Professor, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
 |
| Niraja Gopal Jayal |
whose book CITIZENSHIP
AND ITS DISCONTENTS: AN INDIAN HISTORY (Permanent Black and Harvard University
Press, 2013) has been published to profuse critical acclaim, is
interviewed here by
 |
| Madhav Khosla |
Madhav Khosla (PhD Candidate, Department of Government,
Harvard University).
Q1. It is
sometimes felt that a strictly legal conception of citizenship, as it were, can
work against more participatory forms of citizenship. Do you feel that some
inclusionary forms of citizenship are reflections of deeper failures?
A1.
That, in a sense, is my point of departure in this book: equality is the
premise and the promise of citizenship, but it is also, and precisely because
of this aspiration to equality, an embattled and endlessly contested political
project. Take legal citizenship: it is certainly true that the denial of legal
citizenship can be gravely unjust, but its affirmation in law can also be worth
little or nothing. As far as inclusionary forms of citizenship are concerned,
it rather depends on what sort of inclusion is attempted and which inequalities
the polity seeks to redress. We may be, and frequently are, satisfied with
symbolic inclusion, without however aspiring to address the much larger
challenge of structural inequalities which hold the key to equal citizenship.
Having
said that, legal citizenship should properly be seen as a first, necessary, but
far from sufficient condition of a robust conception of political membership.
This applies to immigrants in affluent societies as much as to those who are
nominally citizens in their own country but so desperately poor or
discriminated against that their citizenship has little real purchase. The
impediments to participation are not exclusively from legal conceptions of
citizenship, but they can also emanate from the denial of membership in the
political community.
Q2. Much of
the current discourse around citizenship in India focuses on rights and their
expansion. Do you think that India needs to be more circumspect in this regard
– and that the enthusiasm with which matters are being set in stone might, as
Bentham had famously feared, hold the potential for giving rise to illiberal
outcomes?
A2.
To the extent that Bentham was suspicious of natural rights, and saw rights
purely as creatures of law, the current predilection (of both state and civil
society) to give legal and even constitutional status to social rights, with no
antecedent moral principles being corralled to justify them, can quite
cheerfully cohabit with Bentham’s view. However, the real question is about
whether we run the risk of illiberal outcomes with rights being cast in stone,
and the question seems to imply that social and economic rights run this risk
more than, say, civil or political rights, which are deeply and foundationally
liberal. So, to return to the question of social and economic rights, thirty
years ago this could have been quite easily answered with a nod in the
direction of the then Soviet Union. Today, however, this is considerably more
complicated. Except for those who altogether dismiss rights as appendages of
bourgeois modernity, the interconnections and interdependencies between
different types of rights have become stronger, whether in international
covenants or in some of the new constitutions of the Global South. If anything,
with new forms of state censorship on literary and artistic work, and of state
surveillance using sophisticated technology, it seems that it is the civil and
political rights and freedoms that underpin liberal politics that are
endangered. Today, the possibility of illiberal outcomes appears less likely to
emanate from social rights (to the implementation of which there are not only
serious structural impediments, but also bureaucratic and social resistance)
and more from the new forms of governmentality, and – literally – new
technologies of rule.
Q3. In many
countries, citizens, in any particular endeavour, are not reduced to a single
identity. At the same time, however, the law itself does not focus on
management through identities. The very idea is that one need not speak through
one’s identity. What you do feel should be the relationship between immutable
identities and citizenship?
A3.
I think what you are describing in these countries is really the French ideal
type of the past. The politics of multiculturalism of the last quarter-century
suggest otherwise. I think it is important to recognize that this emphasis on
the immutability of identities, and on conceptions of citizenship mediated by
identity, is something in which citizens and states are complicit. There is a pact
between states (who are eager to ‘identify’ their citizens and govern them
additionally through laws that recognize identity) and citizens or their
community leaderships which make these claims on the state. In such a context,
the idea of a civic identity seems either terribly retro or politically
incorrect.
I do believe that something valuable is lost
when the civic identity completely drops out of the project of citizenship, but
that does sadly seem to be the way things are in the present. The Occupy
movements did seem to herald some possibility of change, but eventually turned
out to be rather shortlived. Ultimately, a civic identity must be not only
about identity, but also about solidarity, and civic solidarity is essential to
crafting consensus on, say, redistributive strategies for a more equal
citizenship.
Q4. Do you
feel that the contests within identity groups merely represent new forms of
elite power capture, and that the poor remain potatoes in a sack – unable to
speak to one another or mobilize together? Does a focus on immutability run the
risk of turning our gaze away from class, and those who truly lack the capacity
to participate as citizens?
A4.
It is very difficult to objectively distinguish between the genuine claims of
oppressed identities and those that represent forms of mobilization for elite
capture. The political scientists’ binary of primordialism vs constructivism
simply cannot answer all questions. It is however true that the more strident
claims are often made by leaders of already empowered groups that have learnt
how to leverage identities by linking them to political and economic
opportunity. This has, as we know, generated incentives for the invention of
new identities. In that the state is the first and last port of call for
arbitrating identities, we have not strayed too far from the colonial script.
As for class, it is astonishing that despite the obvious and compelling overlap
between class and horizontal inequalities, both citizens and the state are
equally invested in the latter, and tend equally to disregard the convergence
between them.
Q5. On a more
personal note, can you us a little bit about your journey into this topic, both
from your important earlier work, Democracy and
the State (1999), and more generally? And,
if possible, what we might expect your next project to be?
A5.
The journey from Democracy and the State
was fairly straightforward, though long and punctuated. In that book, I had
argued that the quality of Indian democracy should be assessed in terms of its
ability to provide for the meaningful exercise of the rights of citizenship. So
the next logical question clearly was: what are rights of citizenship, and is
citizenship about more than rights. This book attempts to answer both those
questions. Going forward, I would like to explore a bit more the implications
of the theoretical hollowing out of the state, which is at least partly an
outgrowth of some of the citizenship literature and its fascination with
transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. My worry is that while the questioning of
borders and normative nationalism is very appealing, it can also be a little
irresponsible because cosmopolitanism does not offer any convincing answers to
problems of poverty, hunger, and disease, even as it lets the state off the
hook completely.
Q6.
(publisher’s question) Could you list a few of the books that have stimulated
your ideas and intellectual directions?
It is hard to identify a handful of books
that have influenced my intellectual formation. Two books that made me turn to
the study of Indian politics in the 1980s were Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World:
A Derivative Discourse and Atul Kohli’s The
State and Poverty in India.
I derive aesthetic pleasure from novels that
are unusually structured, and speak to contemporary problems through history.
Two of my all-time favourites in this genre are Iain Pears’s The Dream of Scipio and Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land.
This may also explain why the books that I
have hugely admired, without their necessarily having influenced me in any
discernible way, are Hobbes’s Leviathan, Rawls’s
A Theory of Justice, and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK
Citizenship and Its
Discontents
An Indian History
Breaking new ground in scholarship, this is the
first history of citizenship in India.
Unlike the mature democracies of the West,
India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of
citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian
society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern
India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the
constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic
inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies
of inclusion.
Citizenship
and Its Discontents explores a
century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the
present, analysing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as
rights, and as identity.
The early optimism that a new India could be
fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive
legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and
group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic
community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and
weak solidarity.
Once seen by Western political scientists as an
anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about
citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of
the subject can afford to ignore.
“The idea of citizenship in India promised
inclusive community, but the country's enlivened politics have transformed that
promise into a more fragmentary, divisive reality. In this magisterial analytic
history, Niraja Gopal Jayal maps for the first time the concept's vicissitudes,
and makes an essential contribution to our understanding of contemporary India
and of political theory.”—Sunil
Khilnani, King’s India Institute
“A contribution to our understanding of
citizenship and democracy in India that is empirically rich and theoretically
sophisticated.”—Amrita Basu, Amherst
College
Hardback / 376pp / Rs 795.00 / ISBN 81-7824-371-7 /
South Asia rights
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