Since the victory of the BJP in 2014 there has been much speculation about the fate of Muslims and their place in Indian politics. This paper seeks to argue that the recent rise of the BJP has caused the center of politics to move further to the right which in turn has precipitated a change in the politics of the opposition parties as well wherein Muslims have become political “untouchables.” I argue that this change also marks a shift of Indian Muslims from a position of marginalization towards one of exclusion. The Citizenship Amendment Act, India’s Nuremberg moment, was a significant marker of this fundamental shift in the political, economic, legal, institutional, cultural and social status of Indian Muslims.
{"title":"Indian Muslims and the Anti-CAA Protests: From Marginalization Towards Exclusion","authors":"Ali Khan Mahmudabad","doi":"10.4000/samaj.6701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6701","url":null,"abstract":"Since the victory of the BJP in 2014 there has been much speculation about the fate of Muslims and their place in Indian politics. This paper seeks to argue that the recent rise of the BJP has caused the center of politics to move further to the right which in turn has precipitated a change in the politics of the opposition parties as well wherein Muslims have become political “untouchables.” I argue that this change also marks a shift of Indian Muslims from a position of marginalization towards one of exclusion. The Citizenship Amendment Act, India’s Nuremberg moment, was a significant marker of this fundamental shift in the political, economic, legal, institutional, cultural and social status of Indian Muslims.","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45705278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What role do agrarian capitalism and regional caste/class formation play in the making of post-liberalization urban India? And, what can we learn from these agrarian-urban entanglements to better understand current processes of urbanization in India? These are some of the main questions Sai Balakrishnan specifically addresses in her book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India. The book is an empirically rich and highly informative narrative of “agrarian-urban ...
{"title":"Sai Balakrishnan. Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India","authors":"Alexander Follmann","doi":"10.4000/samaj.6617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6617","url":null,"abstract":"What role do agrarian capitalism and regional caste/class formation play in the making of post-liberalization urban India? And, what can we learn from these agrarian-urban entanglements to better understand current processes of urbanization in India? These are some of the main questions Sai Balakrishnan specifically addresses in her book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India. The book is an empirically rich and highly informative narrative of “agrarian-urban ...","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46581278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Aadhaar program has been among the most defining socio-political projects of the Indian state over the last decade. Translating to “platform” or “foundation” in several Indian languages, this colossal identification scheme has been extended thus far to almost 1.25 billion Indian residents. As noted by Rao and Nair (2019), the word Aadhaar has become a metonymy that transcends its literal meaning, automatically linking it to the national biometric identification project that carries its na...
{"title":"Grappling with Aadhaar: Biometrics, Social Identity and the Indian State","authors":"Silvia Masiero, S. Shakthi","doi":"10.4000/samaj.6279","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6279","url":null,"abstract":"The Aadhaar program has been among the most defining socio-political projects of the Indian state over the last decade. Translating to “platform” or “foundation” in several Indian languages, this colossal identification scheme has been extended thus far to almost 1.25 billion Indian residents. As noted by Rao and Nair (2019), the word Aadhaar has become a metonymy that transcends its literal meaning, automatically linking it to the national biometric identification project that carries its na...","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45976700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Supporters of Aadhaar, the unique identification scheme that aims to use biometric information and a 12-digit number to catalogue every Indian resident, have often commented on the tremendous amount of “fraud” that this program has curtailed since its introduction nearly a decade ago. Four years before the first Aadhaar number was issued, this discourse of ensuring authenticity was similarly deployed by the Indian information technology (IT) industry’s employer association, NASSCOM, which inaugurated its own unique identification project to verify potential and current employees. Known as the National Skills Registry (NSR), this database utilizes biometric identification to create individual profiles of IT employees, each of whom is assigned a unique number called an ITPIN. In this paper, I draw on interview and observation data collected during nine months of fieldwork in Chennai’s IT industry, as well as a detailed analysis of industry reports and documents, to dissect employee and corporate narratives on the NSR. I interrogate the overarching discourse of employee “integrity” operating within the industry to deconstruct the myth-making, misconceptions and self-disciplining generated by the existence of this database. As a result, I provide a comparative framework through which to conceptualize Aadhaar’s implications for safeguarding individual privacy, while also commenting on the power of private players under neoliberal capitalism and the increasing ubiquity of surveillance strategies in the lives of Indian residents.
{"title":"Crafting “Integrity”: The Implications of Authentication through Unique Identification Databases","authors":"S. Shakthi","doi":"10.4000/samaj.6414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6414","url":null,"abstract":"Supporters of Aadhaar, the unique identification scheme that aims to use biometric information and a 12-digit number to catalogue every Indian resident, have often commented on the tremendous amount of “fraud” that this program has curtailed since its introduction nearly a decade ago. Four years before the first Aadhaar number was issued, this discourse of ensuring authenticity was similarly deployed by the Indian information technology (IT) industry’s employer association, NASSCOM, which inaugurated its own unique identification project to verify potential and current employees. Known as the National Skills Registry (NSR), this database utilizes biometric identification to create individual profiles of IT employees, each of whom is assigned a unique number called an ITPIN. In this paper, I draw on interview and observation data collected during nine months of fieldwork in Chennai’s IT industry, as well as a detailed analysis of industry reports and documents, to dissect employee and corporate narratives on the NSR. I interrogate the overarching discourse of employee “integrity” operating within the industry to deconstruct the myth-making, misconceptions and self-disciplining generated by the existence of this database. As a result, I provide a comparative framework through which to conceptualize Aadhaar’s implications for safeguarding individual privacy, while also commenting on the power of private players under neoliberal capitalism and the increasing ubiquity of surveillance strategies in the lives of Indian residents.","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44082846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the 2000s, “rights-based approaches” to development acquired prominence in national level social policy in India. From 2005 to 2013, the Indian parliament passed several laws that effectively created new legal “rights.” This included a national legislation on the “right to work” under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) enacted in 2005 and a National Food Security Act (NFSA) on the “right to food” enacted in 2013. In text, rights created under these legislations expanded the idea of citizenship by defining justiciable claims that could be made against the state. The enactment of these legislations drew on a history of collective action and litigation centered on constitutional law and created the possibility of a new, progressive politics. Yet this positive expansion of citizenship rights has in recent years encountered a backlash and a de facto reigning in of rights. Part of this erosion of rights has been due to the Aadhaar based digital technologies using biometrics that were introduced as a key tool of implementation of social protection programs implemented under laws such as the NREGA and NFSA. Despite the present context of Aadhaar based erosion of citizenship rights, and the specter of coded and precarious citizenship, this paper argues that challenges to implementation of social policy need to be viewed in perspective. The role of social movements has been fundamental to the emergence of the aforementioned policies and legislations. Moving forward, the role of civil society actors in demanding probity in implementation of social policy, and in the reclaiming of citizenship, is critical for ensuring that new rights legislations retain their progressive potential.
{"title":"Chasing Rights in Delhi: Social Movements and the National Food Security Act","authors":"Nandini P. Nayak","doi":"10.4000/SAMAJ.6306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/SAMAJ.6306","url":null,"abstract":"In the 2000s, “rights-based approaches” to development acquired prominence in national level social policy in India. From 2005 to 2013, the Indian parliament passed several laws that effectively created new legal “rights.” This included a national legislation on the “right to work” under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) enacted in 2005 and a National Food Security Act (NFSA) on the “right to food” enacted in 2013. In text, rights created under these legislations expanded the idea of citizenship by defining justiciable claims that could be made against the state. The enactment of these legislations drew on a history of collective action and litigation centered on constitutional law and created the possibility of a new, progressive politics. Yet this positive expansion of citizenship rights has in recent years encountered a backlash and a de facto reigning in of rights. Part of this erosion of rights has been due to the Aadhaar based digital technologies using biometrics that were introduced as a key tool of implementation of social protection programs implemented under laws such as the NREGA and NFSA. Despite the present context of Aadhaar based erosion of citizenship rights, and the specter of coded and precarious citizenship, this paper argues that challenges to implementation of social policy need to be viewed in perspective. The role of social movements has been fundamental to the emergence of the aforementioned policies and legislations. Moving forward, the role of civil society actors in demanding probity in implementation of social policy, and in the reclaiming of citizenship, is critical for ensuring that new rights legislations retain their progressive potential.","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41484898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The category of information has been at the heart of notions about citizenship and governance in all modern societies. This paper constructs a genealogy of information and statehood in India by examining how information as a governing idea was brought into play in successive stages of contemporary Indian history. This first section provides a broad account of the creation of the Aadhaar card project—that attempts to uniquely identify every citizen in the country—and briefly reviews the controversies it has generated. The second portion of the paper provides historical snapshots that illustrate information’s constitutive role in previous versions of the Indian state. Thus, the second section looks at the role information played in constituting colonial government, while the next section examines the nationalist phase in pre-independence India to suggest that information functioned as speculative category that allowed freedom fighters to dream and think the nation. In the fourth section I look at the pre-liberalization period of postcolonial history to trace how information becomes a state “good” that is both strictly controlled and sparsely disseminated while at the same time acting as a spur to a specialized sort of economic activity. Finally, in the fifth and concluding section of the paper, I analyze information’s role in emerging India by revisiting the implications of the Aadhaar card in particular and of informational governance in general, by placing both in the context of contemporary political and administrative developments like the National Population Register and the Citizenship Amendment Act.
{"title":"Information and the Indian State: A Genealogy","authors":"Biswarup Sen","doi":"10.4000/SAMAJ.6377","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/SAMAJ.6377","url":null,"abstract":"The category of information has been at the heart of notions about citizenship and governance in all modern societies. This paper constructs a genealogy of information and statehood in India by examining how information as a governing idea was brought into play in successive stages of contemporary Indian history. This first section provides a broad account of the creation of the Aadhaar card project—that attempts to uniquely identify every citizen in the country—and briefly reviews the controversies it has generated. The second portion of the paper provides historical snapshots that illustrate information’s constitutive role in previous versions of the Indian state. Thus, the second section looks at the role information played in constituting colonial government, while the next section examines the nationalist phase in pre-independence India to suggest that information functioned as speculative category that allowed freedom fighters to dream and think the nation. In the fourth section I look at the pre-liberalization period of postcolonial history to trace how information becomes a state “good” that is both strictly controlled and sparsely disseminated while at the same time acting as a spur to a specialized sort of economic activity. Finally, in the fifth and concluding section of the paper, I analyze information’s role in emerging India by revisiting the implications of the Aadhaar card in particular and of informational governance in general, by placing both in the context of contemporary political and administrative developments like the National Population Register and the Citizenship Amendment Act.","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48217077","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India, anthropologist Kenneth Bo Nielsen explores the phenomenon of state-led land expropriation for the benefit of private investors following the adoption of the 2005 Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Act (Jenkins, Kennedy and Mukhopadhyay 2014), and the associated struggles over land dispossession, popularly termed as India’s “new land wars” (Levien 2013). The originality of this study is however its focus on the case of the Singur mov...
{"title":"Kenneth Bo Nielsen. Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India","authors":"Delphine Thivet","doi":"10.4000/samaj.6542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6542","url":null,"abstract":"In Land Dispossession and Everyday Politics in Rural Eastern India, anthropologist Kenneth Bo Nielsen explores the phenomenon of state-led land expropriation for the benefit of private investors following the adoption of the 2005 Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Act (Jenkins, Kennedy and Mukhopadhyay 2014), and the associated struggles over land dispossession, popularly termed as India’s “new land wars” (Levien 2013). The originality of this study is however its focus on the case of the Singur mov...","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70624563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Introduction The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is a unique legislation not just in India but also among developing countries for the simple reason that no other developed, nor developing, country has enacted a right to employment. In simple terms, it guarantees 100 days per year of paid work, on demand and as a manual laborer, to every adult resident of rural areas. As a legislative act it provides for compensation in the form of an unemployment allowance for delays in wage ...
{"title":"Rob Jenkins and James Manor. Politics and the Right to Work: India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act","authors":"Himanshu","doi":"10.4000/samaj.6262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6262","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is a unique legislation not just in India but also among developing countries for the simple reason that no other developed, nor developing, country has enacted a right to employment. In simple terms, it guarantees 100 days per year of paid work, on demand and as a manual laborer, to every adult resident of rural areas. As a legislative act it provides for compensation in the form of an unemployment allowance for delays in wage ...","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46030839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Against a history of ID documents that defines them only as products of the State, Tarangini Sriraman, historian and political scientist, shows how such documents are co-products of the State and its subjects, the citizens. In so doing, she distances herself from a classical and Eurocentric history of ID documents, defined as “a unique subset of bureaucratic writing,” which considers them only from the perspective either of the Enlightenment or of a history of domination (Sriraman 2018:26). O...
{"title":"Tarangini Sriraman, In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India","authors":"Nicolas Belorgey","doi":"10.4000/samaj.6222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6222","url":null,"abstract":"Against a history of ID documents that defines them only as products of the State, Tarangini Sriraman, historian and political scientist, shows how such documents are co-products of the State and its subjects, the citizens. In so doing, she distances herself from a classical and Eurocentric history of ID documents, defined as “a unique subset of bureaucratic writing,” which considers them only from the perspective either of the Enlightenment or of a history of domination (Sriraman 2018:26). O...","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43392174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What is the Indian city, and more specifically, what are post-colonial Indian cities, are the two interrelated questions that this small, informative and unusual volume published by the Presses Universitaires de Provence, uniquely addresses. There is a continuous tension running throughout the book as chapters counterbalance between qualifying the idea of “the Indian city” as a whole, and acknowledging the diversity of “real Indian cities.” The stage is set beginning with the philosophical an...
{"title":"Livio Boni and Marine Carrin-Bouez, Villes Post-Coloniales en Inde","authors":"Marie–Hélène Zérah","doi":"10.4000/samaj.6246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4000/samaj.6246","url":null,"abstract":"What is the Indian city, and more specifically, what are post-colonial Indian cities, are the two interrelated questions that this small, informative and unusual volume published by the Presses Universitaires de Provence, uniquely addresses. There is a continuous tension running throughout the book as chapters counterbalance between qualifying the idea of “the Indian city” as a whole, and acknowledging the diversity of “real Indian cities.” The stage is set beginning with the philosophical an...","PeriodicalId":36326,"journal":{"name":"South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45800586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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