Employment, Poverty and Rights in India

Dayabati Roy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138479586
• eBook ISBN: 9781351065405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Economics

In comparison to other social groups, India's rural poor – and particularly Adivasis and Dalits - have seen little benefit from the country's economic growth over the last three decades. Though economists and statisticians are able to model the form and extent of this inequality, their work is rarely concerned with identifying possible causes.

Employment, Poverty and Rights in India analyses unemployment in India and explains why the issues of employment and unemployment should be the appropriate prism to understand the status of wellbeing in India. The author provides a historical analysis of policy interventions on behalf of the colonial and postcolonial state with regard to the alleviation of unemployment and poverty in India and in West Bengal in particular. Arguing that, as long as poverty - either as a concept or as an empirical condition - remains as a technical issue to be managed by governmental technologies, the 'poor' will be held responsible for their own fate and the extent of poverty will continue to increase. The book contends that rural unemployment in India is not just an economic issue but a political process that has consistently been shaped by various socio-economic, political and cultural factors since the colonial period. The analysis which depends mainly on ethnography extends to the implementation of the 'New Rights Agenda', such as the MGNREGA, at the rural margin.

Challenging the dominant approach to poverty, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of South Asian studies, Indian Political Economy, contemporary political theories, poverty studies, neo-liberalism, sociology and social anthropology as well as development studies.

1
Introduction

Land, capital and well-being in India

At the onset of this book, I make two senses very clear. These two senses, I believe, are enormously significant to understand the logic not only of my emphasis on politics as an angle to analyse the issues of employment, but also of my focus on employment rather than poverty as an analytical category. First, I take it as axiomatic that unemployment is nothing but a political process. Second, I propose to focus on employment, instead of poverty, as an analytical category to gauge the degree of well-being of a particular society. These two senses, I argue, would together engender both a theoretical possibility of a change in viewpoint to conceive the issues of well-being and social justice in a better way, and a practical possibility of essaying a politics in the field of power with an aim of ‘transformative social development’. In other words, what I analyse here is the way unemployment has politically been created and recreated in the present regime as part of the complex relationship between capital, class and the state in India. Furthermore, I explain why the issues of employment and unemployment are the appropriate prism to understand the status of well-being of a particular group of population. Conversely, the question of poverty which is being recognized as the main focus of several scholars who are concerned with the well-being of population, or even with the social justice, I would argue, is just one of the techniques of the government to manage the population in want of well-being for the sheer purpose of governance. Poverty is itself an apolitical technical concept originated for the purpose of governance by the state ‘bureaucracy’ particularly of the developing countries. Departing from the Harriss’s argument (2014, 9) that ‘the narrow focus on measurement in the analysis of poverty’ has a tendency to reduce the problem of poverty to a technical question, I contend that not only does the focus of measurement, but also the discourse of poverty as a whole, in any form and on any level, have the potential to reduce the issues of well-being to a managerial question on the part of the government.

The entry point of my argument to the poverty issues is a recent provocative article titled ‘State of Injustices: The Indian State and Poverty’, by John Harriss, the veteran scholar on Indian political economy, who draws the inference that (2014, 17) ‘even the new rights agenda is more about the management of poverty, in the interest of capital, than it is about the realisation of social justice’. While the statement is partially correct when it says that the ‘New Rights Agenda’¹ is about the management of poverty, the statement carries a sense of expectation that the ‘New Rights Agenda’ has the potential ‘that is inherent in the way in which the legislation has cast some socio-economic entitlements as legally enforceable rights’ for the realization of social justice. I argue by problematizing the concepts like social justice, its means of realization, its relation with both the issues of poverty and poverty alleviation programmes that there is hardly any inherent potential in the way the ‘socio-economic entitlements’ have become ‘legally enforceable rights’ in regard to social justice since these policies including the New Rights Agenda are meant for the management of poverty. The policies, legislations or agendas which are aimed at managing issues of poverty have undoubtedly little prospect to deal with the realization of social justice. The issues of social justice are essentially related with the issues of entitlement or, more specifically, with the well-being of the population. In other words, the sphere of social justice is more about the processes of well-being through which the population of a given society enable themselves to have their socio-economic entitlements. The state unsuccessfully tries to mediate between the two processes, or rather the two classes, in order to fulfil the capitalist agenda. If the process of capitalist accumulation is one among two such processes, another must be the process of intervention in citizens’ well-being. Why the state often fails to keep a balance between these two processes is actually due to the inherent fallout of capitalist processes, which I discuss in the following chapters, but what is important in our context is that the state somehow successfully manages the dynamic manifestation of the deficiency of well-being among its population.

The manifestation of the deficiency of well-being, this is to say, of the effect of accumulation of capital can generally be called as poverty. The term ‘poverty’ is so influential in the administrative terminology of governance that the state politics in contemporary period has mainly been revolved around this term. The state does its politics in, or manages, the domain of poverty in such a way that all the concerned actors presuppose poverty as an end in itself. This is to mean, we all endeavour to target the concept of poverty as both cause and effect. The real cause of poverty, it seems, has increasingly faded into oblivion. The more the governed people would become oblivious to the real root of poverty, the more the state and its institution would try to manage the issues of poverty only for the purpose of governance. As long as poverty, either as a concept or as an empirical condition, remains a technical issue to be managed by governmental technologies, the ‘poor’ would just be thought to be responsible for their own wretchedness and misery. And, therefore, not only would the extent of poverty continue to increase, but also market capitalism would remain as a default condition in all societies. In the book Poor Economics,Banerjee and Duflo (2011) describe the nature of poverty across the globe and explain the ways of fighting global poverty. They have attempted, not surprisingly, to explore the dynamic reasons why the poor are poor, and to prescribe some steps about what is to be done to remedy the poverty or, in a way, to improve the lives of the poor. What the book reveals throughout its pages, interestingly, is that poverty is the reason of poverty. The poor themselves are, as it were, liable for their sorry state. Thus the poor themselves should step forward to improve their lives, and, if they desire, they can undertake the lessons chalked out by the authors. Evidently, the authors are against the view of political economy which presupposes ‘politics has the primacy over the economics’. So there is, as such, no politics or class politics or the politics of capital, in their world of poverty, which does play consistently in creating and recreating the issues of poverty. The authors, or the so-called poverty specialists, are rather quite optimist that they identify the poverty traps, armed with patient understanding ‘why the poor live the way they do’, and know which tools they need to give the poor ‘to help them get out of them’ (Banerjee and Duflo 2011, 272).

I argue that we all, within the academy as well as in popular discourse, have been familiar with this kind of narrative since long from the beginning of the practice of liberal thought. The normative theories of liberal politics are actually nothing but a capitalist narrative in which the state mediates the issues among its citizens in terms of well-being. But the issues of well-being in the toolbox of the statist discourse almost always remain as a technical, or bureaucratic, purpose of governance throughout all the countries. In the postcolonial countries as well, it has no doubt that, the politics of well-being, rather the politics of governance, mainly revolves around the management of poverty, not around the social justice. Even the Marxist tradition, though having contrary views to liberal political thoughts, rarely offers an effective alternative to liberal political theories. Because, as Chatterjee (2011, 4) correctly analyses the failure of Marxist thoughts, the tendency in a great deal of Marxist thinking is to subordinate ‘the political to the economic’, and thus to regard ‘political principles as the instrumental means for securing economic ends’. The poverty narrative of Banerjee and Duflo simply reflects the mainstream liberal thoughts with which many among the academic milieu perhaps agree. Not only does economics as a discipline conceive this kind of narrative, but the academics in other disciplines also conceive the issues of well-being in terms of the idea of poverty, and thus believe that the latter’s eradication requires only an apolitical intervention. The class or capitalist agenda, or the politics in any form, never get a primacy in this narrative of capitalist development. Regardless of the perspective or broader context which set the dynamics of social justice, the dominant liberals try only to understand the nature of poverty, and various means of its eradication. As a result of these deliberations, Harriss (2014, 5) argues that, all ‘attention began to be directed at measurement of the incidence of poverty’ and its alleviation, at least to some extent, ‘which has subsequently become a major academic industry’. But, the question arises whether the attempts or attentions which are to be directed towards the issues of poverty may at all deliver the social justices to the population. Harriss, who correctly recognizes that all the policies including the ‘New Rights Agenda’ are actually more about the management of poverty, holds some expectation that the policies have potential, since his arguments remain in the same discursive practices. It is the urgent call of the present to the scholars who are seriously constructing their arguments in terms of social justice for a departure from this dominant liberal discursive terrain.

Why I urge for a departure from the liberal discourse is actually due to the very reason that the genuine arguments in favour of social justice are incompatible with the discourses in liberal thoughts. Interestingly, like the Marxists, as mentioned by Chatterjee (2011), who, although critiquing the liberal discourse, are nevertheless failing to offer an effective alternative, the scholars who, though having a tendency to critique often the liberal way of thinking, actually are limiting their arguments to the same discursive mode. I would strongly recommend for a framework which departs from the liberal discursive level toward a new discursive level, and would try to understand the issues of social justice in a newer way. The new framework intends to construct its arguments on the basis of new discourses, and makes sense of the current regime of hegemonic strategies. The question arises: how does Harriss’s social justice look like? In fact, Harriss possibly still dreams of the realization of social justice which Nehru had set out in1947 as a promise.² He believes that the policies including the recent New Rights Agenda in India still fall (2014, 17) ‘far short of the Nehru’s promise of social justice’. Harriss has referred to Nehru’s statement that was made during the question and answer session on his draft resolution in the Constituent Assembly where he (Nehru 1947) had affirmed very clearly that ‘(T)he first task of this Assembly is to free India through a new constitution to feed the starving people and cloth the naked masses and to give every Indian fullest opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity’. However, interestingly, two months ahead of this session, Nehru (1946) didn’t hide his concern while moving the resolution that

this Constituent Assembly is not what many of us wished it to be. It has come into being under particular conditions and the British Government has a hand in its birth. They have attached to it certain conditions. We shall endeavour to work within its limits…. But … governments do not come into being by State Papers. Governments are, in fact the expression of the will of the people.³

Here probably lies a part of the dynamic reasons behind why the government in our context still lacks its essence.

Although Nehru’s vision of social justices as declared by him in 1946–1947, and considered by Harriss very recently as kind of exemplary model are essentially based on the principles of liberal politics, his grave concern over the circumstances under which this Constituent Assembly was going to be originated in accordance with the conditions attached by the British Government is significant here to further our discussion. Instead of referring to latest Nehru in the period of 1946–1947, if Harriss could have turned his attention to Nehru’s thoughts and arguments a little earlier in the 1930s, particularly in the period of 1933–1936, he could have found another Nehru whose senses of social justice was quite different from the former one. Jawaharlal Nehru grew more and more radical in the period of 1933–1936, and had become a ‘Marxist revolutionary anti-imperialist’ and written in 1933 (Chandra 1975, 1307), ‘the true civic ideal is the socialist ideal, the communist ideal’. The renowned historian Bipan Chandra had written a beautiful and insightful piece about how the radical Nehru would produce consternation among the Indian capitalists and the right-wing in the Congress. Nehru writes, as quoted by Chandra (ibid.), ‘I see no way of ending the poverty, the vast unemployment, the degradation, and the subjection of the Indian people’ and ‘the ending of vested interest in land and industry’ and also the ending of private property ‘except through socialism’.⁴ But, surprisingly, he was gradually, after his Presidential address at the Lucknow session in 1936, abandoning his radical stance only to be engrossed once for all in the liberal fold. Why did this happen? Discussing vividly about how the capitalist class were being frightened upon Nehru’s radical political stance, and stepped down wholeheartedly to cut-into-size Nehru, Bipan Chandra clarifies reasonably that (1321) ‘many factors, forces, and events went into the making of post-Lucknow Nehru’. While the inherent weakness in Nehru’s Marxism and socialist commitment is, no doubt, one of the main causes behind the transformation of Nehru, the multi-pronged attempts of the capitalist class, who became frightened owing to his radical stance, to tackle Nehru at any cost did accelerate this process. This narrative of Nehru’s transformation from one pole to another would be of our interest when we discuss the role of the Communists in the sphere of employment in the context of West Bengal.

The main problem regarding the issues of social justice and its achievement seemingly lies the way we are to conceptualize it. Many a time, the scholars who endeavour to use the terms viz. social justice, well-being and poverty alleviation usually use them interchangeably. Although these terms are apparently identical, interpretation of the processes is going to be complicated by the interchangeable use of the terms. It is undeniable that all these terms can be defined in a number of ways on the basis of the standpoints of different schools in social sciences. Social justice is, everyone perhaps agrees, justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities and privileges within a society.⁵ If this is the definition of social justice in just a rational expression, it is clear that the attempts of poverty alleviation and the deliveries of social justices have their own different purpose. The policies which are aimed at poverty alleviation can hardly deliver anything related to social justice. However, the social policies which are aimed at social justice can have the potential to alleviate, or even eradicate, poverty. Almost all the social policies in India, as mentioned by Harriss, have more or less failed to deliver social justice simply due to the fact that these are only aimed at poverty alleviation. Nehru’s senses of social justices that Harriss has considered as models of social justice, and also equated with that of Sen’s concept of social justice are actually pseudo–social justice being, as it seems (Harriss 2014, 2), ‘a commonsensical statement of what would be regarded as fair and reasonable by very many people’. What Nehru had aspired, or rather concerned about, in concrete terms, since a major part of his statement is commonsensical and vague, to achieve at the time of first Constituent Assembly, is nothing but the alleviation of poverty thus having very limited scope and potential in terms of the issues of social justices. Sen’s theory of capability approach is, instead, evidently wel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: land, capital and well-being in India
• 2 Right to work! Politics of poverty alleviation policies in India
• 3 Political parties, employment generation policies and governance
• 4 Caste, class and rural employment
• 5 ‘Civil society’, NGOs and rural employment
• 6 Women, gender and employment in rural West Bengal
• 7 Conclusion: employment, capital and the state in rural India
• Glossary
• Index