldview or political imaginary. In other words, if
political imaginaries might be accessed through paying attention to words
and concepts, then it is not hard to see that one might be studying historical
ontologies of concepts and the processes of self-making and world-making
these put in place.
Let me provide a few examples of the complex and capacious imaginaries
of haq that are explored in anthropological writings on Islamic juristical
languages and life-worlds in different locations especially on matters of legal
adjudications and disputations. Clifford Geertz in Local Knowledge (1983)
explores fact finding and rule applying in ‘adjudicative processes’ in different
juridical traditions, namely the Islamic, the Indic and the Malayo–Indonesian
and examines the ways in which different juristical life-worlds deal with a
central juridical problem. This problem is the distinction between ‘the is/
ought, what-happened/was-it-lawful distinction’ or that between fact and law.
Contending that law is but one way of ‘imagining the real’ (Geertz 1983: 184),
Geertz writes that haq, which he identifies as a key Arabic jurisprudential term,
captures not only a ‘distinctive way of imagining the real’ but also a term whose
capacious meaning bridges the fact-law divide characteristic of Western legal
practices, invoking as it does a ‘deeper connection’ between the ‘normative
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 75

and the ontological’4 or the ‘right and the real’ (Geertz 1983: 189). He uses
illustrations from everyday Moroccan usage to illustrate the moral, normative,
ontological, juridical and religious connotations of haq and identifies different
ways in which haq is applied, where each ‘level of application’—religious,
metaphysical, normative/moral and a jural/enforceable claim—reveals a
consistent ‘identity between the right and the real’ (Geertz 1983: 189) or that
between the empirical and the normative.
Lawrence Rosen (1980) also notes the normative and the ontological
connections of haq in his ethnographic investigations of qadi justice in a
qadi court5 in the Moroccan city of Sefrou where he observes the role and
application of haq in legal adjudications. Through his ethnography, Rosen
examines the influence of ‘cultural assumptions’ in shaping ‘judge’s modes of
reasoning, factual assessments, and choice of remedies’ (Rosen 1980: 217) to
argue that not only is law (including in North America) ‘suffused by culture and
cultural is integral to law … ’ (Rosen 1980: 218) but also that law is a critical
site for negotiating questions of equity and discretion. In the qadi courts at
Sefrou, questions of equity and discretion invariably involve adjudicating over
the operation and validation of haq. Rosen writes that Moroccan society is
constructed around ‘a series of interpersonal ties, freely negotiated and highly
expedient which center on each individual … it is however, clearly understood
that every action one takes creates an obligation in the other, and the key to
the formation of network of personal ties, as well as to a sense of how others
are most likely to act toward oneself, is to organize and learn about such
obligations in the most effective way possible. This sense of mutual ingratiation
and indebtedness is broadly subsumed by Moroccans under the central Arabic
concept of haqq’ (Rosen 1980: 221). To speak of haqq, is to convey that sense
of mutual obligations that bind men to men, and man to God. Each of these
obligations is open to negotiation and the question of whose obligation or haqq
is valid, ‘true’ or ‘real’ (Rosen 1980: 223) needs to be settled. It is in the qadi
courts that the legal validation of haqq is established.
Cutting across southwest from Morocco to another Islamic legal context
on the African continent, Susan F. Hirsch (1998) examines the discursive
and dynamic constructions of gendered subjectivities and positionings in
legal interactive speech over marital disputations in kadhi courts in coastal
Kenya. Unlike Rosen, Hirsch’s focus is less on kadhi negotiations of equity
and discretion, than on the discourses available for ‘marital disputing’. A
predominant literal and conceptual language of marital disputing in Hirsch’s
ethnography is that of haki, the Swahili version of haq deployed by the disputants
76 Vernacular Rights Cultures

in Hirsch’s ethnography. According to Hirsch, ‘when disputants use haki,

they produce distinct senses of the term that presuppose identifiably different
discourses—one of specific, actionable laws and one of ethics or just behavior …’
and while, ‘in the abstract, haki can embody haqq in all three senses’ identified
by Geertz: those of the real, reality and God, with ethics and just behaviour
and with law and justice, ‘but in Swahili marital disputes, most deployments
of haki tend either towards rights or justice … ’ (Hirsch 1998: 86).
These ethnographic deployments of haq in the different Islamic contexts
explore Islamic jurisprudential traditions where haq operates as an ‘orienting’
(Geertz 1983: 187) concept of Islamic law and theology. My ethnographic
tracking of haq in the subcontinent, on the other hand, reveals that the use
of haq is not limited to Muslim communities in the region nor indeed only to
the application and adjudication of Muslim Personal Law, which incidentally
governs Muslim communities in both India and Pakistan.6 In fact, a striking
aspect of its deployment in the region is its use across geographical, linguistic
and religious groups. For instance, in Rajasthan, where I have been conducting
fieldwork since 1999, recent census figures suggest that Muslims constitute
just 9.07 per cent of the state’s population and Urdu (popularly associated with
Muslim communities in the subcontinent) is only spoken by 1.17 per cent of
the people (Linguistic Survey of India 2011).7
The association of particular languages with religious communities in South
Asia does not have long historical roots in the Indian subcontinent. The popular
imaginary of Hindi and Urdu as being two separate languages and belonging
to two separate literary traditions, and the association of Urdu with Muslims,
and of Hindi with Hindus is of a very recent origin. The subcontinental
politics, activism and historiographies of Urdu and Hindi literary cultures
are also mired in a politics of origins. These originary ‘myths’ are in part
a ‘colonialist construction’ and in part an ‘emotional and political space of
Indian (Hindu) identity of modern India’ (Faruqi 2003: 805). Essentially, the
originary myths of Hindi and Urdu revolve around ‘two claimants of a single
literary tradition’ (Faruqi 2003: 806). The myth essentially goes like this:
there was once a ‘pristine’ tradition of Hindi as a spoken and written language,
which becomes Urdu as a result of Muslims who had come into India with the
Muslim invasions developing a language of their own. The originary myth not
only sets up two separate lineages, historical trajectories and literary cultures
but also ascribes a religious identity to these. The question, however, is were
Hindi and Urdu, in fact, two separate languages with their separate literary
and religious traditions? It turns out that they were not. Hindi and Urdu were,
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 77

and are, in fact, one and the same language. Shamsur Rehman Faruqi (2003)
writes that the reference to ‘Urdu’ as a name for a language occurs for the first
time around 1780 and that contrary to the prominent origin myths, no ‘new
language grew up in northern India as a result of the advent of the Mughals’
(Faruqi 2003: 807). A discrete reference to Urdu only emerges during the reign
of the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II, and although it does not supplant the
official court language, which remains Persian, it registers a presence. In this
period, Urdu is known as Urdu-e Mualla and refers to the language of those
who lived in in Urdu-e
Urdu-e Mualla
MuallaororShahjahanabad,
Shahjahanabad,which
whichwas the emperor Shah
is the
Alam II’s new capital. It was only a matter of time, however, that the colonial
drive to provide the colonised with a ‘history’—a history that reflected the
‘political considerations’ (Faruqi 2003: 812) of the colonial state would produce
the colonial discourse of their being two languages, and in which it would be
aided admirably by the subcontinent’s socio-religious reformers and language
‘activists’. As the historian Farina Mir (2011) writes, ‘If the colonial state
and socioreligious reformers emphasized differences, and a sense of religious
competition, language activists also did their part to contribute to that discourse
… What was new about the late nineteenth-century association of language
and religion was that it linked vernacular languages and religious communities’
(Mir 2011: 22). Overall, the production of an ‘imaginary’ (Faruqi 2003: 811)
for Hindi and Urdu had deleterious effects on the latter and consequently, Urdu
was systematically ‘denigrated on moral and religious grounds’ (Faruqi 2003:
814). The ‘communal crusade’ (Robinson, 1974)8 against Urdu sedimented
its ‘Muslim’ character, albeit on ‘historically false and morally questionable
premises’ (Faruqi 2003: 811) with the result that Urdu has become overly
associated and confined to a religious identity—that of a particular nation
and a particular people: the lingua franca of Pakistan and the predominant
language of the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent.
My ethnographies of subaltern struggles for haq in India and Pakistan
demonstrate not only that the deployments of haq are not always in alignment
with Islamic juristical settlements of haq but they also refuse the exclusively
religious associations put in place by the originary myths surrounding
Hindi and Urdu. If anything, the ethnographies of struggle over haq in the
book demonstrate that the word haq in the region is not confined to Islamic
jurisprudentialism or to its deployment by only Muslims in the region but has
a wider presence that includes claim-making and seeking expanded citizenship
entitlements from the state by subaltern groups across the subcontinent’s
religious and geographical landscape.
78 Vernacular Rights Cultures

The context of struggle is crucial here because it is in the context of political

mobilisations and struggles that the word haq acquires salience in contemporary
South Asia. In India, my ethnographic tracking over the last decade has
spread to five districts of Rajasthan9 and has consisted mainly of recording
narratives of development workers, grassroots political workers and participants
of various citizen movements organising under the umbrella of ‘the right to
food’ movement. In Pakistan, I have documented the deployment of haq by
the AMP demanding land rights in the Punjab. The interesting thing I have
noticed in all these years of tracking haq in citizenship mobilisations in both
countries is that although the word haq is used in grassroots mobilisations,
the word itself has somewhat limited mobility when it comes to invoking and
supporting intersectional and complex inequalities. Here, I have in mind the
ways in which haq does not by itself apply organically to articulations of gender
equality. It does not help that the term haq itself is a masculine term and is
rarely deployed as part of the everyday moral vocabulary of women in South
Asia (see Chapter 4). This is not to say that articulations for gender equality or
gender-based rights are not made; in fact, the book focuses predominantly on
these articulations and their gendered nature but that the question of gender
equality always invariably needs to be begged separately within political
struggles. That demands for gender equality or haq for women emerge as a
question that needs to be begged separately and seldom occurs organically
within citizen mobilisations could also be seen as a limitation perhaps, of
the ontological–normative structure of haq, which does not quite allow its
easy translation into all demands for equality and rights. However, demands
of haq for women are not only voiced, but its enunciation also brings into
sharp relief the indivisibility and the intersectional nature of rights including
the imbrication of individual with collective rights and their conf lictual
relationship.

The Curious Return of Ontology

But why a feminist historical ontology of haq though? What does ontology
mean anyway? Is not ontology something that strikes fear and loathing in
some sections of feminist theory? Is it not ‘just another word for colonialism’
(Todd 2016) and of yet ‘another theoretical primitivism that presents itself as
a methodological “avant garde”’ (Rosenberg 2014). What does the coupling
of ‘feminist’ with historical ontology bring to the methodological table? Is
it yet another addition to the growing list of ‘ontological turns’ declared by
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 79

an ever increasing number of disciplinary formations? Certainly, ontology

means different things to different people depending on who you ask, and
if the ‘ontological turn’ declared within several academic disciplines is any
indicator, then it is clear that ontology means a range of different things.10
The ‘ontological turns’ in various disciplines are heralded as re-signifying and
bringing to prominence a range of entanglements with the ‘contemporary’,
including the conditions of difference, exclusion, erasure and absence. It is a
curious return because it was for the very same reasons that ontology fell out of
favour. The charge brought against ontology then was that it enabled epistemic
histories based on metaphysical and transcendental claims about reality
and being, which refused difference and put in place logics of civilisational
exclusion and absence. But this return of ontology has not come without a set
of qualifications and reignifications. Consequently, there are a range of prefixes
that now accompany the return of ontology and the ontological, achief few among
these are: ‘political ontology’ (Blaser 2013), ‘politico-ontological’ (Escobar
2018) and ‘historical ontology’ (Hacking 2002). The prefixes matter. They do
particular kinds of work. In particular, they flag the particular deployments
of ontology and the different intellectual investments in reclaiming ontology.
There are at least three things that are quite striking about the various
disciplinary ontological turns. First, they seem to operate in disciplinary
silos and show little awareness of the ontological crises going on next door.
As a result, these accounts are marked by a fair amount of self-referentialism
and there is little cross-referencing among them. For instance, depending on
which ‘ontological turn’ you read, different people are credited with coining
the phrase, and interestingly, none of them are feminist scholars. Similarly,
depending on who you ask, the turn to ontology means very different things
in different disciplinary quarters and sometimes, even within the disciplines.
In the broad area of cultural studies, for instance, the ‘ontological turn’ has
gone hand in hand with the ‘affective turn’ determined to bring the ontological
reality of the body back into the centre of cultural analysis (Holzberg 2018). In
the case of some anthropological interventions, the ‘ontological turn’ has been
primarily about a turn to the ‘native’ or radical alterity. In economics, some
are using the ‘ontological turn’ to draw attention to inadequate methods for
capturing contemporary economic realities and within philosophy, ‘historical
ontology’ is invoked to historicise philosophical concepts. Despite these separate
objects of knowledge, there are also some overlapping themes across this
‘turn’, especially in regard to the ‘origin’ stories’ that are told about this turn
to ontology. Often, for instance, the turn to ontology is said to have arisen out
80 Vernacular Rights Cultures

of a ‘crisis in representation’, from the rise of science and technology studies

and as a response to the ongoing ecological crises.
Among the different origin stories, however, perhaps none has gained
more power and traction than the one that that narrates
narrates thethe ‘ontological
‘ontological turn’turn’ as a
turn away from epistemology, in particular, deconstructionist deconstructionist epistemology.
The
The charge laid against (deconstructionist)
(deconstructionist)epistemology
epistemologyisisthree-fold:
three-fold: that
that it
it
is is theoryforfortheory’s
theory theory’ssake,
sake,that
thatititadvances
advancesaa Eurocentred
Eurocentred view view of the world
and of the subject/human (Escobar 2018), and that it produces civilisational
absence and erasures. Consequently, some some proponents of the ‘ontological
turn’ focus
focuson onthetheontological
ontological erasures
erasures andand
absences
absencesthatthat
poststructuralist
poststructuralistand
deconstructionist
and deconstructionist epistemologies
epistemologies are are
saidsaid
to produce.
to produce. SomeForanthropologists
instance, some
also question thequestion
anthropologists ontological orientationorientation
the ontological towards singularity and universal
towards singularity and
imaginaries, that is, of that
universal imaginaries, theiris,being
of theironlybeing
one world,
only one theworld,
modern theone, and
modern
argue
one, and instead
argue forinstead
the need fortothe
register
need to different
registerworld-makings and pluriversal
different world-makings and
imaginaries (de la Cadena
pluriversal imaginaries 2010; Blaser
(de la Cadena 2010; 2013;
Blaser Escobar 2018).
2013; Escobar Despite
2018). the
Despite
internal differentiations within
the internal differentiations within this this scholarship, a key concern
a key concern driving the driving
the ‘ontological
‘ontological turn’turn’
here here
is how is to
how to engage
engage seriously
seriously with the with the question
question of
of radical
radical
difference.difference.11
11 In a series of interventions, the anthropologist Mario
Blaser
In a(2013),
series offorinterventions,
instance, writes thethat the ‘ontological
anthropologist Mario turn’ has emerged
Blaser as
(2013), for
a result ofwrites
instance, a ‘crisis’
thatinthe
the‘ontological
hegemonicturn’ stories
hastold by those
emerged as awho
resultareof‘modern’
a ‘crisis’
about
in themselvesstories
the hegemonic and the toldontological
by those who present, that is,about
are ‘modern’ modernity.12
themselves Blaser
and
argues
the that the present,
ontological story ofthatmodernity is a storyBlaser
is, modernity. 12 of a ‘hegemonic
argues that the ontological’
story of
account
modernity ofismodernity that is propelled
a story of a ‘hegemonic by aaccount
ontological’ progressivist, teleological,
of modernity that is
evolutionary, linear narrative based on ‘an ontologically
propelled by a progressivist teleological, evolutionary, linear narrative based stark distinction’
(Blaser 2013: 554) stark
on ‘an ontologically between ‘nature (Blaser
distinction’ and culture’ (Blaser
2013: 554) 2013:‘nature
between 554) and
‘modern and non-modern’
culture’ (Blaser 2013: 554) and (Blaser
‘modern 2013: and554). The question
non-modern’ (Blaser of2013:
difference
554).
here is hierarchised
The question and plotted
of difference here along a linear direction
is hierarchised and plotted of historical time
along a linear
and consequently,
direction of historical read
timeas and
backward and primitive,
consequently, a condition,
read as backward andwhich will
primitive,
eventually
a condition,be whichresolved when everyone
will eventually be resolved becomes modern.becomes
when everyone This particular
modern.
ordering of the hegemonic
This particular ordering ofontological
the hegemonic story ontological
of modernity therefore,
story refuses
of modernity
the question
therefore, of ‘radical
refuses difference’
the question of (Blaser
‘radical 2013: 559) and
difference’ different
(Blaser 2013:worldings
559) and
by denying
different their existence
worldings by denying through either refusing
their existence through these
eitherany ‘veracity’
refusing or
these
by
anyregarding
‘veracity’ difference
or by regardingas another subset
difference as or cultural
another variant
subset of the modern
or cultural variant
story.13 The question
of the modern story.13 is The therefore,
question one of how one
is therefore, to bring
of howthese different
to bring these
worldingsworldings
different or ontologies into view?
or ontologies into According
view? According to Blaser, this requires
to Blaser, not
this requires
onlyonly
not thinking
thinkingabout aboutontology
ontology butbutalsoalsoononhow howtoto methodologically
methodologically go
about capturing these different ontologies. Consequently, Blaser argues that
the way forward is to think in terms of ontology as a ‘conceptual political
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 81

project’, or in terms of a political ontology, where political ontology means

to be ‘concerned with practices, performances and enactments and not with
specific groups’ (Blaser 2013: 552). Blaser writes that political ontology is
concerned with ‘reality making, including its own participation in reality
making … with telling stories that open up a space for, and enact, the
pluriverse’ (2013: 552–53).
The politics of the pluriversal and the ontological absence of the Indigenous
is also a concern for Marisol de la Cadena (2010). In her case, the politics of
the pluriversal requires the reformulation of two things: first, for politics to
include the nonhuman and second, to interconnect such plurality without
rendering these commensurable.14 The ontological singularity that informs
current understanding of politics renders different ontologies and worlds absent
through marking them as inferior and as only ever ‘others’. The problem of
ontological absence is not one of finding resolutions through inclusion into
existing ‘politics as usual’ but rather of changing the ‘baseline of politics’ and
to reorient it towards a politics of the pluriversal. The new baseline would
disavow singularity and make multiple worlds visible as legitimate actors
and disputants within politics. The reconfiguration of politics would enable
the Indigenous to take part as ‘legitimate adversaries’ and not be only at the
receiving end of a biopolitical war that both liberalism and socialism have
waged against their alleged ‘others’.
Pluriverse also features in the title of Arturo Escobar’s book Designs for the
Pluriverse (2018) in which he argues that the contemporary crises of ecological
devastation, dispossession and capitalist extractivism are the result of particular
ways of ‘doing, knowing and being’, which in turn are a result of hegemonic
forms of organising the world based on a particular design. This design is
driven by a particular ontological orientation towards singularity of existence
and of there being only one world—that of the modern. This ontological drive,
which has a particular subject, a particular reality and a particular economy
(capitalism) realises itself not only through producing and implementing this
ontological design on a global scale (through development, humanitarianism
and so forth) but also through putting in place a ‘sociology of absences’. In
other words, the other ways of world-making are not only ignored but in
fact, wilfully rendered absent. Pluriversal thinking then, is an imaginary that
replaces singularity thinking with a register of different ontologies engaged
in different designs for world-making which are also in partial connection
with one another. Escobar’s designs for different ontologies are informed by
Latin American Indigenous struggles. These movements, Escobar writes, are
82 Vernacular Rights Cultures

led by an ontology of radical relationality—a mode of existence that centres

autonomy/autonomia and the community/communal.
Even though Escobar is careful to insist that ‘community is understood in
deeply historical open, and non-essentialist terms’ he is also clear that this
openness and non-essentialist understanding of the community rests upon a
basic system (emphasis
(emphasis added)
added) of
of relations,
relations, which has to be maintained for the
community to preserve its autopoeisis, that is, its capacity for self creation.
(Escobar 2018: 183).
I admire Escobar’s wide-ranging, thoughtful and sophisticated book but the
privileging of the non-representational political structure of social sovereignty
organised around obedience to the ‘basic system’ of relations within community
worries me. In my view, such a privileging evacuates power relations from the
scene of politics. Therefore, the question is: do gender relations constitute basic
relations within the ‘community’ that Escobar refers to? And, how does this
basic system of relations register, negotiate and resolve gender relations, which
are essentially conflictual and reflect different power hierarchies? To be fair,
Escobar does cite the work of decolonial communitarian feminists describing
their strategy as consisting of ‘pursuing the twin goals of depatriarchalization
(in relation to both autochthonous and modern patriarchies) and decolonization
(in relation to liberal, modernising and capitalist hegemonies, including
individualizing Western feminisms)’ (2018: 182–83). However, it is not
clear how the interventions of decolonial communitarian feminists inform
pluriversal thinking and its social relations. And, I cannot help thinking
how little space there is in these political ontological accounts for struggles
over gender and sexuality (Tola 2018). An important aspect of the work of
decolonial communitarian feminists is their critique of the biocentric, binary
gender relations put in in place
place by
by colonial
colonialformations,
formations,Indigenous
Indigenouspatriarchies
patriarchy
and universal feminisms and of the epistemic and ontological struggles against
these. However, not enough of this important critique and interventions find
much room in Escobar’s account.

The Refusal to Disentangle Ontology from Epistemology

Contrary to the ‘ontological turn’ within anthropology, a feminist historical
ontology refuses the disentanglement of epistemology from ontology.
Epistemologies have particular ontological effects,15 and therefore, not only is it
difficult to unentangle epistemology and ontology—this is borne out by Black
feminist and postcolonial scholarship—but also because there exists a mutually
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 83

reinforcing relationship between ontology and epistemology, a relationship

which is held together by a specific onto-epistemic glue. This onto-epistemic
glue produces particular epistemic histories and subjects and puts in place a
white onto-epistemic subject at its centre while negating others. As is evident,
what is at stake here it is not so much the white onto-epistemic worldview of
modernity, as critiqued by the ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology, but the white
onto-epistemic subject of feminist theory that is the object of critique. Now
widely documented within feminist scholarship, the white onto-epistemic
subject does particular kinds of work—it shores up the white feminist subject,
imbues it with capacities of autonomy and agency and invests it with epistemic
authority. The strength of this onto-epistemic glue has meant that some of the
poststructuralist inspired moves to displace the earlier ontological talk have
done little to address thequestion
cancel the question of
of epistemic
epistemic erasure
erasure of
of non-white
non-white subjects.
subjects.
What has been displaced, however, even if only partially, is the idea that there
might be an essential experience of gender. Regardless of this shift, questions
remain as to whose experiences count in producing poststructuralist accounts
of gender and subjectivity.
If poststructuralist and deconstructionist inspired feminist critique have been
unable to shift the white onto–epistemic glue that accords subject privilege to
white women, has the recent ‘ontological turn’ within feminist cultural studies
done any better in holding open the possibility of historical and ontological
difference? Has the question of difference, absence and erasure been more
productively engaged with through its ‘ontological turn’? As it turns out, the
answer is more or less no. In her important article ‘Invoking Affect’, Hemmings
argues that
(2005) argues thatwithin
withinfeminist
feminist cultural
cultural studies,
studies, the the ‘ontological
‘ontological turn’turn’
has
has aimed
aimed to (re)centre
to (re)centre the in
the body body in feminist
feminist scholarship
scholarship markedthrough
throughaa ‘turn
‘turn to
affect’. Hemmings notes that the turn to ontology/affect in cultural studies is
premised on two manoeuvres. First, it overstates the ills of deconstruction—its
political flatness, the predictable nature of the analysis it proffers. Second, in
its focus on white affects and white bodies it enacts an epistemic erasure of
Black and postcolonial feminist scholarship. It is striking, notes Hemmings,
that the proponents of the ‘ontological turn’ disavow deconstructionist concerns
and direct attention towards ontology—to the body and its affects—but they
do not acknowledge the Black and critical race scholars who have insisted on
embodiment and racial affect.16 The epistemological–ontological divide and
the privileging of ontology over epistemology is worrying on several counts,
not least because questions of epistemology have historically attached to the
white subject and non-white worlds have been represented as those that are
84 Vernacular Rights Cultures

devoid of theory but also of history (Said 1978). And therefore, histories of
epistemic violence on non-European/non-white worlds is not something that
can simply be reinstated through non-historical accounts of the body or an
ahistorical, undifferentiated account of ontology over epistemology.
Perhaps, among the most inf luential interventions by which feminist
scholars have laid bare the imbrication of epistemology and ontology is by
calling for a critical reflexive ‘politics of location’. Now many feminist scholars
have written influentially about location as a place in space and in time but also
in history and epistemology. They have invoked location to draw attention to
unequal distribution of intellectual and institutional capital and production of
knowledge around the globe but also to the entanglements of theory building
with the heteropatriarchal, racist, capitalist geopolitics and power relations
that structure and inform knowledge production (Rich 1984; Mohanty 1995;
1991; Wynter 2003; Cusicanqui 2012). Questioning the location of knowledge
production is, of course, hardly confined to certain strands feminist thinking
alone. Within wider scholarship, location has been used to draw attention
to the interstitial and ‘in between spaces’ where differences are negotiated
(Bhabha 1994), to the ‘provincialism’ of the universalist pretensions of thought
(Chakrabarty 2000), to ‘place based consciousness’ (Dirlik 1999: 151–2), and to
the historicity of concepts (Hacking 2002). More recently, location has come
inform ‘border thinking’ espoused by the decolonial scholars (Mignolo 2000).
However, what is perhaps unique to feminist scholarship on location is its
insistence on location as a critical reflexive ethics. This critical reflexive ethics
comes into two forms: the first helps register and document the global power
relations that underpin the production of knowledge and privilege particular
sites of knowledge production and dissemination. It insists that the theorist
declare their location and position within the global circuits of intellectual
division of labour (Spivak 1987) and account for the epistemic tracks of their
location upon their theorising. In other words, a critical reflexive politics of
location demands an answer to the question: from where are you looking, and
whom/what are you seeing? And the second forges a dynamic, theorised and
historicised relationship between the self and the collective in specific locations
and contexts of struggle (Mohanty 1992), and also involves redrawing the
ethical relationship of the self or selves to the site(s) of knowledge production.
Adrienne Rich, the feminist poet and author titled her essay ‘Notes on the
Politics of Location’ and catapulted struggles over accountability, responsibility
and ethical politics to the centre stage of feminist knowledge production.
Exhorting white feminists to examine the ‘thoughtlessly white’ assumptions
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 85

underpinning their feminism, Rich directs her ire at the deadly ‘sameness’
of abstraction that ‘allows no differences among places, times, cultures,
conditions, movements’ (Rich 1984: 221). As opposed to this ahistorical, ‘lofty
and privileged’ abstract theorising which centres white women and engenders
a ‘confusion between [our] claims to the white Western eye and the woman-
seeing eye’ (Rich 1984: 219, 221), Rich demands that we recognise the location
and ‘name the ground we are coming from and the conditions we have taken
for granted … ’ (Rich 1984: 219). A significant effect of this refusal to locate
oneself in the geopolitics of theory production has been the prolific circulation
of the universalising representational manoeuvres that produce visions of
‘global sisterhood’ without taking into account power differentials of race,
class, caste, sexuality and geopolitical location (Mohanty 1995; Grewal and
Kaplan 1994). As opposed to this feminist politics of ‘global transcendence’
with its refusal of global power relations, Chandra Mohanty calls for a feminist
politics of engagement that is located in the ‘temporality of struggles’ and
draws on ‘historically interpreted and theorised’ experiences of differently
located and ongoing struggles over what it means to experience gender/gender
oppressions in different locations (1992: 87–8). It is this centrality of and
complicity within crisscrossing and dynamic entanglements of power structures
and relations across different locations and their implications for knowledge
production that distinguishes transnational feminist scholarship and practices
from global and international feminisms (Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Mohanty
1995; Alexander and Mohanty 2010; Swarr and Nagar 2010). This focus on
uneven and unequal entanglements of power relations dispels any attachment
to location as signifying difference for difference’s sake. If anything, invoking
location as power saturated and as signifying specific relations of domination
and subordination institutes a meaningful corrective to the easy slip slide into
‘neo relativism’, where difference and multiplicity are celebrated without any
recognition of the fields of power in which difference and sameness operate
and are invoked (Frankenberg and Mani 1993).
By insisting on knowing not only who is and can be the knower, but also what
can be known, about what and from which locations, feminist epistemologists
have engaged in unmasking, decentring and locating the Archimedean all
seeing and all representing universal knower and also in identifying the
contradictory and inconsistent assumptions that underpin epistemological
thinking. For instance, a glaring contradiction in philosophical thinking is
that it not only presupposes only particularly located persons as knowers (Code
2012) but also presupposes these particularly located knowers are also located
86 Vernacular Rights Cultures

nowhere. Parsing through these contradictions, feminist epistemologists

have located knowers in particular social and historical milieus, shown the
imbrication of the processes knowledge production within political and
ontological entanglements (Alcoff 1993, 1991), but also consistently challenged
the methodological individualism and the assumptions of ‘human homogeneity’
that underpin epistemological enquiry. But even as feminist scholars continue
to successfully challenge epistemology’s ‘irrepressible connection with social
power’ (Fricker 2007: 2) and critique the epistemic exclusions that have denied
(white) women a place at the epistemology table, questions of who, where and
what possesses epistemic authority within feminist theory itself refuse to die
down (Rich 1984; Spivak 1988; Crenshaw 1989; Mohanty 1991; Bhavnani
1993; Hill Collins 2000; hooks 2000; Lorde 2001; Chow 2003; Lugones 2010).
And, here too, the prevailing forms of colonial unknowing together with the
vice grip of positivist knowledge production has meant that there is both a great
deal of reluctance to engage reflexively with the imperialist, heteropatriarchal,
racialised and power laden theoretical entanglements at different locations, and
even much less with the colonial burdens that inform theory building. The
operation of epistemologies of ‘white ignorance’ (Mills 2007: 13) and those of
‘colonial unknowing’ have rendered not only these geopolitical, colonial, and
institutional entanglements largely invisible but also unspeakable.
Crucially, however, influential strands of Black, postcolonial, decolonial
and queer feminist scholarship have productively mined a critical, reflexive
feminist politics of location in order to undertake critical conceptual work in
‘non-standard’ locations and contexts. Many of the key feminist conceptual
categories that we have become accustomed to deploying in everyday
theorising, empirical and in policy work, emerge out of critical engagements
with the location of particular subjects. So, for instance, Kimberlé Crenshaw
coins the term ‘intersectionality’ to mark the invisibility and erasure of Black
women. Significantly, and this is crucial, intersectionality comes forth from
a place that is a ‘non-standard’ background context for conceptual work but
also for theory making. The complex inequalities, oppressions, social worlds,
experiences and histories of struggle of Black women constitute the background
condition here, and it is this unique location and context that intersectionality
describes and visualises. After all, how often does one come across or deploy
concepts that do not emerge and in turn reflect hegemonic and privileged
raced and classed worldviews and histories? Another feminist conceptual
intervention premised on the epistemic authority of marginal subjects whose
‘shared histories based on shared location within hierarchical power relations’
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 87

(Hartsock 1983; Harding 1993; Hill Collins 1997:376) is, of course, feminist
standpoint theorising. Standpoint thinking itself has been a hugely productive
site for a range of important conceptual interventions. Sandra Harding has
argued for the necessity of ‘strong objectivity’ for critically evaluating ‘which
social situations tend to generate the most objective claims’, and for ‘starting
thought from the lives of marginalised peoples’ (Harding 1993:56). Donna
Haraway has written of ‘situated knowledge’, arguing powerfully that it is
‘about limited location’ and enabling ‘us to become answerable for what we
learn how to see’ (Haraway 1988: 583). Also insisting on specific and different
feminist standpoints, Patricia Hill Collins writes of a Black feminist standpoint
as a ‘subjugated knowledge’ located in a context of racialised and gendered
economic and political domination that emerges from an ‘interdependence’
of the everyday knowledges of Black African American women and ‘the
more specialised knowledge of Black women intellectuals’ (Hill Collins
2000: 269). And Sharmila Rege (1998) writes of Dalit feminist standpoint
that derives from and is located in Dalit women’s struggles but crucially,
does not originate from an authentic well of Dalit women’s difference or
experience. As opposed to the politics of authenticity, Rege argues that a
Dalit feminist standpoint is not only a ‘liberatory’ feminist project but also
one that is ‘multiple, heterogenous, contradictory’, which needs to be open to
and in dialogue with all other liberatory projects.17 In a slightly different vein,
but carefully locating and starting from poor rural women’s ‘contradictory
experiences of globalisation’ within transnational circuits of production and
consumption in Southern India, Priti Ramamurthy introduces us to the concept
of ‘subjects in perplexity’, who ‘experience both joys and aches of the global
every day, often simultaneously (Ramamurthy 2003: 525). Perplexity, writes
Ramamurthy, is the site of convergence of ‘multiple ideologies that constitute
subjects—cultural
subjects—cultural practice,
practice, temporalities
temporalitiesandand place
place…’ …’ (2003: 525). Locating
herself firmly within the political economy of knowledge production in Latin
America, and critiquing statist ideologies of hybridity and multiculturalism
deployed to manage difference, especially, Indigenous difference, Silvia
Rivera Cusicanqui (2012) writes
writes of
of the
the notion
notion ofof ‘chi’xi’,
chi’xi, which
which is the ‘most
appropriate translation of the motley mix that we, who are called mestizas
and mestizos are’ (Cusicanqui 2012: 105). A hugely capacious ‘notion’ of
many ‘connotations’, chi’xi is irreducible to colonial governmentalising moves,
capturing instead the ‘parallel coexistence of multiple cultural differences
that do not extinguish but instead antagonise and complement each other.
Each one reproduces itself from the depths of the past and relates to others in
88 Vernacular Rights Cultures

a contentious way’ (Cusicanqui 2012: 105). Crossing south central America

and heading north to the borderlands of Mexico and southwest USA, is the
location of Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptual offering: borderlands. Also, the title
of Anzaldúa’s pathbreaking book, Borderlands locates the history of a people
living in a specific geography; a geography spanning and telling the history of
Mexican-origin US Chicanas. Straddling specific border geographies, imperial
histories, racialised political economies of dispossession and psycho-sexual
socialities, it tells the history of the coming into being of a ‘border culture’
and of a ‘hybrid subjectivity’ informed and striated by histories of loss, psychic
unrest, marginality, struggles to belong, displacement and perpetual transition.
The borderland hybrid subjectivity is not one of a celebratory variety that
confidently celebrates multiculturalism and diversity but is borne from an acute
recognition of unequal power relations, alienation, ‘cultural ambiguity’, and
‘perplexity’. But this ‘psychic unrest’, economic and historical alienation in the
borderlands also produces an ‘alien consciousness’—a borderland consciousness,
borne out of a ‘struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, an inner war … towards
new possibilities’ (Anzaldúa 1987: 100-01). By highlighting these conceptual
interventions, my aim is not to provide an exhaustive list of location based
concepts, which of course, by any means, these are not, but rather to argue
that a careful attention to a critical reflexive politics of location makes it
‘unthinkable’ to delink the ontological and the epistemological.

Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology: Concepts,

Subjectification, Struggles
My aim in highlighting these feminist interventions on the imbrication of
ontology and epistemology is to show why the work of ontology in a feminist
historical ontology is not to signal a dismissal of epistemology but to instead
underscore the impossibility of epistemology and ontology as discrete and
radically disconnected. So, through articulating the idea of feminist historical
ontology, how am I proposing to articulate vernacular rights cultures? Well,
quite simply, my objective is to marry the critical insights offered by historical
ontology with those of a feminist critical reflexive politics of location. As
I have made clear, by invoking a feminist historical ontology, I am neither
referring to the ‘ontological turn’ in the humanities and the social sciences
nor am I referring to the dominant meanings of ‘ontology’ within sections
of philosophical discourse. And while I think that the discussions of the
pluriversal and of ‘political ontology’ are important interventions, especially
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 89

because of their investments in producing concepts which are non-coincident

with bourgeois modernity, ultimately though, they are unable to capture the
question of the political category of gender and the gendered nature of conflict
and struggle and are not entirely helpful in assembling a feminist historical
ontology. As I will go on to show in Chapter 5, Adivasi mobilisations deploy haq
in their struggles for survival, life and being, and against their dispossession and
eviction from their ancestral lands by the overwhelming violence and coercion
unleashed by the developmentalist state and the syndicates of transnational
capital. However, it would be a mistake to think about their claims for rights
as either representing a hermetically sealed off ‘authentic’ discourse or as
entirely aligned with the state-led discourse of rights. By deploying the word
haq, the Indigenous groups in my ethnographies claim rights in a language
that is imbricated in a web of gendered relationality and cosmology, including
a particular relationship to the state.
In assembling a feminist historical ontology, I am drawing on but also
supplementing the insights on historical ontology offered by the philosopher
Ian Hacking (2002) with those offered by a critical feminist politics of location.
The supplementation becomes necessary since Hacking’s historical ontology
is neither informed by gendered power relations and nor is he particularly
interested in the existing nature of Eurocentred epistemic discourses. And, in
order for historical ontologies to reflect these two concerns they will require
supplementing with a postcolonial, decolonial, critical race and intersectional
feminist lens. In other words, historical ontology will require a reorienting
towards a feminist historical ontology.
Ian Hacking interprets historical ontology to invoke among other things, the
historical coming into being of concepts, of how they acquire meanings, make
up people, produce new possibilities for relating to oneself, aid the production of
subjectivities, and how people constitute themselves. Consequently, a historical
ontology is concerned with the speaking of words in their places but also with
tracking the ‘coming into being’ of objects that include not only ‘material
objects’ but also classes, kinds of people, and indeed ideas’ (Hacking 2002:2).
For Hacking, the process of ‘coming into being’ is explicitly historical, and
‘the beings that become’ are: ‘things, classifications, ideas, kinds of people,
institutions ...’ (Hacking 2001: 5).18
Incidentally, the term ‘historical ontology’ does not originate in Ian
Hacking’s work but is articulated for the first time in Foucault’s essay, ‘What
is Enlightenment?’, where Foucault refers twice to ‘historical ontology’.
According to Hacking (2002: 2), by historical ontology, Foucault means a
90 Vernacular Rights Cultures

study involving truth through which we constitute ourselves as objects of

‘knowledge’, with ‘power’ (how subjects constitute themselves as ‘subjects
acting on others’) and with ‘ethics’ (how subjects turn themselves into moral
agents). In effect, historical ontology refers to the material, intellectual
and conceptual resources and practices through which subjects constitute
themselves. However, Hacking’s own conceptual enquiries do not just mirror
Foucault’s own work, even if he does deploy the term ‘historical ontology’.
What is interesting about Hacking’s interlocution of Foucault’s work is that
he deploys Foucault’s insights to objects, sites and problematisations that exist
outside of Foucault’s ‘corpus’ (Koopman 2015: 571). To put it differently,
Hacking uses Foucault’s methodological tools—that is, historical ontology—to
produce enquiries, which were never part of Foucault’s repertoire. Instead he
applies historical ontology to a different field and towards a different end,
that is, towards historicising philosophy and towards producing new objects
of knowledge. This deployment of Foucault’s methodological apparatus, or
his analytic, rather than his conceptual repertoire is somewhat uncommon. In
academia, we have become accustomed to scholarly investigations that take up
Foucauldian concepts (biopolitics, governmentality, discipline, subjectivation,
and so on). However, we are less so, when it comes to work deploying
Foucault’s analytics (archaeology, genealogy) towards non-Foucauldian
enquiries (Koopman 2015). In this regard, Koopman and Matza suggest
that in contrast to the popular take up of Foucault’s concepts—it is, in fact,
Foucault’s methods or his analytic that are more mobile and can travel a ‘range
across contexts’ (Koopman and Matza 2013: 838). The reason for the greater
mobility of Foucault’s methods in contrast to his concepts is attributed by some
to Foucault’s ‘relentlessly empirical approach’ (Patton 2011:41), evidenced in
his attentiveness ‘to peculiarities, to small differences, to the moments when
shifts in truth, authority, spatiality or ethics make a difference for today as
compared to yesterday’ (Rabinow and Rose 2006:205). As Koopman and
Matza insightfully note, ‘analytics, which range across contexts, are light,
whereas concepts, which are always tied to their sites, are heavy’(Koopman
and Matza 2013: 838).
2013:838).
My reason for discussing this taxonomy of Foucault’s concepts, categories
and analytical
analyticalcategories
categoriesis to
is make clearclear
to make that tothat
study
to vernacular rights cultures
study vernacular rights
is not to isengage
cultures not toin another
engage or a newor‘model
in another a newbuilding’ around around
‘model building’ human human
rights/
rights or indeed in producing a new theory of human rights. But why study
concepts and not produce a theory of human rights? As I noted noted earlier,
earlier, the
problem is not one of not having enough theories but of not having enough
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 91

concepts. Concepts are the ‘building blocks’ of theory, they make our world
‘visualisable and discussable’ (Rabinow 2011: 122) and they need to be in place
in order to produce theoretical accounts. The problem in producing ‘theories’ for
‘most of the world’ is that the concepts that are put to use in these theoretical
descriptions are ‘provincial’ (Chakrabarty 2000) and produced in specific
temporal, spatial and historical contexts. And, therefore, in order to produce
theorised accounts of different forms of world-making, many existing concepts
would either need to be retooled or new ones would need to be generated.
A feminist
feminist historical
historicalontology
ontologyisisa acritical
criticalanalytic and
analytic an ethical
and ethical tool for
producing concepts and theories from the Global South or in non-standard
background conditions, that is, away from contexts which are taken as standard,
assumed or unquestioned. Through an insistence on historical and contextual
specificity, responsibility, intersectionality, interdisciplinarity and attention to
epistemic, ontological and political marginality, a feminist historical ontology
refuses a technical application of theory and holds open ‘historical difference
as constitutive of the possibility of thought’ (Wiegman and Elam 1993: 3).
In its insistence on a critical reflexive politics of location, a feminist historical
ontology demands that the theorist answer the question: from where are they
looking, and whom/what are they seeing?
Drawing on while also supplementing Ian Hacking’s thinking on ‘historical
ontology’ enables me to put together some key elements of a feminist historical
ontology. As I noted earlier, a feminist historical ontology does not see a
disjuncture between the ontological and epistemological. It does not turn
away from the epistemological towards the ontological but instead shows
their imbrication matters and produces consequences. The work of a feminist
historical ontology is to make explicit the ways in which particular concepts
come into being, the political cultures they put into place, the kinds of people
they make up but also the accounts we produce of these. It helps draw attention
to the different, historically specific and located languages of rights and human
rights—both literal and conceptual in different parts of the globe. It attends to
the political imaginaries these languages make available, and the subjectivities,
conceptions of personhood and the claims for subject status that underpin them.
An important way of documenting and analysing rights languages and the
political imaginaries within which they operate is to examine the justificatory
premises that underpin the political struggles around claim-making. As I shall
go on to show in Chapters 4 and 5, the deployment of haq and the struggles
that ensue are gendered struggles but also located within specific political
struggles for rights. A key objective of a feminist historical ontology of haq is
92 Vernacular Rights Cultures

to challenge reigning epistemic preoccupations that characterise the theoretical

and philosophical scholarship of global human rights, which mostly fails to
pay near adequate theoretical, philosophical and conceptual attention to the
struggles for rights and human rights in the Global South. As a result, rights
struggles inin the
struggle the Global
Global South
South seldom
seldom inform
inform theoretical
theoretical and
and philosophical
debates on global human rights on the one hand, and on the other, when
they do appear in the scholarship, they are more often than not subjected to
a technical application of normative theory.
Consequently, in assembling a feminist historical ontology of haq, I turn
my attention not only to the forms that these subaltern political struggles
take and the sites they occupy but also to the intellectual resources for claim-
making these deploy and use. Furthermore, a feminist historical ontology
of rights and in this case, of haq, is explicitly oriented towards tracking and
documenting how rights and human rights are mobilised in the vernacular;
to exploring how concepts come into being and are deployed to claim rights;
to attending to the political cultures of rights these concepts mobilise and
put in place; to analysing and cataloguing the forms of subjectification these
concepts engender and the political imaginaries they enable; to theorising the
forms of rights politics and the erasures and silences that these put in place;
and finally, to accounting for the ways in which the gendered articulation of
concepts and in this case, of rights and human rights, can exceed both the
purpose and nature of their mobilisation. In other words, a feminist historical
ontology is explicitly concerned with critical epistemologies and ontologies of
rights politics in different geographical and historical contexts.
As I noted earlier, it is Ian Hacking’s focus on words and concepts and their
role in ‘making up people’ that draws me to his work on historical ontology.
In part, this is to do with my longstanding interest in speech practices and
processes of political subjectivation Madhok (2013)—for instance, reorienting
agency in terms of speech practices rather than free action, in order to counter
the ‘action bias’ in our theoretical formulations of agency—but also in trying
to think closely about the stakes involved in the ‘politics of presence’ (Phillips
1995), and in the ‘performative politics of assembly’ (Butler 2015) for differently
gendered, raced, low caste and Indigenous subjects sitting in public assembly
and staking a claim to the language of rights, and the ways in which their
assembling in public disrupts the normative constitution of the public space
while also making rights politics so conflictual for them.
However, even while I write this, I am acutely aware that Hacking is not
interested in the coming into being of gendered concepts, nor in the gendered
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 93

nature of power relations, imaginaries and subjectivities they put in place or

even in the gendered
genderedprocesses
process which
whichmake
makeupuppeople.
people.Even
Eventhough
though Hacking
Hacking is
deeply invested in the particular historical sites at which words develop into
concepts, he does not acknowledge the feminist politics of location. A feminist
historical ontology on the other hand, explicitly argues that concepts are not
only historically and contextually specific and tied to particular historical
sites but also that they are intersectional and gendered. Gendering Hacking’s
historical ontology, allows one to see not only that haq is a masculine concept,
which very often than not means, that gender equality needs invariably to
be begged separately; and the latter has been without exception, the case in
all the citizen mobilisations I am tracking in this book. Quite simply, this
means that haq puts in place particular gendered political imaginaries of
rights, which in turn, engenders a whole new arena of a politics of struggle
over haq.
Accounting for conf lict and struggle is central to feminist historical
ontologies. Bringing a gender lens to historical ontology is to exercise awareness
of the inherent power relations in the meanings that concepts take up but also
in the work they do. Gender is an intrinsically political concept and struggles
over gender relations are political struggles and involve multiple levels of
conflict. A gender lens is manifestly important and crucial because bringing
a gendered perspective means one is constantly aware of the intersectional and
conflictual nature of rights but also of the limits of the normative ontological
possibilities offered by haq.
Finally, I want to draw attention to the ethical commitment of working
to and for justice that drives a feminist historical ontology. In particular, I
want to highlight two issues in this regard: The first is to do with the thorny
question of representation and the other is concerned with the relationship
of marginal epistemologies to the politics of the marginalised. Driving both
is the ethical question, which is this: how to acknowledge the intellectual
contributions of the counter-hegemonic ideological work that feminist
scholars and activists do in the Global South? And, furthermore, how to
demonstrate ethical responsibility by not appropriating the epistemologies
of subaltern movements of the Global South on the one hand, and/or by
not displaying historical amnesia about their temporality, location, and
counter-hegemonic contributions, on the other? In other words, how to
practice vigilance against an easy forgetting of the counter-hegemonic
work that is done by subaltern grassroots struggles for rights in the Global
South? Consider for instance, how some influential feminist critiques of
94 Vernacular Rights Cultures

neoliberalism not only display ‘startling [historical] amnesia’ (Briggs 2008:85)

when characterising feminist politics in binary terms as either struggles for
recognition and/or redistribution, an analysis that does not take into account
either the temporality or the nature of the struggles against neoliberalism by
women in the Global South, which have insisted on both recognition and
redistribution, and not just one or the other (Briggs 2008). Further, in the
event when these social movements in the Global South are acknowledged,
the terms of acknowledgment focuses predominantly on their inf luence
on producing a shift in ‘Europe’s mind’ (Briggs 2008) and consequently,
re-centres ‘Europe’ as the subject of history all over again.
The question of feminist scholarship and its internal colonialisms, wilful
erasures, and lack of intellectual acknowledgement of its others is hardly
confined to the unequal production and acknowledgment of feminist
intellectual labour between the Global North and the Global South. It also
characterises feminist production in the Global South, where upholding
gender binarism, biocentrism and heteronormativity, and the erasure of Dalit
and Indigenous feminisms is rife. This is not to say that the context of theory
production in the Global South, both feminist and mainstream, is not a context
of marginality, or that theory produced by women of colour in academia is not
maginalised. It is only to say that there are multiple intersectional hierarchies
and circuits of power and privilege that come into visibility when we undertake
multidirectional critique and start paying attention to a critical reflexive politics
of location, one that is both historically located but also carefully acknowledges
the multiply intersecting and entangled circuits of power.
In studying vernacular rights cultures, I am of course, studying the rights
politics of subaltern groups with a view to shine a light on the conceptual
deployments of rights within their political struggles, and how to make these
speak back to received understandings of global human rights discourse and
politics. In particular, two concerns inform my intervention in the debate on
decolonising human rights in this book. First, I am very aware that the subaltern
groups I am studying are mobilising to make demands from the state, which
is also
also the
the all-powerful
all-powerfulactor
actorininthis
thisstruggle. And
struggle. second,
And given
second, the existing
given
coloniality of knowledge production, it is also the case that these subaltern
struggles are unlikely to inform the theoretical concerns of global human rights
scholarship. Both insights lead me to argue that the decolonising imperative of
human rights is a twofold one: to produce human rights scholarship aimed at
shifting the epistemic centre of human rights, and to generate conceptual work
supportive of those challenging complex inequalities and the intersectional
nature of oppression at the frontline. And, even though I share many of the
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 95

critiques of human global rights, I also believe strongly that these critiques
global human
are by no means enough. We cannot afford to rest at producing sophisticated
critiques alone and need to find epistemic practices, forms of activism and
political practices that will challenge, or at the very least be theoretically and
politically non-complicit with structures of power opposed to rights, justice, and
freedom. This conclusion might seem at one level to be quite easy, instinctual,
default and even commonsensical. Yet I have reached this position after many
years of observing and documenting subaltern struggles for rights and human
rights, and also navigating and negotiating powerful, persuasive and astute
critiques of rights, many of which I agree with. Three things have been vital
for me to reach this position: the vibrancy of the subaltern movements on the
ground, the dynamic deployment of a vocabulary of rights in the vernacular
and, finally, the epistemic urgency of conceptually capturing these movements
and normative meanings of rights politics in the vernacular while also insisting
that these have something to say to the human rights discourses. This ‘speaking
back’ is key here as it is this that orchestrates the epistemic shift in the thinking
on global human rights.

Conclusion
This chapter takes up seriously the challenge of understanding the normative
meanings of rights in different part of the globe. In Chapter 1, I noted that
in recent years, decolonising academia has acquired theoretical and political
urgency.
urgency.This
Thisurgency
urgencyhashas
mostly taken
taken thethe form
form of ofmethodological,
methodological,pedagogical
pedagogical
and epistemic critiques: of finding different methods, of producing different
histories and intellectual trajectories, and of teaching different curriculums.
While these decolonising moves are crucial, I have argued that the work on
alternative trajectories and different genealogies must be supplemented by
scholarship aimed at conceptual production that is able to capture the stakes
and struggles of subaltern subjects in ‘most of the world’. This is significant
and crucial, if we are to disrupt and shift the epistemic centre of intellectual
work and thinking.
However, how does does one
oneundertake
undertakethethetask
taskof of conceptual
conceptual production
production in
in ‘most
‘most of world’?
of the the world’?
In thisInchapter,
this chapter, I assemble
I assemble a feminist a historical
feminist historical
ontology
ontology
and argueand
thatargue that it facilitates
it facilitates the production
the production of conceptual
of conceptual accountsaccounts
of our
encounters with the world, which are responsive to a critical reflexive
of our encounters with the world, which are responsive to a critical reflexive politics
of location,
politics of to gendered
location. power relations,
Feminist historicalincluding
ontologies subjectivities
are finelyand modes
tuned to
of subjection.
accounting forFeminist
genderedhistorical ontological
power relations, accounts
conflicts andare finely struggles.
political tuned to
96 Vernacular Rights Cultures
96 Vernacular Rights Cultures
96 Vernacular Rights Cultures
accounting for gendered power relations, conflicts and political struggles.
They insist
accounting on
insist for firmly
on gendered situating
power concepts in specific histories, gendered politics
They
accounting for firmly situating
gendered power relations,
concepts conflicts
relations, conflicts and
in specific political
political struggles.
and histories, gendered
struggles.
and
They practices.
insist
andon Through
firmly a focusconcepts
ona how conceptshowcome into being ininto
particular
politics
They insist firmly situating
onpractices. Through
situating conceptsfocus in specific
inon
specific histories,
concepts gendered
histories, come
gendered politics
being
politics
historical
and
in particular locations,
practices. Through
historical make
a up
focus
locations, onpeople
how
make and
concepts
up political
peoplecome
and imaginaries,
into being
political in feminist
particular
imaginaries,
and practices. Through a focus on how concepts come into being in particular
historical
historical ontologies
locations, make
make visible thevisible
new forms of subjectivities and forms
feminist
historicalhistorical make up
locations,ontologies people
up make
people and
and political
the new
political imaginaries,
forms feminist
of subjectivities
imaginaries, feminist
of
andsubjection
historical of that
formsontologies they produce.
make theyInthe
visible this
new book, through deploying adeploying
feminist
historical subjection
ontologies make thatvisible the new forms
produce. In this
forms of subjectivities
ofbook, through and
subjectivities and forms
forms
historical
of subjection
aoffeminist ontology,
that
historical I
they am of
produce.
ontology, course,
I In
am studying
this
of book,
course, the conceptual
through
studying life
deploying
the trajectories
a
conceptualfeminist
life
subjection that they produce. In this book, through deploying a feminist
of haq, theontology,
historical
trajectories work
of haq,it does,
I
theam the
of
work ethical
course,
it does, commitments
studying
the the
ethical it produceslife
conceptual
commitments andittrajectories
the forms
produces
historical ontology, I am of course, studying the conceptual life trajectories
of
andsubjectivities
of haq,
thethe work ofititengenders.
does, Initshort, I am looking at Isome ofand
the gendered
of haq, forms
the work does, the
the ethical
itsubjectivities ethical commitments
engenders.
commitments it
it produces
In short, and the
am looking
produces theat forms
some
forms
possibilities
of the for
subjectivities
gendered becoming
it engenders. a
possibilities subject
In for of
short, rights
I am
becoming that haq
looking
a puts
at
subject in
some
of place.
of the
rights gendered
that haq
of subjectivities it engenders. In short, I am looking at some of the gendered
possibilities
puts in place.for becoming a subject of rights that
possibilities for becoming a subject of rights that haq puts in place.haq puts in place.

Notes
Notes
1. Its root in classical Hebrew is “(a) “to cut in, engrave,” in wood, stone or metal,
Notes
1. (b) “to inscribe,
Its root in classicalwrite, portray”
Hebrew isis “(a). “to
. . (c) “to prescribe,inbywood,
decree,” (d)or“due to
1. Its
God root or in classical
classical
man, right Hebrew
Hebrew
privilege,” ‘(a)
is “(a) “to cut
“to
Cyril cut
cut
in,
in, engrave,”
in,
Glasse´,engrave,”
engrave,”
ed. TheinNew
stone
wood,Encyclopedia
metal,
stone or metal,of
(b) “to inscribe, write, portray” . . . (c) “to prescribe, by decree,” (d) “due to
(b)
Islam“to(Walnut
inscribe,Creek,
write, Calif.:
portray” . . . (c) “to
Altamira, prescribe,
2001), 82. by decree,” (d) “due to
God or or man,
man,right
rightprivilege’
privilege,” Cyril2001:
(Glasse Glasse´,
82). ed. The New Encyclopedia of
2. God
See M. or J.
man, right privilege,”
Mashkur’s Cyril Glasse´, ed.ofThe New in Encyclopedia of
Islam (Walnut Creek,ACalif.:
Comparative
Altamira, Dictionary
2001), 82. Arabic Persian and the
2. Islam
See (Walnut
Mashkur
Semitic Creek,
(1978). Calif.: Altamira, 2001), 82.
2. See M. Languages
J. Mashkur’s (Tehran: Bunyad-i-Farhang-i
A Comparative Dictionary ofIran, 1978).
Arabic in Persian and the
2. See M. J. Mashkur’s A Comparative Dictionary of Arabic in Persian and the
3. ISemitic
draw on Taylor for whom social imaginaries
Languages (Tehran: Bunyad-i-Farhang-i Iran, 1978). are ‘ways people imagine …
Semitic Languages (Tehran: Bunyad-i-Farhang-i Iran, 1978).
3. how they fit together with others, the expectations
I draw on Taylor for whom social imaginaries are ‘ways people that are normally
imaginemet,…
3. I draw on Taylor for whom social imaginaries are ‘ways people imagine …
and the
how theydeeper normative
fit together notions
with others, andtheimages that underlie
expectations that these expectations’
are normally met,
how they fit together with others, the expectations that are normally met,
(Taylor
and the 2002:
deeper23).normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’
and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’
4. Geertz does
(Taylor 2002: 23). not explicate how he deploys ‘ontological’ and I read him here as
(Taylor 2002: 23).
4. alluding to haq as
Geertz does not explicate consisting
how ofhea discourse on the nature
deploys ‘ontological’ andofI being.
read himSeehere
David
as
4. Geertz does not explicate how he deploys ‘ontological’ and I read him here as
Graeber (2015) on some of the ambiguities surrounding
alluding to haq as consisting of a discourse on the nature of being. See David the use of the term
alluding to haq as consisting of a discourse on the nature of being. See David
in anthropology.
Graeber (2015) on some of the ambiguities surrounding the use of the term
Graeber (2015) on some of the ambiguities surrounding the use of the term
5. The
in jurisdiction of the qadi courts in Morocco is limited to matters pertaining
anthropology.
in anthropology.
5. to personal
The law governed
jurisdiction of the qadiby its 1958
courts Code ofis Personal
in Morocco limited toStatus
mattersand thereby,
pertaining
5. The jurisdiction of the qadi courts in Morocco is limited to matters pertaining
only
to to thoselaw
personal of governed
marriage, bydivorce,
its 1958 filiation,
Code inheritance
of Personal and
Statuschild
andcustody.
thereby,
to personal law governed by its 1958 Code of Personal Status and thereby,
6. The to
only Pakistani
those oflegal context
marriage, is more
divorce, complex
filiation, with the and
inheritance setting
childupcustody.
in 1980
only to those of marriage, divorce, filiation, inheritance and child custody.
6. of thePakistani
The Federal Shariah Court,
legal context is which has the authority
more complex with the to determine
setting up in ‘as to
1980
6. The Pakistani legal context is more complex with the setting up in 1980
whether or not a certain provision of law is repugnant
of the Federal Shariah Court, which has the authority to determine ‘as to to the injunctions of
of the Federal Shariah Court, which has the authority to determine ‘as to
Islam’ (Hussain 2011: 15).
whether or not a certain provision of law is repugnant to the injunctions of
whether or not a certain provision of law is repugnant to the injunctions of
7. For census
Islam’ (Hussain data2011:
on Muslim
15). population in Rajasthan, see http://www.
Islam’ (Hussain 2011: 15).
censusindia.gov.in/2011census/C-01.html
7. For census data on Muslim population(accessed 21
on October
in Rajasthan, see 2020).
21 October 2020).
http://www.
7. For census data on Muslim population in Rajasthan, see http://www.
8. See Robinson (1974) and Faruqi (2003).
censusindia.gov.in/2011census/C-01.html (accessed on 21 October 2020).
censusindia.gov.in/2011census/C-01.html (accessed on 21 October 2020).
9.
8. A British
See Robinson Academy
(1974)Grant
and (SG-39747)
Faruqi (2003). made fieldwork in Rajasthan (2005–07)
8. See Robinson (1974) and Faruqi (2003).
9. Aand research
British assistance
Academy Grantin(SG-39747)
Okara andmade Khanewal in Pakistan
fieldwork between
in Rajasthan 2007
(2005–07)
9. A British Academy Grant (SG-39747) made fieldwork in Rajasthan (2005–07)
and 2008 possible.
and research assistance in Okara and Khanewal in Pakistan between 2007
and research assistance in Okara and Khanewal in Pakistan between 2007
and 2008 possible.
and 2008 possible.
Assembling a Feminist Historical Ontology of Haq in South Asia 97

10. While I use ‘disciplines’ here, I do not mean to suggest that there is a wholesale
turn to ontology in these but only that there are sections within disciplines
that have declared an ‘ontological turn’.
11. For anthropology’s ‘ontological turn’, see Holbraad and Pederson (2017).
12. Drawing on Ranajit Guha, founder of the Subaltern School, Blaser (2013)
argues that this crisis can be read into the challenges to neoliberalism by
Indigenous groups but also in the growing realisation in some quarters that the
current ways of understanding and making the world are no longer adequate.
Furthermore, solutions to these growing crises can no longer be sourced from
within ‘modern’ paradigms.
13. However, Blaser notes, quite paradoxically, a single ontological story is
reproduced in well-meaning and important anthropological critiques of
culture in the 1970s, which in critiquing the ‘static, backward, timeless’ view
of ‘culture’ end up reproducing the hegemonic ontological status of modernity
through assertions that there are ‘no really existing traditional societies’ (Blaser
2013: 549).
14. Drawing on the rise of Indigenous movements in Peru and Ecuador, de la
Cadena notes that the politics of these movements have been categorised as
‘ethnic’ and their demands as ‘cultural’. However, their demands and politics
are premised on an ontological refusal of the nature–culture binary that not
only exceeds this categorisation as ‘culture’ but also the current formulation
of politics.
15. The philosopher Sylvia Wynter has written powerfully about the entanglements
of epistemology and ontology (2003, 2015). Walter Mignolo (2015: 108) notes
that for Wynter ‘the human is the product of a particular epistemology, yet it
appears to be (and is accepted) as a naturally independent entity existing in
the world (Mignolo 2015: 108).
16. Different bodies invoke different affects. Moreover, Hemmings argues, Black
and postcolonial scholarship has shown that affects are not only the ‘good’
ones but also are sites of violence and racialisation. Citing the work of Audre
Lorde and of Frantz Fanon, Hemmings demonstrates not only the white
ontology of this ‘ontological turn’ but also the active erasure of the ‘fact of
blackness’ in their work. In effect, what Hemmings is pointing to is the lack
of historicity in this work and the ease with which it proceeds in its historical
forgetfulness—the ease with which we forget bodies and scholarship of colour.
17. For critical interventions on Dalit feminist standpoint,
standpoint see
see Gopal Guru (1995),
Guru (1995), Datar
Datar
(1999),(1999), Lata (2015),
Lata (2015) andand
and Arya Arya and Rathore
Rathore (2019). (2019).
18. For Hacking an important question is ‘how do new ways to classify open up,
or close down, possibilities for human action’? (2002: 99). Describing himself
as a dynamic nominalist, he writes that
98 Vernacular Rights Cultures

The claim of dynamic nominalism is not that there was a kind of person
who came increasingly to be recognized by bureaucrats or by students of
human nature, but rather that a kind of person came into being at the
same time as the kind itself was being invented. In some cases, that is,
our classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each
egging the other on … i.e. the category and the people in it emerged hand
in hand. (2002: 106–7)
106–07)
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 99

4 The Political Imaginaries of Haq

‘Citizenship’ and ‘Truth’

In April 2001, India’s leading current affairs magazine, Frontline, reported

that 47 Adivasi people had died from hunger in Kotra Block of Rajasthan’s
Udaipur district (Mishra 2001). The report struck a raw nerve and made for
difficult reading then, and it still continues to be a difficult read. It made for
a difficult read not because the fact of hunger was unknown in postcolonial
India1 or that newspaper reports had skipped stories of hunger but more
because the fact of hunger has been invisibilised and rendered banal through
what Sudipta Kaviraj (2010: 225) has termed ‘the logic of bureaucracy’. Policy
makers prefer to use the bureaucratic term ‘drought’ and not the affective term
‘hunger’ in their reports. The erasure of ‘hunger’ and ‘starvation’ from national
policy discourses represents nothing less than a national scandal for not only is
hunger a constant feature of India’s postcolonial timeline but also because the
failure to recognise and address it unequivocally has resulted in an exponential
growth in the experiential everyday reality of hunger and starvation. It is no
surprise, therefore, that recent figures show that India ranked 102 out of 117
countries on the global hunger index (Global Hunger Index 2019). In contrast
to the institutional reticence to acknowledge hunger, drought is a term that
lends itself much more amenably to bureaucratic discourse, where it works to
successfully elide the empirical fact of hunger and starvation through folding
these into neat columns describing the ‘social and economic consequences’ of
drought. The annals of India’s drought policy weigh heavy with references to
the administration, definitions and the management of drought but shed little
light on the
the actual
actualnature
natureofofharm
harmand theexperience
and experienceofofhunger
hungerand
andstarvation,
starvation
including
brought ononbythe magnitude of hunger and death brought on by drought.
drought.
However, in 2001, this bureaucratic logic governing the administrative
representation of drought and its downplay of hunger received a major legal
and political challenge. This legal challenge to the bureaucratic logic of
drought came in the form of a public interest litigation (PIL) filed in the
Supreme Court of India by the Rajasthan branch of the People’s Union for
100 Vernacular Rights Cultures

Civil Liberties in April 2001. Rajasthan is India’s most ‘chronically drought

prone’ (Bokil 2000: 4171) region. Since 1901, the state has experienced a
minimum of 48 drought years (Rathore 2004), and at the time of filing the
PIL in 2001, the state was already in its third consecutive year of rainfall failure
(Bokil 2000: 4171). The PIL (a form of judge-led or ‘juridical democracy’
that became operational in India in the post-emergency period for ‘activating’
fundamental rights and providing protection from ‘excesses of state power’)2
questioned whether the right to life guaranteed under Article 32 of the Indian
Constitution also included the right to food (Banik 2010). In its response, the
Supreme Court passed interim orders for the country-wide implementation of
the ‘mid-day meals’ scheme under which a cooked meal would be provided to
all children attending government aided schools. For all practical purposes, the
legal challenge, through the submission of the PIL, converted the bureaucratic
logic of drought management into a political and legal question, and into a
substantial question of human rights.
The legal challenge in 2001, however, was by no means the beginning
of this line of questioning. For a decade by then, Rajasthan had been at
the forefront of grassroots mobilisations demanding official accountability,
transparency and for the citizen’s ‘right to information’. These mobilisations
catapulted the rights of citizens to official information and to transparency
in matters of governance into mainstream political discourse, arguing that
these were essential for drawing attention to the horrendous bureaucratic
apathy, corruption and mismanagement of state resources and for enforcing
administrative accountability, not least in the face of growing dispossession,
destitution and hunger. Approaching the Supreme Court through the
mechanism of the PIL, though, was but one among a combination of strategies
of activism and engagements pursued by activists that included public
protests, drought awareness and village level drought action committees and
significantly, it led to the formation of a grassroots mobilisation forged from
ongoing existing movements in the state to demand the ‘right to food’. As a
result of these efforts, The Right to Food network, a decentralised network
built on local initiative and voluntary cooperation, was formed in 2001 as an
umbrella group of several NGOs predominantly based in Rajasthan in order
to frame a people’s response to governmental apathy and inaction in the wake
of successive droughts. The cruel irony of this institutional abandonment
and bureaucratic fostering of precarity, hunger and dispossession was that it
coincided with a surfeit of official stocks of food grains in the country.
As a consequence of these mobilisations on the ‘right to food’, the
administrative term ‘drought’ has come to be associated, and in not insignificant
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 101

measure, not with official apathy alone but also with political mobilisation,
legal interventions and legislative actions directed at the developmental
state. The decade-long mobilisation demanding the right to food reached
its climax with the federal government deciding to legislate on the legal
right to food. Accordingly, in March 2013, the Indian cabinet approved the
National Food Security Act, a scheme looking to provide subsidised nutrition
to two-thirds of the Indian population at an annual cost of INR 1.3 trillion.
Although the legislation suffers from several shortfalls, nevertheless, in
light of increased destatisation and prevailing neoliberal inspired economic
orthodoxies prescribing one size fits all models of self-sufficiency, autonomy
and entrepreneurial citizenship, it is indeed remarkable that this citizen
activism has resulted in expanding the rights dispensation of the postcolonial
state to secure for its most vulnerable citizens, what is by all accounts, an ‘old
fashioned’ social welfare legislation.
The legal right to food is but one among six recent legislations guaranteeing
social and economic rights and entitlements.3 Since the early years of the new
millennium, India has witnessed substantial expansions in the architecture
and the coverage of ‘social security’ in the country (Drèze and Khera 2017).4
The temporality of these social welfare legislations and legal rights, which
bear not an unlikely resemblance to old fashioned social welfarism, passed in
an era marked by the high point of global neoliberalism and also at a specific
neoliberal economic juncture in India’s political economy constitues something
of an achievement but also a ‘paradox’ (A. Sharma 2013; Jayal 2013; Madhok
2017). As a range of scholars (Chatterjee 1996; Jayal 1999; Kaviraj 2004) have
pointed out, the central objective of the postcolonial Indian state has
historically been economic development and not economic and social welfare.
Even though welfare appears regularly in the first sets of five-year plans
(Palriwala and Neetha 2009), and is a clearly constitutionally marked objective
stated in the non-justiciable parts of the Indian constitution known as the
directive principles of state policy, its presence in terms of policy formulation
and outcomes from 1947–2001 is at best marginal and sketchy. As Jayal (1999,
2013) argues, welfare discourse during the first four decades of Indian state
developmentalism was essentially conceived in terms of ‘charity’, ‘beneficence’,
‘relief ’ and ‘poverty alleviation’ rather than a citizenship right. And, therefore,
it is quite striking that this language of welfare as charity undergoes a
significant shift in the first decade following the neoliberalisation of the
Indian economy in the 1990s. Thus the paradox that is often pointed to here
is essentially this: that the point of ‘opening’ of the Indian economy to global
102 Vernacular Rights Cultures

and neoliberal market-led forces is also one that coincides with a re-articulation
of welfare in terms of citizenship rights and entitlements in Indian political
discourse. But how does one explain this paradox and this shift in political
discourse of state welfare from charity to one that is a legal right of citizens?
A number of different explanations can be mobilised here. For instance, this
shift in discourse can partially be traced to transnational circuits of policy
making that began emphasising human development and human rights (UN
1986; UNDP 1990, 2016),5 and in particular to the global agenda in the
post-Washington consensus era where civil and political rights have come to
be regarded as ‘essential parts of institutional structures’ and mechanisms
necessary for the functioning of the ‘liberal market order’ (Whyte 2018: 15).
And, therefore, it is sometimes argued that contrary to the ‘roll back of the
state’ under neoliberalism, the state is positioned ever more centrally in
mobilising private investment and enforcing the rules of neoliberal market
regulation. The shared temporality of the rise in fortunes of both neoliberalism
and global human rights has led some scholars to ask if human rights are
indeed the ‘handmaiden to neoliberal power’? (Özsu 2018: 144; see also Moyn
2015). In this context, where civil and political human rights are seen as key
to advancing neoliberal economic agenda, it is worthwhile asking as to what
might be the record of human rights-based initiatives in countering global
inequality? Furthermore, since institutional discourses and practices of
development are a key conduit through which the global politics of inequality
operates, it is also useful to ask what might be the relationship between the
rise of discourses and strategies advocating rights-based and rights-led
development, neoliberalism and growing global inequalities? To reprise briefly
from Chapter 1, recent critical scholarship has shown that global human
rights have, in fact, done little to counter the rising inequality around the
globe. The general disinterestedness of global human rights in questions of
inequality has been attributed to the ‘minimalist’ and ‘moralising’ nature of
human rights discourse steeped in a ‘politics of fatalism’ (Brown 2004) and
one that is disinclined towards either maximalist ends of championing equality
or a structural reorganisation of social and political life demanded by a
commitment to equality and justice. In India, what is striking, however, is
that rights-based development is not only an official, top down, global
institutionalist discourse but is also one led by grassroots citizen movements
demanding the people’s right to development; and, the vitality and dynamism
of these rights mobilisations is evidenced in their substantial influence over
national policy making resulting in the successful passage of legal entitlements
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 103

to welfare (Khera 2013). Quite strikingly, though, the neoliberal landscape

in India is characterised by a curious coexistence of state directed market-led
neoliberal reforms to the economy resulting in rampant and exponential levels
of inequality, precarity and dispossession, alongside a simultaneous expansion
of the state charter on legal welfare rights. If anything, neoliberal economic
policy making and the politics of expanded rights struggles and entitlements
operate on parallel tracks within India’s neoliberal trajectory, resulting in
neither the displacement of India’s neoliberal economic reforms and its
resultant inequalities, nor in the withdrawal of demands for expanded citizen
rights settlements. The sociologist Alf Gunvald Nilsen (2021) writes that the
explanation for the paradox of expanded welfare rights under neoliberalism
lies with neoliberalism’s reinvention of itself as ‘inclusive’. Consequently,
‘inclusive neoliberalism’ refers to the coupling of market-oriented accumulation
strategies with social policy interventions that aim to protect poor and
vulnerable groups from marginalisation and dispossession. It is this ‘inclusive
neoliberalism’, writes Nilsen, that has allowed the Indian neoliberal project
to include rights-based legislation alongside its robust commitment to
neoliberal market reforms. However, while this ‘inclusive neoliberalism’ did
little to obstruct the expansion of the legal charter of welfare rights, it actively
facilitated the rise of endemic and pervasive inequalities and a ‘high incidence
of poverty’, particularly among Dalit and Adivasi groups, who are also the
most structurally oppressed and disadvantaged groups in India (Kannan
2018). So, it is the case that roughly three decades of relatively high growth
rates under economic neoliberalisation have not ‘trickled down’ to those
bearing the brunt of ‘multidimensional inequality’,6 and despite a ‘vastly
accelerated’ growth, actual poverty levels in the country have seen only a very
‘sluggish’ decline(Drèze
‘sluggish’ decline (Drèzeand
andSen
Sen 2013:
2013:217).
217). As
As the
the economist
economist K.
K. P.
P. Kannan
Kannan
points out, the six year period between 2004 and 2010, which were also years
that saw accelerated economic growth, 69 per cent of the population earned
PPP $2 per capita per day and were classed poor and vulnerable, with the
‘highest incidence of poverty’ distributed among Dalit and Adivasi groups
followed by Muslims (Kannan 2018: 35). More current statistics continue to
show that this stranglehold grip of inequality is firmly in place with just over
60 per cent of the population continuing to live on $3.10 a day (Oxford Poverty
and Human Development Initiative [OPHI] 2018). As is now well
documented, while inequality is pervasive around the globe, what sets apart
inequality in the Indian context is its ‘unique cocktail of lethal divisions and
disparities’ (Drèze and Sen 2013), where extreme economic inequality is
104 Vernacular Rights Cultures

experienced at the intersection of structural oppressions of caste, class,

Indigeneity and gender inequalities, which mutually reinforce and reproduce
each other (Drèze and Sen 2013; Kannan 2018). Perhaps the impact of recently
struggled for expansions in legal welfare rights could be read not so much as
representing a ‘comprehensive vision’ in either the social policies on universal
welfare and social security or indeed directly impacting on poverty reduction,
not least as their implementation on the ground has been uneven and marked
by political unwillingness, but rather as directly targeting the deep structural
intersectional inequalities of caste and gender (Drèze and Khera 2017: 563).
And, therefore, even while cold statistics show the firm grip of inequality,
which has grown unfettered and in tandem with the rise of rural movements
demanding expansive citizen entitlements, there are also other stories coming
out of the experience of the rights-based legislations which draw attention to
discernable shifts within gendered relations of oppression and dispossession;
changes and disruptions not always captured by cold statistics alone7 or
anticipated by the rights legislations.
However, the ushering of this new welfarism and new legal rights has
neither meant that the argument on the need, design and implementation of
India’s social security apparatus has in any way been won; and, nor has it led
to a firm political consensus or policy commitment towards these. Over the
years, these legal rights have been rendered precarious and fragile through
official apathy, ‘indifference’, refusals to allocate funding and by the repeated
recalibrations of these entitlements in the name of removing ‘corruption’ and
improving ‘efficiency’. The passage of these new rights—while showing not
insignificant results in terms of access to social security, social equity benefits
and ‘significant gender related benefits’—have ramped up popular cynicism
and criticism of these ‘social protections’. This criticism has been particularly
pronounced within sections of urban media circles and city dwelling middle
classes who complain of their unaffordability, but also among a section of
economists and social policy analysts for their inefficiencies, ‘leakages’, non-
accountability and corruption on the one hand, and over the economic ideas
and design underpinning these on the other. Consequently, technical and
theoretical questions with respect to exclusion errors versus inclusion costs;
universal versus targeted distribution; and social benefits versus market costs,8
have come to preoccupy detractors as well as supporters of these citizen rights.
Significantly, though, the grassroots rural mobilisations spearheading
these new rights legislations and legal rights have produced new political
cultures of rights. These political cultures of rights are explicitly non-party
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 105

political, articulate political claims in a language of rights, and mobilise and

demand public policy legislation in respect of these rights claims but do not,
at least in the final instance, regard the state as the dominant mainstay of
citizen rights. These rural mobilisations have revitalised and animated the
meaning and work of legal constitutionalism through invoking citizenship
rights but in doing so, have also expanded the meaning and spectrum of rights
on offer. Interestingly, the language through which these rights have been
demanded has not been the formal, abstract and distant language of legal
constitutionalism alone, but a language of rights in the vernacular; a moral
language imbricated in the relational structures, which it both upholds but
also seeks to disrupt.
My focus in this chapter, is not so much to rehearse or shed any new light
on the legislations themselves but rather to examine the critical vocabularies
of rights that have spearheaded this demand for rights-based legislations. In
particular, I examine the political cultures that this deployment of rights has
produced, the political imaginaries these have generated and the political
subjects of rights that have come into being as a result. As I pointed out earlier,
these subjects of rights are complex and conflictual subjects primarily because
although haq has emerged as the principal language to make unhesitant claims
for very specific entitlements from the state, it does not translate easily into one
that also makes claims to or defines inter-personal relations. The boundary-
keeping around these subjects of rights and the policing and regulation of these
rights subjects begs the following question: to what sorts of claim-making does
haq lend itself? And, who are these subjects of rights that haq makes up? The
rural mobilisations predominantly deploy haq to claim citizenship entitlements,
and not surprisingly then, citizenship is an important justificatory premise of
rights. However, upon querying who this citizen is, the homogenous category
of the citizen starts to unravel along intersectional gender, caste, religious and
class lines.
Going forth in this chapter, I draw on my ethnographies of the right to
food movement in Rajasthan and identify the political imaginaries and the two
dominant justificatory premises that underpin the deployment of haq. Through
ethnographic descriptions, I show how haq produces particular subjects of
rights. The first subject of rights I focus on draws heavily on the justificatory
premise of citizenship but this idea of citizenship and the relationship with
the state that it summons is a qualified one. The second justificatory premise
of haq I explore in this chapter is articulated by primary women development
workers in a state sponsored development programme for women in Rajasthan
106 Vernacular Rights Cultures

known as the sathins and is grounded in the moral idea of ‘Truth’. The Hindi
word sathin literally translates as female companion or friend, and the sathins
were recruited by the state as ‘agents of change’ to bring development to the
women in Rajasthan’s villages. As I will go on to illustrate in the second half
of the chapter, in the narratives of the sathins, haq is said to embody the moral
idea of Truth and therefore, demanding haq is to stake a claim to Truth and
to be considered morally credible and believable subjects.
Significantly, this chapter also shifts the empirical context within which
conceptual and theoretical work on rights and human rights takes place. As
this chapter demonstrates, the background context for rights claims in ‘most
of the
the world’
world’isisnot
notsosomuch
muchtheglobal
globalhuman
humanrights
rightsdiscourse
discourse championed
championed by
transnational organisations and policy makers, but a rights discourse mediated
through the nation state and its deployment of rights and human rights and
explicitly oriented towards furthering its policy interests of development. In
short, the developmental state is a key agent and facilitator in the production
of rights subjectivities and in providing the context for rights struggles.
However, as I show in the chapter, the political mobilisations on the ground
around citizenship rights have not only resulted in the fashioning of new and
innovative rights thinking, rights politics and citizenship claims, but also
produced innovative forms of ‘counter-development’.

Mobilising for the Right to Food

As I noted earlier, the right to food campaign came into being in Rajasthan.
The reasons for Rajasthan’s pre-eminent position in matters of citizenship
struggles are not altogether clear. In terms of development outcomes and
indicators, Rajasthan is among the persistently poorly performing states in
India. Going by cold statistical print alone, the social and economic indicators
in the state, especially in respect of gender, make for grim reading. Recent
statistics indicate that maternal mortality rate in Rajasthan is on a downward
trend but still considerably lags behind that of other Indian states. The child
sex ratio already among the worst in the country is worsening (there were
888 girls for 1,000 boys in the 0–6 age group in 2011) and there are only 926
females for every 1,000 males.9 The literacy rate for women in Rajasthan, in
2012, was 57 per cent, with 37 per cent of 15–17 years old girls not enrolled
in any school (World Bank 2016). The latest available statistics point to a 31
per cent gap in the literacy levels between rural and urban women (World
Bank 2016) and a further disparity in the literacy rates of Scheduled Caste
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 107

women (44.6 per cent) and those belonging to Scheduled Tribes (37.3 per
cent).10 However, these depressing social indicators only tell some of the
story, for somewhat paradoxically, and in spite of these dismal statistics, it is
also the case, that Rajasthan has a vibrant women’s movement and boasts of a
high visibility of women in the public sphere. Moreover, it elects the highest
percentage of women to to Panchayat bodies in
panchayat bodies in India,
India, and currently
currently 56 per cent
of the total elected representatives in its local government bodies are women.
While the numbers elected to its state legislature are not impressive, however,
in electing 12 per cent women to the legislature,11 Rajasthan leads far ahead
of the better socioeconomically performing states in India. Finally, it is also
worth noting that in the latest elections to the state legislature, 74.66 per cent
women exercised their vote, outstripping the state’s total voting percentage of
74.21 per cent.12
Overall, despite the mismatch between social and political indicators of
gender wellbeing and keeping in view the plurality of social contexts inside rural
Rajasthan, the statistical evidence reflects the fairly common social practices,
experiences and conditions one witnesses first hand in its hamlets and villages:
that girls are very seldom in secondary education let alone in primary schools,
that iniquitous caste practices determine interpersonal social relations, that
access to public amenities is strictly regulated according to one’s position in
the caste hierarchy, that child marriages abound and are celebrated in annual
religious festivals, and that female infanticide occurs in several communities,
helping to account for the state’s skewed sex ratio. All these iniquitous and
discriminatory practices take place in the persistent background of widespread
and acute structural poverty and hunger.
Although my fieldwork focused on the articulations of haq amongst rural
participants of rights mobilisations, it is important to keep in mind that these
were not spontaneous but a result of intricately organised and coordinated
rights initiatives by NGOs and social activists with a longstanding presence in
the area. From the mid-1980s onwards, the streets of Jaipur began witnessing
large popular mobilisations voicing protest over a diverse array of issues. These
included public demonstrations against institutional inaction over the sati
(widow immolation) of a young woman, Roop Kanwar, at Deorala in 1987;
women’s groups calling for more stringent laws on sexual harassment and
violence in the workplace in the wake of the gang rape of a village development
worker in 1992; and civil society organisations demanding state legislation
in favour of minimum employment guarantees and citizens’ ‘right to know’,
with the latter seen both as a tool against corrupt bureaucratic practices and
108 Vernacular Rights Cultures

as a means of enforcing accountability and transparency within governmental

mechanisms13 (Madhok 2009; see also Jenkins and Goetz 1999).
Approaching the courts courts was
was but one of the strategies pursued by the right to
food network. In effect,
effect, the
the right
right to food movement has engaged in a diverse diverse
of advocacy
set of advocacy and and mobilisational
mobilisational practices,
practices, organising
organising publicpublic hearings,
hearings,
rallies, dharnas,
rallies, dharnas, padyatras,
padyatras,national
nationalconventions
conventionson on the
the right
right to food, action-
oriented research, mediamedia advocacy
advocacy and political
political lobbying
lobbying of elected members
parliament. They
of parliament. They havehave been particularly
particularly effective
effective in in lobbying
lobbying the state
administration for
administration increasing drought
for increasing drought relief
relief and assistance in villagesvillages and
mobilising popular
popular support in favour of aa social social rights
rights legislation
legislation guaranteeing
guaranteeing
the ‘right to work’. For A forerunner
example, aoflocally
the right
basedto strategy
food movement
that the was
rightthe
to Akal
food
Sangharsh adopted
movement Samiti (ASS)
was to orform‘drought
villageaction committee’,
level Akal Sangharsh a platform of 50
Samitis (ASS)
organisations
or across Rajasthan,
‘drought action committees’ thattoscrutinised
scrutinisethetheimplementation
implementation of state-led
of state
drought
led reliefrelief
drought schemes. The ASS
procedures andheld public These
schemes. hearings and surveyed
village the living
level committees,
conditionsdid
however, in not
drought
alwaysaffected
functionareas, which challenged
democratically the statist narratives
and transparently. Many of
drought
my Dalitrelief.
women Manyfieldofrespondents,
my Dalit women field respondents,
for instance, spoke of the for struggles
instance, spoke
to be
of the struggles
included withintothese
be included
committeesin drought
and torelief programmes,
secure and especially
any state welfare by
relief for
women-headedlow
drought-hit women-headed lowcaste
castehouseholds.
households.Despite
Despitethe themany
manydifficulties
difficulties
outlined by these DalitDalit women,
women, however, what remained remarkably clear was
their resolute demand for aa more more expansive
expansive social
social rights legislation. Let me
provide an excerpt
excerpt from
fromoneoneof ofmy
myinterviewees
intervieweesininthis thisregard:
regard:

On 5 June 2003, we attended a public rally at Jaipur where we demanded

our haq. We said we wanted kam ka adhikaar (right to employment/work or
employment guarantee). This right to work or employment guarantee is very
important to us for in the face of severe drought, successive crop failures,
disappearance of water, food and livestock feed, how are we meant to live?
When the drought came, I went to the village sarpanch [a sarpanch is the
elected chairperson
chairperson of the Panchayat,
panchayat, which
which is a democratically
democratically elected village
village
level local body] to enquire if there had been a muster roll for a local road works
programme sanctioned for our village under the drought relief programme
organised by the sarkar [sarkar refers to the state and/or government]? I came
to know that there had in fact, been one that had been sanctioned but we never
got any employment or relief under it … there is so much rajniti (politics of
caste) in these things...
things ...the
theupper
uppercastes—the
castes—theJats,
Jats,Thakurs,
Thakurs, Meenas, Kumhars
were getting the employment but people of lowest castes—the Bairwas and
Rehgars—could not even register themselves on the employment rolls.
In all of this politics, we must not forget that it is the people who are the
wealth creators … and the government in guaranteeing a right to employment
would only be giving us what is rightfully our due.14
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 109

What is evident in this narrative is an intersecting and a non-hierarchical

view of rights, which refuses a strict categorisation and discrete understanding
of rights in terms of social, economic and political rights. In fact, a common
theme that emerged in my fieldwork interviews was how the employment
guarantee or the ‘right to work’ and the ‘right to food’ was fundamental to
render substantial the constitutionally enshrined right to life. In addition,
what was also evident was that it was no longer enough for the state to be
charitable and welfare oriented but for welfare to be a matter of legal right. This
intersecting nature of legal rights moves away from the ad hoc and uncertain
provision of ‘lifelines’ for survival provided by the state in times of ‘drought’
and other ‘crises’ and towards claiming formal and substantive legal provisions
to welfare rights that would ensure wellbeing and welfare at all times and not
only mere survival in the face of starvation and acute hunger.
The intersecting nature of rights is also emphasised by the right to food
campaign. Their website has a vast amount of information on the various
social welfare rights they are involved in. Although the campaign started in
2001 with a petition demanding that government food stocks should be used
to prevent hunger and starvation, it also demands equitable land rights and
forest rights. However, despite its insistence on an integrated set of rights
that include the right to ownership of land, unlike other more transnationally
focused campaigns and networks such as the Via Campensina, which focus on
food sovereignty and the rights of the producers over both land and the means
of producing the food (Dunford 2016), the right to food campaign focuses
mainly on the institutional mechanisms and duties of the state, believing that
the primary responsibility for guaranteeing basic entitlements to food rests
with the state. The campaign emphasises popular mobilisations as a way to
pressurise states and aims to use ‘all democratic means’ to make people’s basic
rights political priorities for the state. It regards the right to food as interrelated
with broader entitlements. As its foundation statement says: ‘we consider that
everyone has a fundamental right to be free from hunger and under-nutrition.
Realising this right requires not only equitable and sustainable food systems
but also entitlements relating to livelihood security such as the right to work,
land reform and social security’. It has, therefore, focused on legislation and
government schemes, including NREGA, the integrated child development
services, mid-day meals scheme, and the public distribution system.15 The
mid-day meals proposal and campaign, for example, is indicative of the way
the right to food intersects with other rights in a way that elides any clear
hierarchy of rights. The demand for the provision of mid-day meals for all
110 Vernacular Rights Cultures

children enrolled in state schools argues that educational attainment in deeply

segmented societies and poor households is clearly dependent on some kind
of provision of food, and powerfully demonstrates the intersection of a right
to education and a right to food with various equality outcomes, including
promoting school participation, preventing classroom hunger, fostering social
equality and enhancing gender equity (Roy and Dey 2012).

A Tale of Two Jan Sunwais

Perhaps, the most recognisable, significant and and innovative
innovative form of public
mobilisation organised by the right to food movement is the jan sunwai.
As the Hindi word suggests, a jan jan sunwai
sunwai is literally
literally a public hearing where
people gather together to scrutinise particular
the working public policies and
of particular to demand
public policies
ain public
a specific place and to demand a public audit of these, especially public
audit of these, especially of the public expenditure on of the
projects. The ‘publiconhearing’
public expenditure public institutes a public
projects. The monitoring
‘public mechanisma
hearing’ institutes
and consists
public of airing
monitoring people’s testimonies,
mechanism and consistsexperiences and observations
of airing people’s on
testimonies,
the existence
experiences andand actual workings
observations on theof policiesand
existence andactual
development
workingsprojects in
of policies
their villages.
and development projects in their villages.
The jan sunwai is predominantly the brainchild of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti
Sanghathan (MKSS), or the Association for Workers and Farmers (Mishra
2003), also a part of the right to food network, which has been involved in a
long-drawn struggle for the right of ordinary citizens to gain access to state
financial records and to state audits of development projects. It spearheaded
a social movement espousing the right of to public information and of people’s
right to know about the government’s economic functioning, which led to the
passage of a federal law known as the the Right to Information Act in June
2005. The right to information (RTI) movement formally began in the early
1990s to highlight the gross failures of the state to uphold minimum wage
legislation particularly within drought relief programmes set up to provide
stipulated employment to people in drought affected districts and to focus on
the flagrant inefficiencies and corrupt practices within the state PDS. The
people’s right to public information was seen as a key political tool with which
to scrutinise reasons for endemic rural poverty and as a means for enforcing
democratic accountability and transparency. However, the activities of the
MKSS have not been limited to exposing the everyday forms of official
corruption but have also come to reveal the ‘multifaceted nature of corruption’
within the legal and political system through championing innovative social
techniques of mobilisation and public appraisal.
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 111

On 2 December 1994, the MKSS organised its first ever jan sunwai at
Kirana Panchayat
Kot Kirana panchayat inin Rajasthan’s The jan sunwai declared
Rajasthan’s Pali district. The declared
itself as a public forum for the people to speak openly about the corruption
in development works carried out in the villages. The people came to the Kot
Kirana jan sunwai where they assembled to hear the nature and scale of the
discrepancies between the official records of the development works carried
out in their name and those that actually existed on ground. They heard in
astonishment, anger and dismay at the names of all the people in the official
records who were supposedly the beneficiaries of development schemes and,
who in reality were anything but that. More often than not, a jan sunwai
follows a set order of events. They usually begin with the reading out of the
agenda and introducing the representatives of state bureaucracy and also of the
various civil society organisations participating in the jan sunwai . Soon after
there is usually a performance of a few high energy and catchy motivational
and movement songs highlighting the importance of exercising citizenship
and the work that a jan sunwai does in holding the state to public account,
not least in respect of citizen entitlements. This is soon followed by a reading
out aloud of the individual testimonies about the ongoing development
works. These testimonials of corruption on the ground more often than
not draw attention to the current state of development projects and their
corrupt practices; to the existence of ghost schemes and ghost development
works, to fake muster rolls of public works programmes, to bogus receipts
and expenditure logs and to the various corrupt practices of state officials,
ration shop owners, and elected local government representatives. After
these testimonials are read out, the invited officials are asked to provide
explanations and to give an account of the current state of affairs in respect
of these, and/or to provide clarifications.
The jansunwais
The jan arepublic
sunwaisare publicmonitoring
monitoring mechanisms
mechanisms which
which focus
focus on public
on the
shaming of the powerful. And not surprisingly, the questioning of both power
and also the powerful at the jan sunwais led to a ‘backlash’ orchestrated by
powerful groups, who found themselves now increasingly coming under public
scrutiny. In the early years of their institution, the jan sunwais were actively
boycotted by the local administration and elected representatives who also
organised collective threats against the villagers offering testimonies at these16.
However, as the public demands for a ‘right to information’ gained momentum,
the jan sunwais too increasingly came to be viewed favourably both by the state
administration and also by the people. Importantly, though, and as Neelabh
Mishra (2003: 41) notes:
112 Vernacular Rights Cultures

Each such success made a breach in the wall of feudal fear that characterises
a typical Rajasthan village, helped put the finger on the convergence between
feudal inequities and the pathologies of contemporary practices of development
and politics and thus helped make the Jan Sunwai a continuously growing
mass movement.

Over the years, the jan sunwai has become not only one of the most
recognised forms of public monitoring of public policy, but it has also come to
be adopted by many international institutions, national and local governments,
who along with several Indian states, including Rajasthan, have adopted social
audits (Roberts 2006).17 Their institutional incorporation notwithstanding,
the jan sunwais are contentious and conflictual exercises with the ever present
threat of violence. In 2004, I attended two jan sunwais held on consecutive
days at the end of January. Both jan sunwais were organised by the MKSS
but both were different in the atmosphere, attendance and the kinds of issues
they brought to light. The first, held on 29 January in Jawaja in Ajmer district
focused on the state of local public health facilities, and in particular, on the
misappropriation of funds and the general mismanagement of the government
hospital at Jawaja. The jan sunwai took place under a large marquee where rugs
were laid out for the gathered public to sit on. For the attending invited officials
and other civil society representatives, a long set of tables were arranged in a
rectangular fashion with accompanying chairs lined up next to each other on
one side. The entire scene was staged in such a manner that the assembled
officials and invitees sat facing the assembled public. There was a visible
presence of women who had come out in large numbers to the jan sunwai.
In line with the established order of events, the jan sunwai at Jawaja began
with a round of introductions of those who were sat at the table and the reading
out of the agenda of the jan sunwai. Next, the testimonials from the affected
villagers of the Panchayat
panchayat were
wereinvited
invitedfrom
from those
those in
in assembly, and these came
in thick and fast with many people coming over to the microphone to speak
about their particular hardships at the hospital. A substantial number of the
testimonials had also already been collected beforehand and subsequently were
read out by the MKSS representatives. The testimonials highlighted that the
‘ladies bathroom’ in the hospital was always shut and out of operation so that
women suffering from malaria or those who were pregnant or who had come
to the hospital for the ‘delivery’ of their babies had no option but to relieve
themselves outside in the open without any privacy. It was noted that the funds
sanctioned under the state tuberculosis prevention scheme for procuring an
ambulance for the hospital and also for buying computers for the hospital had
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 113

in fact been used by the District Collector18 for buying an air-conditioned

‘Ambassador car’ for his office and a personal home computer. It was pointed
out that statutory ‘free’ treatments to people who were below the poverty line
(BPL) at the hospital were never free, that women had to pay for deliveries
and for abortions; and that doctors demanded money to treat snake bites and
dog bites, even when these are meant to be provided free of cost. The general
atmosphere at the jan sunwai was one of chaotic bonhomie and enthusiasm,
and after receiving replies and assurances from invited state officials that these
issues would be looked into, the jan sunwai gradually dispersed.
In contrast, the jan sunwai held the next day on 30 January at Kelwara
village in Rajsamand district could not have been more different. The MKSS
had organised a jan sunwai at Kelwara to institute a public meeting on the
right to food and to scrutinise the progress of the development works in the
panchayat. The
Panchayat. Thejan
jan sunwai
sunwai took
took place
place near
near aa check
check dam,
dam, and
and in the outdoor
precincts of a one storied building. Unlike the jan sunwai at Jawaja, there was
no marquee this time but rugs were laid out on the ground for the public, with
the tables and chairs arranged similarly in long rectangular lines in a fashion
similar to those at Jawaja the day before. A larger gathering was in assembly
at Kelwara and there was also very high level official presence. The state
administrative hierarchy present included the Assistant District Magistrate
(ADM) and the Block Development Officer (BDO) of Kumbalgarh who
present throughout
were present throughoutthe theentire
entire proceedings
proceedings of the
of the jan sunwai
jan sunwai alongalong
with
with other officials
officials of the development bureaucracy. There There was also a large
number of civil society representatives, a delegation from the Ford Foundation
and a smattering of journalists including one from the Washington Post. In my
estimation, there were about 350–400 people assembled at the jan sunwai and
there were not as many women present as there had been at Jawaja.
After the initial introductions, the jan sunwai began with a two-minute
silence in homage to Mahatma Gandhi (he was assassinated on 30 January
1948) followed by a reminder to the gathered public that the objective of the jan
sunwai was not to oppose the administration but to demand accountability.19
And that at the same time, the state administration was also required to
apprise the jan sunwai about the progress of official investigations into
the corrupt practices of various development programmes across different
Panchayatsthat
panchayats thathad
hadbeen
been unearthed
unearthedandand laid
laid bare
bare at
at the previous jan sunwais.
Highly aware of the potentially conflictual nature of the discussion agenda
at hand, the organisers repeatedly reminded the assembled public that the
main aim of the jan sunwai was not to instigate conflict between the public
114 Vernacular Rights Cultures

and the state officials

officials or
or sarkar (government) but to demand answers from
the administration. Early in the proceedings of the jan sunwai, the state
officials in attendance at the jan sunwai at Kelwara were asked for an update
on the outcome of the jan sunwai held three years ago at Janawad in 2001.
The Janawad jan sunwai of 2001 and the contents of the investigation that
followed it have been widely covered in the regional and national press but
the details are worth repeating. In broad strokes, the state’s own official
investigation into the endemic corruption in development projects in Janawad
found that during the period of 1994–2001, out of the INR 1.25 crore (1 crore
is equivalent to 10 million)
million) that
that had
had been
been sanctioned
sanctioned to
toJanawad
JanawadPanchayat
panchayat for
development projects, 70 lakhs (700,000) had been misappropriated.20 The
scale of corruption aside, what was truly spectacular about the Janawad jan
sunwai was that it brought to light the astounding levels of official resistance
to make public any documentary evidence of the development projects in
progress or their incurrent expenditure. For nine months prior to the jan
sunwai at Janawad, the people of Janawad assisted by the MKSS knocked
on the doors of every state official and elected representative linked with
their Panchayat
development in their panchayat toto demand information on the expenditure
expenditure
on development projects sanctioned in Janawad between 1995 and 2000. In
their bid for official information, the people submitted applications to relevant
state officials, wrote to prominent functionaries of the gram panchayat and
the Rajasthan state bureaucracy including to the ministers in the government
with repeated reminders of their obligation to provide information under the
revised rules of the Panchayati Raj Act (1996). When all their efforts came
to nothing, the MKSS organised a dharna (protest demonstration) outside
the District Collector’s office in Rajsamand. In the end, and after a year
long struggle, the people of Janawad did receive the official documents they
had been demanding but, even then, these were only made available in an
incomplete form with some crucial paperwork missing.
The official update on the Janawad corruption scandal was, however, not
the only major issue on the agenda at the Kelwara jan sunwai. Previously in
2003, a jan sunwai also held at Kelwara had looked into the irregularities in
shops in
the dealings of ration shops in the
the Panchayat.
panchayat. By 2003, the public welfare
system had already undergone a series of neoliberal reforms to meet the fiscal
constraints of a market friendly economy introduced in India in the early
1990s. A heavy brunt of these reforms to public welfare was shouldered by
the public distribution system (PDS) which underwent a major overhaul in
orientation in the 1990s when it became a targeted system focused on two
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 115

categories of beneficiaries: those ‘Below the Poverty Line’ (BPL) and those
‘Above Poverty line’ (APL). In December 2000, a third category, ‘Poorest
of the Poor’ (Antyodaya) was added. Over the years, the PDS has been
transformed into a highly complex, segmented and scaled down entitlement.
A prominent feature of the PDS is the dense network of ration shops which
distribute subsidised grains21 to those officially classed poor (BPL). Ration
shops are the lifelines of the village poor and in Rajasthan, there are 26,000
such ration shops. In 2003, the Kelwara jan sunwai had drawn attention
to the gross irregularities in the record keeping practices of ration shops
in Kelwara, which showed that the subsidised grains had been sold to the
intended beneficiaries when
when in
in fact,
fact,they had not received
the recipients had notany of theirany
received food
of
their food
grain grain entitlements.
entitlements.
On 30 January 2004, the jan sunwai at Kelwara demanded to know if
there had been any improvements in the functioning of the ration shops in
the Panchayat
panchayat since
since the
the previous
previous jan sunwai held in thethe Panchayat
panchayat a year ago.
Over the year, there had been public reports, which had raised doubts over
these improvements, and as some of these public testimonials on the corrupt
practices of the ration shops in Kelwara were being read out, there arose a
noticeable disruption in the gathered crowd. The ration dealers and shopkeepers
who had come to the jan sunwai began shouting objections to some of the
testimonies and started raising their hands and voices demanding a chance
to speak. On being asked by the jan sunwai organisers to let the proceedings
continue without interruption, the ration dealers started raising slogans and
began to move forward through the mostly seated crowd in a bid to approach
the invited guests sat on the other side of the assembled tables. Soon, a
discernable wave of panic arose among the assembled crowd who scrambled
to get up in order to get out the way of the advancing ration dealers. I heard
some urgent and impassioned voices asking people to leave the site and the jan
sunwai quickly. However, since there was no easy and swift exit away from the
thronging crowds which had now spilled out onto the main street, I followed
a few people I knew and climbed up to the rooftop of the building in whose
precincts the jan sunwai had assembled. Looking down from the rooftop, I
could see that a few policemen were trying to calm the gathering while also
trying to control the ration dealers. There seemed to be nothing more to do
but to wait for the upheaval to die down. And, after just under half an hour,
the ration shop dealers stood aside. The jan sunwai resumed its work with the
MKSS organisers reading out falsified sale entries in the ration registers and
also checking entries in the ration books of the villagers.
116 Vernacular Rights Cultures

For many days after the Kelwara incident, I kept thinking about the everyday
nature of ‘feudal
‘feudal fear’
fear’ reigning in in Rajasthan’s
Rajasthan’s rural
rural villages.
villages. As powerful
powerful
interventions by Dalit Dalit feminist
feminist scholarship
scholarship makes
makes clear
clear(Irudayam
(Irudayam et etal.
al. 2011;
Kowtal and andSoundarajan
Soundarajan2014; 2014;Rowena
Madhukar,2013),Lata
this Pratibha
‘feudal fear’2015; Rowena
is borne from
2013),
specificthis
and‘feudal
systemic fear’ is bornerelations
gendered from specific and systemic
of violence, gendered
dispossession, relations
injury 22 and
of violence,
upper caste dispossession,
entitlement. Demanding injury22 andrights
upperis caste
a conflictual
entitlement.business
Demanding
and the
rights is a conflictual
organisers of the jan business
sunwai were and the organisers
highly aware of thethe jan
fearsunwai were highly
and intimidation
aware
involvedof the
in fear
theseand intimidation
settings. As notedinvolved in these
earlier, settings. Asexpressed
the organisers noted earlier,
this
the organisers
awareness expressedexhortations
by repeated this awarenesstobythe repeated
gatheredexhortations
public to to notthebegathered
fearful
public
and toto not be
speak offearful and to speakwithout
their experiences of theirfear.
experiences
But these without fear. But
assurances did these
little
assurances
to allay thedid little
heavy to allay
cloak the heavy
of anxiety andcloak of anxiety and
fear circulating in thefear circulating
crowd. The fear in
the
and crowd. The was
trepidation fear palpable
and trepidation was palpable
at the Kelwara at the despite
jan sunwai Kelwarathe janfact
sunwai
that
despite
there was thea fact that there was
full attendance a fullofficials
by high attendance bystate,
of the high byofficials of theand
journalists state, by
other
journalists
subjects with andfair
other subjects
amounts of with
socialfair amounts
capital, none ofof
social
whom capital, nonethe
deterred of whom
ration
deterred
dealers from the ration
flexingdealers from flexing
their muscles, their However,
of course. muscles, ofrights course.areHowever,
not only
rights
exercisedare innot only full
either exercised
public in either
view full public
or indeed underviewfull or indeedofunder
security one’s full
life
security
and bodily of one’s life andFor
autonomy. bodily autonomy.
subaltern For demanding
groups, subaltern groups, demanding
and exercising and
rights
exercising rights
are conflictual, aresaturated
risk conflictual, risk saturated
exercises precisely exercises
because the precisely
act of because
articulatingthe
act of articulating
rights is also to draw rights is also to draw
attention attentionoppressions
the structural to the structural oppressions
of social life that
of social life
effectively thatoppose
deny, effectively deny, opposerights
and delegitimise and delegitimise
for these groups rightsandfor where
these
groups and rights
to exercise where isto to exercise rights is to
simultaneously simultaneously
also stage an act also stage anagainst
of defiance act of
defiance againstoppressions.
these structural these structural oppressions.
Consider, Consider,
for example, for example,
the case of Manohari the case
Bai,
of Manohari
a Dalit woman Bai,anda Dalit woman and
a member a member Ganga
of Marudhar of Marudhar
Society, Ganga
a localSociety,
NGOa
local
workingNGO forworking
Dalit rightsfor Dalit
based rights based in Jodhpur
in Jodhpur district. Atdistrict.
a gram At sabha
a graminsabhaher
in her village,
village, and inand fullinpublic
full public
view,view, Manohari
Manohari Bai exercised
Bai exercised her her citizen’s
citizen’s right
right to
to information
information andand asked
asked afterthe
after theproposal
proposaltotobuild
buildaagirl’s
girl’sschool
school in in her ‘ward’.
but she did so in in aa setting
setting without the the high-profile
high-profile presence of administration
administration
officials and civil
officials and civil society actors.
In her interviews with me, Manohari Bai recounted the horror that broke
loose when she stood up and asked the question about the girl’s school. Barely
had she finished asking her question that she was mercilessly beaten by the
sarpanch (a Choudhury by caste and his supporters) and her clothes were
violently torn off. She describes the incident in the following interview:

In 2002, sometime in August–September, I went to the gram sabha meeting

where I stood up and asked about what had happened to the proposal for the
girls school which had been approved in our ‘ward’ no 14 [a village
village Panchayat
panchayat
is divided into smaller units called ‘wards’]. The sarpanch said, ‘chup ho ja, tu
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 117

kaun hain bolni wali’ (you must shut up, who do you think you are to pose
these questions?). Then all violence broke loose. There were 500 men who
shouted obscenities at me and I was beaten up, my dupatta and other clothes
were torn off me whilst all the time the people kept shouting ‘randi baith ja’
(sit down you whore). My attackers were mainly Rajputs and Jats but there
was also one Mali and even a sarkari karamchari, I mean he was a Patwari
… I went to Osian, and then after a month and a half the police registered a
case against them. The police only registered my case after I pleaded my case
with the Chief Minister and he ordered a case to be registered. The police did
register a case after pressure from the Chief Minister’s office, but they put a
FR (False Report) against it. In the courts, the magistrate was pressured by
the police and the sarpanch and he dismissed the case. I didn’t give up though
and I took the case up to the High Court in Jodhpur. I am now waiting for a
date for a hearing to be announced.23

Apart from Manohari Bai’s graphic account of the violence and conflict
that demanding rights entails, her narrative also points to the indivisible
and intersecting nature of rights. For instance, demanding the ‘right to
information’ from elected representatives or indeed public officials about
public work programmes on health, education or work programmes can in
many cases involve a simultaneous claim for gender and caste equality whilst
in the same breath drawing attention to corruption within the local and state
bureaucracies, the judicial system and to the flouting of procedural norms
within the administrative, executive and legislative system itself. Perhaps, it is
the indivisible nature of rights (and the futility of analytically trying to isolate
them into categories)—of political and civic entitlements intersecting and
interwoven with individual rights—that makes rights politics so conflictual.

The Justificatory Premises of Haq as Citizenship

Given the institutional focus of the right to food movement, it is not entirely
unsurprising that in the narratives of the grassroots participants of the right to
food movement, by far the most ubiquitous justificatory premise underpinning
haq was that rights accrued to one through citizenship. In effect, one can detect
two different but related ideas of citizenship in the narratives of haq: the first
is a discernably ‘active’ view of citizenship that regards rights as crucial for
political participation and for exercising citizenship, while the second is a more
or less straightforward legalist notion of citizenship that predicates rights upon
legal constitutionalism. An unmistakably ‘active’ view of citizenship replete
118 Vernacular Rights Cultures

with notions of self-governance, accountability and responsibility is clearly

enunciated by the political and field workers of the MKSS.
The interview below is excerpted from a long conversation with two
prominent members of the MKSS. According to them:

As citizens, we have haq over this road, the road is built with our money. It is
‘our’ money because we pay income tax and we pay also tax on whatever we buy
such as rice, dal and cooking oil. That is how the sarkar (the state/government)
builds hospitals and schools. It builds these with ‘our’ money. The money that
people think is sarkari or the building that is deemed to be sarkari, we say to
them: it is not sarkari, it is ‘our’ building and it is ‘our’ money. ‘Our’ democracy
must be safeguarded for that will make our rights safe. ‘Our’ effort should be
that the constitution continues to guarantee the rights of citizens. 24

In a different vein, I encountered what might appear at least initially as

predominantly a statist notion of citizenship. Consider the following excerpt
from an interview with Prem Bairwa, a Dalit woman and member of the
village council in Kotkhawada in Jaipur district. In addition to her role as a
member of the local village council, Prem Bairwa is affiliated with a large
and well-funded NGO25 that explicitly describes itself as a ‘facilitator in the
development process’ (Cecoedecon 2017);
2017) and
she is also closely associated with
the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), a national level
advocacy organisation in India.
According to her:

As a council member, II have

have aa haq
haq in
in the
the panchayat
panchayat (village council) to get
development done in the village. Do only men have the right to speak and
conduct political business; are not women to enjoy these rights equally? It is a
fight for my haq and a fight I have to fight myself. The government has given
these rights to women; Indira Gandhi started the mahila raj [government ruled
by women]. Before her, there were no women’s rights. In case the government
changes ‘our’ rights then we have to fight the government. After all, it is ‘us’
who make the government.

At the outset, these two views of citizenship appear to resonate with liberal
citizenship (subjects with rights) and also with those of civic republicanism
and its ideas of self-governance, rights and public service. They also seem to
uphold the ‘umbilical’ relationship (Moyn 2010: 38) between rights and the
state. Yet, all these conclusions would be too quick for at least two reasons: first,
liberal citizenship is based on a contractual arrangement between individuals
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 119

and the state on the basis of negative liberty, and civic republicanism with its
valorisation of political participation takes homogenous political communities
as self-evident. Neither liberal selfhood nor the assumption of single axial
political identities inform the justificatory premise of haq as citizenship, not
least, since the rights subjectivities engaged by haq are not always individuated
and also because citizenship’s common unitary identity fractures only too
easily in the actual practice of rights and citizenship especially by marginalised
subjects. Second, it would seem that these deployments of haq conflate legal
rights with entitlements—a widespread academic tendency that cuts across
disciplinary divides (for example, Morris 1993; Hirschl 2000), 26 where rights
and entitlements are mainly (and interchangeably) understood as positive legal
rights attached to corresponding obligations, liabilities, addressees and duties.
However, paying close attention to the narratives above shows that claims of haq
exceed this predominant and legalist understanding of rights and entitlements.
If anything, the deployments of haq in my ethnographies embrace legal rights
but also draw attention to entitlements and to extrajudicial claims. Within
analytical philosophy, the distinction between rights and entitlements is not
only one between legal and moral rights but concerns the more general question
of the structure of rights, the relationship between rights and obligations
and the justifications of rights itself. Consequently, the relationship between
rights, claims and entitlements has engaged philosophical discussions and
many philosophers make some careful and intricate distinctions between these
(for example, Wasserstrom 1964; McCloskey 1965; Feinberg 1970; Hohfeld
1978; Raz 1986; Sen 1986; Nickel 1987). Some view rights not as claims or
powers (McCloskey 1976: 99) but rather as ‘entitlements to do, have, enjoy or
have done’ and consequently, independent of a corresponding duty holder in
place from whom rights can be claimed against. Others envisage rights as ‘valid
claims’ backed by mandatory positive legal sanctions with a corresponding duty
holder and/or addressee in place and/or, where there might be (as in the case
of moral rights) a claim for recognition based on existing moral principles.
Joel Feinberg (1970: 255), who is most closely associated with the above view,
regards rights as ‘valid claims’ which are always ‘correlated with another’s
duty’ but he also makes allowances for a ‘manifesto’ sense of rights in some
contexts, which are entitlements without corresponding duty holders in place.
As is evident, the chief distinction between valid and manifesto claims is over
where to place the burden of obligation but also that the relationship between
rights and obligations or duties is more often than not overdetermined by the
question of law: rights are judged ‘valid’ or ‘weak’ depending on their relation
120 Vernacular Rights Cultures

to law. In other words, when there is no strong link between the two, there is
unlikely to be a right, at least in the strictest sense (Hohfeld 1978).
The activist narratives in my ethnographies deploy haq to denote ‘valid
claims’ in so far as they claim haq over clearly identified sets of legal obligations
and a stipulated addressee, that is, the state. Yet, often, demanding haq is also
to claim recognition for an altogether new or a different set of rights or for an
For instance,
expanded set of rights. For instance,the
thepolitical
politicaldemands
activism of the right to food
movement and of the MKSS for the right to public information were raised as
qualified versions of ‘manifesto’ demands which were subsequently successfully
converted into ‘valid claims’ with the passage of federal laws on the same; these
were qualified manifesto rights in the first instance, because unlike Feinberg’s
(1970) definition of manifesto rights, these were directed towards a specified
addressee, that is, the state and were therefore not unspecified. While it follows
that deployments of haq certainly coincide with legal rights, albeit with certain
qualifications, what does this legal coincidence lead us to infer about the nature
of the justification underpinning haq here? In other words, does haq only ever
hold in the presence of legal rights? Or to put it another way, does haq depend
on declared legal rights to sustain its meaning and authority? At first reading,
the above narratives appear to uphold a correlative link between rights and legal
constitutionalism, in the sense that haq or rights are premised upon, depend
on and are justified by legal constitutional citizenship. However, if we were to
examine how haq mediates citizenship in these narratives more carefully, we
would find that haq does not quite posit a symmetric and correlative relation
between itself and the positivist legal order of the state. In fact, upon close
inspection, one will note a peculiar conceptual insight: whether these narratives
rest their justificatory premise of rights on law, the state or on the constitutional
rights and obligations of citizens, they, in the final instance, retain with the
people the right to change both the law and government and the constitution if
these fail to uphold the rights of citizens. For instance, in advocating constant
vigilance over the state on citizen rights, both Prem Bairwa and the MKSS
activists align haq with legal constitutionalism but also withhold its subsuming
into the latter. In other words, although the justificatory premise of rights in
the two narratives draws on law and the constitution and on legal citizenship,
in both cases, there is a clear enunciation that even though law and the
constitution are required for these rights, haq has an independent justificatory
premise separate from the formal legal regime of rights and lies in what Brett
(2003: 98) has termed a ‘zone of non-coincidence between individuals and the
positive legal order of the state.’ Haq, therefore, refers to and is based on an
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 121

ethical, normative, moral and empirical idea, which exists independent of the
law and has a moral authority of its own.27

Counter-Development, Counter-Conduct and Human Rights

It is worth noting that the haq narratives that I have been documenting thus
far are articulated in the context of development. As I pointed out in Chapter
2, development is an important site for rights talk in ‘most of the world’.
Development, however, is not only simply a ‘top down’ state owned and led
discourse but is one that has come to be an all embracing, shared discourse that
all sections of society are expected to share. In effect, development operates as
a form of governmentalised power, producing subjects for development, setting
off forms of political subjectivation and also authoring its own critiques. As a
form of governmentality, development institutes a specific mode of critique and
even resistance to development, which it channels through a form of ‘perpetual
questioning’ of development. This ‘perpetual questioning’ of development, in
line with Foucault’s idea of counter-conduct, sets off what I shall call ‘counter-
development’, which in producing and engaging with critiques of development,
reproduces the object of its critique, that is, development. Counter-development,
marks not a sharp break with development but rather configures development
as a site of continual contestations over how to improve, expand and seek,
among other values, those of rights and justice in and through development.
This counter-development emerges through modes of political subjectivation
that development and its accompanying ideas, in particular, human rights, put
in place. These in turn engender new fields of possibilities—making it possible
both to imagine different forms of sociality and challenge existing ways of
doing development, while also making it impossible to imagine a time and a
politics outside of development.
Counter-development enables us to focus on the productive power of
development and the forms of political subjectivation it engenders. However,
and this is very important, counter-development, like other modes of counter-
conduct, is gendered and not explicitly oriented towards emancipatory efforts
(Roy 2017) but may, in fact, stall on the question of gender equality. While
I will examine the unfolding of counter-development or counter-conduct in
development along gendered lines in Chapter 5, for now I want to focus on
explaining the idea of counter development in some more detail.
The term counter-development is a non-technical application of Foucault’s
concept of ‘counter-conduct’ to development contexts. In his College de
122 Vernacular Rights Cultures

France lectures on ‘Sovereignty, Territory and Population’, Michel Foucault

introduces a new ‘resistant concept’ (Golder 2015: 54), which he calls ‘counter-
conduct’. Describing it as a ‘specific web of resistance to forms of power that
do not exercise sovereignty and do not exploit, but “conduct”’ (Foucault, 2004:
200), Foucault offers possibilities of ‘wanting to be “conducted differently”
and “towards other objectives”’ (Foucault 2004: 194) not exhausted by either
‘dissidence’ or ‘misconduct’. Arnold Davidson (2011) writes that ‘counter-
conduct’ is the ‘conceptual hinge’ that brings ‘together the ethical and the
political axes’ in Foucault’s work (Davidson 2011: 26), where the ethical or the
‘exercise of the self on the self ’ (Foucault 2004: 205) aligns with the biopolitical
or the conduct of power through the social body, that is, biopower. Through
conceptualising ‘counter-conduct’, Foucault draws attention to the ways in
which forms of ‘revolt of conduct’ or resistance deploy existing modalities and
‘certain themes’ of power against ‘structures of power’ (Foucault 2004: 207).
In recent years, governmentality28 scholars have turned their analytical
scrutiny to the concept of counter-conduct in Foucault’s late work. Partly led
by an increasing dissatisfaction with the politics deficit in governmentality
accounts they aim to theorise the relationship between power and resistance
and forms of resistance under governmentalised power. Accordingly, these
scholars turn to counter-conduct in order to ask: how to conceptualise agency
and resistance to power where resistance does not lie outside of power but is both
constitutive and constituting of it? This philosophical question is, of course,
hardly new; feminist theorists have long asked how subjects produced within
relations of power rise to challenge those very relations through which they are
constituted? (Weeks 2011; Butler 1997). For some human rights scholars the
relationship between governmentalised forms of power and human rights is of
increasing importance. But, is it really the case, and as some governmentality
accounts suggest, that human rights are but another governmentalised
technique of freedom? And if it is indeed so, then, how do we account for the
politics of resistance or indeed for the production of ‘insurgent imaginaries’
under governmentalised power? Or as Selzmecki puts it, ‘if freedom is indeed
the vehicle of power, then how could demands for freedom enshrined in rights
declarations manifest a challenge to power?’ (2014: 1077). One can identify at
least two different strands of thinking that offer a response to this philosophical
puzzle, and interestingly, both turn to Foucault for their explanation: the first
set of responses deploy Foucault’s idea of counter-conduct in order to produce
complex accounts of politics and resistance under governmentalised power
(Odysseos 2016); and, the second considers the democratic potential of human
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 123

rights by engaging Foucault’s idea of subjectivation (Rancière 2004; Butler

2015). Ben Golder (2015) develops an account of Foucault’s late politics of
rights, which he calls a ‘critical counter-conduct of rights’. The prefix ‘critical’
in ‘counter-conduct’, flags two things: Foucault’s distance from a liberal politics
of rights, and his philosophical understanding of critique, where ‘meaning
and operation of forms of governing are not set in stone but rather available
for contestation, appropriation, and reversal…’ (2015: 154). Consequently, to
think in terms of a ‘critical counter-conduct of rights’, then, is to think of the
ways in which rights can be put to ‘different, and contrary, uses’ (Golder 2015:
159) but also, to view rights as establishing a particular relation to oneself and
with others, and as being ‘simultaneously forms of regulation and resistance’
(Golder 2015: 57).
Somewhat relatedly, a second set of responses draw attention to the
democratic potential of human rights for enacting claims/freedoms that are
not yet in place—in particular, to the potential of human rights to produce
forms of political subjectivation that could reconfigure and disrupt existing
power relations. As I argued in Chapter 2, it is this possibility of political
subjectivation that underpins Jacques Rancière’s (2004) critique of Giorgio
Agamben and Hannah Arendt. Rancière’s reformulation of the foundational
paradox of the rights of man and citizen helps draw attention to moments in
which the powerless and the oppressed rise up to demand and claim rights.
And, as I also noted earlier in the book, Judith Butler (2015: 168–9) highlights
situations, where ‘people engage in acts of self-making or self-constitution’ by
assembling together and appearing and acting alongside in public concert with
others, that produce possibilities for political subjectivation. For both Rancière
and Butler, it is the enactment of rights in concert with others in a public space
that posits what is not yet in place. However, while philosophers such as both
Rancière and Butler use global human rights as their standard background
condition for theorising moments of political subjectivation, I argue that it
is, in fact, developmentalism that provides the context and articulation for
human rights in ‘most of the world’, and thereby, for political subjectivation.

Counter-Development and the ‘Perpetual Questioning’ of

Development
Broadly, the Jan
jan Sunwais
sunwais that
that I described
described earlier
earlier can
can be
be described
described as
as a form of
counter-development. Let me, however, give another example of what I mean
124 Vernacular Rights Cultures

by counter-development from my more recent rounds of fieldwork. Between

early December 2015 and March 2016, the right to food movement organised
a public audit of the existing development and social security provisions in
Rajasthan. The movement demanded the adoption of a public accountability
law, 29 aimed at instituting efficiency and official accountability and at
curtailing the endemic corruption in the delivery of welfare and development.
The public audit itself was conducted through a 100 day long jawabdehi yatra
(answerability–accountability caravan) across all 33 districts in the state and
was spearheaded by the MKSS.
The immediate political context for the jawabdehi yatra though, was the
assault on the new legal welfare rights including the NREGA and the NFSA
by the combined efforts of the new BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) governments
at the federal level (Ghosh 2015), and at the state level, in Rajasthan. Under the
mantra of ‘good governance’, the new BJP state administration which came to
power in 2013 in Rajasthan had immediately set about recalibrating existing
lists of all those entitled to welfare provisioning, including under the NFSA,
2013, on the basis that it operated on inflated statistical figures and was marred
by corruption. It tore up the lists of all those identified as beneficiaries eligible
for entitlements under the NFSA, 2013, drawn up by the previous Congress
administration30 and put in place a new enumerating exercise, which would
be ‘transparent’ and free from the corrupt and false practices of the previous
government, and one that would weed out the non-entitled populations. This
new identification survey took about eight months to complete and severely
disrupted existing welfare programmes and resulted in the removal of 10.2
million people from existing welfare lists (A. Khan 2018). In light of the
severe ongoing drought affecting 19 out of the 33 districts of Rajasthan, 31
this recalibrating exercise resulted in very serious consequences, not least for
those already extremely vulnerable and highly dependent on state welfare for
survival. Controversially, however, not only were great numbers of poor and
vulnerable people excluded from welfare entitlements but also now in order to
access the PDS and welfare schemes, a biometric based identity card known as
Aadhaar was made mandatory.32 Proclaiming the end of paper ration cards, the
Rajasthan government’s website announced that all transactions through the
Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS) were now electronically handled
via the computerised machines (PoS or point-of-sale machines) installed in
all 26,000 PDS shops in the state. Moreover, people in the state were now
required to present their biometric ID cards at the ration shops and only upon
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 125

their biometric data, mostly a thumb impression, registering a match, would

their PDS allowance be released.
The jawabdehi yatra spent three days in each of the 100 blocks of the state
documenting complaints about the corruption and inefficiencies plaguing the
various development policies and welfare schemes operational in mostly rural
areas. Its overwhelming focus was to set development right; and it focused on
the importance of doing development differently and in accordance with the
stipulations laid down in law. The majority of the complaints documented by
the yatra concerned difficulties in accessing the PDS through these newly
mandatory biometric cards. The PoS machines require uninterrupted links
to the internet; not all villages in Rajasthan are wired, and even when there is
an internet connection, its reception is very poor, especially in remote villages,
where shop owners transported the machine to higher grounds or a hilltop in
the hope of connecting to the internet! And even when there was a working
internet connection, often the thumb impressions of people were faint and did
not register a match—as was often the case with the elderly and daily wage
labourers who are also among the most poor and precariously positioned.
Additionally, complaints were also registered concerning the poor condition of
state schools and the lack of government teachers, the disruption to pensions
and access to other social welfare schemes. Overall the yatra recorded 7914
grievances, of which it registered
grievances, registered 2551
2551 on
on the
the states
state government’s public
grievance portal known as the Rajasthan Sampark Portal.33
The scrutiny and questioning of the developmental activities instituted by
the jawabdehi yatra was not geared towards dispensing with developmental
welfare but rather to ensure that they were carried out in the right manner and
in keeping with laws guaranteeing citizen rights and entitlements. Nowhere
was development as an idea or an instrument of state policy under question.
Instead, it was the actions of BJP governments, at the federal and state level, to
weaken existing legal guarantees of citizens’ entitlements that was the object of
scrutiny and critique. Therefore, what was at stake here was not the object of
development34 but the proper and right manner of doing development which
was seen to be in jeopardy.35
As such, the jawabdehi yatra is not an exceptional response to neoliberal
policy making and its rollback of hard-won citizen guarantees won through
grassroots struggles and mobilisations. It is rather a part of the broader context
and history of the ‘push and pull’ of rights in the long running discourse on
developmentalism in postcolonial India, which took a decisive ‘rights-based’
turn coinciding just at the point of the liberalisation of the Indian economy
126 Vernacular Rights Cultures

in the early 1990s. Now rights-based development in India imbricates both

state and non-state institutions. It interpellates citizen rights and entitlements
as sites of ‘judicialized activism’ (Bornstein and Sharma 2016), mobilisation,
juridical biopolitics, 36 welfare policy making and counter-conduct. The
‘perpetual questioning’ of development has resulted in blurring the distinction
between activist concerns and activities on development and those of state
actors.37 In India, various state governments now routinely adopt activist
mobilisational modes in order to generate popular support for development,
and both state and non-state actors share discursive codes of rights-based
development, transparency, corruption and empowerment.
On 12 February 2019, news wires began reporting that the recently elected
Congress government in Rajasthan had published published aa draft
draft copy
copyof ofthe
the‘Rajasthan
Rajasthan
Social Accountability
Accountability Bill, Bill, 2018,
2018’,and
andmade
made itit available
available for public consultation
(The Hindu 2019a,
(The Hindu 2019). The2019b). TheBill,
Draft draft bill, is
2018, 2018, is undoubtedly
undoubtedly an institutional
an institutional and a
political
and response
a political to the long-standing
response demand by
to the long-standing citizensbygroups
demand citizens in Rajasthan
groups in
even if a commitment
Rajasthan to citizen’s to
even if a commitment social accountability
citizen’s legislation was
social accountability also a
legislation
part also
was of the 2018ofassembly
a part the 2018election
assembly manifesto
election of the Congress
manifesto of theParty.
Congress TheParty.
chief
demand
The chiefofdemand
the jawabdehi yatra in 2016
of the jawabdehi yatrawas for a was
in 2016 public
foraccountability law that
a public accountability
would
law hold
that state hold
would officials to officials
state account for the provision
to account of welfare
for the provision entitlements,
of welfare
and the bill certainly
entitlements, and the fulfills this. Among
bill certainly the notable
fulfills this. Amongfeatures
the notableof thefeatures
Draft
Billthe
of aredraft
‘timebillbound’
are ‘timedelivery
bound’ ofdelivery
welfare,ofpenalties
welfare, for state officials
penalties for statewho fail
officials
to deliver
who fail togoods
deliverandgoods
services
andwithin
servicesthe prescribed
within time period
the prescribed timeand for a and
period jan
sunwai
for a janorsunwai
public hearing
or publicofhearing
these grievances within 14 within
of these grievances days of 14their complaint
days of their
(Government
complaint of Rajasthan
(Government of 2019). 38 Although,
Rajasthan 2019).38 Although,
it remains it toremains
be seen as to tobewhat
seen
thetofinal
as whataccountability provisionsprovisions
the final accountability of the billofwould bewould
the bill and what be andthewhat
bill will
the
actually
bill do once do
will actually passed,
once but if thebut
passed, social
if theaccountability legislation
social accountability is ratified
legislation is
by Rajasthan’s
ratified legislative
by Rajasthan’s assembly,
legislative then itthen
assembly, would be the be
it would first
thesuch
firstlaw
such inlaw
Indiain
guaranteeing
India a timea bound
guaranteeing time boundprovision of citizen
provision entitlements.
of citizen entitlements.
Before ending this section on counter-development, I want to provide a
note of caution against viewing counter-development in terms of a ‘reversal’ of
power or indeed as only directed ‘against’ and as such countering hierarchy and
power. Counter-development is double-edged: it can not only be invested in
making development more expansive and responsive and rights cognisant, but
it can also be directed explicitly away from realising rights to gender equality.
I shall come back to this point in Chapter 5 in some more detail but for now,
I want to turn to the gendered forms of political subjectivation that human
rights and developmentalism give rise to.
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 127

Developmentalism, Political Subjectivation and the Remaking of

the Gendered Self
The counter-development I have been describing is but one form through which
we can see the governmentalised power of rights and also of development.
Another site to study their productive power is to focus on the forms and
processes of subjectivation released by human rights and development, and
in particular, on how subjects refashion their selves under developmentalism.
In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to processes of
subjectification under development as a form of governmentality39 to argue
that development is not merely a technical project engaged in provisioning
services and infrastructure but is also invested in the improvement and
welfare of populations (Li 2007) through producing particular subjects and
subjectivities for development (Madhok 2013). As a form of governmental
power, developmentalism operates through conducting ‘conduct’ and
educating desires of persons. These techniques comprising both discipline
and ethical self-fashioning include overt directives, laws, incentives and
policies but also work through ‘responsibilisation’ and ethical practices of
the self, which in turn are also heavily surveilled. Developmentalism, as I
pointed out earlier in Chapter 1, comprises not only institutions, practices and
discourses but also a particular ethical mode of relating to the self. Ethical
and experiential encounters with developmentalism constitute critical sites
for tracking the normative and political life trajectories of developmentalism
and of the ethical and political project it unleashes. Such a tracking can lead
to an attentiveness to the forms of subjectivities released by development as it
authorises itself in these sites, to the new modes of subjection it generates, and
to the forms of political cultures it gives rise to. Moreover, we can examine
how developmentalism attaches itself to differently gendered and racialised
subjects, produces particular subjectivities but also makes the performance of
these particular subjectivities a condition of representation within development
(Madhok 2013).
The narratives and the justificatory premises of haq articulated by the
primary development workers known as the sathins within a state sponsored
development project for women set up in the mid 1980s by the state government
of Rajasthan provide us with insights into the processes through which rights
subjects come into being and the forms of political subjectivation unleashed by
development, but also into new forms of coercion, policing and regulation that
accompany these processes. The sathins’ moral engagements with individual
128 Vernacular Rights Cultures

rights and developmentalism evocatively highlight haq’s legal ‘non-coincidence’

as well as its moral authority. Significantly, their invocations of haq also
reveal the gendered nature of social and caste hierarchy and intersecting
power relations that haq is embedded in and upholds, but also its intellectual
capaciousness and elasticity when put to very different critical political work
by very poor and dispossessed Dalit and Adivasi women.
The sathins are predominantly Dalit, low caste, and vastly politically literate
even though most have no formal literacy skills. They enjoy considerable
visibility within gender and development bureaucracy and feminist circles in
India. They rose into unexpected prominence in the early 1990s and began
attracting unusually high levels of attention from the media and other civil
society groups. I use ‘unexpected’ here to underscore how rare it is for rural
women in India to gain any visibility, and, given the very low interest in
theorising rural women in the Global South in both feminist scholarship and
activism in South Asia, and around the globe where rural women’s everyday
lives mostly only get a glance in as ‘case studies’ or target groups’ of various
development interventions. The sathins come into being in the first instance
within a state sponsored development programme launched by the state
Government of Rajasthan in 1984. The Women’s Development Programme,
Rajasthan (WDP) set up entirely new administrative structures and assembled
different civil society and feminist groups to assist with the responsibility of
training and developing rural women. It put together a training programme
with metropolitan feminist positioned as ‘trainers’ and the rural women selected
as sathins, as the ‘trainees’. The involvement of the civil society and feminist
groups resulted in suturing different ideational scripts for the programme,
which invariably pulled the sathins and the programme in different directions
and which in the end, all too easily unravelled at the seams at various times
of crises. Within the WDP, despite efforts to the contrary, the inclusion of
feminist actors as ‘trainers’ reproduced power hierarchies between the trainers
and their trainees and left little room for critical practices of reflexivity on
the role and position of feminist interlocutors of state developmentalism and
especially, on the ways in which technologies of state developmentalism can
render precarious subjects even more vulnerable and exposed to risk and injury
(Madhok 2010; Madhok and Rai 2012).
The training design of the sathins was technical but also normative. The
sathin was to be a development worker with a difference; she had to embody
the ideals of development that she was meant to carry out. Accordingly, the
developmentalism beamed at the sathins directed its energies at changing
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 129

subjectivities and creating new values and patterns of behaviour, emphasising

individual rights, self-empowerment, self-improvement and the performance
of individual agency (Madhok 2013). Becoming a sathin required aligning
with and embodying this normative impulse of developmentalism. In effect,
this required a certain reorienting and re-crafting of the self in line with
the expectations of personal transformation, in matters not only ethical and
moral but also of comportment, speech and sartorial. These exercises in the
refashioning of subjectivities and the constituting of oneself as a development
‘subject’—the self-conscious operations or ‘technologies of the self ’ (Foucault
1994) that the sathins perform upon themselves in order to wrought a desirable
subjectivity—helps focus attention on the ‘technologies of power’ associated
with developmentalism as a form of governmentality (Li 2007), aimed at
‘shaping’, ‘guiding’, and ‘modifying’ subjectivities (Burchill 1996: 19).
I first met the sathins in 1999, nearly 15 years into the inception of the
programme, and ever since then have been intermittently following their
entanglements with developmentalism. The majority of them have now retired
or no longer work for the state. I was a graduate student out on my first ever
fieldwork trip when I was introduced to them, while they were already very
well known in Indian feminist circles and in state development bureaucracy;
several sathins had even attended the 1995 UN women’s conference at Beijing.
At that time, many feminist activists regarded them as iconic feminist subjects
and uniquely subversive and transgressive agents of transformation; while
the state, who was also their employer, considered them as spectacularly
unsuccessful and disobedient employees.40 As I began documenting and
organising the narratives of the sathins accounting for their 16 years of work
in the WDP, the most unmistakable, exciting, intriguing and dynamic stories
they entrusted me with were invariably those that recounted their struggles over
rights. These stories described their first encounters with individual rights, of
alienness but
their strange alien-ness but also
also the difficulties
difficulties and
and conflicts
conflicts they encountered
in putting rights to work. They belaboured over why a public commitment
to rights became an important part of their identity as sathins and why this
identification required them to wrest haq away from statist interpretations of
rights; and why it mattered that they justified haq on a premise that they could
morally and politically defend. Their stories of rights struggles are difficult
stories to narrate but also to hear;
hear; these are stories
they are stories of
of disappointment,
disappointment, despair
and frustration, of heart-breaking betrayals, disenchantment and catastrophic
violence. But at the same time, these are also inspirational stories of collective
struggles and solidarities.
130 Vernacular Rights Cultures

Two events catapulted the sathins to the the forefront

forefront of
of feminist,
feminist, activist and
bureaucratic imaginations: the first
first brought them recognition within feminist
andtheir
circles and theiremployers,
employers,thethe state
state of Rajasthan.
of Rajasthan. The second
The second propelled
propelled them
themmaking
into into making an indelible
an indelible mark onmark on consciousness.
national national consciousness.
In 1990, 40Insathins
1990,
40 sathins
women belonging
belonging to to KekriPanchayat
Kekri panchayatininrural
rural Rajasthan
Rajasthan travelled
travelled nearly
1,400 miles to participate in the National Women’s Conference in Calicut,
Kerala. At the Calicut conference, however, they represented themselves not
as development workers, but congregated under a banner which read ‘Mahila
Samooh Kekri’ (Women’s Group of Kekri). Upon their return from Calicut,
they were sacked from the sathin programme on the pretext that they were
‘government workers’ and could not attend events as an independent women’s
group. The irony, of course, was that the sathins had not only been explicitly
denied the status of ‘state worker or employee’ by the state as they only received
an ‘honorarium’ and not an employee’s wage, but also that they were embodying
and enacting the ‘empowerment’ that the state and its feminist partners had
‘trained’ them to adopt. But in doing so, the sathins had clearly exceeded the
state mandated remit of what women’s empowerment means and looks like.
Within two years of the sathins registering their presence at Kekri, one
event above all brought the sathins into direct confrontation with the state and
installed them into national imagination. The gangrape of sathin Bhanwari
Devi took place on 22 September 1992. The sexual assault of Bhanwari Devi, a
Dalit sathin, attracted the attention of national media as well as of metropolitan
women’s organisations based outside of Rajasthan. However, the sexual
assault itself constituted only the first in a long list of humiliations heaped on
Bhanwari Devi, most of them institutional in nature. The local police station
refused to file a FIR (first information report) of the incident and when they
did so after coming under considerable pressure from the higher ups in the
development programme, Bhanwari Devi was denied a medical examination
for nearly 52 hours after the assault. Throughout the ordeal, Bhanwari Devi
was humiliated by the police and the medical professionals. She was locked
up in a cell and her clothes were taken away from her.41 A month later on
22 October 1992, a women’s rally was organised with thousands of women
activists from other states joining rural women who came out of their villages
to march through the streets of the state capital, Jaipur, in protest against the
state for its spectacular failure to uphold justice. The legal travesty attached to
Bhanwari Devi’s case led a local NGO called Vishakha to file a PIL case in
the Supreme Court of India, demanding safety for women in the workplace.
In response, the court, invoking the UN Convention on the Elimination
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 131

of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, expanded the meaning of

‘fundamental rights’ and held that gender equality included protection from
sexual harassment at work and the right to work with dignity. In passing a
landmark judgment in the Vishakha case, the court laid down guidelines to be
followed by establishments dealing with complaints about sexual harassment
with the proviso that these guidelines were to be in place until legislation was
passed to deal with the issue.42 The court’s judgment was taken up for action
by The National Commission for Women who took the lead in drafting a
bill called Sexual Harassment of Women at the Workplace (Prevention and
Redressal) Bill (2006).43
As things stand today, justice continues to elude Bhanwari Devi. Her
legal fight continues in the Supreme Court of India, more than a quarter of
a century from her sexual assault. In the length of time it has taken for the
wheels of justice to turn, one of her rapists has escaped indictment through
death. Bhanwari Devi continues to wait for justice in penury. She has received
a number of awards but no meaningful financial support. As Kavita Srivastava,
a prominent civil liberties activist, points out, ‘Bhanwari’s case was a pioneering
one for the anti-rape movement. It brought about a change even in the system
of accountability of the police. While many women have gained from Bhanwari
Devi’s struggle, however, justice has continued to elude Bhanwari Devi.’44

A Feminist Historical Ontology of Rights as Truth

A feminist historical ontology is invested in tracking the ‘making up’ of
gendered subjects in the vernacular. The vernacular in vernacular rights cultures
flags the specific languages of claiming rights but also that this language of
rights is gendered, generative and makes up people. The justificatory premise
of haq as citizenship that I was documenting in the earlier parts of the chapter
was not only claiming haq as a citizenship right but also claiming a particular
relation to the self as a citizen. Citizenship has historically been a masculinist,
racist, colonialist project but itit has
has also
also been
been central
central totothe
theanti-colonialist
anticolonialist
movement. The postcolonial Indian state gave itself a constitution in 1950
where it guaranteed fundamental rights for all citizens. However, it would take
another 35 years after the adoption of the Indian constitution before the news
of these constitutional guarantees would reach rural heartlands of Rajasthan
and gain entry into the moral and political imaginary of Dalit and Adivasi
women living in its impoverished tiny hamlets and villages.
132 Vernacular Rights Cultures

The political imaginary of individual rights began making inroads into rural
hamlets through the women’s development programme. Nearly all the sathins
identified their participation in the WDP as their first point of contact with
the idea of individual rights. The feminist trainers in the WDP held training
workshops on the legal constitutional basis and protections afforded to rights,
which stressed that the state or sarkar was duty bound to uphold these rights
and that rights belonged to all citizens. The language of constitutionally
guaranteed rights presented a novelty. The sathins had never heard about
women’s rights or that these were owned by and belonged to Dalit and Adivasi
women before. And, there was no evidence or example of their presence or
working that could help them visualise or describe the concept. The novelty
of this idea of rights, however, did not reach them via translation. There was
no need for literal or conceptual neologisms in order to have a conversation
about individual and citizenship rights. The sathins deployed the existing and
familiar Arabic and Urdu term haq to speak of their rights. The complexity
of their deployments of rights lay not in that they needed to translate rights
from a ‘foreign’ language but that the language of entitlement and of rights
that they knew was attached to privileged upper caste subjects, was hierarchial
and exclusionary and, if and when deployed by Dalit and Adivasi women,
resulted in severe and violent reprisals and retribution. As a moral term, haq
was put to use to maintain social hierarchies in everyday transactions. For
instance, upper caste men and women exerted their haq to claim entitled and
exclusive use of public utilities such as water handpumps and water wells.
And, when used in private spaces, haq was the preserve of male household
members, and used mostly to demand
demand rightful
rightful shares
shares in
in familiar
familial property and
landholdings. Therefore, what confronted the sathins was not only a problem
of the chasm between formal and substantive rights but of a language of rights
that was firmly attached to gender and caste privilege, and which worked to
protect and uphold these. Their narratives of their early days in the WDP are
replete with the moral and cognitive dissonance together with a real sense
of fear, conflict and trepidation that rights talk sets off. How to claim this
language of rights that had never belonged to them, and of which they had
no experience? Many admitted never even using the word haq before. Also,
how to embody this rights bearing self in interactions with others together
with an expectation that those others would also recognise them as rights
bearing persons? Their feminist training had made them aware of both the
formal existence of constitutional rights but also of the feminist demands and
interpretations of rights, which encouraged them to relate to their body outside
of patriarchal claims and outside of discourses of shame, disgust and impurity
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 133

and to critically rethink popular norms governing women’s modesty, behaviour,

comportment and ‘good conduct’. These are powerful rights lessons and in
keeping with the democratic and liberatory potential of rights, the deployment
of haq in this new mode and imaginary set off complex processes of political
subjectivation. The heady mix of feminist visions of empowerment in the WDP
training manuals together with the forms of discipline directed by the state at
the sathins led them to undertake self-fashioning exercises where in order to
perform their duties as the public face of women’s rights also meant becoming
that subject of rights. Articulating haq in public view and also becoming the
subject warranted by haq meant a complex undertaking that was somewhat
easier to justify when the injustice or breach of rights was either in full public
view or unambiguously backed by full legal sanction of the law. For instance,
rights for women in marital and natal property, often referred to as dakin haq,
could be defended by invoking equal rights to property, or the removal of girls
from schools could be opposed on the basis of legal equality of girls and boys,
or the denial of welfare entitlements to widows could be backed by existing
state laws on the same. It is striking of course, that ‘dakin’ in hindi translates
as a ‘witch’. And, therefore, it’s quite telling how neatly the phrase dakin haq
captures both the enormity of the social pressure but also the vilification that
ensues when rural women decide to ask for rights in the familial property. But
it was the painstaking, careful building of a public and private profile of an
intersectional subject of rights who embodied haq and invoked it freely and
without fear and favour, which was the hardest part. How does one justify the
existence and the experience of being a Dalit, Muslim and Adivasi woman
with full legal rights when they could not conjure up any real life examples of
such a woman living among their midst? How does a Dalit sathin whose lived
experience is structured and informed by oppressive, threatening and violent
caste relations, and who lives in fear of the Rajputs in the village, referring to
them by the honorific title of annadata (provider of food), and who till recently,
was not allowed to walk with shoes near the hatai45 (designated meeting place
in the village where upper caste men conduct their business) concretely and
meaningfully exercise her haq, a word and an idea that was long accepted as
attached and belonging to the powerful and privileged?
For the
the sathins,
sathins, itit was
wasthetheWDP
WDPwith withitsits strands
several of multiple
strands rights
of competing
discourses
multiple thatdiscourses
rights provided thethatintellectual
provided theand moral justification
intellectual of haq, and
and moral justification
in the
of haq,absence of any
and in the other of
absence competing
any otherdiscourse
competing on discourse
rights, theonsathins
rights,came
the
to regard
sathins camethetostate
regardas the
the state
source of all
as the rights
source of and thereby,
all rights and rely on arely
thereby, state-
on
acentric discourse
state-centric of rights.
discourse As IAshave
of rights. detailed
I have detailedelsewhere,
elsewhere,thethe association
134 Vernacular Rights Cultures

with the state was not without risks, even if in the short run, it gave the
sathins some semblance of security in the midst of the social hostility that
engulfed them. The sexual assault of Bhanwari Devi proved the associational
security from the state to be illusory and fragile and even counterproductive.
The flagrant
flagrantfailings
failingsofofthe
thestate
stateinin
thewake
wakeofofthe
thesexual
sexualassault,
assault, perhaps more
than any other, led to a radical revision in their generally positive assessment
of the state in the face of serious failings of the state. The moral regression
of the state and in particular, its collusion with the upper castes and classes,
came into a sharp relief after the gang rape of Bhanwari Devi and the failure
of the state to stand up for the rights of Dalit women. In her interviews with
me (Madhok 2013), Bhanwari Devi characterised the Indian state as classist,
casteist and masculinist, and radically estranged from any real commitment to
social justice. The immediate aftermath of the sexual assault of Bhanwari Devi
led the sathins into a crisis of reflection over the nature of their relationship
with the state, and subsequently, into open conflict with it over the question
of rights, which they had thus far identified with the state.
The sexual
The sexualassault
assaultofof Bhanwari
Bhanwari DeviDevi tore
tore open
open the wounds and injuries the
sathins had experienced and accumulated in becoming and working as sathins
in the WDP. Their Their relationship
relationship withwith and
and public
public commitment
commitment to rights had
evolved through immense personal personal risk,
risk, cost, injury, courage and even social
ostracism and the crucial question and moral conundrum staring at them
was whether they could continue justifying their rights politics and work in
a language that was was intimately
intimately connected to andthederived from the
state, which theystate, which
associated
they associated
with with moral
moral corruption and corruption
intrinsicallyand intrinsically
prejudicial prejudicial
to women’s to women’s
rights? It soon
rights? Itclear
became soontobecame
them thatclearthe
to them
moralthat the moral
collapse of thecollapse of the
state over its state
failureover
to
its failure
protect to protect
Dalit women’s Dalit women’s
rights meantrights meant
that they that they
needed needed
to wrest haqtoaway
wrestfrom
haq
away from its problematic
its problematic associationassociation
with the state.withGiven
the state. Given
the deep the deep
betrayal betrayal
of women’s
of women’s
rights, rights, the
particularly particularly
rights of theDalitrights
women, of Dalit women,
the sathins theleft
were sathins
with were
little
left with little choice but to weave their own independent
choice but to weave their own independent theoretical and practical defence theoretical and
practical
of defence
the idea of the independent
of rights idea of rights independent of constitutional
of constitutional citizenship citizenship
supported
supported
by by the
the state andstate and to consequently
to consequently espouse espouse a different
a different normative
normative basisbasis
for
for defending
defending rights.
rights.
The new and different justificatory premise of haq was no longer derived
from the state but was now grounded in the idea of Truth. It is not surprising
that sathins would turn to Truth as the justificatory premise for rights. In their
narratives, Truth had received a fatal blow when the state institutions and the
courts chose to believe
believe Bhanwari
Bhanwari Devi’s
Devi’s rapists’
rapists and not her testimony;
testimony; and,and,
in upholding Bhanwari Devi’s rapists’ defence, the courts and the investigative
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 135

agencies simply maintained and protected the widely held popular view that
Dalit women are not capable of the truth and are not to be believed. Mobilising
Truth as a justificatory premise of haq enables an existential and structural
critique of the life of marginalised gendered subjects while also shoring up an
ideal of justice in social and political life. In the narratives of the sathins, Truth
is an expansive and non-cognitive term.46 It is informed by ideas of rightness
and justice and certain ‘ideal’ and uncorrupted aspects of politics and political
life. This is not a human rights politics of minimalism or despair but one that
is strongly committed to a politics of justice. Here, Truth occurs both as an
ideal order of justice in the form of a pack of principles and as an order of facts
in the form of concrete practices. But Truth also invokes moral rectitude and
morally correct and fearless political agency. Let me illustrate this through
the following narrative:

We sathins exist so that we can

can assist
assist the depressed and deprived women and
become their voice ... we speak
speak the
the Truth
Truth and walk the pathpath of
of Truth
Truth … The
[official responsible
sarpanch and patwari [official responsible for lands records] are are partners
partners in
corruption; why
why should
shouldthey
theyspeak
speakthe
theTruth?
Truth?They
Theybenefit by by
benefit notnot
walking the
walking
pathpath
the of Truth. Whereas
of Truth. Whereasthethe
sathin
sathinalways
alwaysspeaks
speaksthe
theTruth
Truthand
and is not party
party
to their corrupt schemes.47
corrupt schemes. 47

The narratives of the sathins are replete with haq as embodying ideals of
sathins are
Truth in political life. They invoke images of this Truth, or of haq, in public life
by linking it to their own moral example and by contrasting their own work and
moral rectitude with the actually existing corrupt practices of the sarpanches and
the various officials of drought relief programmes and other state development
schemes. For instance, during the famine that ravaged Rajasthan from 1985 to
1988, the sathins joined women’s groups in raising awareness and demanding
justice against the widespread forced sterilisation of women by state department
officials as a precondition for receiving state assistance and employment under
the famine relief works set up by the government of Rajasthan. They were
also at the forefront of demanding equal wages for women and for equality in
distribution of food grains to all affected in the ‘food for work’ programmes.
However, before rushing to celebrate their various successful initiatives, we
have to be extremely careful and ethical to foreground the inordinate gendered
risk, injuries and social and institutional backlash that precarious gendered
subjects experience while taking on the powerful. As the sathins often said
to me, it is one thing to make demands of the state and quite another to do
so from the social community one lives amongst. And even though engaging
136 Vernacular Rights Cultures

both involves conflict, however, at least, in the case of the citizenship rights
there is a possibility of some legal answerability and accountability. There are
no such guarantees of answerability, they often stressed, that one can expect
while exercising individual and bodily rights in interpersonal relationships.
Paradoxically, however, even as citizenship and its associated rights provide the
sathins with a vocabulary to assert their constitutional rights but as Bhanwari
Devi’s case tragically highlighted, the assertion of these rights also makes
them visible targets for injury and violence. Their association with the state
is a complex and contradictory one; making them both the agents of the state
and also its adversaries. This complex relationship of proximity as well as
antagonism with the state was highlighted powerfully by sathin Batto Devi
of Danganwada village when she spoke with me on how upholding the Truth
means that sathins are often seen as unelectable political representatives or
indeed find it difficult to contest elections to local bodies.

If sathins were to be elected as sarpanch then we would not be able to oppose

the many things we now oppose or fearlessly bring up the issues that we do.
we speak
Also, we speak the
theTruth
Truth openly
openly and
and onon becoming
becoming aa sarpanch
sarpanch ourour voices
voices will
get muted. For example, if there is a child child marriage
marriage taking place somewhere
in the Panchayat, the sarpanch
panchayat, the sarpanch will
will not
not oppose
oppose it. it. If
If he did, then he will end
up anatagonising important interests. The The politics
politics of of sarpanch
sarpanch is such that
neither can hehe stop
stop aachild
childmarriage
marriagefrom
fromtaking
takingplace,
place,neither
nor cancan hehe stopa
stop
a nukta[death
nukta [deathfeast]
feast]from
fromtaking
takingplace,
place,ornorindeed,
can hecan stophepeople from giving
stop people from
or demanding
giving dowry.
or demanding He gets
dowry. wrapped
He gets up up
wrapped in in
allallsorts
sortsofofobligations
obligations and
relationships. Moreover, if the sarpanch spoke the
relationships. Moreover, if the sarpanch spoke the Truth Truth then who would vote
for him next time? TheThe sathin on the other hand, will will always
always speak
speak the
the Truth
Truth
and therefore they [the people] will will do everything to stop her from contesting
speaking up.
elections or speaking up.48
48

I have written elsewhere that very few sathins contest local government or
Panchayat elections.And
panchayat elections. Andwhen
whenthey
theyhave
havedone
done so,
so, nearly all
all of them have lost.
Although much can be learnt from the experience of the sathins with political
institutions and the democratic processes of seeking political office (Madhok
2013), however, my aim here has been to offer a feminist historical ontology of
the politics of rights and developmentalism. Central to this reading has been
the critical role of concepts in ‘making up people’ and in laying bare gendered
processes but
but also
alsotracking
trackingthe
therights
rightsencounter and
encounter thethe
and forms of the
forms of political
subjectivation that rights discourses set off in development contexts. In effect,
the sathins’ encounter with rights sets off two separate processes of political
subjectivation, each of which have a bearing on the conceptual content of
The Political Imaginaries of Haq 137

haq but also for a more expansive content for human rights discourses. The
participation of the sathins in the WDP sets off the first phase of their political
subjectivation, whereby they engage in self-fashioning exercises in alignment
with the developmentalist goals of the state and of the WDP programme. Their
particular contexts of coercion and precarity together with the utter novelty and
alienness of women’s rights leads them to ground their justification of rights
in state discourses and legal constitutionalism. However, when the state fails
them at crucial moments, the sathins seize haq away from the state to weave
a justificatory premise independent of the state. The justification of rights as
Truth present us with an expansive view of human rights, one that is not led by
either a politics of minimalism or that of despair. An attention to the complex
forms of moral engagement of the sathins with haq, allows us to track several
transformations in their rights thinking and to identify the justificatory premise
that underpins their rights talk. Their different and transformed thinking on
rights is consequently reflected in their dynamic and singular deployments of
haq. This distinctive and innovative engagements on haq is forged through
their particular immersion in state developmentalism and from their struggles
to fashion a different justification for rights independent of the state.

Conclusion
Through focusing on the forms of counter-conduct and the forms of political
subjectivation that are produced in the context of developmentalism,
this chapter draws attention to the productive and generative power of
human rights, rights and developmentalism. The justificatory premises of
citizenship and ‘Truth’
citizenship occur within
Truth occur within every
every day
day and sustained engagements
with developmentalism. These justificatory premises provide insights into
how subaltern subjects deploy rights but also produce political cultures of
rights. Crucially, the encounters with human rights and developmentalism
are epistemic as well as experiential encounters and give rise to not only new
modes of relating to the self and becoming a subject of rights but also generate
different ways of justifying and supporting a commitment to rights.

Notes
1. If anything, food scarcity and food consumption within this scarcity have
been a conspicuous part of India’s version of postcolonial citizenship. In newly
postcolonial India, for instance, citizens were exhorted to demonstrate their
138 Vernacular Rights Cultures

responsibility and stake in the new imaginary of citizenship and development

by refashioning their ‘diets’ in very specific ways that would ease the import
burden of the newly industrialising state (Siegel 2016).
2. For the PIL as a form of ‘juridical democracy’, see Baxi (1985). The PIL has a
chequered history. While it is indeed the case that the PIL reinvented itself in
the post-emergency
post emergency era era primarily
primarily as a tool for addressing pressing public issues,
however, in recent decades, it has shown strong economic conservatism and
‘betrayed a lack of sensitivity towards the rights of the poor and disadvantaged
sections of society’ (Bhushan 2004: 1770). And where courts have handed
down pro-poor judgments, they have not only mostly refrained from penalising
the government (Shankar and Mehta 2008: 147) but also mainly tinkered
with ‘temporary solutions’ (Shankar and Mehta 2008: 178), preferring to rely
on ‘weak remedies such as setting up committees and negotiation channels’
(Shankar and Mehta 2008: 147). Some note that there is a paradox in the
PIL which has meant that: ‘it has strengthened the rule of law by delivering
justice to the poor and guaranteeing various social rights, but its development
has an aspect of undermining the rule of law through the informalization of
judicial proceedings’ (Sato 2017: 67). Relatedly, Anuj Bhuwania writes (2014:
321) that the growth of PIL has contributed to a ‘delegitimization of legal
procedure’, which has made it easier for courts to uphold draconian laws and
statutes (2014: 321).
3. These laws include The Right to Information (RTI) Act of 2005, The
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)
of 2005, The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers
(Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, The Right to Education Act of
2009, The Right to Food Act or The National Food Security Act (NFSA) of
2013 and The Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement (LARR)
Act of 2013.
4. There now exists a growing and sophisticated scholarship analysing the
functioning, shortfalls as well as the impact of these newly introduced acts
and policy measures. See, among others, Drèze (2004), Shah (2007), Khera
(2008, 2011), Banerjee and Saha (2010), A. Sharma (2013), Drèze and Khera
(2017) and Nilsen (2018b).
5. I am grateful to Diane Perrons and Shirin M. Rai for clarifying this point.
Personal communication, February 2018.
6. Neoliberal economic reforms have disproportionately negatively impacted the
already vulnerable and precarious condition of Adivasis and Dalits. See, for
instance, Kannan (2018).
7. See ininparticular
See, Drèze
particular, andand
Drèze Khera (2017)
Khera for the
(2017) forbenefits of theseofsocial
the benefits thesesecurity
social
security legislations
legislations on rural empowerment.
on rural women’s women’s empowerment.
8. See Drèze and Khera (2017) for an excellent review of the expansion of rights-
based social security programs in India.
 October 2020).
10. Among females of the Scheduled Castes, the literacy rate was 44.6 per cent
in 2011 and among the Scheduled tribes, it was 37.3 per cent (World Bank
2016). Also see S. Sharma (2013).
11. See Government
The Political Imaginaries ofofHaq India (2019). ‘Women and Men in India: A Statistical 139
Compilation of Gender Related Indicators in India’. Social Statistics Division,
9. Ministry
Census of of IndiaStatistics
2011. SeeandinProgramme Implementation. Available at http://
particular: https://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011-
mospi.nic.in/publication/women-and-men-india-2019
prov-results/data_files/india/Final_PPT_2011_chapter5.pdf (accessed (accessed
24 February 13
2021).
October 2020).
12. The Times
10. Among females of India
of the(2018).
Scheduled ‘Rajasthan
Castes, assembly
the literacy elections
rate was2018: Women
44.6 per cent
outshine
in 2011 and menamongin voting thepercentage
Scheduledacross tribes,Rajasthan,
it was 37.3 December’.
per cent 09 December.
(World Bank
http://timesof
2016). Also see india.indiatimes.com/articleshow/67006922.cms?utm_
S. Sharma (2013).
source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
11. See GoI (2019b). of India (2019). ‘Women and Men in India: A Statistical
Government (accessed
24
SeeFebruary
12. Compilation
Times of India2021). (2018).
of Gender Related Indicators in India’. Social Statistics Division,
13. Ministry
Field interviews, Jhadla,
of Statistics andPhagi Block, Jaipur
Programme district (2004).
Implementation. Available at http://
14. mospi.nic.in/publication/women-and-men-india-2019
Field interviews, Jhadla, Phagi Block, Jaipur district (2004). (accessed 24 February
15. 2021).
The website of the Right to Food Campaign (http://www.righttofoodcampaign.
12. in/)
The provides
Times ofdetailed information
India (2018). and resources
‘Rajasthan assemblyon court orders,
elections 2018: research
Women
reports,
outshinebriefing
men in votingnotes, percentage
posters, pamphlets and campaign
across Rajasthan, updates.
December’. 09 December.
16. For a detailed discussion
http://timesof of the ‘backlash’ against the organisation of the jan
india.indiatimes.com/articleshow/67006922.cms?utm_
sunwais, see Neelabh Mishra’s excellent account (2003).
source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst (accessed
17. 24
ForFebruary
an insightful 2021).account of how governments respond to demands by citizen
13. groups for ‘transparency’
Field interviews, Jhadla, Phagi and accountability, see Alasdair
Block, Jaipur district (2004).Roberts (2006).
18. A District
14. Field Collector
interviews, is thePhagi
Jhadla, seniorBlock,
most officer in-charge
Jaipur district of the administration
(2004).
15. of
The a district.
website of the Right to Food Campaign (http://www.righttofoodcampaign.
19. This point wasdetailed
in/) provides made by Aruna Royand
information andresources
then repeatedon court at several
orders,occasions
research
reports,the
during coursenotes,
briefing of theposters,
jan
Jan sunwai
sunwai by
by the
pamphlets the MKSS
MKSS
and representatives.
representatives.
campaign updates.
20. For aBDO
16. The detailed informed
discussion the ofgathering that following
the ‘backlash’
gathering against thethe
following Janawad
organisation
Janawad jan sunwai
of the jan
in 2001, see
sunwais, the Neelabh
government had instituted
Mishra’s jan sunwais
excellent account (2003).at the seven villages in
17. Janawad Panchayat
panchayataccount
For an insightful and although
and although new incidents
new
of how governments incidents of corruption
of
respond to demandscamebytocitizen
light,
light,
none were
groups for of the magnitude
‘transparency’ and that were exposed
accountability, at Janawad.
see Alasdair Furthermore,
Roberts (2006).
18. legal casesCollector
A District had beenis lodged
the senior against all thein-charge
most officer accused officials and elected
of the administration
representatives
of a district. so they were legally required to return the money they had
stolen.point
19. This In addition,
was made theby anti-corruption
Aruna Roy and bureau
thenhad launched
repeated an investigation
at several occasions
into the fraudulent muster rolls with a view
during the course of the Jan sunwai by the MKSS representatives.to identify the correct beneficiaries
20. of
Thethe BDOfamine relief the
informed programmes
gathering undertaken
that following in the
the Janawad
village. The BDO
jan sunwai
concluded
in 2001, the by government
saying that at had present all those
instituted indictedatinthe
jan sunwais theseven
Janawad report
villages in
had takenPanchayat
Janawad their case and to the High Court
although at Udaipur,
new incidents of which had put
corruption camea legal stay
to light,
140 onnone their arrests,
were of the andmagnitude
that thingsthat could onlyexposed
were proceedatfurther onceRights
Janawad.
Vernacular the legal
Furthermore, stay
Cultures
was
legalremoved
cases had from the lodged
been courts. against all the accused officials and elected
21. With the passage
representatives so of
theythewere
NationallegallyFood Security
required Act in the
to return 2013, aspects
money theyof had
the
PDS
stolen.such as the NFSA
In addition, became reoriented
the anti-corruption bureautowardshad alaunched
near universal coverage,
an investigation
with
into thea stipulated
fraudulentcoverage
muster rolls of 75withpera view
cent to in identify
rural areas and 50beneficiaries
the correct per cent in
urban
of theareas.
famine Seerelief
Drèzeprogrammes
et al (2018). undertaken in the village. The BDO
concluded
22. See Madhok by and
sayingRaithat at present all those indicted in the Janawad report
(2012).
had takenwith
23. Interview their case
withManohari to theDevi,
Manohari High
Devi, Court
field atworker,
worker,
field Udaipur,
Marudhar which
Marudhar hadGanga
Ganga put a legal
Society, stay
village
Society,
on theirBaodi,
Baodi,
village arrests,
Tehsil andGopalgarh,
that things
Gopalgarh,
tehsil could only
Panchayat
panchayatSamiti proceed
samiti Osian, further
Osian, onceJodhpur,
District
district the legalcaste
Jodhpur, stay
was removed from
Meghwanshi, the courts.
interviewed
interviewed ininBaodi,
Baodi,2005.
2005.
24. Interview with Sarpanch Tej Singh and Sarpanch Narayan, Jawaja and Kelwara,
29–20 January 2004.
25. Cecoedecon is noted by many to be one of the largest recipients of foreign
funds. Interview with Sunny Sebastian, Rajasthan correspondent for The
 21. With the passage of the National Food Security Act in 2013, aspects of the
PDS such as the NFSA became reoriented towards a near universal coverage,
with a stipulated coverage of 75 per cent in rural areas and 50 per cent in
urban areas.
22. See Madhok and Rai (2012).
140
23. Interview with Manohari Devi, field worker, Marudhar Vernacular Rights Cultures
Ganga Society, village
Baodi, Tehsil Gopalgarh, Panchayat Samiti Osian, District Jodhpur, caste
21. Interview
24. With the with
Meghwanshi, passage of theTej
sarpanch
interviewed National
inSingh
Baodi, Food
and Security
sarpanch
2005. Act in 2013,
Narayan, Jawajaaspects of the
and Kelwara,
PDS
29–20 such as
January the NFSA
2004. became reoriented towards
24. Interview with Sarpanch Tej Singh and Sarpanch Narayan, Jawaja and Kelwara, a near universal coverage,
with
29–20a January
25. Cecoedecon’s stipulated coverage
influential
2004. of 75inper
position cent in rural
Rajasthan’s NGOareas sectorandwas50 per cent
brought to myin
urban
notice areas.
by Sunny Sebastian, Rajasthan correspondent
25. Cecoedecon is noted by many to be one of the largest recipients of foreign for The Hindu, interviewed,
22. February
See
funds.Madhok 2004,and
Interview Rai
with(2012).
Jaipur. Sunny Sebastian, Rajasthan correspondent for The
23. Prem
Interview
Hindu, Bairwa with
February Manohari
interviewed inDevi,
2004, Jaipur. March field worker,
2004, MarudharPhagi
Kotkhawada, Ganga Society, village
Panchayat, Jaipur.
Baodi, Tehsil
26. For conflation
conflation in Gopalgarh,
in philosophy, Panchayat
philosophy, see, Samiti
for instance,
see for Osian, District Jodhpur, caste
instance, the Stanford Encyclopaedia of
Meghwanshi,
Philosophy; andinterviewedwithin policy in Baodi, 2005. see in particular UNRISD or its
documents,
24. Interview with Sarpanch
various background Tej on
papers Singh and Sarpanch
migration, genderNarayan,
equality.Jawaja and Kelwara,
27. 29–20
See Brett January
(2003). 2004.
On haq’s particular quality of legal ‘non-coincidence’ as well
25. Cecoedecon is noted by
as its moral authority, seemany
Madhok to be(2013).
one of the largest recipients of foreign
28. funds.
As is well Interview
known,with Sunny(2000:
Foucault Sebastian,
341; see Rajasthan correspondent
also Gordon, 1991: 2) for The
defined
Hindu, February as
governmentality 2004,
the Jaipur.
‘conduct of conduct’ and government as ‘governing
the conduct
26. For conflation of the self and others’,
in philosophy, see forandinstance,
scholars the noteStanford
that theEncyclopaedia
crucial feature of
of governmentality
Philosophy; and within is that
policy it signifies
documents, ‘theseeirreducible
in particularconnection
UNRISD between
or its
‘practicesbackground
various of governing and the
papers on modes
migration,of thought
genderunderpinning
equality. those practices’
(Golder 2015: 52).
27. See Brett (2003). On haq’s particular quality of legal ‘non-coincidence’ as well
29. as
The itsorganisers
moral authority, produced see their
Madhok own(2013).
prototype titled ‘Rajasthan, Bhagedaari
28. Jawabdehi
As is well aur known,Saajedhari
Foucault Ankekshan
(2000: 341; Billsee2016’.
also Gordon, 1991: 2) defined
30. governmentality
Rajasthan was oneasofthe the‘conduct
first states of toconduct’
implement andthe NFSA, 2013.
government However,
as ‘governing
its implementation
the conduct of the was self rushed
and others’,and chaotic and relied
and scholars noteon ‘oldthe
that lists’ replete
crucial with
feature
errors
of whilst including
governmentality new it
is that and previously
signifies ‘theexcluded
irreduciblebeneficiary
connection populations.
between
All of thisofresulted
‘practices governing in theandstate
the exceeding
modes of thoughtits mandated quota of covering
underpinning 69 per
those practices’
cent of the
(Golder 2015: 52).total population (Khera 2017). The new BJP government elected
to power
29. The in 2013produced
organisers was quick theirto seize
own on the statistical
prototype chaos and swiftly
titled ‘Rajasthan, went
Bhagedaari
about ‘pruning’ the list of ‘undeserving
Jawabdehi aur Saajedhari Ankekshan Bill 2016’. beneficiaries’.
31. The
30. severity
Rajasthan wasof onethe drought
of the led the
first states Government
to implement the of Rajasthan’s
NFSA, Disaster
2013. However,
Management and Relief Department to extend
its implementation was rushed and chaotic and relied on ‘old lists’ replete the operation of drought
with
measures in 14,487 villages uptil July 2017. Accordingly,
errors whilst including new and previously excluded beneficiary populations. it sought and
consequently, received additional funds under MNREGA
All of this resulted in the state exceeding its mandated quota of covering 69 per from the Union
government
cent of the total in the form of 50
population days of
(Khera additional
2017). The new employment for the drought
BJP government elected
affected villages (Government of Rajasthan 2016).
to power in 2013 was quick to seize on the statistical chaos and swiftly went
32.Political
The During 2015–16ofwhen
Imaginaries Haq I was interviewing the activists of the right to food 141
about ‘pruning’ the list of ‘undeserving beneficiaries’.
movement, the Aadhaar Bill was under consideration by a five member
31. The severity of the drought led the Government of Rajasthan’s Disaster
constitution bench of the Supreme Court. On 29 September 2018, the Supreme
Management and Relief Department to extend the operation of drought
Court passed its judgment on the constitutional validity of Aadhaar. In a split
measures in 14,487 villages uptil July 2017. Accordingly, it sought and
judgment (4:1), the court upheld the constitutional validity of Aadhaar while
consequently, received additional funds under MNREGA from the Union
declaring some aspects of the bill unconstitutional. In particular, the Supreme
government
Court opined in that
the form
Aadhaar of 50could
days of notadditional
be used by employment for theeven
private entities drought
as a
affected villages (Government of Rajasthan 2016).
voluntary scheme. And, that, furthermore, it could not apply to children and
32. that
During 2015–16 when
an Aadhaar card was I was notinterviewing
a prerequisite theforactivists
enrolmentof the to right to food
schools. The
movement, the Aadhaar Bill was under consideration
judgment also put in a stipulation for the elderly and the infirm, stating that by a five member
Aadhaar authentication was not required for pensions. Finally, the judgment
encouraged the federal government to legislate a ‘data protection act’ that
would act as a deterrent and a protection against identity fraud, theft and
official misuse of biometric data belonging to the citizens. It, however, upheld
 judgment (4:1), the court upheld the constitutional validity of Aadhaar while
declaring some aspects of the bill unconstitutional. In particular, the Supreme
Court opined that Aadhaar could not be used by private entities even as a
voluntary scheme. And, that, furthermore, it could not apply to children and
that an
The Political Aadhaarofcard
Imaginaries Haq was not a prerequisite for enrolment to schools. The 141
judgment also put in a stipulation for the elderly and the infirm, stating that
constitution bench of the was
Aadhaar authentication Supreme Court. On
not required for 29 September
pensions. 2018,the
Finally, thejudgment
Supreme
encouraged
Court passedthe its federal
judgment government to legislatevalidity
on the constitutional a ‘dataofprotection
Aadhaar. In act’a split
that
would act (4:1),
judgment as a thedeterrent and a protection
court upheld against validity
the constitutional identityoffraud,Aadhaar theftwhile
and
official misuse
declaring someof biometric
aspects of the data
billbelonging to the citizens.
unconstitutional. It, however,
In particular, upheld
the Supreme
the most
Court vigorously
opined contestedcould
that Aadhaar aspectnotofbetheusedAadhaar hearing,
by private which
entities evenwasastoa
do with the
voluntary welfare
scheme. exclusions
And, that had resulted
that, furthermore, it couldas nota apply
consequence
to children of state
and
governments
that an Aadhaar makingcard Aadhaar
was not acompulsory
prerequisitefor forreceiving
enrolmentwelfare to schools.including
The
access to the
judgment alsoPDS put in(Khera 2018). The
a stipulation for thejudgment
elderly makes
and thea infirm,
clear distinction
stating that in
relation toauthentication
Aadhaar fundamental rights was not in the constitution
required (such asFinally,
for pensions. the rightthe to judgment
education
for all children
encouraged thetill the age
federal of 14) and to
government those whichaare
legislate legalprotection
‘data rights, such act’asthat
the
National
would actFood
as aSecurity
deterrent Actand(NFSA) 2013 and
a protection the Mahatma
against identity Gandhi
fraud, theft National
and
Rural Employment
official misuse of biometric Guarantee dataAct (MNREGA),
belonging 2005. These
to the citizens. welfareupheld
It, however, rights
are not
the mostfundamental rights andaspect
vigorously contested therefore,
of thethe court did
Aadhaar not seek
hearing, which to remove
was to
them
do with fromthethe purview
welfare of Aadhaar
exclusions thatauthentication.
had resulted asHowever, a consequence it did move
of stateto
protect
governments the fundamental
making Aadhaar ‘right to education’
compulsorybyfor making Aadhaar
receiving welfareinapplicable
including to
children’s
access to the services
PDSincluding
(Khera 2018).schoolTheadmissions.
judgment Both
makes sidesa claimed vindication
clear distinction in
on the Aadhaar
relation judgment:
to fundamental those
rights who
in the opposed it(such
constitution on the grounds
as the right for the clear
to education
legislative
for all childrendirective towards
till the age of providing
14) and athosedata which
protection law and
are legal for declaring
rights, such as the as
unconstitutional
National Food Security the useAct of Aadhaar
(NFSA) by 2013 private
and thestakeholders.
Mahatma Gandhi The government
National
on theEmployment
Rural other hand, lauded the Court
Guarantee for upholding2005.
Act (MNREGA), the constitutional
These welfarevalidity rights
of Aadhaar.
are On 2 January
not fundamental rights2019,
andthe government
therefore, the introduced
court did not amendments
seek to remove to the
Aadhaar
them from Billthe(2016)
purviewto the Parliament.
of Aadhaar Barely two days
authentication. after its
However, it introduction
did move to
in the Lok
protect Sabha (lower‘right
the fundamental housetoof India’s Parliament)
education’ by making Aadhaar on 4 January 2019, the
inapplicable to
bill was passed
children’s services without
includingas much
schoolasadmissions.
an amendment Both sidesbeingclaimed
introduced to the
vindication
government
on the Aadhaar bill judgment:
or indeed eventhosethe who briefest
opposed debate.
it on the grounds for the clear
33. legislative
In an interview,directive Shyam Lal providing
towards Purohit, the State
a data Coordinator
protection of the
law and forright to food
declaring as
movement at thethe
unconstitutional people’s
use of organisation
Aadhaar by private Aasthastakeholders.
Sanghathan,The toldgovernment
me that it
wasthe
on important
other hand, to log the complaints
lauded the Court directly on thethe
for upholding state web portal asvalidity
constitutional it was
theAadhaar.
of designated On website
2 January for2019,
citizens’ complaints,introduced
the government and in light of the facttothat
amendments the
it was personally
Aadhaar Bill (2016) monitored by the District
to the Parliament. BarelyCollectors
two daysand afteralsoits by the Chief
introduction
Minister,
in the Lokcomplaints
Sabha (lower logged
house here were required
of India’s Parliament)to beondisposed
4 January of 2019,
withinthea
fortnight
bill at the without
was passed latest. See as also
much http://jawabdehiyatra.in/.
as an amendment being introduced to the
34. government
142 As Nilsen (2016: bill or 272)
indeed even many
notes, the briefest
studies debate.
‘both Vernacular
of the micropolitics
Rights Cultures of
33. everyday
In an interview,
developmentShyamencounters
Lal Purohit, …the andState Coordinator
of large-scale of the
social right to food
movements …
movement
have at thethat
established people’s organisation
subaltern groups doAastha Sanghathan,
not oppose told me that in
or reject development it
was important to log the complaints directly on the state
its entirety, but rather seek to negotiate and change the direction and meaning web portal as it was
thedevelopment.’
of designated website for citizens’ complaints, and in light of the fact that
it was
35. See personally
interview withmonitored
Shankar Singh by theofDistrict
the MKSS Collectors
where and also by thethe
he highlights Chief
end
Minister,
to inefficient complaints
and corrupt logged here were
practices required
of state to be
officials disposed
as the of withinofa
main demands
fortnight
the at the latest.
yatra (Kumar 2016).See also http://jawabdehiyatra.in/.
34. Judicial
36. As Nilsen (2016: (Biehl
biopolitics 272) notes,
2013) many studies legal
has a specific ‘bothand of political
the micropolitics
trajectory in of
everyday
India. Its development
high point occurredencounters … and
in 2001 whenof large-scale
the Supreme social
Court, movements
working on …
an expanded interpretation of ‘the right to life’ under Article 21 of the Indian
constitution, issued orders for the provision of mid-day meals to all children
in government schools.
37. Anthropologists Bornstein and Sharma (2016) note that in the current global
 of development.’
35. See interview with Shankar Singh of the MKSS where he highlights the end
to inefficient and corrupt practices of state officials as the main demands of
the yatra (Kumar 2016).
36. Judicial biopolitics (Biehl 2013) has a specific legal and
142 political
Vernacular trajectory
Rights Culturesin
India. Its high point occurred in 2001 when the Supreme Court, working on
have established
an expanded that subaltern
interpretation groups
of ‘the rightdotonot
life’oppose
under or reject21
Article development
of the Indian in
its entirety, but
constitution, ratherorders
issued seek tofornegotiate and change
the provision of mid-daythe direction
meals toand all meaning
children
of
in development.’
government schools.
35.
37. See interview with
Anthropologists Shankarand
Bornstein Singh of the(2016)
Sharma MKSS where
note thathe in highlights
the currentthe end
global
to inefficient
neoliberal and corrupt
context, practices of(2016:
a ‘technomoral’ state officials
76) language as theofmainlaw demands
and policy, of
the
which yatra
fuses(Kumar
moral2016).
pronouncements with technical details for implementing
36. Judicial
policy, and biopolitics
shared (Biehl
by not2013) has a and
only state specific legal organisations
nonstate and political trajectory
but also by in
India. Its highorganisations
transnational point occurred hasin‘emerged
2001 when thekey
as the Supreme
terrainCourt, working
of struggle where on
an expanded
non-state interpretation
actors express their of ‘the right to life’
distinctive under and
identities Article 21 of
moral the Indian
projects and
constitution,
negotiate theirissued orders
political for thewith
relations provision
the stateof mid-day meals to all activism’
through judicialized children
in government
(2016: 77). schools.
37. Anthropologists
38. Bornstein and Sharma (2016) note that in the current global
See http://rajasthan.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/SA-Bill-Draft.pdf.
39. neoliberal
For an account context,
of thea ‘technomoral’
governmentalised (2016:power76) oflanguage
development of lawin and policy,
the Indian
which
context,fuses moral pronouncements
see Sanyal (2013) and Madhok with(2013).
technical details for implementing
40. policy,
As I have andwritten
shared elsewhere
by not only state and
(Madhok nonstate
2013), what organisations
soon became apparentbut also by to
transnational
me was their organisations
polarised andhas ‘emerged
binary as the key terrain
representations. Driving of these
struggle where
polarised
non-state
representations actorsofexpress theirwere
the sathins distinctive
two things:identities and moraltoprojects
an attachment a particularand
negotiate
conceptiontheir politicalthat
of agency relations with athe
valourised state through
transgressive judicialized
subject activism’
who performed
(2016:
overt acts77).of subversion in the face of power without fear; and second, the
38. See
fluenthttp://rajasthan.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/SA-Bill-Draft.pdf.
articulation of rights by the sathins. However, it was when the discourse
39. For an account
of rights of the
deployed bygovernmentalised
the sathins was directed power of against
development in thethat
the state Indian
the
context, see Sanyal
institutional backlash (2013)
againstandthemMadhok began. (2013).
40.
41. As I haveinterviews
Author’s written elsewhere
with Bhanwari(Madhok Devi2013),
between what 1999soonand became
2005. apparent
These took to
me
placewas their polarised
in Jaipur and Bhateri.and binary representations. Driving these polarised
representations
42. Vishakha and othersof the sathins
State
v. State were twoand
of Rajasthan
of Rajasthan things:
and others,
Others,anAIRattachment
1997, SCto3011;
1997, a particular
see the
conception
text of the of agencyatthat
decision valourised a transgressive subject who performed
http://www.iiap.res.in/files/VisakaVsRajasthan_1997.
overt
pdf. Inacts
Mihirof subversion
Desai’s (2003)in the face of
words, thepower
Vishakha without fear;found
decision and second,
that ‘if the
fluent
Indianarticulation
Government of rights
makesby ... the sathins. However,
commitments it was when
in international foratheitdiscourse
shall be
of rightsondeployed
binding by the sathins
the Government was directed
even within the nation against
and itthewillstate that the
be treated as
institutional backlashlaw
part of the national against
unlessthem therebegan.
is a law within the country which is in
41. Author’s interviews
direct conflict with with
such Bhanwari
a law’.
law.’ Devi between 1999 and 2005. These took
The place
43.Political in Jaipur
As defined and
in the
Imaginaries Bhateri.
of 1997
Haq Supreme Court guidelines in the Vishakha decision, 143
42. sexual
Vishakha and others v.
harassment State of such
includes Rajasthan and others,
unwelcome AIR 1997,
behaviour SC 3011;contact,
as physical see the
atext of the or
demand decision
requestatfor http://www.iiap.res.in/files/VisakaVsRajasthan_1997.
sexual favours, sexually colored remarks, showing
pdf. In Mihir or
pornography, Desai’s (2003)
any other words, the
unwelcome Vishakha
physical, decision
verbal found thatconduct
or non-verbal ‘if the
Indian
of Government
a sexual nature, for makes ... commitments
example, leering, telling in international
dirty jokes, fora making it shall
sexualbe
binding on
remarks aboutthe aGovernment
person’s body, evenand within
so on.theAnation
revised andversion
it will ofbethetreated
sexualas
part of the national
harassment legislation lawis unless
available there
on is
thea National
law within the countryfor
Commission which
Women’sis in
direct conflict
website with such a law.’
at http://ncw.nic.in/sexualharassmentatworkplacebill2005.pdf.
43. Kavita
44. As definedSrivastava,
in the personal
1997
Personal communication,
Supreme July
Court guidelines
communication, July 2016, Jaipur.
in the
2016, Vishakha decision,
Jaipur.
sexual harassment
45. Interview with Kiran includes
Dubey,such unwelcome
18 March 1999, behaviour
Ajmer. as physical contact,
46. In ordinary social science writing, truth is often regarded as a cognitive concept,
which is invoked in order to establish ‘falsifibaility or ‘verifiability; of a claim.
In the discourse of the sathins, however, it is an expansive term encompassing
morality and justice.
47. Interview with Kalyani village, Mokumpura, Panchayat Samiti Dudu, Jaipur,
 of a sexual nature, for example, leering, telling dirty jokes, making sexual
remarks about a person’s body, and so on. A revised version of the sexual
harassment legislation is available on the National Commission for Women’s
website at http://ncw.nic.in/sexualharassmentatworkplacebill2005.pdf.
44.Political
The KavitaImaginaries
Srivastava, of Personal
Haq communication, July 2016, Jaipur. 143
45. Interview with Kiran Dubey, 18 March 1999, Ajmer.
a demand
46. In ordinary or request
social forwriting,
science
science sexual favours,
writing, truth sexually
truth is often colored
regarded as a remarks,
cognitive showing
concept,
pornography,
which is invoked or any othertounwelcome
in order physical, verbal
establish ‘falsifibaility or non-verbal
or ‘verifiability; of conduct
a claim.
of a sexual
In the nature,
discourse forsathins,
of the example, leering,it telling
however, dirty jokes,
is an expansive termmaking sexual
encompassing
remarks about a
morality and justice. person’s body, and so on. A revised version of the sexual
harassmentwith
47. Interview legislation
with sathin is
Kalyani available
Kalyani,
village, on the
village
Mokumpura, National
Mokumpura, Commission
Panchayatpanchayat for Women’s
samiti
Samiti Dudu, Dudu,
Jaipur,
website
Jaipur, at
1998. 1998. http://ncw.nic.in/sexualharassmentatworkplacebill2005.pdf.
44. Kavita Srivastava,
48. Interview with SathinPersonal
sathin Batto
Battocommunication,
Devi, Village July
Devi, Village 2016, Jaipur.
Danganwada,
Dangarwara, Ramgarh,
Jamwa Ramgarh,
45. Jaipur,
Interview with1999.
January
January Kiran Dubey, 18 March 1999, Ajmer.
1999.
46. In ordinary social science writing, truth is often regarded as a cognitive concept,
which is invoked in order to establish ‘falsifibaility or ‘verifiability; of a claim.
In the discourse of the sathins, however, it is an expansive term encompassing
morality and justice.
47. Interview with Kalyani village, Mokumpura, Panchayat Samiti Dudu, Jaipur,
1998.
48. Interview with Sathin Batto Devi, Village Dangarwara, Jamwa Ramgarh,
Jaipur, January 1999.
144 Vernacular Rights Cultures

5 Resisting Developmentalism and

the Military
Haq as a Cosmological Idea and
an Islamic Ideal

In May 2012, NapiNapi Bai,

Bai, the
the Adivasi
Adivasi sarpanch
sarpanch of
of Medi
Medi Panchayat
panchayat in Kotra
1
Block of Udaipur, organised a gram sabha to pass a ‘no-confidence’ motion
against a development project intent on expanding the boundaries of a wildlife
sanctuary. Kotra is the Adivasi block of Udaipur district and nearly 96 per
cent of its population (GOI 2011b) belongs to India’s Indigenous or Adivasi
communities. It nests in the Southern Aravalli hills where the Wakal river
flows through. The Adivasi block is also part of southern Rajasthan’s ‘hunger
belt’. Kotra is where India’s pre-eminent news magazine Frontline reported
47 hunger deaths in 2001 (Mishra 2001). Hunger continues to haunt Kotra
while bureaucratic apathy and death by starvation continue to be a persistent
presence.
For nearly four decades, the Adivasi peoples of Kotra have been resisting
the steady bureaucratic inroads that Phulwari Ki Naal, the wildlife sanctuary
which was declared as such in 1983, has been making into their life-worlds
by gradually swallowing up their ancestral lands, forests, streams and villages
and forcing them to live under the uncertainty and terror of being dispossessed
from their lands. Today, the Phulwari Ki Naal wildlife sanctuary covers a
total area of 511.41 square kilometres out of which 365.92 square kilometres
is designated as ‘Reserved Forest’ and encompasses 134 villages in the area
(Forest Department Rajasthan 2014: 3). The event, however, that precipitated
the passage of the ‘no-confidence’ motion in the gram sabha on that fateful
day was the proposed extension of the wildlife sanctuary into two villages
in the Panchayat.
panchayat. IfIf the
the extension
extension plans
plans for the sanctuary
sanctuary were
were to go ahead,
then in effect, this would mean the displacement and relocation of these two
villages along with its people, cattle and livestock elsewhere. But where was
this elsewhere? No one quite knew to where the villages would be relocated.
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 145

The word going

going around
around in
in the
the Panchayat
panchayat was that this elsewhere would be
somewhere in Jaisalmer. Those who are familiar with the topography of
Rajasthan would know that Jaisalmer is the desert district of Rajasthan and
it could not be more in contrast with the lush hills and forests of Kotra. This
dread of displacement is hardly an abstract one. While official figures admit
that between 1951 and 1990, 21.5 million people in India have been displaced
from their lands as a result of development projects, scholars however, have
put the figures of displaced populations at three times higher, at 60 million
(Fernandes 2007). Recent figures published by the Internal Displacement
Monitoring Centre in 2016 note that between 1950 and 2015, 65 million
people have been displaced in India as a result of development projects (IDMC
2016). As many as 40 per cent of all those displaced and dispossessed of
their lands have been Indigenous people, 2 which means that given the total
population of Adivasis in the country, ‘nearly one in four have experienced
some kind of displacement’ (Sundar 2016: 10).
The history of forest dispossessions is hardly new and predates the
postcolonial state in India and is more than a century old (Guha 1989). These
dispossessions became systematised with the enactment of the Indian Forest
Act in 1865 by the colonial state and its subsequent amendments in 1878 and
1927, which reserved a fifth of land area as ‘government forest’ primarily for
increasing revenue and for ‘marketable timber’ (Rangarajan and Shahabuddin
2006: 368), resulting in the removal of forest communities from designated
‘government forests’. In postcolonial Rajasthan, the dispossession and eviction
of Indigenous peoples from their land is a fallout of the passage of the Rajasthan
Forest Act of 1953 that converted tribal forest rights into ‘concessions’ and
required Adivasi dwellers to show ‘proof ’ in the form of documentary evidence
in support of their land or dwelling rights over the forest land. In the absence
of official land certificates, the land belonging to the Adivasis was suddenly
transferred to the state forest department and they became known in official
speak as ‘tribal tillers’ and thereby ‘encroachers’ upon forest lands. Over the
years, the state government has sought to address the conditions of ‘tribal
tillers’ by the ensuing notifications in 1978 and 1991 to regularise forest land
possession, yet these governmental circulars were not publicised among the
beneficiary populations and even less implemented. The year 2002 became
a watershed year in the postcolonial history of state violence against forest
communities with arbitrary, violent and coercive evictions of the Indigenous
forest communities and other non-tribal forest dwellers from their homes and
lands carried out at a scale ‘unprecedented in recent history’.3
146 Vernacular Rights Cultures

In October 2006, India’s Parliament passed a legislation decreeing a bill of

rights protecting the forest land of Indigenous people known as the Scheduled
Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights)
Act. India is not a signatory to the ILO Convention 169 on the rights of
the Indigenous peoples but it does provide special constitutional safeguards
for Indigenous people or the administrative category of Scheduled Tribes
(ST) through which they are recognised in constitutionalist legal and policy
discourses. The legislation itself was a direct outcome of a nationwide displaced
forest dwellers campaign and the passage of the legislation was seen as a way
to address the ‘historical injustices’ suffered by India’s forest communities.
The Forest Rights Act 2006 provides for individual rights and also
collective community governance over forest land. Importantly, it mandates
explicit approval of development projects by the gram sabha in Indigenous
villages. Napi Bai exercised this particular safeguard when she called a
joint gram sabha ofof all
all eight
eight villages
villages in
in her
her Panchayat
panchayat to debate the planned
extension of Phulwari Ki Naal. However, organising a gram sabha of all the
eight villages is no mean feat and in the ordinary run of things takes a great
deal of organisation, time and planning, all three of which as Napi Bai narrated
to me over several interviews, were in limited supply at the time. Here is how
Napi Bai explained the roll-out of events on that particular day in May 2012.
She was on herher way
way toto the
thePanchayat
panchayat office
office in
in her village
village when
when she was told
that a written ‘notice’ had arrived addressed to her from the State Forest
Department. Not being able to read herself, Napi Bai took the letter to the
village school teacher so that he could read out the contents to her. The letter
was an official notice announcing the population survey of two villages in
her Panchayat. Thesetwo
panchayat. These twovillages
villagesshared
shared aa boundary
boundary with
with Phulwari
Phulwari Ki Naal.
As is well known in Kotra, the conduct of an official survey marks the first
step in the preparation of state plans to relocate and rehabilitate populations
who inhabit the land and forests that the sanctuary wants to ‘conserve’. The
contents of the letter left Napi Bai in no doubt about the seriousness of what
was being proposed by the state forest officials. She immediately set off for
Kotra to confer with the NGO, Adivasi Vikas Manch, and from there on to
the state capital Udaipur, to seek advice from a well-known lawyer based in
the city who has been associated with Indigenous rights. The lawyer advised
her to call a ‘joint special meeting’ of the gram sabha of all the eight villages
panchayat 44 and
of the Panchayat and toto make
make sure
sure to record all the proceedings in writing.
In her interviews with me, Napi Bai describes the events leading to the ‘no-
confidence’ motion in the following way:
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 147

An official
official notice arrived
arrived atat the
the Gram
gram Panchayat
panchayat office
office atat Medi
Medi in May
2012 announcing that a relocation survey would be carried out the day after
tomorrow in Bheem Talai and Bao Veeran; the two villages were to be relocated
to another site so that the development of Phulwari Ki Naal could be carried
out. The notice said that the gram sarpanch was required to assist the Block
Development Officer, the Forest Ranger and the veterinary department
officials in conducting a population survey in the two villages—to ascertain
as to how many people resided in the two villages, how many animals were
reared, and the number and varieties of crops grown in the villages and in
the forest. I cannot read Hindi or Bagri but there was a school master who
was walking by and I asked him to read the contents of the letter out to me.
immediately realised
I immediately realised the
the serious
serious implications
implications for
for the
thePanchayat
panchayat villagers;
villagers;
there was no time to be lost and I took a taxi from Medi to Kotra, which is
25 kilometres away and first went to the NGO office (Adivasi Vikas Manch)
and informed them of the impending survey. The next day, I took the bus to
Udaipur around 2 hours away and met with Advocate Nandwanaji and showed
him the letter; on my return, I hired a private taxi and went to all the 8 villages
of the
the Panchayat and told them about the plans to relocate
panchayat and relocate twotwo villages
villages and
urged them to come to a gram sabha meeting at 9 am the next day.
By 2 pm the next day, nearly 500–600 people had congregated at the
Panchayat Bhawanfor
panchayat bhawan forthe
thegram
gramsabha
sabha meeting,
meeting, and
and not much time after that,
the officials arrived. The forest ranger pulled me aside to ask me: ‘Sarpanch
sahib how have you called these people?’ I replied: ‘They are the people of
the whole Panchayat; they are
panchayat; they are the
the public;
public; you have sent a letter
letter announcing
announcing
relocation of two villages but you know that under Fifth Schedule [of the
constitution] and under the PESA kanoon (PESA: Panchayat Extension to
Scheduled Areas Act 40 of 1996)5 and also the Forest Rights kanoon (2006)6
you need to consult with and seek the approval of the village gram sabha for
any acquisition of Adivasi village lands? And now, everyone is here because
they have a haq to hear your proposal and also decide on it. Let me ask you all
first and foremost: what are the sarkar’s plans for the rehabilitation of all these
people?’ They remained quiet and had no answer—they had come unprepared
and did not have any documents or plans with them. At this point, I asked
the assembled villagers to consider passing a ‘no-confidence’ motion against
the official proposal for the relocation and they agreed. I turned to the gram
sachiv (village panchayat
Panchayatsecretary)
secretary)and
andasked
askedhim
himto
to make
make a formal note that
in our village gram sabha, we have decided to pass a ‘no-confidence’ motion
against the relocation survey. All the gathered people signed the note and we
made a photocopy of the document and sent it off to the Forest department
Office at Kotra. There has not been any talk of relocation ever since.7
148 Vernacular Rights Cultures

The proceedings of ‘no-confidence’

‘no-confidence’ that that the
the villagers
villagers ofof Medi
Medi Panchayat
panchayat
launched against state development project under the leadership of Napi Bai
was organised under the provisions of the Forest Rights Act and the PESA
Act. It is worth noting that this ‘no-confidence’ measure undertaken by the
Adivasi villagers is hardly a commonplace occurrence and one led by an
Adivasi woman sarpanch, is even rarer. In the last few years, there have been
a few celebrated cases of Adivasi villages taking on the might of powerful
transnational corporations and stopping them in their tracks. On the whole,
however, these have been few and far between not least because the costs of
opposition are inordinately high in a context where the developmentalist state
is transparently aligned with the commercial interests of transnational capital.
And, while it is certainly the case that the Forest Rights Act has invigorated
and encouraged democratic energies, however, the rights of the Indigenous
and forest communities over the forests and its produce is by no means a
settled question. In addition to bureaucratic indifference, implementation
lethargy and a distinct lack of political and administrative will to implement
the provisions of the act, forest communities are also seen as ‘encroachers’ by
the conservation lobby, who sees the forest communities as obstacles to their
conservation efforts. Recently, the Indian Supreme Court ruled in the latter’s
favour potentially placing 1.5 million Indigenous families at risk of eviction
from their homes and lands.8 Not unsurprisingly, the Court’s judgment met
with a great deal of criticism especially from Indigenous groups, and even
though the court has suspended its original judgement, the threat to India’s
Indigenous communities remains ever present.
Overall, in
Overall, in terms of its implementation,
implementation, the authorities have preferred
to deal with individual claims over forest land and paid ‘little attention to
provisions to facilitate community control of of state-owned
state-owned forest
forest areas’
areas’ (Kumar
and Kerr
Kerr 2012:
2012:758).
758).The Thegovernment’s
government’s ownownfigures reveal
figures the extent
reveal of non-
the extent of
implementation of theofact.
non-implementation theIn Rajasthan,
act. till 31till
In Rajasthan, March 2020, just
31 March 2020,over 50 just
only per
cent of
over 50the
pertitles
centtoofindividual
the titlesclaims to land were
to individual claimsdistributed
to land wereand only 7.1 per
distributed
cent 7.1
and of per
community titles to land
cent of community approved.
titles to land.In sum, only
Overall, 51%51 per cent ofand
of individual all
submitted claims
community claimstowere
landupheld.
titles were
9 Theupheld.
figures The
9 figures
behind behind
the land thedistributed
titles land titles
distributed
do do not
not tell the tell the
whole whole
story, story,For
though. though.
evenFor eventhe
where where
claimsthe for
claims
landforrights
land
rights have been upheld, these have not meant that the full extent
have been upheld, these have not meant that the full extent of the claims have of the claims
have been
been recognised.
recognised. Furthermore,
Furthermore, serious
serious questions
questions havebeen
have beenraised
raisedover
over the
propriety, transparency and accountability of the instituted process for deciding
forest rights, especially community rights. Adivasi activists in Rajasthan point
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 149

out that while the Forest Rights Act establishes a process to decide community
rights over forest land, the state of Rajasthan has yet to establish a proper
process for the same with the result that the state department of forest and
environment continues to exert inordinate power over the process.10
At this point, I want to draw attention to the use of haq in Napi Bai’s
narratives and also those of her fellow Adivasi activists in Kotra. The first
thing to note here is that Napi Bai and other Adivasi interlocutors in Kotra
spoke to me in Bhili/Bhilodi language, which made the presence of haq in
their vocabulary, a word whose intellectual provenance and trajectory is vastly
different from Bhili/Bhilodi, appear quite arresting. Also, the justificatory
premises of haq that the
premises the Adivasi
Adivasi activists
activists articulated
articulated, encompassed
encompassed both
individual and collective claims that intersected in interesting ways with legal
constitutionalism, albeit not entirely, and certainly not for all claims.

The Cosmological Justification of Haq

After coming to know the contents of the letter addressed to her by the
forest officials, Napi Bai told me that she first called on the NGO Kotra
Adivasi Vikas Manch (Kotra Adivasi Development Group), of which she is
a member, and which has its main office in Kotra. The NGO is part of the
large umbrella movement of Adivasi activists known as the Jungle Zameen
Jan Andolan (JZJA), which is engaged in a struggle for rights to forest land
in southern Rajasthan. JZJA came into existence in 1995 as a response to the
forcible evictions and disposession of Rajasthan’s Adivasis from their lands
and homes deep in the forests. In southern Rajasthan, there are several locally
based Adivasi organisations affiliated to the JZJA that mobilise on issues of
collective governance
governance over
over forest
forestland
landand
andforest
forestproduce
produceandandalso
alsoagainst
againststate-
state
led eviction and violence at development projects inside forest land,land, which
they regard as ancient and sacred. One of these local groups is the Kotra
Adivasi Vikas Manch which is specifically concerned with the fallout from
the designation of Phulwari Ki Naal as a sanctuary.
The Adivasi activists of Kotra Adivasi Vikas Manch mostly allude to haq
in ancestral and cosmological terms.11 Here, the justificatory premise for
haq is predominantly embedded in ideas of the ‘ancestral’, the ‘historical’,
the ‘prior’ and the cosmological. Importantly, and as I emphasised earlier
in Chapter 4, this justification of haq is not articulated in a discrete or an
ahistorical way but as before, emerges in particular political, institutional and
historical contexts of developmentalism, disposession, citizen activism, state
150 Vernacular Rights Cultures

violence, and legal constitutionalism. In the interview I represent below, one

of my interviewees, Harmi Bai, a former secretary of the Kotra Adivasi Vikas
Manch, belonging to the Bhil tribe, describes the Adivasi peoples’ resistance
to the declaration of the Phulwari Ki Naal sanctuary and of the difficulties
that this has caused. The designation of Phulwari Ki Naal as a sanctuary
has led to a series of restrictions on people’s access to the forest and on their
collection and consumption of forest produce such as honey, firewood, fruits,
medicinal herbs, tree bark and leaves, which the Adivasi villagers depend upon
for their everyday survival. The ban also has a commercial sting: the villagers
used to collect tendu leaves (leaves of Diospyros melonoxylon, which is classed
as a forest produce) from the forest, made these into bundles and then sold
them to contractors from the cities for manufacture
manufacture as beedis [roughly
(roughly rolled
cigarettes wrapped
cigarettes wrapped in tendu leaves]. The
tendu leaves). The sale
sale of
of tendu
tendu leaves
leaves is a seasonal
seasonal
activity and even a two-week collection could earn a medium sized household
cash in hand for the whole season.12 The ban on forest produce has led to
a substantial loss of earnings for Adivasi households with the result that a
majority of these are now forced to undertake ‘seasonal migration’, mainly
to work on the large landholdings in neighbouring states as agricultural
sharecroppers or labourers. In an excerpted conversation, Harmi Bai reflects
on some of these difficulties:

Earlier, we used to take the produce openly from the jungles and without any
restriction and then suddenly, we were told that there was a prohibition on
the forest produce as this was now a sanctuary for wild animals. We were told
that we could not build homes or rear our animals or sow the field inside the
jungle. We were told that this was now protected land and a sanctuary and
that they were now going to develop a park inside it and that tourists were
going to come from abroad to visit the sanctuary.
We continue to take the produce from the forests. We only take what we
need. We are the owners of this jungle and the lands therein; we have a haq over
these. Wherever there are Adivasis there are jungles, in the cities there are no
jungles. We have protected the jungles. The haq over these forests and water
comes from ourour ancestors.
ancestors. These
These are
are our
oursacred
sacredlands—
lands—our
our ancestral spirits
reside here—we have ancestral rights over these lands. Our forefathers have
used this land for centuries. We tell the state forest officials, you do your job
and stay here and that together we can stop the jungle mafia who go into the
jungles in their lorries illegally and for commercial purposes. But you cannot
stop us from taking the produce for our own use from these jungles or force
us off our land.13
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 151

In the above narrative and those of the Bhil activists I interviewed, haq
has very specific applications: It is hardly ever used to claim gender rights
and equality and where it does, it draws on legal constitutionalism and not on
prior entitlements. It is more often than not deployed to claim qudrati haq, or
those rights justified by and/or in alignment with what nature or the cosmos
intended. It is also used to signify nazar qabza or community recognition, a
possessive claim to untitled land and property not recognised in legal or state
documents but one that is upheld by a council of community chiefs known
as bhanjgarhiya.14
The deployments of haq articulated by Bhil activists encompass individual
and collective claims but also legal, moral and cosmological ones. In demanding
their haq to their forests, the Bhil activists are staking a ‘valid or justified claim’
(Feinberg 1970) over ancestral forests lands—these claims are recognised under
the Forest Rights Act, 2006, which also identifies the state as the obligation
bearer—even though their justification of these rights claims is independent
of the state and its constitutional legalism framed primarily around liberty
and welfare. In their narratives, haq signals a different source of power and
authority and is a rights claim not linked with the political authority of the
state. Audra Simpson in her important book Mohawk Interruptus (2014) argues
that taking
taking up
thethe challengeofofIndigeneity
challenge Indigeneityseriously
seriouslyrequires
requires anan accounting
accounting
which is able to locate Indigenous claims for sovereignty, nationhood and
citizenship outside a different frame of reference and authority than that of
the settler colonial state. Simpson’s book narrates the ‘awkwardness if not
outright refusal’ of settler colonial citizenship by the Mohawk of Kahnawà:ke
to be ‘enfolded’ within settler colonial state logics, a ‘refusal’ (2014: 11) of its
recognition, and a refusal to disappear. In place of citizenship deriving from
the settler colonial state, the Mohawk of Kahnawà:ke speak of ‘living’ ‘primary,
feeling citizenships’ that do not depend on institutional recognition ‘but are
socially and politically recognized in the everyday life of the community, and
people get called out on them’ (Simpson 2014: 175). In the case of the Bhil
activists, the struggle for recognition does not involve an ‘outright refusal’ of
the state but rather opens up something akin to a ‘third space of sovereignty’
(Bruyneel 2007); a political space where the political authority of haq derives
from an altogether different political imaginary than that of the state while
also demanding that this different political authority be recognised by the
state. The Bhil activists open up a new ‘supplemental’ (Bruyneel 2007: xvii)
discursive and political space, which ‘exposes the practices and contingencies’
of the state in respect of its principles, policies and practices of rights. They
152 Vernacular Rights Cultures

stretch and trouble administrative abstraction and bureaucratic disposession.

In seeking ‘non-derivative’ rights from the state, the Bhil activists underline
their historicity and epistemic presence to point out that rights are not creations
of the state or of the government but that they are ‘dynamic’ (Gewirth 2001:
332) and have independent justifications. Let me make two remarks about
the distinctions between the discursive deployments of haq in the above
narrative and the category of a positive legal right in Anglo-American rights
theorising. Unlike the moral individualism espoused by several dominant
rights theories, haq is not the moral property of self-regarding individuals and
thereby, does not only engage in establishing jural ‘correlatives’ and ‘opposites’
(Hohfeld 1978) between ‘pairs of individuals’ (Simmonds 1998: 142), that
is, in establishing what rights individuals have in relation to others and to
which the latter are obligated. Propelling the analytical debate on rights is the
existence of ‘dichotomies’, not least between abstract freedom and the material
circumstances of of choice
choiceofor the one
choice between
or the individual
one between autonomy
individual and and
autonomy the
the public
public goodgood (Simmonds
(Simmonds 1998:
1998: 129).However,
129). However,thethedeployment
deploymentofof haq
haq by
Bhil activists does not suggest or uphold dichotomous relationships between
individuals and the public good, rather, it signifies a cosmic inseparability and
indivisibility of individuals from the collective good. Moreover, even if rights
theorists do not premise rights on a commitment to individualism or when
they refuse a rights-based morality, they continue to insist that rights provide
grounds ‘for action in the interest of other beings’. In other words, rights are
envisaged to serve the interests only of individuals as human beings whether
as individuals or in collectives; rights whether individual or collective have to
be ‘consistent with humanism’ (Raz 1986: 208). Therein lies the rub. Neither
humanism nor moralsovereignty
or moral sovereigntyofofthe
theindividual
individual or
or their
their interests,
interests, whether
collective or individual, provide the justification for the haq claimed by the Bhil
activists over their ancestral forests and against their dispossession. In their
narratives, haq operates to uphold a cosmological and a normative order with its
prescribed set of ethical relations and responsibilities, which include duties to
(protect) nature.15 It has a normative, non-humanist, cosmic-ontological quality
and its normative and ethical remit extends beyond self-regarding individuals
and their acts of claim-making to invoke a social and political imaginary of
living in the world alongside other beings.
Now, although Bhil activists at Kotra have been unsuccessful in their bid
to get the sanctuary notification quashed in the courts, they were able to use
the rights under the Forest Rights Act especially those empowering elected
village councils to decide on the use of forest lands for ‘non-forestry’ purposes
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 153

and for ‘mega industrial projects’ to stop the relocation of two two villages to
facilitate the progress of the the Phulwari
Phulwari Ki Ki Naal sanctuary.16
Naal sanctuary. 16 The
The act clearly
released democratic
democraticenergies
energies andandstrengthened
strengthened gramgram
sabhassabhas,
(villagewhich
assemblies),
have
which have
organised organised
popular popular
refusals refusals
of large capitaloftakeover
large capital
in the takeover in the name
name of development
of development
such such mining
as by the global as by thegiant
global mining
Vedanta giant Vedanta
Aluminum ( JenaAluminum
2013) while(Jena
also
2013)
leadingwhile also leading
to increased to increased
coercion and statecoercion andon
violence state
theviolence
Adivasioncommunities
the Adivasi
communities withholding
withholding consent consent
to these. to these.
In recent In recentthese
years, however, years,democratic
however, these
gains
democratic
of the Forestgains of the
Rights ActForest Rights
have been Act have
severely been severely
curtailed throughcurtailed
executivethrough
orders
executive orders
and directives and directives
(Aggarwal 2014),(Aggarwal
and also by2014), and also
legislative acts by
of legislative
Parliament.acts
In
of
JulyParliament.
2016, India Inpassed
July 2016, India passed theAfforestation
the ‘Compensatory ‘Compensatory FundAfforestation
Act’, 2016
Fund
(CAF Act’,
Act), 2016
which(CAF Act),
formally which
takes awayformally takes away
the requirement the requirement
of seeking the consentof
seeking the consent
of the gram of thetogram
sabhas prior sabhas
carrying outprior to carryingorout
development development
industrial or
projects
industrial projects affecting
affecting Indigenous Indigenous
lands (Amnesty lands (Amnesty
International 2018;International 2018;
Shrivastava 2018),
Shrivastava
thus leaving 2018), thus leaving
the Adivasi communitiesthe Adivasi communities
even more exposed toeven more exposed
dispossession and
to dispossession
violence and violence
by transnational by and
capital transnational capital and state development.
state development.

The Fragile and Gendered Subject of Haq

Before I bring to close the discussion on haq as a cosmological idea, I want
sarpanch Napi
to revisit the actions of sarpanch, Napi Bai. Similar
Similar to
to the
the case
case of counter-
development exhibited by the jawabdehi yatra, the counter-conduct in the
‘no-confidence’ motion
motion passed by Medi Panchayat under Napi Bai’s direction
panchayat under
and leadership is evident in the collective action of the Adivasi villagers who
deploy existing legal constitutionalism and legal rights to demand that the
state properly uphold the laws and policies that it has itself promulgated. In
this case, too, a ‘critical counter-conduct’ of rights—of very marginal groups
acting in concert and holding the rulebook guaranteeing self-governance
rights of Indigenous groups over natural resource management—is forged
through activism and legal constitutionalism. But the staging of this counter-
conduct by a collective assembling in a public space does beg the question as
to who it is that is allowed to be the subject of rights in the terms of rights
and recognitions set out by the state? Can the homo juridicus and the homo
politicus only ever appear as an already recognised abstract and autonomous
subject with full rights able to represent themselves either individually or as
a unitary collective subject? What about intersectionally marked gendered
subjects who are unable to inhabit this abstract autonomous personhood and
who are only ever recognised through their concrete relational identities? How
do these subjects stake a claim to rights in the absence of either an ability
154 Vernacular Rights Cultures

to appear as abstract autonomous subjects or to mobilise and represent the

collective will? This question becomes crucial especially in contexts when
concrete gendered subjects are unable to mobilise a critical collective mass to
appear on their behalf. Let me illustrate my point by turning once again to
the case of Napi Bai. As I have outlined above, Napi Bai emerged as a key
figure in forging the collective will of the people
figure people of ofthe
thePanchayat
panchayat against the
state but paradoxically she is also a fragile, gendered and precarious subject
of rights herself. Elected twice as sarpanch to a ‘reserved’17 seat for women in
1995 and in 2010, Napi Bai is very well regarded for her competence, wisdom
and courage. Despite her various achievements and standing, in the recently
conducted Panchayat elections in
panchayat elections in Rajasthan
Rajasthan inin 2015
2015 when she declared her
intention to contest
contest elections
elections again,
again, the constituents
constituents of of her
her Panchayat
panchayat told her
in no uncertain terms that they would never elect a woman to an unreserved
or ‘general post’. A ‘general’ post, Napi Bai told me is a ‘man’s post’ and when
voting for a general seat, most people will ‘vote for a man’. Her decision to
contest a ‘general seat’ was widely read as challenging the entitlement of Adivasi
men to the ‘general seat’. Consequently, a concerted effort was mounted against
Napi Bai’s election campaign, involving not only large sums of bribe money
but also alcohol, both of which she says she was unable to compete against
or indeed raise resources for. Undeterred and confident of her standing and
panchayat, Napi
experience in the Panchayat, Napi Bai
Bai went
went ahead regardless
regardless and contested
the ‘general’ sarpanch seat. Unsurprisingly though, she failed to be re-elected
to the post of the sarpanch on a ‘general seat’, but her defeat was only by the
narrowest of margins—in the end, she only received 130 votes less than her
opponent, out of of aa Panchayat
panchayat constituency of nearly 3000 3000 registered voters.
Napi Bai’s experience of contesting elections points to the paradox of quotas for
women: of shoring up representation for women while also limiting it to what
it delimits. For instance, Napi Bai’s election as sarpanch in the first instance
through winning a reserved seat for Adivasi women in the gram panchayat both
underscores the importance of institutional correctives to secure substantive
equality (in this
this case
caseofofthe
theright
rightto
tohold
holdpolitical
politicaloffice and to
case and to put
put oneself forward
for political representation), and the significant loss of representation in the
absence of these. However, institutional correctives also function to police
and regulate gender representation and thereby limit and shackle women’s
rights to just those specific institutions. In this case, the representational
quotas for women do the work of increasing representation of women only
ever in the presence of quotas and thereby, also have the effect of obstructing
the logic of gender representation from seeping into the broader politics. A
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 155

critical focus on the work of institutional correctives in both addressing but

also shoring up gender inequalities and conflicts is crucial in order to avoid
political arguments that view the failure of gender equality as a problem of
backward cultures who fail to modernise through the state. In the context of
Napi Bai and other Bhil women, quotas or ‘reserved seats’ allows the political
appearance of gendered Adivasi subjects but only in the terms of recognition
set up by the state. And, the failure of Adivasi women to show up within these
statist political frames often incites straightforward, binary and non-complex
analysis quick to locate Adivasi groups within an ahistorical and depoliticised
cultural framework untouched by modernity or development, while locating
the state as civilisationally modern and progressive. Crucially, though, this
analysis removes the state from responsibility with respect to the dispossession,
forced displacement, violence, precarity and vulnerability it has unleashed on
Adivasis in India and to zone in exclusively and discretely on the problem of
gender inequality in Adivasi communities and to diagnose it as that which can
be addressed through re-adjusting the terms of recognition and representation.
This is not an argument to either remove these institutional quotas or indeed to
downplay the very real nature of gendered political struggles for representation
within Adivasi communities but only to strike caution against the easy slippage
into ahistorical and non-intersectional thinking that keeps the intersectional
struggles for gender equality outside of institutional power relations, political
context, and the everyday violent and oppressive interactions with the state.18

An Islamic Justification of Haq

Tracking haq further northwest takes me from the foothills of the Aravalli
mountain ranges into the plains of the Punjab in Pakistan where the nearly two
decade long mobilisations of the Anjuman Mazarain or the AMP (Tenants
Association of Punjab) in rural Punjab have been demanding the restoration of
their ownership and sharecropping rights to the land taken over by the Pakistani
military. The mobilisations of the AMP provide us with yet another insight into
the specific political imaginaries which produce particular vernacular rights
cultures. The peasant mobilisations for land rights in the military stronghold
of the Punjab is the most significant working class movement in postcolonial
Pakistan explicitly directed at challenging the institutional and financial
power and privileges enjoyed by the military in Pakistan. Formed in 1999, the
AMP represents one million tenant farming households (Rizvi 2019: 296).
The enormity and significance of this mobilisation cannot be underestimated,
156 Vernacular Rights Cultures

not least because the military has been in direct rule in Pakistan over long
periods, and of the magnitude of social, political and economic capital it
wields in the country. In ostensibly democratic India, where the Adivasis
have been invited to participate and cast their votes to elect representatives
in regularly held elections, and where there are formal constitutional rights
in place that guarantee entitlements, the actual exercise of rights has invoked
severe state repression and there has been an active executive and legislative
bid to dilute these rights by the state. In Pakistan, the stakes could not be
higher: the peasants are locked in a direct battle with Pakistan’s military, the
state’s strongest and most powerful institution. The state has not held back
deploying
from using its military
its military mightmight againstagainst the Mazarain,
the Mazarain, deploying deploying tanks,
tanks, bullets,
barricades
bullets, and internal
barricades andsecurity
internallaws againstlaws
security them. Predictably,
against them.the mobilisations
Predictably, the
of the peasant of
mobilisations farmers have been
the peasant brutally
farmers haverepressed and therepressed
been brutally repressionand against
the
the Mazarain
repression has been
against the strongest
the Mazarain haswhen
been the military
strongesthas beenthe
when in military
government has
in Pakistan.
been Over thein last
in government 20 years,
Pakistan. Overthetherepressions of the
last 20 years, theMazarain
repressions have
of
resulted
the in 17 have
Mazarain deaths and several
resulted in 17 thousand
deaths and peasants
several have been of
thousand arrested.
peasantsMost
are
notoriously,
behind bars.however, many of the
Most notoriously, Mazarain
however, many leaders
of thehave been placed
Mazarain leadersunder
have
Section
been 7 of under
placed Pakistan’s National
Section Action Plan
7 of Pakistan’s for Terrorism.
National Action Plan for Terrorism.19
19 The poor landless

peasants
The poorare now designated
landless peasants are as terrorists by the Pakistani
now designated statebyfor
as terrorists thedemanding
Pakistani
ownership over the land
state for demanding they have
ownership been
over thetilling
land theyfor over
havea been
hundred years
tilling forand
overfora
seeking
hundredtoyears wrestandit for
back from to
seeking thewrest
control of the
it back from Pakistani
the controlmilitary,
of thewhich has
Pakistani
illegally
military,usurped
which has it. illegally usurped it.
The
The struggles
struggles of of the
the AMPAMP must must bebe understood
understood in the context of the
dominance of the military in Pakistan which is also among the largest
landowners
landowners in Pakistan;
Pakistan; a position it has has achieved
achieved through
through organising
organising
‘land transfers’ to itself and the wider ‘military fraternity’, not by illegal or
extra-institutional means but through legal and institutional manipulations
with some
someaid aidfromfrom systematic
systematic actsacts of state
of state violence violence
(Siddiqa (Siddiqa 2007).
2007). Recent
Recent
scholarshipscholarship
on Pakistan on Pakistan has documented
has documented the naturethe nature
and extent and ofextent
the
of the military’s
military’s ‘economic ‘economic predatoriness’
predatoriness’ (Siddiqa(Siddiqa
2007: 5)2007:
and traced5) anditstraced
roots
its roots
to the to the
‘unique ‘unique
colonial colonial
social social
contract’ (Khan contract’ (Khan2014:
and Akhtar and 23)
Akhtar
that
2014:
produced 23)loyal
thatcolonial
produced loyalthrough
subjects colonial subjectsland
operating through operating land
distribution/transfers;
distribution/transfers;
a mode of patronage that a mode of patronage
the military in Pakistanthat the militaryover
has carried in Pakistan
into the
has carried over
postcolonial state into
with the greatpostcolonial statea striking
effect. In fact, with great effect. In fact,
commonality in thea
striking
strugglescommonality
of both the JZJA in theandstruggles
the AMP of isboth
thatthetheyJZJA
bothand bring theinto
AMP sharpis
that
reliefthey both bringcolonial
the continuing into sharp relief of
haunting thelegal
continuing coloniality
arrangements and theof social
legal,
social and economic
and economic arrangementsarrangements. In the case
these instituted. In theof case
Pakistan, the carry-
of Pakistan, the
over of colonial
carry-over of colonial legallegalarrangements
arrangements hashashelped
helpedforge
forge aa postcolonial
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 157

‘state-society consensus’ based on the ‘guardianship of the military’ (Khan

and Akhtar 2014: 36). For not only do these ‘land transfers’ to the Pakistani
military owe their legal and institutional legitimacy to various colonial era
laws such as the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 and The Colonization of
Land Act 1912 (later updated by the Government of Pakistan in 1965), but
also the management of these lands by the military in postcolonial Pakistan
is based on the Cantonment Land Administration Rules, 1937, used by the
colonial military (Siddiqa 2007: 177). Yet it is also the case that it is over
the question of land that the ‘state-society consensus’ in Pakistan suffers its
first ‘public fracture’ (Khan and Akhtar 2014: 28) with the struggles of the
peasant sharecroppers at Okara and Khanewal mounting a ‘resistance to the
post-colonial state dominated by the army’ (Akhtar 2006: 481).
Essentially, the AMP are demanding ownership over the 68,000 hectares
of land they have been tilling ever since 1885. The historical antecedents of
the peasant discontent at Okara and Khanewal can be traced directly to the
vast population transfers that were undertaken by the British colonial State in
order to populate its vast irrigation projects particularly in the Punjab. From
1885 onwards, nine population resettlement projects were set up at the sites
of canal irrigated projects along the five rivers which drained the province of
Punjab in undivided colonial India. New legislation was drafted to legitimize
this ‘unique historical experiment in imperial social engineering’ (Akhtar
2006: 483). Consequently, The Punjab Tenancy Act of 1887 granted tenancy
status to the transferred populations, and the Punjab Alienation of Land Act,
1900, allowed the colonial state to bequeath land to its ‘loyal’ subjects (Akhtar
2006; Saigol 2004; Siddiqa 2007). Through transferring whole communities of
people from across India to these irrigated agricultural sites, the colonial state
aimed both to create an independent class of proprietary peasants as well as
to transfer ownership rights to those who would help secure its economic and
political legitimacy (Akhtar 2006; Saigol 2004). The ‘transferred’ populations
to the irrigated land settlements in the Punjab were given an undertaking by the
colonial state that they would be given inalienable property rights to the land
after a period of 10–15 years but that in the interim, they would have usufruct
rights only and would cultivate the land as sharecroppers. However, this promise
was never upheld, either in the colonial period or by the postcolonial state. As a
result, these peasants continued cultivating only on the basis of usufruct rights
over the land and as sharecroppers rather than as landowning peasants. Except
for a short period between 1957 and 1960, when ownership of some of this land
158 Vernacular Rights Cultures

was transferred to the Mazarain, an order that was subsequently rescinded,

the peasant populations on these lands have more or less continued to till the
land according to the sharecropping and tenancy rights established under the
1887 Act. In the early half of 2000, the military administrators of these farms
introduced changes to the original terms of the contract and revised the basis
of the prevailing peasant sharecropping arrangement concluded over a century
ago, which regulated the share of the agricultural produce and occupancy rights.
The revised terms of the contract replaced sharecropping with its proportional
division of crop yields to requiring cash rentals (Human Rights Watch 2004).
Fearing economic destitution and eviction, the peasant sharecropper farmers
organised themselves as the
the Anjuman
AnjumanMazarain
Mazarain adopting
adoptingthe
theslogan
sloganmaalki
malki ya
maut (‘ownership or death’) in order to oppose the new terms of the contract
and, in so doing, openly challenged Pakistani
the Pakistani military
military state.state.
On 7 October 2000, 5,000 peasant farmers organised a peaceful protest
against the new tenancy laws proposed by the military. Two days later, armed
police along with the Frontier Constabulary entered the Okara Farms and
started a campaign of violence against the village sharecroppers. Thus, began
four years of intimidation and siege of the Okara farms by the military leading
to arbitrary imprisonments without trial, intimidations, beatings and fatalities.
In the course of the agitation and in aftermath, various legal challenges were
mounted by the AMP against the military in Pakistani courts which, in turn,
placed the military ownership of the farmlands under legal scrutiny, thus
making the very claim of ownership to these lands a legal and even a political
question. The court proceedings established that the Pakistani military was,
in fact, not in any legal position to introduce changes to the peasant contract
and even less able to establish through documentary evidence, its proprietary
status as the landowner.20 As a consequence of the legal pronouncements, the
tenants of Okara and Khanewal military farms have not surrendered any share
of their crop yields to the military, Pakistan’s most powerful institution, and
have continued to retain control over the land.
On first reading, it might seem not altogether unsurprising that the activists
of the AMP deploy the term haq to demand their land rights. After all they
represent the predominant religious and national group most identified with
Urdu in the subcontinent, that is, Pakistani Muslims. However, while it is the
case that newly formed state of Pakistan adopted Urdu as Pakistan’s lingua-
franca in 1948, this neither establishes that all Pakistanis are either ‘native’
Urdu speakers nor that Urdu is widely spoken throughout the country. In
fact, neither is Urdu the most popular language spoken in Pakistan, coming
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 159

in after Punjabi, Sindhi and Pashto and only spoken by 8 per cent of the
population (Government of Pakistan 2014), nor does it, and as we have seen
already through the deployment of haq in Rajasthan, have any less presence
and influence in India. If anything, the number of Urdu speakers in India
total three and a half times those of Pakistan and even though the learning of
Urdu script is declining in India, the spoken language is itself thriving. And,
all this of course, establishes the widespread use of haq as the predominant
word for a right in the subcontinent.
In the lush fields of the military farms in the Punjab in Pakistan, the
justificatory premise underpinning the deployment of haq by the AMP
is neither cosmological nor tied to demands for citizenship, instead, it is
embedded in and derives its justification from Islamic jursiprudentialism and
Qur’anic meanings and is consequently tied very strongly to the idea of ‘right
conduct’. However, not unlike the demands of the activist groups in Rajasthan
that I described before, the Islamic premise deployed by the Mazarain also
exceeds the legal category of rights, and in contrast to the Islamic accounts of
haq presented by Rosen (1980), Hirsch (1998) and Geertz (1993), are claims
against the state for the restitution of laws of ownership under secular legal
arrangements and not against particular persons under Islamic personal law.
The following narrative of an activist of the AMP at Khanewal allows us to
document haq that derives its mainstay from a popular Islamic understanding,
but one used outside of a strictly religious context and towards what might be
seen as secular ends.

This word (haq) comes from Islam because Islam clearly marks out a very clear
definition of the practices and conduct that constitute right behaviour. Islam
invokes haq in two separate ways: a) as Haqooq ul Allah which is to do with
right conduct in the discharge of religious obligations such as offering prayers
five times a day, fasting during Ramzan and fulfilling all those religious that
make me a good Muslim and b) Haqooq ul abad which relates to right conduct
in respect of other human beings including towards my government and my
family ...
The right to cultivate and possess ownership is prescribed in the Holy
Qur’an. For instance, in the Qur’an on paragraph three, it says very clearly: if
someone who cultivated the land for five years, he then becomes the owner of
the land. Therefore, the Mazarain have a right over the land which is justified
by Islam itself.21

I want to make clear that by documenting a particular justificatory

premise of haq that explicitly derives from an Islamic imaginary, I am neither
160 Vernacular Rights Cultures

suggesting that the AMP is an Islamic movement or that an Islamic imaginary

dominates understandings of haq among the AMP activists. Moreover, I am
not arguing that this narrative reflects a definitive version of Islamic haq but
only that it is a conception of haq that traces its normative underpinnings to
Islamic texts and to mystical Islam (Schimmel 1975). And, therefore, in this
particular narrative, I am less interested in questions of ‘purity’ or the faithful
recalling of the Qu’ranic passage and more in the marshalling of Qur’anic
texts by peasant activists in their struggle for land rights. As noted correctly
by the above narrative, within Islamic scholarly heritage, the notion of haq
is often evoked as right conduct. In Islamic texts for instance, haq or haqq is
referred to as ‘right things’ and contrasted with batil or wrong things. ‘Haq is
the doing of right things like the acts of obedience, the doing of which God
has not forbidden’ and batil or ‘wrong things’ is ‘associated with injustice, Kufr,
and the acts of disobedience. Both are equally God’s creation. But the one is
right and the other is wrong’ (Isutzu 1965). This interpretation of something
being morally right or ‘morally upright’ is quite distinct from having a right
over something or possessing something. It is important for me to add here
that haq as ‘right conduct’ must not be viewed as a gender-neutral term nor
should its intellectual justification invoking Islamic heritage be regarded as
‘nonpolitical’ (Mernissi 1991; Ouedghiri 2002).
The fortunes of AMP have risen and fallen. At its peak, the membership
of the movement rose to a million. Although it became a ‘broad movement’
for land rights, the leadership struggles within the movement and the brutal
reprisals by the military took their toll. Consequently, the AMP movement has
splintered over the years and religious and political divides have become more
stubbornly entrenched. In an interesting twist to the predominantly binary
narratives of social movements in Pakistan that are more often than not led
by a focus on political Islam and Islamisation of Pakistan and which roughly
cleave these into either as secular or religious (Khan and Kirmani 2018), many
of the Mazarain’s prominent members and leadership in the early years were
Christian. It was spearheaded in its initial years by Dr Christopher John and
Iqbal Younus, both Christians. However, over the years, and as Aasim Sajjad
Akhtar (2019) writes, the movement ‘subsequently slowed and eventually
stopped moving with regards to quam, biraderi, and religious efforts’ (Akhtar
2019), resulting in the locus of power shifting to the numerically stronger
Muslim Arain groups and their leader Mehr Abdul Sattar. Even as the question
of religion did emerge to become a site of leadership contest, however, there
were other pressing reasons for the splintering in the AMP leadership. In
particular, these arose over accepting donor funds from international NGOs
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 161

such as Action Aid, and also over the question of joining formal politics. In
effect, the first break within the AMP came about with the expulsion of
Christopher John and Iqbal Younus for unilaterally accepting funding from
Action Aid and without consulting with rest of the AMP leadership (Rizvi
2019). As for the question of AMP’s association with party political groups,
while the initial stand of the AMP was explicitly ‘nonpolitical’, to maintain no
formal affiliation with formal political parties, however, under the leadership of
Mehr Abdul Sattar, the AMP did become affiliated with the main opposition
party, the Pakistan’s People’s Party (PPP). Mehr Abdul Sattar, who is the
secretary general of the AMP contested the general elections twice: first in
2013 as an independent candidate supported by the left parties and the second
time, as a candidate for the PPP; he lost both elections.

‘In a Field of One’s Own’? Gender and Questions of Land

Ownership
The AMP protests have been marked by large mobilisations of women peasants.
Mobilising as the ‘Thappa Brigade’, women peasants were out in the ‘frontlines’,
standing vigil during the military siege, often leaving their children behind at
home in order to go to the police stations to get the men released from police
custody (Saigol 2004).22 The word thappa means a bat or a thick stick that
women use to wash the dirt off clothes. The thappas inscribed with the slogans
of the Mazarain, malki ya maut (‘ownership or death’) and thappa haq mangda
ay (‘my thappa demands my rights’) (Saigol 2004: 58) have become symbolic
of the non-violent and unarmed struggle of the landless peasants against
the military might of the Pakistani state, which lined up its heavy weaponry
against the AMP. Being under military siege meant that not only were roads,
telephones, electricity and water supplies cut off and contact with the world
outside heavily surveilled if not altogether blocked but also that the visibility of
women in the movement made them targets of state violence including sexual
violence. There are reports of women being beaten mercilessly and threatened
with sexual violence. The threats of sexual violence were directed both at the
women Mazarain as they stood at the frontlines but also at their male kin who
were in custody.23 Furthermore, not only were the women threatened with
sexual violence but also their children could no longer attend school. Rubina
Saigol (2004) interviewed women peasants at Okara farms who spoke of
soldiers kidnapping their children and subjecting them to all kinds of torture
and abuse in a bid to pressurise their parents to sign the new contract.
162 Vernacular Rights Cultures

The visibility and presence of women in large numbers in the peasant

mobilisations was not ignored by the AMP and women were accommodated
in the organisational structure of the AMP which also has a separate AMP
women’s wing. The mobilisation of women in political movements in large
numbers inevitably begs the question of the actual effect, if any, that the large
numbers of women mobilising have on gender politics both within those
particular movements and also on the broader terrain of gender politics that
exists independently of those movements. In short, what have the popular
mobilisations of women in the AMP meant for feminist and gender politics
in Pakistan? Scholars writing on the AMP have noted that it challenged
established and entrenched social and political hierarchies including existing
gender norms (Shaheed 2010; Saigol 2004; Mumtaz and Mumtaz 2010;
Akhtar 2019; Khan and Kirmani 2018). They note that women’s mobilisations
in the AMP have increased women’s political agency and empowerment and
loosened some patriarchal controls, as evident in the noticeable increases in
the mobility of women and education of girls among the Mazarain but also
in the marked reduction in the incidents of domestic violence within the
homes of the Mazarain (Mumtaz and Mumtaz 2010). However, some scholars
also point out that this ‘newfound’ sense of empowerment has not resulted
in a clear, strong and a separate demand for women’s ownership to the land
that they till alongside the men. In an early study of the AMP women, the
feminist scholar Rubina Saigol (2004) raised important questions in relation
to land ownership within the movement and noted that the question of land
ownership for women was clearly a question that baffled and confounded her
field respondents. In studies since, including interviews for this book with the
AMP women activists, it is not that the question of women’s land ownership
rights is not acknowledged or outrightly dismissed but that it is considered
secondary or a deferred one—deferred to a time after the ownership question
of the land has been legally settled. Across South Asia, land and property
ownership underpins and regulates patriarchal gender relations and women
are systematically excluded from property rights (Agarwal 1994). It is worth
noting in this regard, that the exclusion of women from property rights occurs
in spite of the equal rights to own property within both Pakistani and Indian
legal constitutionalism. Therefore, despite legal constitutionalist guarantees,
in South Asia, no more than 10 per cent women own land in their own names,
with women in India driving this figure towards the top end of the statistic.
Across the border in Pakistan, the figure falls steeply to 4 per cent (UNDP
2016).24 In the case of the AMP, Saigol (2004) notes that even if women
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 163

Mazarain were to demand their right to ownership of the land, under the
terms of the 1887 Tenancy Act laid down by the colonial state, under which the
demand for land ownership is being made by the AMP, there is no reference
to ownership rights of women (Saigol 2004: 71).25 In short, the law that is
being appealed to reinstate the ownership rights of the Mazarain recognises
only ‘male tenants’ as entitled to ‘permanent occupancy’.
Yet again, we see that the gender question on land rights when it has been
raised has had to be begged separately. The question of women’s ownership
of land has not come up organically within the AMP mobilisations. In 2008,
the question of women’s right to own the land was articulated by some AMP
women members in Khanewal who set up the ‘Peasant Women’s Society’ to
demand land rights for landless peasant women from the state (Mumtaz and
Mumtaz 2010). On the whole, however, the demand for land rights for women
has not become a part of the demands raised by the AMP and neither has
it emerged organically among the women members of the AMP or indeed
shared across the movement, including by the women peasants in the AMP.
It is worth asking, however, if the political mobilisations of the AMP and the
very large number of women participants within it has led to the articulation
of the land question and indeed of land dispossession as the most pressing
demand within the women’s movement in Pakistan? Over the years, the
Mazarain women have received support from a range of women’s groups and
activists in Pakistan but it would be safe to say that the cause of the Mazarain
has not occurred as a central demand of the women’s and feminist movement
in Pakistan and neither has the question of land ownership been propelled to
the top of the feminist agenda in Pakistan. Having said this, feminist scholars
in Pakistan acknowledge that the fragmented and diffuse demands for women’s
land ownership that have arisen within the AMP have in fact, ‘indicated a
shift (even if only in symbolic terms) in the existing thinking predominantly
focused on community rights to that of women’s rights. This shift is not without
significance, especially, when due share in inheritance and property were until
very recently not subjects of public debate’ (Mumtaz and Mumtaz 2010: 148).
However, as they also point out, any consolidation of this ‘shift’ will require
building up ‘long term linkages’ across the women’s movement in Pakistan
(Shaheed 2010), including alliances of solidarity between peasant women in
rural Pakistan and urban women activists campaigning for women’s rights in
the cities of Lahore and Karachi.
The fissures in
of the Pakistani
Pakistani feminist
feminist movement that operate along urban
and rural women’s activism are not without resonances within the Indian
feminist movement. As I noted in Chapter 4, in the aftermath of the rape of
164 Vernacular Rights Cultures

Bhanwari Devi, women’s activists and organisations from metropolitan India

descended to offer support to Bhanwari Devi and to express their outrage at
the shoddy criminal investigation and her humiliating treatment at the hands
of state investigating agencies. Not unlike the case of the Mazarain women, the
sathins are rural women without the cultural and social capital of metropolitan
feminists. Even though the public show of solidarity on the ground with the
sathins was important, it did not mean either that the representational capacity
of the Indian feminist movement had either shifted radically, or that it has
been able to demonstrate a strong commitment to intersectional oppressions
across class, caste, regional and sexuality divides, or to a politics of solidarity
that bridges the rural–urban divide, ever since.
In recent years, in addition to the rural–urban divide, the glaring
intersectional deficit of feminist movements in India and Pakistan has been
their inability to articulate a sufficiently transnational frame that would enable
them to represent struggles in the region that call into question the category
of the nation state itself. For instance, it is telling that the widely documented
evidence of sexual violence, enforced disappearances, acts of torture and
extrajudicial killings perpetrated by Indian military and para-military forces
in India’s ‘states of exceptions’ in Kashmir and Manipur have never been the
top demand of India’s feminist movement (Madhok 2018), and for that matter,
neither have allegations of sexual violence committed by the Pakistani army
against those it has deemed as terrorist
terrorist sympathisers
sympathisersfigured
figuredasasthe
thepre-eminent
preeminent
demand of the feminist movement in Pakistan. In Pakistan, the military
operations launched in the name of the ‘war against terror’ have used the Anti-
Terror Act (1997) to clamp down on democratic politics of dissent. In using
the anti-terror laws against the Mazarain, the Pakistani state has decided not
only that the Mazarain are ‘terrorists’ but also has put a siege on their lands and
occupied them. As occupation is always corporeal, the fact that sexual violence
has accompanied military siege is no surprise but only in keeping with the
patterns of military siege and occupation. Therefore, the key point here is not
the prevalence of sexual violence but rather the easy conversion of democratic
dissent into an act of dissent against the nation state and the normalisation of
sexual violence used to discipline dissent against the nation.

Meanwhile, The Last Few

Meanwhile, Few Years
Years……
The repression of the peasants’ mobilisations at Okara, Khanewal and at other
military farms have neither escaped critical scrutiny nor condemnation (Human
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 165

Rights Watch 2004). The Pakistan Senate’s sub-committee on Human Rights

has produced a set of recommendations to resolve the dispute.26 On 27 June
2016, The National Commission for Human Rights Pakistan (NCHR), a
statutory body27 issued an interim report on the Okara Farms, in which it
recommended that the cases under the ‘Anti terrorism Act should not be
proceeded with until the NCHR or the body constituted in collaboration
with NCHR hands down its findings…’ findings …’(NCHR,
(NCHR 2016: 17). In recent recent years,
years,
the imposition of terrorism charges against the peasant activists has been
condemned by several Pakistani Senators (Butt 2017). However, this public
censure by Pakistan’s Senate has not detained the military from pursuing the
Mazarain. Since 2001, scores of charges have piled up against the Mazarain
leaders, with the most notorious among them being that they are now branded
as the ‘enemies of the state’. In March 2016, Okara’s district coordination officer
issued a 30-day detention order against Mehr Abdul Sattar ostensibly so that
the authorities could proceed with the 26 cases pending against him since 2001.
The Herald newspaper reported that a letter written by the Management of
Military Farms Group Okara claimed that ‘his arrest had absolutely nothing to
do with the military farmlands’ but rather to do with his ‘anti-state activities’
in association with ‘foreign, Indian agency RAW’. Along with a few AMP
activists, Sattar was ‘detained in a newly set up high security jail in Sahiwal
town meant for hardened criminals and feared terrorists’ (Sheikh 2016). In 2017,
Pakistan’s pre-eminent Supreme Court lawyer, the late Asma Jahangir, brought
a petition in front of Pakistan’s Supreme Court against procedural violations in
Mehr Abdul Sattar’s imprisonment at Sahiwal. In 2018, the Supreme Court
granted Mehr Abdul Sattar bail, but he was shortly sentenced to a 10 year
imprisonment on charges of terrorism filed against him at a police station in
Okara in 2015 (W. A. Khan 2018). On September 8, 2020, The Lahore High
Court acquitted MehrMehr Abdul
Abdul Sattar
Sattar ofofterrorism
terrorism(The
(The Dawn,
Dawn 2020). While
Abdul Sattar is by no means the only AMP member to be imprisoned—in that
2015 Okara case, for instance, 165 farmers were named in the FIR and 2 were
eventually charged—nonetheless, by directly targeting the AMP leadership
under anti-terrorism laws, the Pakistan military has registered its strong refusal
to accede lands to the Mazarain.
Themilitary
The militaryrepression
repressionofofthethe Mazarain,
Mazarain, however,
however, is notis the
notdominant
the dominant
story
story the
here; here; the political
political strugglestruggle
for haq forwagedhaq by
waged by the Mazarain
the Mazarain is. The
is. The Mazarain
Mazarain have in
have mobilised mobilised in their
their villages andvillages
in the and in the
streets; theystreets; they have
have taken theirtaken
fight
their
to thefight toand
courts the to
courts and toParliament.
Pakistan’s Pakistan’s Recently,
Parliament.theRecently, the National
National Commission
Human
for HumanRights Commission
Rights in Pakistan,
in Pakistan, has takenhas taken the lead
the lead in trying
in trying to to bringa
bring
asettlement
settlementtotothe
the dispute.
dispute. On March
March 29 2019, the Pakistani newspaper‘The
29 2019, the Pakistani Newspaper, The
166 Vernacular Rights Cultures

News’
News carried
carriedaastatement
statement from the NCHR declaring
declaring that
that the Okara Military
Military
Farms case had been settled and that it has now ‘disposed off the case’. The
terms of the settlement were for the ‘farmers to pay batai (share-cropping)
as agreed during negotiations
negotiations and
and for
for the
theMillitary
Military Farms administration to
refrain from harassment or psychological torture.’ These settlement terms had
emerged from an earlier meeting of 01 January 2019, convened by the NCHR
between the representatives of the Mazarain, the Awami Worker’s Party,
Pakistan Government officials and a representative of the Military and the
NCHR where it had been proposed that ‘… criminal cases registered against
the tenants will be withdrawn. Batai (share from crop), which existed prior
to the year 2000, will be restored and tenants would start giving 50 per cent
of their production to the army or the government. Tenants would not get
ownership rights, but no one will harass them in future and they will not be
dislocated’ (Junaidi 2019; Imran 2019). The Pakistani military acknowledged
for the first time that it did not own the land, and that it was the legal property
of the government of Punjab. And, even though, the proposed settlement
does not recognise the Mazarain as the owners of the land, the astounding
admission by the military changes the dynamic of the dispute considerably. It
remains to be seen how this proposed settlement is received by the Mazarain
and also by other stakeholders in Pakistan’s military establishment.

Six Remarks on Human Rights, Political Subjectivation and

Gendered Counter-Development
As I close the two empirical chapters, I want to make six remarks on the
politics of haq, human rights, political subjectivation, counter-development
and gendered counter-conduct that I have been discussing in Chapters 4 and 5.
the feminist
First, the feminist historical
historical ontologies of haq that I present in these two
chapters draw attention to the gendered conceptual life and work of concepts.
Tracking haq across political mobilisations in India and Pakistan shows that
even while haq generates political possibilities and shifts normative horizons
of rights talk, however, these
these normative
normative possibilities
possibilities are
are deeply gendered and
marked by intersectional inequalities.
inequalities. It It is
is worth
worth noting
noting that in each of the
cases of political
political mobilisations
mobilisations that I have that I have
been been and
studying studying and documenting,
documenting, I have not
Icome
haveacross
not come across a single instance where the gender question
a single instance where the gender question came up organically came up
organically
within within
these these
or was or was
raised asraised
part as
of part
the of the collectively
collectively raisedraised demands
demands for
for rights.
rights. Furthermore,
Furthermore, it isit isstriking
strikingthat
thatdespite
despite the
the different
different justificatory
justificatory
premises for haq that are are mobilised
mobilised by these these struggles
struggles and which
which in in turn,
turn,
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 167

enable us to envision an expanded landscape for rights and human rights, the
question of gender equality and rights is almost always justified on the basis of
existing legal constitutional guarantees and rights and rarely ever on religious
and historical premises.
Second, as I have shown across the two chapters, developmentalism produces
its own particular forms of governmentalised power, including modes of
‘perpetual questioning’that
perpetual questioning that sets
sets off
off what
whatIIhave
havecalled
called‘counter-development’.
counter-development.
Paying attention to counter-development enables us to foreground the
centrality of developmentalism as the background context within which rights
talk takes place in ‘most of the world’. Not only does development provide a
great deal of the intellectual mainstay for rights talk but through producing
counter-development, it also shines a light on development’s vast hinterland,
which is generated and regulated through intricate networks of governmental
and non-governmental technologies of power, engaged in manufacturing
consent and mobilising legitimacy for developmentalism across different sites.
Importantly, it shows the intertwined and shared nature of discourses, concerns
and strategies of development and also of its critics.
Third, counter-development enables us to track more carefully the
production of subjects and subjectivities under development contexts. The
right to development with its coupling of human rights and development, and
through its declaratory power, interpellates rights bearing subjects into existence
by making them ‘co-bearers’ of development. The ideational energies released
by human rights open up spaces for political subjectivation and for counter-
development, which paradoxically, by instituting a ‘perpetual questioning’ of
development, reproduce the object of their questioning, that is, development
all over again. However, and as the case of Napi Bai illustrates, there are
limits to counter-development. In other words, counter-development does not
necessarily challenge or resist state policies and development interventions in
order to only ever align these with emancipatory ends. It might, infact, use the
letter of the law or policy to hold out against the broader spirit or implications of
some laws and state policies. I have in mind here the resistance to the initiatives
on gender equality which, as I have noted throughout the book, have needed
to be begged separately.
Fourth, and this is important to note, counter-development emerges within
specific institutional and policy contexts of development. The right to food
movement, for instance, coincided with the neoliberalisation of the Indian
economy in the mid 1990s. The growing official apathy to the farming distress
as a result of successive years of drought and the resultant difficulties of access
168 Vernacular Rights Cultures

to food, lead activists to develop legal and activist strategies and responses to
it. The decision of Napi Bai Bai toto contest
contest Panchayat
panchayat elections too, is rendered
possible by two things: the passage of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment,
which provisioned that ‘not less than one third seats be reserved for women’.28
The second aspect was the decision to include women as co-participants in the
development process as an explicit policy objective of India’s sixth five-year
plan. Referencing the objectives outlined in the UN International Decade of
the Woman (1975), the announcement of inclusion of women in development
in India’s national and state-ledstate led policy making laid the groundwork for the
setting up a series of innovative state sponsored programmes for women’s
development explicitly directed at inaugurating rural women as subjects of
development (Madhok 2013).
Fifth, the
the temporality
temporality of these rights mobilisations places a mild question
mark onon some
some of thethecontemporary
contemporaryscholarship
scholarshipon onneoliberalism
neoliberalism that
that ascribes
to it, among
among other other global
globaleffects,
effects,the
thatimminent death of the These
of necrocitizenship. homo politicus.
citizen
These citizen crystallise
mobilisations mobilisations and crystallise
activate in and
a timeactivate in abytime
identified many identified
scholars by as
many scholars as one
one characterised by thecharacterised
ascendanceby andthe ascendance and
intensification intensificationand
of neoliberalism of
neoliberalism
one marked by andtheone marked by the commercialisation
commercialisation of social relations of and
socialtherelations
evacuationand
the evacuationand
of citizenship of citizenship and politics.
politics. However, However,
far from far fromringing
neoliberalism neoliberalism
in the
ringing
impending in the impending
death of the homodeath of the(Brown
politicus homo politicus
2015),(Brown
or indeed 2015),
all oforfeminist
indeed
all of feminist
activism joining activism
hands joining hands with neoliberalism,
with neoliberalism, in South Asia, in South
the mid Asia,
1980sthe
mid
to the1980s to the
present haspresent has witnessed
witnessed the subaltern
the subaltern mobilisation
mobilisation of radical of radical
views
views on citizenship
on citizenship aimedaimedat bothat countering
both countering the truncating
the truncating of their
of their rightsrights
and
and citizenship
citizenship by thebyneoliberal
the neoliberal
state andstate
alsoand also pressing
towards towards for pressing for the
the conversion
conversion of welfare entitlements
of welfare entitlements promised throughpromised through development,
development, into legal rights.intoThese
legal
rights. These mobilisations
mobilisations have not only have not only engendered
engendered novel activistnovel activist strategies
strategies to demand to
demand
innovative innovative public policies
public policies but havebut have
also beenalsosuccessful,
been successful,
as theasright
the right
to food to
food movement
movement shows, shows, at expanding
at expanding existing
existing sets ofsets of rights
rights and entitlements.
and entitlements. In short,In
short,
in lightinoflight
theseof subaltern
these subaltern mobilisations
mobilisations in Southin South
Asia, Asia, we would
we would stillable
still be be
able tothat
to say say that a great
a great success
success of of neoliberalismand
neoliberalism andneoliberal
neoliberalmarket
market rationality
rationality
has been the devastating
devastating blow these these have
have dealt
dealt to
toglobal
globalredistributive
redistributive politics.
politics.
However, we we would
would be be less
less able to say that it is universally
universally the case that the
ascendance of neoliberalism
neoliberalism has entirely vanquished
vanquished movements for economic
justice, rights
rights and
and redistribution
redistributionaroundaroundthe theglobe.
globe.
Sixth and finally, it is certainly the case that rights and human rights talk
sets off processes of subjectification. However, this subjectification does
not result in the production of a homogenous sovereign and free subject of
global human rights but a subject of rights in the vernacular—one inflected,
Resisting Developmentalism and the Military 169

constrained and enabled by existing intersectional, material and power

hierarchies. Consequently, the politics of human rights in ‘most of the
world’ is not one only of simply enacting or reproducing the global subject of
human rights or indeed of translating global human rights. It is a politics of
struggle for justice that is materially, intersectionally, geopolitically located,
and arises
arises from
fromhistorically
historicallyspecific
specificencounters with
encounters rights
with andand
rights human
humanrights
in
in ‘most
‘most of of
thethe world’.
world’.

Notes
1. Gram sabha is a village assembly, comprising all persons whose names are
included in
included in the electoral rolls for the Panchayat
panchayat at
at the
the village
villagelevel.
level.
2. The Tenth Five Year Plan document 2002–07 states:
As per the information readily available, a population of 21.3 million have
been displaced between 1951 and 1990 in the states of Andhra Pradesh,
Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Orissa. Of
whom, 8.54 million (40 per cent) are tribals and of those only 2.12 million
(24.8 per cent) tribals could be resettled, so far.
See also Fernandes (2009) and Mosse et al. (2002).
3. See Campaign for Survival and Dignity (2003).
4. Joint meetings of gram sabhas inin aa Panchayat
panchayat can
can be called
called on matters where
‘co-ordination with other Gram Sabhas is required,’ and these joint meetings
are to be chaired by the gram sarpanch. See Department of Rural Development
and Panchayati Raj (Department of Rural Development and Panchayati
Raj), Notification No.F.4(6)PESA Rules/Legal/PR/2010/ 1938 Jaipur,
November 01 2011, http://www.rajpanchayat.rajasthan.gov.in/Portals/_default/
PESARules2011.pdf.
5. Department of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj (Department of Rural
Development and Panchayati Raj), Notification No.F.4(6)PESA Rules/Legal/
PR/2010/ 1938 Jaipur, November 01 2011, http://www.rajpanchayat.rajasthan.
gov.in/Portals/_default/PESARules2011.pdf.
6. See in particular, Chapter III
particular Chapter III (4.2e)
(4.2e) of
of the Forest Rights
Rights Act,
Act, 2006.
2006.
See also Chapter V, Department of Rural Development and Panchayati
Raj, Notification No.F.4(6) PESA Rules/Legal/PR/2010/ 1938 Jaipur, 1
November 2011, http://www.rajpanchayat.rajasthan.gov.in/Portals/_default/
PESARules2011.pdf.
7. Interviews with Napi Bai also known as Rapli Bai, July 2015, August 2016
and December 2017, in Kotra and Medi, Kotra Block, Udaipur.
8. The news reportage of the judgment was carried in the national and
international press. See
See,also
alsoChandra
Chandra(2019).
(2019).
170 Vernacular Rights Cultures

9. The actual figures behind the dismal percentages are: a total of 74, 414
individual claims and 1,414 collective ones were made to land titles out of which
38,007 individual claims were accepted and 103 collective claims recognised.
For India wide reports published by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs,Government
of India, see https://tribal.nic.in/FRA/data/MPRMar2020.pdf.
https://tribal.nic.in/FRA/data/MPRMar2020.pdf
10. This power of forest department officials over the process and decision making
on Adivasi claims was emphasised by Dharam Chand Kher, who is the state
coordinator of Rajasthan Adivasi Vikas Manch, which is a collective of 27
organisations working in the area of Adivasi issues across 12 districts in
Rajasthan. In his interviews with me, Kher said:
In Kotra, Mawla Ghata, in Jhuda, there is a jungle of Junapader, there
are about 40 people who live in that village, they put in a collective claim
for ownership over their land, but their claim was rejected. Now there is
a process to reject these claims. If the qabza (habitation) is a recent one,
then the van adhikaar committee or the gram sabha can reject the claim.
Also, during the process of an ongoing verification, the Patwari and the
Forest department or indeed the collector can verify/reject the claims. But
these claims that were rejected were done at the upkhand committee, which
has seven members, including the SDM (Sub-Divisional Magistrate), the
BDO (Block Development Officer), officials of the Ministry of Tribal
Affairs, the Forest Department, and three members of the public. In
this committee meetings, there is a verification of claims and where the
claims are seen as lacking verifiable evidence or enough information, they
can be sent back to the gram sabha to be revised or fixed. However, these
claims were rejected on the basis of one official of the Forest Department
directing the others to reject these claims. There was no meeting held,
not even notes or minutes were prepared for this decision, however, the
committee endorsed the view of the forest official that the claims were
invalid. Now the people of Junapader have been living there for centuries,
we resubmitted their case as ‘appeal’ and put it in the ‘appeal process’,
but nothing has come out of it yet, however, the Forest Department
has swung into action and begun evicting Adivasis from their ancestral
homes and lands. (Interviews
Interviews with
with Dharam
Dharam Chand
Chand Kher,
Kher, Udaipur and
2015–2016.
Kotra, 2015–2016)
11. For accounts of cosmic tales and traditions detailing aboriginal originating
myths and status, see Elwin (1937).
12. Interview with Napi Bai, panchayat,
Panchayat, Kotra,
Kotra, 66August
August2015.
2015.
13. Interview with Harmi Bai, Kotra, Udaipur, Rajasthan, 2005.
14. Interview with Dharam Chand Kher, Rajasthan Adivasi Rights Organisation,
Udaipur, 9 August 2015.
15. Interview with Rapli Bai (also known as Napi Bai), Medi Panchayat, Kotra,
Udaipur, 6 August 2015.
 11. For accounts of cosmic tales and traditions detailing aboriginal originating
myths and status, see Elwin (1937).
12. Interview
Resisting with Napiand
Developmentalism Bai,thePanchayat,
Military Kotra, 6 August 2015. 171
13. Interview with Harmi Bai, Kotra, Udaipur, Rajasthan, 2005.
14. Interview
16. Interview
Resisting with
with Dharam
Developmentalism Rapli andBai,Chand
the Kher, Rajasthan Adivasi Rights Organisation,
Military
2015. 171
Udaipur, 9 August 2015.
17. Under the 73rd Amendment to the Constitution, one-third reserved seats
16. Interview
15. quotas with
or Developmentalism
Resisting Rapli
for women andBai,
Bai
Bai 2015.
(also
the(also
were knownin
known
instituted
Military aslocal
as Napigovernment
Napi Bai),Medi
Bai), MediPanchayat,
panchayat,
institutions. Kotra,
The
171
17. Constitutional
Under
Udaipur, the6 August
73rdAmendment
Amendment
2015. to the Constitution, one-third
also instituted a three-tier structure for local reserved seats
or quotas with
16. Interview
governance forin women
Rapli Bai,
India, were
or instituted
2015.
the Panchayats. in local governmentis institutions.
The Panchayat a democratically The
Constitutional
17. elected
Under the
Under the 73rd
system Amendment
73rdofAmendment
Amendment
local governance also
to instituted
to the
the
with a
Constitution,
Constitution, three-tier
elected councils one-third
one-thirdstructure reserved
at thereserved for local
seats
village-level
governance
quotas
or quotas
(Gram forin women
for
Panchayat),India,block-level
women or
weretheinstituted
were Panchayats.
instituted
(Panchayat The
in local
in local Panchayat
government
government
Samiti), is institutions.
ainstitutions.
democratically
and district-level The
The
(Zilla
elected system
Constitutional
Parishad). Bothof localPESA
Amendment
the governance
also withthe
Act instituted
and elected councils
three-tier
a three-tier
Forest at
Rightsstructure the village-level
structure
Act, 2006,for local
have
(Gram
governance
formally Panchayat),
in India,block-level
inIndia,
empowered orthe
orthethe (Panchayat
panchayats.
Panchayats.
village The The
council or Samiti),
panchayat
thePanchayat
gram isand district-level
a sabha
democratically
is awith (Zilla
elected
democratically
important
Parishad).
system system
elected
develpement Both
of local
related the
local PESA
ofgovernance Act
with
governance
functions and
and elected the
with elected
powers. Forest
councils
For thecouncilsRights
at the at
specific Act,
village
rules 2006,
the laidlevel have
(gram
village-level
down by
formally
panchayat),
(Gram
the empowered
block of
Panchayat),
Government level the village
(panchayat
block-level
Rajathan council
samiti) andthe
(Panchayat
to implement or the
district
Samiti),
PESAgramlevel
and sabha
Act, (zilla with
see parishad).
district-level important
Department Both
(Zilla
of
develpement
the PESA
Parishad).
Rural related
Act
Both
Development andthefunctions
the
andPESAForest and
Act
Panchayati powers.
Rights RajAct,
and the For the specific
2006,
Forest
(Department have
Rights rules
of formally
Rural laid down
empowered
Act,Development
2006, by
have
the
the Government
village
formally
and council
empowered
Panchayati of Rajathan
Raj), orthe to implement
thevillage
gram
Notification sabha
council orthethe
with
No.F.4(6) PESAgramAct,
important
PESA seewith
develpement
sabha Department
Rules/Legal/PR/2010/ of
related
important
Rural Development
functions
develpement
1938 andrelated
Jaipur, 1powers. and Panchayati
For the
functions
November specific
and
2011, Raj
powers. (Department
rulesFor laidthedown of Rural
by the
specific rules
http://www.rajpanchayat.rajasthan.gov.in/ Development
Government
laid down by of
and
the Panchayati
Rajathan
Government Raj),
to implement Notification
of Rajathan
Portals/_default/PESARules2011.pdf.the PESA No.F.4(6)
Act,
to implement the PESA
see Department
PESA Act, Rules/Legal/PR/2010/
of Rural Development
see Department of
18. 1938
Rural
See Jaipur,
and also
Panchayati
Development
Simpson1 November
Raj and
(2014). 2011, http://www.rajpanchayat.rajasthan.gov.in/
(Department
Panchayati of
RajRural Development
(Department of Rural and Panchayati
Development
Portals/_default/PESARules2011.pdf.
19. andRaj),Tariq
See Notification
Panchayati
FarooqRaj), No.F.4(6)
Notification
(2016), PESANo.F.4(6)
‘Pakistan: Rules/Legal/PR/2010/
Anti-terror PESA 1938 Jaipur,
lawsRules/Legal/PR/2010/
used against peasants’ 1
18. 1938
See also
November Simpson
Jaipur,
movement’ 2011, (2014). 2011, http://www.rajpanchayat.rajasthan.gov.in/
http://www.rajpanchayat.rajasthan.gov.in/
1 November
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/pakistan-anti-terror-laws- Portals/_default/
19. Portals/_default/PESARules2011.pdf.
See Tariq Farooq (2016), ‘Pakistan:
PESARules2011.pdf.
used-against-peasants-movement. SeeAnti-terror
also, Human laws Rights
used against Watchpeasants’
(2016);
movement’
18. See also https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/pakistan-anti-terror-laws-
Simpson (2014).
and Jameel, Mehlab ( 2016), ‘Badrunissa: Okara’s ‘Terrorist’ Peasant’ https://
used-against-peasants-movement.
19. See Tariq
Tariq (2016).
Farooq See also Human
(2016), ‘Pakistan: See
Rights
www.tanqeed.org/2016/05/badr-okara-terrorist-peasant/ also,
Watch
Anti-terror Human laws Rights
(2016) and against
used Watchpeasants’
Mehlab (2016);
(2016).
and Jameel,
movement’ Mehlab ( 2016), ‘Badrunissa: Okara’s ‘Terrorist’
https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/pakistan-anti-terror-laws-
20. It has since emerged that the Pakistani military at the time of gaining Peasant’ https://
www.tanqeed.org/2016/05/badr-okara-terrorist-peasant/
used-against-peasants-movement.
independence in 1947 had the lands See also, Human
transferred from Rights
the British Watch (2016);
military to
20. and
It has
them, since
Jameel,
but had emerged
Mehlab that
( 2016),
in effect, paidthe noPakistani
‘Badrunissa: military
rent to Okara’s
the Punjab atRevenue
the time
‘Terrorist’ Peasant’ of gaining
https://
Department,
independence
was theinlessee1947 of hadthethe lands
www.tanqeed.org/2016/05/badr-okara-terrorist-peasant/
which land, transferred
and, hence, asfrom a resultthe British
of reneging military to
on its
them,
20. contractualbut had
It has since agreementin effect,
emerged that paid
withthe no rent
thePakistani to the Punjab
military at the
revenue department, Revenue
had time Department,
very of gaining
little legal
which wastothe
independence
authority inlessee
1947 of
administer hadthethe
these land,
lands and, hence,
farmsasin
transferred
agricultural athe
from result
the ofplace.
firstBritishrenegingmilitaryon its
to
contractual
them,
21. Interview but withagreement
had in effect,with
Mustafa, paidthe no revenue
Khanewal, rent department,
to the
Pakistan, Punjab
2008. Revenue had very little legal
Department,
authority
22. which
Rubina was tothe
Saigol administer
lessee of
(2004) these
conducted agricultural
the land, farms
and, hence,
interviews with asinthe
athe firstofplace.
result
women reneging
at Okara on its
farms
21. contractual
Interview with
and in particular, Mustafa,
agreement Khanewal,
with the revenue
this description Pakistan, 2008.
department,
of the Thappa Brigade had very little legal
is evocative:
22. authority
Rubina Saigol (2004) conducted
to administer thesecars interviews withinthe
agricultural womenplace. at Okara farms
They had fifteen police that theyfarms used in the the first
blockades. They
and in
21. Interview particular,
with this
Mustafa, description of the Thappa Brigade is evocative:
constantly used abusiveKhanewal,
and sexualPakistan,
language2008. to intimidate us. In front
They
22. Rubina had
Saigol fifteen
(2004) police cars
conducted
there were Rangers, and at the back there that theywas
interviews used
withtheinthe thewomen
police. blockades.
Theyatkidnapped
Okara They farms
andconstantly
in used
particular, abusive
this and
description sexual
of language
the Thappa to
one of our boys and left him unconscious on a stack of hay. We thought, intimidate
Brigade is us. In
evocative: front
there
They
all were
hadifRangers,
right, fifteen
you havepoliceand
armsat and
the back
cars thatthere
theywas
ammunition, used
wethein police.
have They The
thethappas.
blockades. kidnappedThey
whole
one of our
constantly
village boys and
used the
reached left
abusive him
spot.and unconscious
Thesexual
Rangers languageon a stack
escapedtoasintimidateof hay.
we emerged We thought,
us. with
In front
our
all right,
there
thappas.were ifRangers,
We you
don’thavehave arms
and at and
any the ammunition,
back
arms. Wethere
don’twas we
havethehave
police.
even thappas.
food They The whole
kidnapped
let alone guns.
village
one
We have reached
of our small the spot.
boystracts
and left himTheunconscious
of land, Rangers
barely enoughescaped
onto as we
a stack
feed ofemerged
our hay. We with
children. Weour
thought, hit
thappas.
all right,
the We
policeifwithdon’t
you have have any
arms and
our thappas. arms. We don’t
ammunition,
They will never wehave even
havehow
forget food
thappas. let alone
we foughtThe wholeguns.
back.
Weneed
If have
village small
reached
be, tracts
we willthe fightof land,
spot. Thebarely
again Rangers
and useenoughescaped
our to feed
thappasas we ouremerged
again.
again children.
(2014:with
(2014: Weour
55)
55). hit
the police with our thappas. They will never forget how we fought back.
23. In thappas. We don’t
an interview, the have any arms.
chairman
chairman of AMP,We don’t have Ali,
Liaquat evensaid:
Ali food‘The
said: let alone
‘The armyguns. and the
If need
We have be, we will
small tracts fight
of againbarely
land, and useenoughour thappas
to feed again
our (2014: 55).
children. We torture
hit
rangers would take away our women to private detention centres and
23. In thean police
interview,withtheourchairman
thappas. Theyof AMP, will never
Liaquat forget
Ali howsaid:we ‘The fought
armyback. and the
If need
rangers be, we
would willaway
take fightour again and use
women our thappas
to private againcentres
detention (2014: 55). and torture
23. In an interview, the chairman of AMP, Liaquat Ali said: ‘The army and the
rangers would take away our women to private detention centres and torture
 them. Soldiers would ask us to sign contracts, and if we refused they threatened
to rape our daughters and sisters’ (Saigol 2004: 3). This interview is cited in
Rubina Saigol (2004) and in Mohammad Shehzad (2004). ‘Fighting the Army
for Farmland’. In Paid Enough and No More: The great peasant revolt in Pakistan,
172 (2001-2003). Labour Party Pakistan Publications. p.3. Vernacular Rights Cultures
24. According to UNDP (2016) women in Pakistan own less than 3 percent of
them.
land butSoldiers
comprise would 72.7askperuscent
to sign
of thecontracts, and iflabour
agricultural we refusedforce. they
UNDP threatened
( 2016)
to rape our
our daughters
Development Advocate and
daughters andsisters’
Pakistan sisters’(Saigol
Volume 3,2004:
(Saigol 2004:
Issue 3; Shehzad
2, 3).
Jul This 2004). is cited in
interview
28. https://www.pk.undp.
24. Rubina
According Saigol
to UNDP(2004)(2016)
and inwomen Mohammad Shehzad
in Pakistan
org/content/pakistan/en/home/library/development_policy/development- own(2004).
less than‘Fighting
3 percent theofArmy
land
for
but Farmland’.
comprise In
72.7 Paid
per Enough
cent ofand
the No More: The
agricultural great
labour
advocate-pakistan--volume-3--issue-2.html. This abysmal statistic reflects thepeasant
force. revolt
UNDP in Pakistan,
(2016f).
(2001-2003).
This abysmal
very high levelsLabour
statistic Party
reflects
of gender Pakistan
the veryPublications.
inequality inhigh
the levels
country. ofp.3.
gender
Pakistan inequality in the
has a Gender
24. According
country. to
PakistanUNDP has (2016)
a Gender women in
Inequality Pakistan
Index
Inequality Index value of 0.547 which ranks it 123 out of 148 countries. own
value less
of than
0.547 3 percent
which ranksof
Its
land
it but
123 out
Human comprise 72.7
of 148 countries.
Development per cent
IndexItsrank of
Humanthe agricultural
is 148 Development labour
out of 188 Index force.
countries. UNDP
rankThis ( 2016)
is 148ranking
out of
Development
188
accounts for Advocate
countries. theThis Pakistan
lowranking
education Volume
accounts 3, Issue
for
and literacy 2, Jul
the rates
low 28. https://www.pk.undp.
education
among and literacy
women and ofratesthe
org/content/pakistan/en/home/library/development_policy/development-
among women
high infant andand of themortality
maternal high infant andand
rates maternal
a low numbermortality rates andserving
of women a low
advocate-pakistan--volume-3--issue-2.html.
number of women
in Parliament. This abysmal statistic reflects the
serving in Parliament (http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/
http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/hdr_theme/country-notes.
very Agarwal
See high levels of gender
hdr_theme/country-notes).
(1994) for aninequality
See Agarwal
extensive inoverview
the country.
(1994) forofanthe Pakistan
extensive
questions hasata stake
overview Gender
of the
in
Inequality
questions Index
at stake value
in of
women’s
women’s ownership of land in South Asia0.547 which
ownership ranks
of land it 123
in out
South of
Asia148 countries. Its
25. Human
According Development
to clause 5 (1) IndexA ofrank is 148Tenancy
the 1887 out of 188 Act,countries.
‘male tenants Thisand ranking
their
accounts for the low education and literacy rates among
direct descendants who had cultivated the land for more than two generations women and of the
high infant
(twenty years)andwerematernal
entitledmortality rates and
to permanent a low number of women serving
occupancy.’
26. in three-member
A Parliament. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/all/themes/hdr_theme/country-notes.
sub-committee of the Senate on Human Rights visited Okara
See12
on Agarwal
August (1994)2004 and for tabled
an extensive
its report overview of the on
in the Senate questions
7 December at stake2004 in
women’s
(The Dawn ownership
2005). of land in South Asia
25.
27. Accordingestablished
Pakistan to clause 5a (1) A of the
National 1887 Tenancy
Commission for Act,
Human ‘male tenants
Rights and their
(NCHR) in
direct descendants who had cultivated the land for
2012. On its web page, the NCHR defines its role as providing ‘ … a broad more than two generations
(twenty
and years) were
overarching entitledfor
mandate to the
permanent
promotion,occupancy.’
protection and fulfilment of
26. human rights, as provided for in Pakistan’s on
A three-member sub-committee of the Senate Human Rights
Constitution and visited Okara
international
on 12 August
treaties’. 2004 andittabled
Furthermore, states itsthatreport
‘as aninimpartial
the Senatestate on 7body,December
the NCHR 2004
(The Dawn
works 2005). of the Government and is directly accountable to the
independently
27. Pakistan established
Parliament of Pakistan’. a National
For the Commission
Interim Report forofHuman
the NCHR Rightson(NCHR) the Okara in
2012. On
Farms, see its web page,
National the NCHR
Commission for defines
Human its role Pakistan,
Rights as providing ‘ … aReport
‘Annual broad
and overarching
(2015–16)’, whichmandate
which is available
is availablefor the
online atpromotion,
online protection and fulfilment of
https://nchr.gov.pk/wp-content/uploads/
at: https://nchr.gov.pk/wp-content/
human rights, as provided
uploads/2019/01/Annual-Report-2015-16.pdf.
2019/01/Annual-Report-2015-16.pdf. for in Pakistan’s Constitution and international
28. ‘Not less than one-third (including the number of seatsthereser
treaties’. Furthermore, it states that ‘as an impartial state body, NCHR ved
works independently of the Government and
for women belonging to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes) is directly accountable to the of
Parliament
the total numberof Pakistan’.
of seats For to bethe Interim
filled Report
by direct of the
election in NCHR on the Okara
every Panchayat shall
Farms,
be see National
reserved for women Commission
and such seats for Human
may beRights
allotted Pakistan,
by rotation ‘Annual Report
to different
(2015–16)’, which
constituencies is available(The
in a Panchayat’ online at: https://nchr.gov.pk/wp-content/
Constitution Seventy-third Amendment
uploads/2019/01/Annual-Report-2015-16.pdf.
Act, 1992). See http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/amend/amend73.htm.
28. ‘Not less than one-third (including the number of seats reser ved
for women belonging to the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes) of
the total number of seats to be filled by direct election in every Panchayat shall
be reserved for women and such seats may be allotted by rotation to different
constituencies in a Panchayat’ (The Constitution Seventy-third Amendment
Act, 1992). See http://indiacode.nic.in/coiweb/amend/amend73.htm.
Conceptual Diversity, Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical Reflexive Politics 173

6 Conceptual Diversity, Feminist

Historical Ontology and a Critical
Reflexive Politics of Location

How to tell different stories of rights and human rights? How to tell stories
of rights and human rights that are not only ever those of their origins,
or of the powerful efforts by the powerful including by nation states to
institutionalise global human rights, or of their unidirectional travel,
translation and vernacularisation into ‘other worlds’, or indeed those about
the humanitarian and military interventions by global powers. How to not
tell stories of ‘different’ human rights where ‘difference’ is enacted through
categorising difference as “cultural”, “custom”, “local’’ or as “case studies” of
global human rights talk? How to refuse standardly narrated stories of human
rights that speak of ‘difference’ while keeping the epistemic frameworks of
global human rights talk intact and impervious to serious consideration of
the ‘difference’ that historical difference makes to global rights talk? In short,
how to tell ‘other’ stories of world-making and meaning-making on rights
without either reproducing the vast epistemic power and the time–space
provincialism of the global human rights discourse or compromising the
complexity, dynamism, difference and epistemic and political struggles of
human rights mobilisations in ‘most of the world’? These are the questions
that constitute the burden of this book.
The stories of vernacular rights cultures that appear in this book aim at
disrupting the originary, statist, institutional and Eurocentric stories that
global human rights likes to tell about itself. Specifically, the stories of
vernacular rights cultures make theoretical, conceptual and methodological
claims to shine a light on different possibilities for engaging, imagining and
expanding rights and human rights. Significantly, the stories of vernacular
rights cultures signal that a theoretical and philosophical critique of global
human rights alone cannot account for the life-worlds of subaltern struggles
174 Vernacular Rights Cultures

for rights and entitlements, or indeed for the critical vocabulary and political
grammar within which these struggles and demands are articulated. For,
quite simply, the terms of the critique of global human rights have been such
that these end up resurrecting and reproducing the object of their critiques,
that is, the ‘West’
West asasthe
the subject
subject of
of human
human rights discourses albeit, this time
via critique, while also simultaneously reproducing the global inequalities of
knowledge production by investing
investing epistemic
epistemicagency
agencyin
inthe
the‘West’.
West. Critiques of
global human rights, though hugely useful and significant in demystifying the
constellations of power and their entanglements must only be the starting point
for the production of new intellectual and conceptual histories, geographies
and epistemologies of rights from different locations, including subaltern
locations around the globe.

Theory
The
The Oxford
OxfordDictionary
Dictionary defines
defines‘vernacular’
vernacularas ‘aaslanguage or dialect
that belonging to...a naturally
place or
spoken
a region.byBoth
the people
place andof alanguage
particularare country
key toormeanings
district....’of(OED 1989).rights
vernacular Both
place and language
cultures, which are aresite
keyspecific,
to meanings andofhistorically
vernacular rights cultures, which
and politically are
specific
site specific, and historically
epistemological, ontologicaland andpolitically specific epistemological,
political encounters with rights and ontological
human
and political
rights. encounters
Vernacular rightswith rightsshift
cultures and human
the siterights. Vernacular
of epistemic rightsofcultures
enquiry rights
shift the site
and human of epistemic
rights by curating, enquiry
assemblingof rights and human rights
and documenting by registers,
different curating,
assembling
imaginariesand anddocumenting
possibilities of different
and forregisters, imaginariesinand
rights encounters thepossibilities
world. These of
and for rights
alternative encounters
rights registersinallow
the world. These
different alternative
subaltern rights
politics of registers
human rightsallow
different
in ‘most of subaltern
the world’ politics of human
to appear as anrights in ‘most
epistemic of the The
presence. world’ to appear of
appearance as
an epistemic
these subaltern presence.
politics The appearance
of rights of these presence
as an epistemic subalternispolitics
crucial offorrights
shiftingas
an
theepistemic
epistemicpresence
centre ofis knowledge
crucial for shifting
productionthe epistemic
on global centre
humanofrights.
knowledge
The
production on globalofhuman
epistemic presence rights.
vernacular The epistemic
rights presence
cultures eschew of vernacular
stories of origins rights
and
cultures eschew
global telos stories
to think of origins
instead and global telos
of geopolitically to think
located andinstead of geopolitically
historically particular
located
politics and historically
of subaltern particular
struggles forpolitics
justice.of subaltern struggles for justice.
Theoretically,
Theoretically, the the stories
stories of vernacular
vernacular rights cultures
cultures refuse
refuse the politics of
origins. The
Thepolitics
politicsofoforigins
originsis aisracial story
a racial thatthat
story argues that that
argues human rightsrights
human have
particular origins,origins,
have particular startingstarting
points, founding moments,moments,
points, founding which arewhich all invariably
are all
in the West,
invariably in or
theare assumed
‘West’, to assumed
or are be in theto West
be infromthe where
‘West’ they
fromtravel
wheretotheythe
rest
traveloftothe
theworld.
rest ofAstheI argued
world. in AsChapters
I argued 1inand 2, this1politics
Chapters and 2, of thisorigins
politicsis
shared by celebrators
of origins is shared by and detractorsand
celebrators of human rightsand
detractors andisisnot
notwithout
without effects.
effects.
In the hands of the detractors, it places a politically expedient argument to
delegitimise modes of protest and questioning of excessive state power on the
basis that human rights are illegitimate and foreign and therefore with little
Conceptual Diversity, Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical Reflexive Politics 175

traction and locus standi. In celebratory and critical/progressive scholarship

on human rights, this this originary
originary story shores shores up up the
the ‘West’
West as the epistemic
subject of human rights via celebration or via critique. This politics of origins
is also a key framework for erasing and discounting epistemic authority and
difference from elsewhere, and for assuming unidirectional, non-reciprocal
simplistic translation and commensurability on the one hand, or a human
rights void and a tabula rasa that needs to be filled with global human rights
institutions and practices, on the other.
placeofof
In place originary
originary stories
stories of global
of global humanhuman rights, rights,
vernacularvernacular rights
rights cultures
cultures document
document and curate andthe curate the languages
languages and forms ofthat
and world-making world-making
inform, sustain that
inform,
and sustain and
underwrite underwrite
the politics the politics
of struggles of struggles
for rights. for on
It insists rights. It insists
attending on
to the
attending
‘other’ to the ‘other’
struggles struggles
and worlds of and worlds
rights that of rightstheoretical
escape that escapeand theoretical
conceptualand
conceptual
capture captureeither
through through eithertofailing
failing to ‘fit’
‘fit’ the the model
model of global
of global humanhuman rights
rights or
or are
are actively
actively erased
erased byby thetheworkings
workingsofofthe thepolitics
politicsofoforigins.
origins.TheThe epistemic
presence of vernacular rights cultures crucially disrupts two assumptions of the
global human rights discourse:
discourse: universal
universal and unidirectional
unidirectional translatability and
radical commensurability. The Thepolitics
politics ofof origins
origins insists on the unidirectional
unidirectional
travel of global human rights from a specified location but also that these
localisedororvernacularised
become localised vernacularisedthrough through translation
translation intointo
locallocal contexts
contexts and
and into
into different
different locallocal languages.
languages. However,
However, vernacular
vernacular rightsrights cultures
cultures refuserefuse
this
this demand
demand and insistence
and also also insistence on straightforward
on straightforward and simple
and simple translational
translational global
global human
human rights practice
rights practice to speakto speakofinstead
instead different of politics,
differentmeanings,
politics, meanings,
epistemic
epistemic authority,
authority, subjectivitiessubjectivities and political
and political cultures cultures
of rightsof andrights and human
human rights
rights. The refusal here is to appear only in terms of recognition
struggles. The refusal here is to appear only in terms of recognition already already setset
in
place
in (Povinelli
place (Povinelli 2011)
2011)and andagainst
againstthethelogic
logicof of‘deadly
‘deadly sameness
sameness of abstraction’
(Rich 1984) while also insisting on the epistemic presence of vernacular rights
cultures. This
cultures. Thisinsistence
insistenceononappearing
appearing as asan an
epistemic
epistemicpresence
presenceinterrupts the
interrupts
global
the and and
global locallocal
binarybinarywhichwhichlocates global
locates globalhuman
human rights in ainposition
rights a position of
epistemic
of epistemic authority
authority and andasasthetheoriginary
originarysite siteofofhuman
human rights
rights politics and
scholarship, and and the
the local
local as a passive receptacle of these global human rights
through global projects of of translation.
translation. TheThe stories of vernacular rights cultures cultures
are invested in asking questions that query the context for and meanings of
rights in different parts of the globe and about the forms of rights politics, politics,
subjectivities these engender including
subjectivities including the the political
political cultures,
cultures, imaginaries,
imaginaries,
contestations and struggles that take place place overover rights.
rights. They
They insist on asking
the following: Where do rights come from? Who do they belong to? Where do
they derive authority from? Furthermore, what what forms of politics and kinds of
subjectivities do rights produce and uphold? I must hasten to add here that this
176 Vernacular Rights Cultures

is not a critique of translation or of the travel of theories and ideas but rather of
the automatic and straightforward ‘assumption of translatability’ (Apter 2013)
and of the conceptual symmetry and politics of epistemic inequality that inform
global human rights. The trouble with the unidirectional travel and translation
projects of global human rights is their epistemic refusal of relationality together
with a weak recognition of global human rights as ‘travelling theories’ that
might go beyond ‘borrowing and adapting’ (Said 2002: 421) to take on a
wholly, radically new and invigorated intellectual life in different places and
among different peoples. Crucially, the practices and projects of this simplistic
unidirectional translation categorise and manage difference in terms of binary
epistemic frames of those who are ‘universal knowers’ and those who are
known through translation but even then only ever so, if they if they can fit
or are made to fit the terms of that universal knowing. Writing in the context
of comparative literature, Emily Apter (2013) argues that an ‘assumption of
translatability’ can lead to a ‘reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and
substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethically branded
“differences”… niche marketed as commercialized “identities”’ (2013: 2). In the
place of this ‘assumption of translatability’, Apter calls for ‘untranslatability as
a theoretical fulcrum’ that would ‘recognise the importance of non-translation,
mistranslation, incomparability and untranslatability’ (2013: 4). What
Apter calls the ‘untranslatable’ and at times, incommensurable, constitutes
a different meaning, politics and ethics in critical Indigenous theory. Here,
incommensurability is not a critique of the ‘embedded epistemologies of cultural
equivalence and substitutability’ but rather, institutes a ‘refusal’ (Simpson 2014)
of the epistemological frameworks that have as their object the elimination
of Indigenous peoples. Whereas Apter turns to elements of postcolonial
scholarship as exemplars that challenge this assumption of translation, for
Indigenous scholars, postcolonial scholarship is itself implicated in the logic
of elimination of the Indigenous. The incommensurability that Indigenous
scholarship demands is the incommensurability of Indigenous life-worlds
with the epistemic frameworks of the settler colonial state and its projects of
self, subjectivity, citizenship, nation, territory and sovereignty, which are led
by the genocidal logics of dispossession and elimination (Woolfe 2006; Byrd
2011; Simpson 2014). Consequently, Indigeneity troubles and disrupts the
‘logics of colonialism’ that inform the ‘settled nature of settler colonialism’
(Simpson 2014). Even though it might appear, at least on the surface, that
decolonial, postcolonial scholars
and critical
andIndigenous studies scholars
critical Indigenous scholars are engaging
on a common platform of anticolonial, anti-imperial and decolonisation talk,
Conceptual Diversity, Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical Reflexive Politics 177

however, the stakes

stakes and struggles
struggles and and epistemic terms of critical Indigenous
scholarship
studies are very
are very different
different (Byrd
(Byrd 2011;
2011; Byrdand
Byrd andRothberg
Rothberg2011;
2011; Tuck
Tuck and
Yang 2012;
2012; Simpson
Simpson2014). 2014).AsAsis iswell known,
well known, forfor
Indigenous critical and studies
critical Indigenous critical
Indigenous scholarship,
scholarship, the questionthe question of decolonisation
of decolonisation is not for
is not a ‘metaphor’ a ‘metaphor’ for
social justice
social justice
projects projects
or indeed of or indeed of
‘epistemic ‘epistemic disobedience’
disobedience’ (Mignolo 2018) (Mignolo 2018)
but requires
but requires of
repatriation repatriation
Indigenous of land.
Indigenous land. Andtheirs
And therefore, therefore,
is nottheirs
only is not only
a question
a question
of settlementof settlement
of land andofthe landformal
and the endformal end of decolonisation
of decolonisation and its
and its afterlife,
afterlife,
but, but also
crucially, alsoof of
thetheerasure and extinction
continuing erasure ofandIndigenous
extinctionpeoples who live
of Indigenous
on that who
peoples land.live
And, on even though
that land. And, theeven
decolonisation
though theprojects of postcolonial
decolonisation projects
andpostcolonial
of critical Indigenous scholarship
and critical Indigenous are inscholarship
a large measure
are inincommensurable,
a large measure
perhaps, it is also the
incommensurable, question
perhaps, it isofalso
incommensurability that may possibly open
the question of incommensurability itself
up amay
that space for potentially
possibly open up a spaceproductive dialogues
for potentially betweendialogues
productive subalternity and
between
Indigeneity (Byrd
subalternity and Rothberg
and Indigeneity (Byrd 2011).
and Rothberg 2011).

Conceptual Diversity
Conceptual diversity is a key intellectual project of vernacular rights cultures.
The conceptual intervention of vernacular rights cultures is to generate
conceptual work from ‘non-standard’ locations and contexts, that is, contexts
outside those of in which
which concepts
concepts are
are standardly
standardly produced,
produced, described and
visualised but also through demanding that theorists locate their subjects and
themselves in the transnational ‘political economy of knowledge production’, at
particular places and in different languages. The thinkability of this conceptual
diversity becomes possible in a large part because of the crucial intervention
a critical
that reflexive
a critical feminist
reflexive politics
feminist of location.
politics of location makes.
As an epistemic project and intervention, location renders the very
thinkability and intellectual possibility of producing knowledge from
different locations. However, what in effect, is the epistemic difference that
a critical reflexive politics of location makes to knowledge production? Or,
if you prefer, what particular stipulations and enablements does a critical
reflexive politics
reflexive politicsofoflocation putput
location in place for doing
in place for feminist, socialand
doing social and political
theory? Now, to centre location is to already establish two things right
away: it is to flag the ‘provincial’ location of all theory and also to signal the
specific context of unremitting power relations that inform theoretical and
representational endeavours (Said 1978)—the imperial, colonial entanglements
of epistemologies with contemporary global geographies, prevailing political
economies (Cusicanqui 2012) and the transnational circuits of power through
178 Vernacular Rights Cultures

which knowledges travel and assume authority (Grewal and Kaplan 1994;
Mohanty 1995; Alexander and Mohanty 2010). To put it in specific terms,
location signifies the role of place in knowledge production as a generative site
(McKittrick 2011) in which concepts and persons come into being (Hacking
2002) and, declares it as a productive site for methodological interventions
while insisting on a critical reflexive ethics. The central work of the book,
which is to think of rights and human rights politics from the standpoint of
subaltern groups at the frontline of rights struggles, is enabled by the epistemic
interventions that a critical reflexive politics of location makes. These epistemic
interventions institute certain demands and constraints and are simultaneously
both limitations but also enablements for engendering particular kinds of
knowledge production (see Chapter 3). In effect, a critical reflexive politics of
location requires asking different questions, naming the epistemic ground that
one speaks and writes from, of refusing a technical application of theory while
insisting on ‘speaking back to it’ and of working to and for justice: that is, to
work towards demystifying and shifting the epistemic hierarchies and power
relations that underpin knowledge production. Fundamentally, however, a
critical reflexive politics of location demands an answer to the question: from
where are you looking, and whom or what are you seeing?
It bears worth repeating that the production of concepts from ‘most of the
world’ is a matter of urgency. We simply do not have the concepts we need in
order to produce theorised accounts of our different and historically specific
encounters with the world. But how do we study concepts in ‘most of the
world’ without either falling into the trap of violent commensurability (Tuck
and Yang 2012) or radical unintelligibility? The first trap of forced and violent
commensurability leads to theoretical and conceptual misdescriptions and
the latter, down the poisonous hole of cultural relativism. Both traps refuse
meaningful and open theoretical engagement and shut down conversations.
Vernacular rights cultures is a key intervention for enabling and encouraging
scholarship on conceptual diversity around the globe. The vernacular in
vernacular rights cultures signifies the epistemic presence and authority of
different literal and conceptual languages of rights deployed by subaltern groups
in different parts of the globe. In refusing to assemble unquestioningly under
the umbrella of global human rights, vernacular rights cultures signal their
dynamism and difference but also their epistemic presence. Vernacular rights
cultures intervene to disrupt the cycle of despair and exhaustion brought on
by critique upon critique of human rights. In this book, I have been tracking
Conceptual Diversity, Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical Reflexive Politics 179

and documenting the critical vocabularies, political imaginaries, conceptual

and political presence in the gendered politics of haq in the subcontinent.
Urdu is often referred to as the ‘pan Indian language’, which is spoken
across India and is also one of its officially recognised languages. In India the
number of Urdu speakers is falling with only 4.2 per cent of the population
declaring it as their mother tongue, however, in terms of actual numbers, the
number of speakers is not insubstantial. In neighbouring Pakistan, Urdu is
the national lingua franca but like across the border in India, the percentage
of Urdu speakers is quite low registering at only 8 per cent of the population.
Those who follow language politics in the subcontinent often note that despite
the percentage of speakers of the language being recorded in single digit
figures in both countries, Urdu extends an important influence on the cultural
and literary landscapes in both countries. This symbolic cultural weight and
influence of Urdu extends to the domain of social struggles and movements
where Urdu revolutionary poetry has emerged in recent times to affectively
bind the people
people of
ofthe
thesubcontinent
subcontinentininsolidarity
solidarityagainst
againstauthoritarian
their authoritarian
ruling
ruling dispensations
dispensations (Kuchay(Kuchay 2019).
2019). The The influence
influence of of Urduonondifferent
Urdu different spoken
languages Indiaisisalso
languages in India alsoevident
evident in thethe
through ways
waysin inwhich
whichthe
theword
word haq
haq is
the principal word used to denote a ‘right’ in all the five different languages
that make an appearance in this book: Rajasthani, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and
Bhili Bhilodi.In
Bhil Bhilodi. In addition,
addition, I have also documented haq as far as northeast India
in the frontier state of Manipur where activists also use haq (Madhok 2018).
The striking thing about the conceptual presence of haq in India and Pakistan
is that nowhere is Urdu the dominant language spoken by the majority of
population groups And yet, haq pushes through to the surface to emerge as
the foremost and most recognisable word for a right within subaltern struggles
in the subcontinent.
Haq is, of course, principally an Arabic word. In contemporary times,
Arabic is spoken by over 300 million people around the globe and therefore,
scholarly work on the presence of the word haq in different locations and its
deployments in different political contexts has an extraordinary potential to
offer unique, productive and generative perspectives on the operation of rights
and human rights. In this book, however, I document the conceptual life-worlds
of haq in the Indian subcontinent through documenting the different political
imaginaries of haq to shine a light on the complex, capacious and shifting
meanings of haq that come into being when gendered subjects seize it. In
attending to the justificatory premises of haq that animate and activate rights
in the region, I insist not only on a scrupulous politics of location but also a
180 Vernacular Rights Cultures

refusal of originary discourses that dominate human rights politics thinking

and politics. Anthropological scholarship on haq has drawn attention to its
Arabic and Persian linguistic lineage and to its conceptual meanings steeped in
Islamic jurisprudentialism (see
(see Chapter 3 and,
and in
inparticular,
particular, Rosen 1980, Geertz
1983, Hirsch 1998). However, as this book shows, the conceptual deployment
of haq in India and Pakistan is not confined to Islamic jurisprudentialism alone,
but has a wider presence that includes claim-making and seeking expanded
citizenship entitlements from the state and its secular legal framework not
always in alignment with Islamic juristic settlements of haq. It is, however,
through paying attention to how gendered subjects both seize haq and reorient
it in ways that make it ‘speak to’ and ‘for them’ that the normative orientations
of haq become visible. These normative orientations reveal the ways in which
haq orients proper ordering of relations among persons, maintains an image
of a gendered moral order and mediates citizenship, political discourse and
political struggles. The seizing of haq by intersectionally gendered subjects
shows, for instance, that haq denotes masculine and caste relations of property
ownership or due share in familial property; that it operates as a non-elite
conceptual term with a predominant take up by relatively formally non-literate
and marginalised people in ‘rural areas’, while its Hindi counterpart, adhikaar
is often associated with ‘educated’ people living in urban areas. This popular
impression of adhikaar as the term associated with legal speak, officialdom
and the powerful is borne out by the fact that in the official Hindi language
version of the Indian constitution, it is adhikaar that appears as the official
word for right, whereas in the Urdu (GoI 2013) and Manipuri (GoI 2019a)
versions, it is the word haq that stands in for and translates as a right. As
opposed to adhikaar which is almost always invoked as a legal right, haq is
something which belongs to one; and one is justified in ‘snatching it back’ if
taken away. Finally, haq does not only signify minimalist negative rights of
individuals,
individuals, that is to
to be
befree
freefrom
frominterference
interferencefrom
by others
others but
but also extends
to include collective rights of sentient and non-sentient beings and posesses
a maximalist imaginary that embraces ideas of justice and equality.

Feminist Historical Ontology

How to study vernacular rights cultures? In this book, I propose a feminist
historical ontology as a methodological device for studying vernacular rights
cultures. A feminist historical ontology is an unapologetically interdisciplinary
methodological intervention that brings together an eclectic set of conceptual
Conceptual Diversity, Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical Reflexive Politics 181

and theoretical investigations, and methodological tools, irrespective

of their disciplinary habitations. Academic disciplines are notorious for
policing boundaries and setting up disciplinary borders, leading to both the
depoliticisation of academic scholarship (Said 1994) and a lack of accountability
and reflexivity (Spivak 1999). My academic training as a political theorist
made me acutely aware of the constraints of discipline bound conceptual and
methodological tools that simply did not allow, encourage or facilitate the
complexity required for theorising ‘other worlds’. The power of Eurocentric
frameworks is such that they convert these ‘other places’ into ‘case studies’ or
into the ‘local’ and as devoid of epistemic authority, or as having something
to say that matters epistemically. Two decades ago, as I set out to study the
philosophical and theoretical investigations of the relationship between agency
and coercion, I found myself turning to ethnography and to ‘fieldwork’ to make
sense of but also to query the spatial geographies and intellectual contexts that
formed the standard background contexts for theorising autonomy and agency.
Soon enough, through attending to location as a generative site for theoretical
work on agency and coercion, it became clear to me that the unquestioned,
unlocated and therefore unnamed standard background context for theorising
of agency and autonomy was one of negative freedom and that the governing
measure of autonomy and agency was (and is) free action. The former institutes
the latter by shoring up the heroic unbounded white onto-epistemic subject able
to reproduce without exception this governing action bias. However, even a
cursory regard for the grounded realties of my ethnographies showed that lives
and living are constrained in all manner of ways, and that agency thinking could
not continue
continuetotoregard
regardconditions
conditionsof negative freedom
of negative freedomas ‘standard’, a necessary
as ‘standard’, and a
given while
necessary also while
given, insisting
also that persons
insisting thatdisplay
personstheir agentic
display theirselves through
agentic selves
their ability
through to ability
their committomaximal
commit free actionfree
maximal in allaction
circumstances. Therefore,
in all circumstances.
reconceiving
Therefore, agency would
reconceiving involve
agency wouldrefusing
involvea refusing
technicala application of theory
technical application
buttheory
of also challenging and speaking
but also challenging and back to mainstream
speaking theories oftheories
back to mainstream autonomy of
and agency.and
autonomy In agency.
sum, it In
would
sum,mean shifting
it would meanthe standard
shifting background
the standard location
background
of theory of
location production of agency and
theory production of autonomy—from negative freedom
agency and autonomy—from to one
negative
of ever present
freedom to one threat
of everofpresent
coercion andofsubordination—and
threat to a site specific
coercion and subordination—and to
ahistorical, political
site specific and political
historical, ideational context
and to enable
ideational context a different
to enable theoretical
a different
perspectiveperspective
theoretical on agency (Madhok
on agency2013).
(Madhok 2013).
The work on vernacular rights cultures reflects a continued commitment to
combine philosophical and theoretical investigations alongside ethnographic
undertakings but it is also a recognition that the conceptual, theoretical
182 Vernacular Rights Cultures

and empirical maps of vernacular rights cultures require more diverse and
complex methodological tools. In particular, they require a multihued set
of methodological
methodological tools
tools that
thatwould
wouldenable
enable
thescholarly
scholarlyexplorations
explorations of
of the
following:of
following: ofthe
productive
productiveand generative
and generativework
workthat
thatrights
rightsand
andhuman
human rights
rights do
in ‘most of the world’; of site specific historical and theoretical investigations
of the ways in which concepts come into being at particular locations and to
document and theorise the political imaginaries these are imbricated in, the
political cultures of rights they engender, the intersectionally gendered subjects
of rights they bring into being, support but also refuse; and of an accounting
of the political stakes, and struggles over rights and human rights in ‘most of
the world’. Moreover, they require a methodological toolbox that facilitates an
analysis of how concepts attach themselves to specific subjects but also how
these concepts are seized by those who are not their intended attachments,
together with an account of the gendered forms of political subjectivation that
these concepts are implicated in but also enable. Finally, the study of vernacular
rights cultures requires a methodological toolbox that enables an epistemic
accounting of the world-making exercises of subaltern groups.
As a methodological device, a feminist historical ontology directs attention
to not only how concepts come into being and are gendered but following
Ian Hacking, also how concepts make up people. Consequently, a feminist
historical ontology unequivocally locates itself firmly in the imbrication of
epistemology and ontology (see Chapter 3) as it works to make explicit the
ways in which concepts come into being in different locations and within
particular knowledge systems. It tracks their political imaginaries and
justificatory premises, the political cultures they enable, the kinds of people
they make up, and the politics in which they are invoked and sustained.
The work of a feminist historical ontology begins with an insistence that
concepts are gendered and that ‘making up people’ is a gendered exercise, as
‘people’ are intersectional subjects. By drawing attention to the different and
historically specific and located languages of rights/human rights—both literal
and conceptual in different parts of the globe, a feminist historical ontology
attends to the political imaginaries these languages make available, and to the
subjectivities, forms of political subjectivation, conceptions of personhood and
the claims for subject status and gender orders they render possible. A feminist
historical ontology enables site specific investigations attentive to historical
and political specificity of rights politics in ‘most of the world’ while refusing
assumptions of universal translatability or of unidirectional translational
practices. Importantly, it tracks the path of power that informs rights politics
Conceptual Diversity, Feminist Historical Ontology and a Critical Reflexive Politics 183

to shine a light on the intersecting axes of oppressions that characterise the

attachment of rights politics to specific gendered subjects.
Practising ethical
Practising ethical vigilance
vigilance (Chapter
(Chapter 3), 3), a feminist historical
historical ontology of
haq attends to the the gendered
gendered saturated
saturated sites of of grassroots
grassroots political
political struggles to
document the different meanings
different meanings of haq that are
are mobilised, towards
mobilised, towards what and
by whom? AlongsideAlongside tracking the forms of of subjectification
subjectification haq engenders and
the political imaginaries
imaginaries it engages,engages, a feminist historical historical ontology is attentive attentive
to the
the forms
formsofofrightsrightspolitics
politics and andthethe erasures/silences
erasures/silences it puts
it puts in place.
in place. It seeksIt
seeks to illuminate
to illuminate what haq whatallows,
haq allows, articulates,
articulates, rendersrenders intelligible,
intelligible, refuses,refuses,
and to
and to highlight
highlight how thehow the gendered
gendered articulation articulation of concepts/rights
of concepts/rights exceeds both exceeds
the
both
purpose theand purpose
nature andof nature of their mobilisation.
their mobilisation. In other words,In other words, ahistorical
a feminist feminist
historical
ontology ontology
of haq isofexplicitly
haq is explicitly
concerned concerned
with the withprocesses
processes and and discourses
discourses
of subjectivation
subjectivation and and howhow gendered
gendered subjectssubjects of of rights
rights comecome into being in
the vernacular.
vernacular. The The political
political subjectivation
subjectivation that that rights
rights discourses
discourses set set off are
circumscribed
circumscribed bybyintersectional
intersectional gender
gender relations.
relations. The The justificatory
justificatory premises premises
of haq
of
drawhaqattention
draw attention to the conceptual
to the conceptual dynamism dynamism
of haq. Butofhaq haq.is neither a neologism
forBut
a righthaqandis neither
nor is ita empty
neologism for a right
of normative and nor
content. It is it empty of normative
a conceptual term that
content. It is a conceptual
upholds particular subjectivities term andthat upholds
political and particular
moral imaginariessubjectivities
that bringand
political
into beingand moral imaginaries
particular subjects of rights that bring into being particular
and entitlements. subjects of
These imaginaries
rights
haq jostle andalongside
entitlements. These
the rights imaginaries
discourse mandated of haqbyjostle alongside
the state, which the rights
it seeks to
discourse mandated by the state, which it seeks to revise
revise and expand. The four different political imaginaries of haq that I document and expand in light.
The
in this fourbookdifferent political
demonstrate theimaginaries
limitations, of haq that Iand
narrowness document
prejudicialin this
naturebookof
demonstrate the limitations, narrowness and prejudicial
statist rights, not least for intersectionally marked non-normative subjects. I use nature of statist rights,
not least ‘jostle’
the term for intersectionally
and not ‘refusal’marked (Simpson non-normative subjects.the
2014) to characterise I use the term
deployments
‘jostle’
of haq and and engagement
not ‘refusal’ (Simpson 2014)discourse
with the statist to characterise
because thethedeployments
subaltern subjectsof haq
and engagement with the statist discourse because
in my ethnographies direct their energies at demanding the rights that they the subaltern subjects in feel
my
ethnographies
they are entitleddirect to from their
theenergies
state. Asat demanding
I show the rights
in Chapters 4 andthat5, thethey feel they
relationship
are entitled to, from the state. As
of the state with respect to their rights is complex.I show in Chapters 4 and 5, the relationship
of the
Thestate with respect
justificatory to theirofrights
premises is complex. The
haq demonstrate thatjustificatory
that even thoughpremisesthe of
haq
statedemonstrate
is invoked that that even
to justify though therights,
citizenship state isthese
invoked to justify
rights are incitizenship
the final
rights, these rights are in the final instance, non-derivative
instance, non-derivative from the state. What is at stake in these negotiations from the state. What
is at stake
with in these
the state is tonegotiations
hold the latter withaccountable
the state is for to hold
thesethe latterIn
rights. accountable
short, the
for
statethese
is therights. In short,
assigned and the state is the
designated dutyassigned
bearer and designated
of these rights duty
but isbearer
not theof
these rights but is not the origin of these. In the final
origin of these. In the final instance, therefore, haq is non-derivative of the instance, therefore, haq is
non-derivative
state. Assigningofthe the state
state.as Assigning
the dutythe stateof
bearer as rights
the duty doesbearer
notofmakerightsfor does
an
not make for an outright epistemic refusal of the liberal
outright epistemic refusal of the liberal democratic state and its institutions democratic state and
its
butinstitutions
for a trenchant but for acritique
trenchant ofcritique
the moral of theand moral and practical
practical failingsfailings
of theof
the
state;state;
for for failing
failing to to
livelive
upuptotoitsitsprofessed
professedidealsideals andand constitutional duties,
184 Vernacular Rights Cultures

and in particular, its failure to uphold women’s rights and gender equality.
The sathins as well as the Bhil activists (Chapters 4 and 5) draw attention
to the intersectional nature of the violence, terror, dispossession and lack of
recognition as political subjects and citizens that characterise their life-worlds.
What is evident in their narratives is how omnipresent the state is in their
personal and as well as public lives, which makes the encounters with the state
intimate, coercive but also potentially agential. The encounters with the state
leave the sathins to
to describe
describe the
the state
state plainly
plainly as
as gendered,
gendered, casteist and classist;
the Bhil women activists are equally scathing of the state in their recounting
of the violence, terror and dispossession from their sacred and ancestral lands.
However, like
like the sathins, the moral regression of the state does not turn them
away from exercising their democratic and citizenship rights to representation
and to stand for elections under the constitutionally sanctioned quotas and
reserved seats in local governing councils. The difficulties, obstructions and
coercion they face in exercising their citizenship rights must not fall into an
analytical trap of seeing this as a problem of gender and women’s rights in
‘backward communities’. As I noted in Chapter 5, a failure to recognise the
ways in which the state delegitimises and erases Indigenous lives and livelihoods
cannot be separated from the overriding nature of conflictual gender relations
that the state is actively involved in orchestrating and participating, but also
intimately implicated in.
The political imaginaries, critical conceptual vocabularies and political
struggles for haq are struggles
strugglesfor
for different
differentpossibilities
possibilitiesand
andfutures
future for rights and
human rights. They call into being a different sense of justice and citizenship.
They refuse the politics of origins while insisting on a politics of democratic
accountability that holds the nation state to account. In centring questions of
intersectionally experienced oppressions and inequalities, these struggles for
haq insist on squaring the circle between inequality, justice and human rights
but also insist on the epistemic presence of subaltern struggles for rights and
human rights.
References 185

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Index
Index
Abu Lughod, Lila, 14, 19
accountability, 4, 11, 39–40, 55, 84, 100,
108, 110, 113, 118, 124, 126, 131,
136, 148, 181, 184
Action Aid, 161
‘action bias’, 61, 92, 181
adhikaar, 108, 170n10, 180
Adivasi, 4, 10, 30n6, 39, 89, 62, 103, 128,
131–33, 144–45, 148–50, 153–54,
170n10
Adivasi peoples of Kotra, 99, 144–47, 149,
152, 170n7, 170n10
Adivasi Vikas Manch, 146–47, 150,
170n10
Agamben, Giorgio, 45, 123
agency, 8, 13, 54, 61–62, 83, 92, 122, 129,
135, 142n39, 162, 165, 174, 181
political 2, 7, 29, 34, 61, 135, 162.
epistemic 8, 61, 174
ethical 29, 62
Akal Sangharsh Samiti (ASS), 108
Akhtar, Aasim Sajjad 156–57, 160, 162,
Amnesty International, 43, 153
Anjuman Mazarain (AMP), 4, 27, 29, 78,
155–63, 165
Anzaldúa, Gloria, 88
Apter, Emily, 176
Arabic, 1, 9, 57, 73–75, 132, 179–80
Arendt, Hannah, 45–46
authenticity, 9, 35, 87
Balibar, Étienne 45–47, 68n9
Bhanwari Devi, 130–31, 134, 142n40, 164
211
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 29, 38,
124–25, 140n29,
Bhil activists, 151–52, 184
Blaser, Mario, 79–81, 97n12–13
Brown, Wendy, 8, 17, 19, 21, 24, 49, 61, 66,
102, 168
Burke, Roland, 44
Butler, Judith, 64–65, 123
Caste,3,3,14n7,
caste, 14n7,31,
31, 51,
51, 55, 85, 92, 104–08,
104–08,
116–17, 128, 132–34, 139–40, 164,
172n27, 180, 184
Carby, Hazel, 34
Chatterjee, Partha, 26, 30n1, 56–57, 101
chi’xi,
Chi’xi’8787
citizenship, 3, 10, 12, 18–19, 23, 25–27, 29,
31n14, 40, 45, 48–49, 51–52, 54–57,
74, 77–78, 101–02, 105–06, 111
civil society, 54, 56–57, 107, 111–13, 116,
128
coloniality of power, 34
conceptual diversity, 3, 177–80
constitutive thesis, 61–62
Constitution
73rd amendment to the Constitution,
168, 171n16
cosmological, 27, 147, 149, 151–53, 159
counter-conduct, 63, 121–23, 126, 137,
163, 166–69
critical counter-conduct of rights 63,
123, 153
counter-development, 106, 121–26, 166–67
gendered counter-development 166
212
Crenshaw, K., 86
cultural values, 8, 38–39
Asian values, 8, 37
Cusicanqui, S.R., 5, 84, 87–88, 177
Dalit feminist scholarship, 116
Dalit feminist standpoint, 87, 97n17
decolonial, 34, 82, 84, 86, 89
decolonial communitarian feminists, 82
delinking, 35
depoliticisation thesis, 8, 47–50
developmentalism, 2, 9, 14, 25–26, 28,
35, 50, 55, 57, 66–67, 72, 101, 123,
125–31, 136–37, 149, 167
displacement of populations, 35, 48, 88,
103, 144–45, 155
dispossession, 1, 4, 29, 35, 55, 72, 81, 88–
89, 100, 103–04, 116, 145, 152–53,
155, 163, 176, 184
dissensus, 45–46
Eaton, Richard, 73
entitlements, 2–3, 12, 14–15, 25–26, 28–29,
35, 37, 39, 44, 47, 54, 56–58, 60, 62,
77, 101–05, 109, 111, 115, 117, 119,
124–26, 133, 151, 156, 168, 174,
180, 183
epistemology, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 97
epistemological–ontological divide, 83–84
equaliberty, 45, 69n9
Escobar, Arturo, 79–82
ethical vigilance, 183
ethnography/ethnographic, 3–4, 18–19,
24, 27–28, 55, 60, 75–78, 89, 105,
119–20, 181, 183
Eurocentrism, 7, 34, 36
Faruqi, Shamsur Rehman, 76–77
feminist historical ontology, 15–16, 54, 71–
78, 82, 88–96, 131, 137, 173, 180–84
feminist movement, 38–39, 52–53, 163–64
autonomous feminist movements, 52
Index
Forest Department, Rajasthan, 145–47
Forest Rights Act, 2006, 138n3, 146, 148–
49, 151–53, 169n6, 171n16
Foucault, M., 48, 63, 70n16, 89–90, 121–
23, 140n27
Geertz, Clifford, 74–75
gendered lives of concepts, 72, 92
global human rights, 1–9, 11–14, 18,
20–23, 29, 34–36, 39, 41–42, 44, 48,
51, 53–54, 58, 60–63, 67–68, 71,
92, 94–95, 102, 106, 123, 168–69,
173–76, 178
critiques of, 9, 17, 41–42, 95
decolonisation of, 4–13, 82, 176–77
Eurocentrism of, 7
justifications for, 57–61
paradox of, 17, 24, 28, 41, 45, 51, 53,
66, 123
philosophical accounts of, 44–47
productivity of, 16–25
‘self-evidence’, 42–43
subjects of human rights, 9–11, 62–63
time–space provincialism in, 8, 12, 29,
36, 41–44, 47, 173
Western notions and conventions of,
8–9, 18, 36–38, 41–42
global hunger index, 99
global sisterhood, 85
Golder, Ben, 63, 122–23, 140n27
governmentality, 17, 57, 66–67, 90, 121–22,
127, 129, 140n27
global governmentality, 66
transnational governmentality, 17
rights-based governmentality, 67
gram sabha, 116, 144, 146–47, 153, 169n4,
170n10, 171n16
grassroots mobilisations, 2, 4, 54, 78, 100
Hacking, Ian, 15, 58, 71–72, 74, 79, 84,
89–93, 97n18, 178, 182
Index 213
Index 213
historical ontology, 15–16, 71, 78–79, intersectionally marked gendered subjects,
historical
88–93ontology, 15–16, 71, 78–79, intersectionally
153, 183 marked gendered subjects,
88–93
Haitian Revolution, 34, 43 Islamic153, 183
jurisprudentialism, 28, 74–77, 180
Haitian Revolution,
haq, 1, 11–15, 18–19,34, 43 40, 50, 51,
25–29, Islamic jurisprudentialism,
Islamisation of Pakistan, 4028, 74–77, 180
haq, 1, 57–58,
11–15, 60,18–19, 25–29,
71–78, 40, 50, 96,
89, 91–94, 51, Islamisation of39
Islamophobia, Pakistan, 40
57–58, 60, 71–78, 89, 91–94,
105–08, 117–18, 120, 127–29, 131– 96, Islamophobia, 39
105–08, 117–18, 144,
35, 137, 140n26, 120, 147,
127–29, 131–
149–53, Jayal, Niraja Gopal 52, 68n11, 101
35,
155,137, 140n26,
158–61, 144, 147,
165–66, 149–53,
179–81, 183 Jayal,
jan Niraja110–17,
sunwai, Gopal 52, 68n11,
123, 101
126, 139n19
155, 158–61,
cosmopolitan 165–66,
idea 73 179–81, 183 jan sunwai,yatra,
jawabdehi 110–17, 123, 153
124–26, 126, 139n19
cosmopolitan idea 73 of, 57–61, 117,
justificatory premises jawabdehi
Jensen, yatra,44
Steven, 124–26, 153
justificatory
127, 149,premises of, 57–61, 117,
179, 183 Jensen,
John, Steven, 44 161
Christopher,
127, 149,
as citizenship, 117–21179, 183 John,
JungleChristopher,
Zameen Jan161 Andolan ( JZJA), 149,
as citizenship,justification
cosmological 117–21 of, 27, Jungle 156
Zameen Jan Andolan ( JZJA), 149,
cosmological
149–53justification of, 27, 156
Kapur, Ratna 17–18, 31n14
Islamic149–53
justification of, 155–61
Kapur, Ratna
Kannan, K. P.,17–18,
103–04, 31n14
138n6
Islamic justificationasof,Truth,
moral justification 155–61 27, 29, 73,
Kannan, K. P.,
Kanwar, Roop, 107 103–04, 138n6
moral 90,
justification
106, 131–37,as Truth,
143n45 27, 29, 73,
Kanwar,
Kher, Roop, Chand,
Dharam 107 170n10
feminist90,historical
106, 131–37, 143n45
ontology of, 71–72,
Kher, Dharam
knowledge Chand, 170n10
production, 5, 14, 34, 84–87,
feminist78,historical
91, 183 ontology of, 71–72,
knowledge
174, production,
177–78 5, 14, 34, 84–87,
gendered78,subject
91, 183of, 153–55
Koopman,174,C.,
177–78
90
Haqgendered subject of, 153–55
Koopman,
Kotra C., Vikas
Adivasi 90 Manch (Kotra Adivasi
Haqjustification of, 149–53
Kotra Adivasi
Development Manch
Vikas Group),(Kotra
149–50Adivasi
justification
General Zia-ul,of,40 149–53
Development Group), 149–50
Harding, Sandra,4087
General Zia-ul, land ownership, 4, 161–64
Harding,
Harmi Bai, Sandra,
150 87 landtrajectories
life ownership,of4,developmentalism,
161–64 66,
Harmi
Hemmings,Bai, 150
C., 6, 83, 97n16 life trajectories
96, 127 of developmentalism, 66,
Hemmings,
Hill Collins,C., 6, 83, 16,
Patricia, 97n1686–87 Lugones,96,M.,
1275, 86
Hill Collins,
Hirsch, Susan, Patricia,
75–76,16,159,86–87
180 Lugones, M., 5, 86
Hirsch,
historical difference, 91, 173180
Susan, 75–76, 159, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural
historical difference,
homopoliticus,
homo politicus, 21, 91, 173
21,32n16,
32n16, 49,
49,153,
153,168,
168, Mahatma Gandhi National
Employment Rural
Guarantee Act
homopoliticus,
Htun, Mala, 52 21, 32n16, 49, 153, 168, Employment Guarantee
(MNREGA), 2005, 109,Act
124,
Htun,
HudoodMala, 52
ordinances, 40 (MNREGA),
138n3, 140n30–31 2005, 109, 124,
Hudood ordinances,
humanitarianism, 8,40
11–12, 48, 81 ‘making138n3, 140n30–31
up people’, 15, 72, 92, 136, 182
humanitarianism,
human of human rights, 8, 11–12,
10,48,
48,81
51 ‘making upZ.,
Manfredi, people’,
46 15, 72, 92, 136, 182
human of human rights,
hunger, 99–100, 107, 109–10, 14410, 48, 51 Manfredi,
Marks, Z., 46
Susan, 23
hunger, 99–100,
Hunt, Lynn, 42–43107, 109–10, 144 Marks, Susan,
Mazdoor Kisan23Shakti Sanghathan
Hunt, Lynn, 42–43 Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghathan
(MKSS)/Association for Workers
incommensurability, 176–77 (MKSS)/Association
and Farmers, 110–15,for Workers
118, 120, 124,
incommensurability,
Indian Forest Act, 1865, 176–77
145 and Farmers,
139n18, 110–15, 118, 120, 124,
142n34
Indian Forest Act, 1865,
Indigeneity, 9, 151, 176–77 145 Merry,139n18, 142n34
Sally Engle, 19–20, 53
Indigeneity, 9, 151,
intersectionality, 86,176–77
91 Merry, Sally
‘mid-day Engle,
meals’ 19–20,
scheme, 10053
intersectionality, 86, 91 ‘mid-day meals’ scheme, 100
214
Mignolo, W., 5, 17, 34, 84, 97n15, 177
Mir, Farina, 77
Mishra, Neelabh, 99, 110–11, 139n16, 144
Mohanty, Chandra T., 16, 84–86, 178
Mohawk of Kahnawà:ke, 151
Moyn, Samuel, 23, 43–44
Napi Bai, 144, 146, 148–49, 153–55,
167–68
National Campaign for Dalit Human
Rights (NCDHR), 118
National Commission for Human Rights
Pakistan (NCHR), 165–66, 172n26
The National Food Security Act (NFSA)
2013, 101, 138n3, 139n20, 140n31
neoliberalism, 8–9, 21, 23–24, 47–49, 94,
97n12, 101–03, 168
New International Economic Order
(NIEO), 22–23
Nilsen, Alf Gunvald, 2, 26, 30n4–5, 31n11,
32n22, 56, 103, 138n4, 141n33
‘no-confidence’, 147–48, 153
Okara Farms, 165–66
originary, 6–9, 13, 18, 36, 38–48, 50, 68n8,
76–77, 173, 175, 180
Oxford Poverty and Human Development
Initiative (OPHI), 103
Panchayat, 107–08, 111–16, 118, 130,
136, 139n19, 144–48, 153–54, 168,
169n1, 169n4, 171n16, 172n27
Panchayati Raj Act, 1996, 114
peasant mobilisations, 155, 162
Persian, 1, 9, 31n14, 73, 77, 180
PESA Act, 148, 171n16
Phillips, Anne, 59–60
Phulwari Ki Naal wildlife sanctuary, 144
pluriverse, 81
politics of location, 16, 58, 71, 84, 86,
88–89, 91, 93–95, 173, 177–79
Index
political imaginaries, 1–4, 6–7, 12, 15, 19,
25, 27–29, 44, 58, 60, 64, 72–74,
91–93, 96, 99–37, 151–52, 155, 179,
182–84
political society, 56–57
political subjects, 184
political subjectivation, 1, 15, 46–47, 57,
60–61, 63–67, 70n16, 90, 92, 121,
123, 126–31, 133, 136–37, 166–69,
182–83
politico-ontological/political ontology, 79
politics of origins, 7, 9, 12, 29, 31n8, 34–42,
44, 47, 50, 67, 76, 174–75, 184
refusing the politics of origins, 34–67,
174, 184
politics of rights, 6, 24, 45, 68, 123, 136,
174
public distribution system (PDS), 55, 110,
115, 124, 125, 139n20, 141n31
public interest litigation (PIL), 69n12,
99–100, 130, 138n2
Punjab, 4, 27, 78, 155, 157, 159, 166
Quijano, Anibal, 34
Razack, Sherene H., 31n8.
race, 21, 44, 85
racism, 7, 10, 31n8
raced subjects, 24, 32n16, 51, 86, 92
critical race scholarship, 83, 89
Rabinow, P., 90–91.
Rajasthan, 3, 27, 32, 58, 66, 69, 76, 78, 96,
99–100, 105–07, 111–12, 114–16,
124–28, 130–31, 135, 139–40, 142,
144–45, 148–49, 154, 159, 169–70
Forest Act, 1953, 145
Sampark Portal, 125
Social Accountability Bill, 2018, 126
Draft Bill, 2018, 126
Ramamurthy, Priti, 87
Rancière, Jacques, 8, 11, 17, 19, 29, 45–48,
61, 64–65, 123
Index 215
Index 215
reflexivity, 5, 128, 181 struggles for rights, 1–2, 6, 12, 41, 60, 73,
reflexivity, 5, 128,87181
Rege, Sharmila, struggles for rights,
91–92, 1–2,
95, 175, 1846, 12, 41, 60, 73,
Rege,
republicanism, 8,87
Sharmila, 17, 43, 45, 118–19 91–92, 95,
subalternity, 35, 51 175, 184
republicanism,
Rich, Adrienne,8,84–8517, 43, 45, 118–19 subalternity, 35, 512–4, 8–9, 16, 23–26,
subaltern groups,
Rich, Adrienne, 84–85
rights-based development, 66, 126 subaltern groups, 2–4, 8–9,
30n2, 35, 50–55, 65, 16,
67, 23–26,
72–73, 77,
rights-based 30n2, 35, 50–55, 65, 67, 72–73, 77,
rights-based development,
legislations, 103,66,105
126 116, 137, 141n33, 178–79, 182–84
rights-based legislations, 103, 105 116, 137, 141n33, 178–79,
political struggles, 1–2, 92–94 182–84
rights-based mobilisations, 12
rights-based political struggles, 1–2, 92–94
rights-based mobilisations,
morality, 152 12 rights mobilisations, 1, 3–4, 7, 12,
rights-based rights mobilisations, 1, 3–4, 7, 12,
rights of man,morality, 15245–46, 59, 65,
17, 28, 43, 14–15, 19, 27, 57, 94–95, 168,
rights of man, 17, 28, 43, 45–46, 59, 65, 14–15,
173–7419, 27, 57, 94–95, 168,
68n9, 123
68n9, 123 173–74 14–16, 19, 23–25, 27,
subaltern struggles,
right to appear, 64–65
right subaltern
35, 53, 55, 57,14–16,
struggles, 72–73,19,77,23–25,
92–95,27,
right to
to appear, 64–65 65–67, 102, 167
development,
right to development, 65–67, 102, 167 35, 53, 55, 57, 72–73,
168, 173–74, 178–79 77, 92–95,
right to food, 19, 27, 29, 78, 100–01,
right to105–10,
food, 19, 27, 29, 78, 100–01, 168, 173–74,
subjectivities, 178–79
1–3, 6–7, 12–13, 15, 20, 24,
113, 117, 120, 124, 139n15,
105–10, subjectivities, 1–3, 6–7, 12–13, 15, 20,
89,24,
140n31, 113,167–68117, 120, 124, 139n15, 26, 49, 57, 60, 67, 72, 74–75, 91,
140n31, 167–68 26, 49, 57, 60, 67, 72, 74–75,
93, 95–96, 106, 119, 127, 129, 167, 89, 91,
Right to Food Network, 100, 108, 110
Right 93,
175,95–96, 106, 119, 127, 129, 167,
right totohave
Foodrights,
Network, 100, 108,
8, 18–19, 11064–65
46, 54, 182–83
right 175, 182–83
Right to Information Act, 2005, 110 64–65
to have rights, 8, 18–19, 46, 54,
Right Targeted Public Distribution System
Rosen,toLawrence,
Information 75 Act, 2005, 110 Targeted Public 124
Distribution System
Rosen, (TPDS),
rural mobilisations,7557, 104–05
Lawrence,
(TPDS), 124
124. See also PDS
rural mobilisations, 57, 104–05 see also PDS
see also PDS
Tenth Five Year Plan document 2002–07,
sacred, 3, 149–50, 184
sacred, 3, 108,
149–50, 184 135–36, 147–48, Tenth 168,
Five 169n2
Year Plan document 2002–07,
sarpanch, 116–17, 168, 169n2
sarpanch, 108, 116–17, 135–36, 147–48,
153–54 Thappa Brigade, 161, 171n21
153–54 Thappa Brigade,
thappas, 161, 171n21161, 171n21
sathins, 106, 127–30, 132–37, 142n39, thappas, 161, 171n21
sathins,143n45,
106, 127–30, 132–37, 142n39, Ticktin, Miriam, 11–12
164, 184 Ticktin, Miriam,
143n45, 164, 184 Trouillot, Michel 11–12
Rolph, 34, 43
Sattar, Mehr Abdul, 160–61, 165 Trouillot, Michel Rolph, 34, 43
Sattar,
Saigol,Mehr
Rubina,Abdul, 160–61,
40, 157, 165171n21,
161–63, unidirectional translation, 176, 182
Saigol,172n22
Rubina, 40, 157, 161–63, 171n21, unidirectional translation, 176, 182Rights
Universal Declaration of Human
172n22 Universal
Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional (UDHR), 21, 59, 63, 70n16Rights
Declaration of Human
Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional (UDHR),
Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Urdu, 1, 9, 57, 73,21, 59, 63,
76–77, 70n16
132, 158–59,
Forest Dwellers (Recognition
Forest Rights) Act, 146 of Urdu, 1, 9, 57, 73, 76–77, 132, 158–59,
179–80
Forest Rights) Act, 146.
146
see also Forest Rights Act 2006 See also 179–80
Urdu-e Mualla, 77
see Forest
sexual also Forest
violence,RightsRights
161, Act 2006
Act 2006
164 Urdu-e Mualla, 77
sexual violence, 161,
Siddiqa, A., 72, 156–57 164 van adhikaar committee, 170n10
Siddiqa, van adhikaar committee, 170n10
Simpson,A., 72, 156–57
Audra, 9, 31n14, 151, 171, vernacularization, 19
Simpson, Audra, 9, 31n14, 151, 171, vernacularization, 19
vernacularisers, 20, 54
176–77, 183
176–77, 183
Slaughter, Joseph, 17, 19, 61–63 victimsvernacularisers,
of human rights, 20,11,
54 48, 54
Slaughter, Joseph, 17,69n14,
19, 61–63 victims of human rights, 11, 48, 54
Spivak, G.C., 30n5, 84, 86, 181
Spivak, G.C.,
Srivastava, 30n5,131
Kavita, 69n14, 84, 86, 181 Weldon, Laurel, 52
Srivastava, Weldon,52,
welfare, Laurel, 52101–04, 108–09, 114,
55–57,
standpoint Kavita,
theory, 131
87
standpoint theory, welfare,124–27,
52, 55–57,133,101–04,
140n31,108–09,
151, 168114,
starvation, 99, 109,87 144
starvation, 99, 109, 144 124–27, 133, 140n31, 151, 168
216 Index

Whyte, Jessica, 21, 23, 48, 102 world-making, 3, 20, 24, 41, 74, 80–81, 91,
Women’s Development Programme, 173, 175, 182
Rajasthan, 27, 128, 132 Wynter, Sylvia, 5, 10, 31n8, 31n10, 32n16,
women’s equal citizenship rights, 40 58, 84, 97n15
women’s rights, 19, 24, 38–40, 52–53, 62,
Younus, Iqbal, 161
69n12, 118, 132–34, 137, 154, 163,
184 zina, 40