Citizen, Subject and Development in South Asia

Arun Kumar Patnaik

(A paper submitted in a workshop on “Citizenship, the State, and Expanding the boundaries of Democracy”, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, December 28, 2011)

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Citizen, Subject and Development

In a seminar on citizenship, let us not forget the concept of subject. Each one of us is born as

subject rather than citizen. Every child is a subject, before becoming citizen. For, citizenship

is a governance-related concept but subject is society-related concept. As Mazzini, the great

Italian nationalist, says that family is the first school of citizenship. Children are schooled in

families and elsewhere to acquire citizenship gradually but they remain first and foremost

subjects. Apart from being human subjects, both children and adults remain fragmented

across gender, class, caste, race, language, region, religion and so on. Also, historically, we

have different kinds of citizenship – citizens defined in terms of obligations in ancient times

or in terms of rights in modern times, depending on the nature and process of governance.

However, beneath citizenship identity, our subject identity is primary.

Towards Citizen-Subjects:

If we look at the concept of citizenship, we will understand what is being said here. There are

two kinds of citizenship: restricted citizenry and inclusive citizenship. For ages from ancient

to modern times, restricted citizenry was and is still operative. Now we wish to use inclusive

citizenship, which is still a normative ideal and is only partially a real life experience. If you

examine restricted citizenry, it will be easier for us to understand the distinction between

subject and citizen. The reference points of restricted citizenry in ancient times are groups

who were excluded from citizenship: women, labour, slaves, Dalits and foreigners and so on.

These excluded groups are subjects with different subjectivities. Old restrictions vanished but

new restrictions appeared in medieval times. Slavery vanished but the restrictions on peasants

appeared and yet the restrictions on women continued. Peasants disappeared in modern

Europe but labouring poor were denied citizenship. Until 19th century, such restricted

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citizenship was operative and the poor and women were denied citizenship. Citizenship

gradually expanded to include the poor in 19th century and women in 20th century, not due to

thinkers alone but due to political movements of socialists and feminists. In 21st century, as

David Held argues, global citizenship has arrived by including certain types of foreigners

beyond the nation-state frameworks but there are many difficulties still to fulfil the ideals of a

global citizen.

Now when we talk about inclusive citizenship, we mean how citizenship may be broadened

to include new subjects and their subjectivities, which in my view is still in the process of

formation/reformation. Therefore the distinction between subject and citizen remains valid.

Nancy Fraser and B. Cruikshank call this double identity as “citizen-subject”. The noun is

subject and qualifier is citizen. So we should not forget subjects when we talk about citizenry.

The Liberal Fallacy:

I reject any attempt to absorb subject within citizenship or vice versa. Liberals assume that

citizen is autonomous and agency driven and subject is passive and powerless natural.

Liberals following social contract theory privilege citizenry over subject. Even Aristotle too

says the same thing. Aristotle argues that unless people have obligations towards polis, they

should be deemed as animals or God. Liberals too claim a similar thing, albeit in a different

form in a discourse of rights. People become social and political animals by joining nation-

state as in order to preserve rights by surrendering rights as assumed by Hobbes or by joining

nation-state and civil society to promote rights as in Locke. Those who cannot join due to

“certain busy preoccupations” or due to the lack of time and opportunities for leisure remain

in the natural domain like the animals or God, so argues Locke, the modern founding liberal.

Those who do not have property – women and labour - remain outside citizenry. They belong

to the natural rather than social realm. The propertied subjects who are citizens are properly

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social and political animals. Thus, citizenry absorbs subject status of individuals, though they

are propertied individuals. Is the present situation any different from Locke’s time when

property-based citizenry rather than universal citizenship was followed by classical

capitalism? More matured but late capitalism today follows universal human rights rather

than property-based rights. Property-based citizenry is not followed by contemporary nation

states where democracy is operative. Our times are different. Is it fair to claim that Locke’s

notion is still valid now? My answer is complex rather than a straightforward yes or no. True,

the notion of citizenship may have undergone transformation in the political realm but

capitalism has not undergone any major transformation in the economic realm. Locke’s

property-less people still sweat and labour without participating effectively in citizenry.

Today’s neo-liberal capitalism has worsened their citizenship rights and conditions by

ignoring the question of property distribution/share. Neo-liberals are willing to concede

anything including participatory citizenship or are willing to promote various forms of

inclusive citizenship through the formation of stakeholder societies, except a broad

conception of property redistribution which was considered essential for Locke for every

individual to enjoy human rights. There is thus no Locke among liberals today who might

honestly admit that unless everybody has property that includes work, people will live under

animal conditions and their “natural rights” of being human would not conform to their civil

and political rights. Locke realised inconsistently that civil and political rights established by

social contract might not promote natural rights of being human. The emergence of citizenry

may not necessarily realise the potential of human subject. Classical liberals left such uneasy

tension between citizen and subject for posterity like you and me to debate and resolve. That

was sheer intellectual honesty. As compared to this honest confession, the neo-liberals today

blame the poor rather than entire social contract for not availing opportunities offered to them

by a universal system of rights. The neo-liberal policies which produce poverty and gross

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inequalities are not brought into question. That is why in the on-going Wall-street Occupy

movement, the question of distribution of wealth has become very important. People are

prepared to question why world’s wealth is concentrated in 1% of population leaving 99%

people out of neo-liberal capitalism. Thus, the neo-liberal problematic has not gone beyond

the propertied citizenry in economic domain. This is coming under strain by people of the

streets world over who have now acquired Locke’s honest moral vision which far exceeds his

own liberal political project. Therefore, in the liberal projects, the idea of citizenship tends to

absorb subject, though differently in different periods. It fails to make a critical distinction

between citizen and subject. It separates active citizen from natural/passive subject.

Rousseau’s original criticism of this liberal dichotomy is still valid for our neo-liberal era.

The Left Fallacy:

However, I also disagree with the left-wing resistance to the separation of citizen from

subject that believes only in the recovery of subject in any emancipatory project. It believes

in abolishing the distinction between citizen and subject in favour of subject, an idea

originally envisaged by Rousseau in 18th century, rearticulated by Marx in 19th century and by

Foucault in 20th century. In my view, it is a romantic booby trap with a simplistic notion of

governance. However, I agree with them that under private property regimes of capitalism,

there is a separation between subject and citizen that tends to suppress various subjects for

citizenship. Under the neo-liberal capitalism, this suppression takes place in the economic

realm, if not in the political realm. They would like to claim that the recovery of subject,

subjectivities and agency must replace citizenship. I agree with them that liberal conception

of citizenship hides behind veil of power, formal equality, private property and legal political

society. Anything outside state’s law or outside civil society is called illegal which is not

necessarily correct. Recall Marx’s analysis of capitalism as Bentham + liberty + private

property, a telegraphic expression of his critique of capital.

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Recall Ambedkar’s critique of legal democracy: it has tendency to split political democracy

from social democracy; it may also split democratic mechanism from democratic values in a

country like India where caste is operative. From Rousseau to Ambedkar, from different

political traditions, these activist thinkers are wary of liberal democracy. Ambedkar goes

further on Marx: while we may abolish private property, we cannot abolish personal property;

we must fight for equality but cannot abolish liberty, as Marx envisages. It may be noted here

that Ambedkar’s critical observation is sympathetic of Marx’s egalitarian concerns. His

objections point towards deficits in Marx for not having a theory of liberty or citizenship. In

Rousseau, Marx and Foucault, there is no conception of rights or citizenship or complex

governance. Their notion of liberty remains slippery in their simplistic conception of

governance which is known as self-governance. Governance process is assumed to be self-

mediated and direct. If it is not direct and self-involved, governance means that there is loss

of subjectivity. For Foucault, such mediated and indirect governance means governmentality

which through controls of technology alienates subjectivity from subject. Even the neo-liberal

governance that promotes participatory citizenship is also a form of governmentality for him

as it involves discreet controls over the subject population, by denying autonomy to citizen-

subjects to carry out what they wish to do.

But the key questions are as follows: can the idea of self-governance be envisaged without

complex political mediations? By abolishing political mediations can we form free self-

governing subjects and their free associations? Is the question of governance always self-

governance or mediated governance? Does political mediation always involve loss of

subjectivity of the poor, women, Dalits and so on? Or, to recover their subjectivity, a

particular kind of political mediations is necessary, which may be more an expansive kind

rather restrictive kind. If the question of governance or if I can call ‘expansive governance’

cannot be avoided, for people must participate in normal power in order to transform power

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which ought to be a continuous process rather than one-time final event, then the idea of

citizenship which is aligned with governance process cannot be abolished. There is thus no

easy solution to the problem of inclusive citizenship, recovery of the subjects and so on. For

this problem of inclusive citizenship requires us to recognise complex political mediations,

intersections of subject and citizenship as well as intersections of inclusion and exclusion.

Inclusive citizenship cannot be conceived as a neat process of gradual expansion towards

more and more inclusion with a final outcome waiting in the wings of an emancipatory

project. Yet, the ideal of inclusive citizenship cannot be given up in socio-political

movements ceaselessly questioning economic inequalities produced in the neo-liberal era.

How do complex mediations work in the emergence of an inclusive citizenship? How does

inclusive citizenship intersect with exclusion of immanent others who are also integral part of

the same society? How does inclusive citizenship not necessarily eliminate exclusion? How

must inclusive citizenship refer to what Charles Taylor calls democratic exclusion? I may not

answer all these questions effectively but will try to tackle all of them by citing two crucial

examples from India and Nepal.

Complex Political Mediations: A Dialogue between the Left and the Liberal

If we relook at the concept of political society developed by Partha Chatterjee in both

empirical and conceptual materials, we will notice what is meant by complex political

mediations involved in the recovery of subject, the formation of citizenship and the nature of

governance. I agree with Chatterjee that subaltern subjects and their subjectivity are excluded

by the legal state and civil society which worships rule of law only. I also agree with his

alternative conceptualisation that subaltern subjects are better represented in political society

which is a network of governance involving subaltern communities in non-Western societies

(sic). But his story both excites and dampens me.

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Chatterjee’s concept of political society is unitary and has a single determinate meaning

attached to it by glossing over many meanings pregnant in his own empirical story. However,

following Gramsci, it can be said that there are many forms of political society: extreme

political society like Italian fascism, passive or moderate political society or legal state during

Italy’s passive revolution, liberal political society as in France and Britain (Gramsci’s

admiration for hegemony in France is well-known) and “integral” political society (counter-

hegemonic subaltern society) in search of “integral autonomy” of subalterns (for example,

factory council movement + communist state) which was briefly experienced during Lenin’s

Russia or Gramsci’s own Turin working class movement. Chatterjee’s concept glosses over

this rich classification of political societies by Gramsci. However, you may ask why

everybody would follow Gramsci’s rich account of political societies. Agreed but I hope you

would agree with me that like Gramsci, we should offer plural conceptualisation of a subject

matter rather than follow Chatterjee’s unitary conceptualisation, even though you may not

agree with Gramsci’s pluralism here.

The Story from Bengal:

First, let us begin with the empirical material presented by Chatterjee. In Bengal during

1980s, where the Left Front government was in power, there was a problem to clear slums

settled around railway tracks on government land. The government formed a resettlement

committee which consisted of members from ruling party, opposition party, civil servants,

lawyers and community leaders from the slums. Have you heard of such a broad-based

resettlement committee elsewhere in Lalgarh or Singur under the same government in Bengal

or even in other parts of India, where resettlement is an on-going process? This question is

relevant to our story but let us return below. The result of the work by this committee is

phenomenal. The slums could be resettled elsewhere with rehabilitation measures even

extended to the destitute women who too got houses with land “pattas”. But this story

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presented by Chatterjee challenges his own conceptual apparatus marred by the fatal touch of

Michel Foucault, which is not noticed by his followers or even critics. I say this as it has great

relevance to the story of citizen-subject unfolding under a complex political mediation. Let us

get back to the story again which has many conceptual complexities.

First, the official resettlement committee is unusually broad and also a reality, which can

happen only if the leadership of the governing party is broad-minded and non-sectarian.

There are many inferences that can be derived from this story. First, the communist

leadership is not interested in using slum dwellers for the ruling party’s legitimacy for next

elections, and it has also prevented the opposition party for doing so. The ruling party

involved two competing parties from the electoral arena in the resettlement process. It also

involved community leaders from slums who could give critical feedback which got

legitimised by the committee’s decisions. A non-sectarian leadership with positive outlook

could pass on its own broadmindedness to the committee’s members. The pressure of

electoral democracy works here as both the party-system is formed due to parliamentary

democracy operative in India. And parliamentary democracy cannot function without civil

society, if you recall Locke’s theory of democracy. In the present story, however, the poor

illegal squatters have got voting rights to elect legislators who too compete for their votes.

If the resettlement committee is an illustration of Chatterjee’s political society, let it be so (I

will ignore my reservations). But his political society has come into being due to two things:

communist leadership and civil society. Chatterjee’s theory is hell-bent in showing that

political society is formed outside civil society and is diplomatically silent in showing that

communist leadership of a particular kind is responsible for the formation of political society.

In either case, he derecognises their contributions to the formation of political society. The

contribution of communist leadership is critical in this story, as a new leadership of the same

communist-led government in Bengal did not bother to think of forming a development

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committee of a broad kind in Singur and Lalgarh. For orthodox Marxists and postmodernist

writers, the role of leadership, its non-sectarian nature, its relative autonomy vis-à-vis a

collective system of governance are not significant and are therefore worth ignoring in

normal power process. However, as the Bengal story shows, the initiative for political society

rests not on all critiques of civil society as Chatterjee assumes rather than on a certain kind of

a non-sectarian criticism. It is not simply borne out of a strategic decision as Chatterjee

argues but also due to the nature of a non-sectarian leadership. Jyoti Basu was right when he

said unambiguously that “our party made some fundamental mistakes in Lalgarh and Singur.

If only it corrected them, it would gain the confidence of common people.” Probably there

was over-optimism in his vision. But that did not happen as his leadership – a non-sectarian

leadership - was missed by his communist party in the above cases in Bengal.

The governance process is very complicated. It involves a complex political mediation, while

recovering the suppressed subject as citizen. If we return to our story, we will find that the

old civil society is reformed through a political society which is nothing but an expansive

form of government where the excluded subjects participate through their community leaders

and then new members like the destitute women become members of civil society as they

now acquire legal property-rights. Recall Locke’s normative vision that every human

subject’s natural right to property must be recognised by social contract – that civil and

political rights must conform to inalienable natural rights of every human subject. Only then

social contract can be deemed to be complete. Locke’s ideas are ironically executed not by a

liberal project of governance but by a non-sectarian leadership of the communist party

working its way out under a liberal governance regime at national level. Suffused with

political correctness, Chatterjee’s story has great empirical richness (my reservations

notwithstanding) but suffers from a postmodernist blind. He refuses to appreciate his devils in

the legal state and civil society which together with subaltern members produced political

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society strategically under a non-sectarian left-wing leadership. He refuses to acknowledge

that the destitute women renew citizenship with the right to shelter now legally acquired

which was denied to them in their pre-existing subaltern setting with only voting rights. Their

citizenship rights got expanded. Their rights have expanded beyond electoral rights to

incorporate the right to property in shelter, if not their right to property in work. Thus, many

processes of exclusion may be still at work. Yet, the destitute women have moved ahead

towards their ideal of inclusive citizenship, though in a very unstable way. But Chatterjee

does not tell us incompleteness of his story - ceaseless struggles of subalterns in the search of

autonomy. Nowhere, Chatterjee examines their search for many nuances of integral

autonomy in his many writings on political society spread over since 1998. On the contrary,

he denies the significance of autonomy – subaltern, partial or integral – for subaltern

societies, while formulating his theory following Foucault’s governmentality rather than

Gramsci’s hegemony. I will come back to this question of autonomy in my next case study

from Nepal, for this question remains an integral of the politics of subaltern communities/

classes in the East or the West. The idea of inclusive citizenship must address this question of

autonomy of citizen-subjects.

The Story from Nepal:

Neila Kabeer’s definition of inclusive citizenship talks about the four values such as justice,

recognition, self-determination and solidarity but does not talk about the value of autonomy.

The concept of self-determination simply assumes that we must have some control over our

lives and resources, whereas autonomy refers to the intersection – a contested zone - between

the self and the Other. Self-determination assumes away the role of the Other in intersecting

with self in several positive and negative mediations. That is why I prefer to sail with

Gramsci’s search for autonomy of the subaltern subjects to define the ideal of inclusive

citizenship. Subaltern autonomy is better than no autonomy; partial autonomy is better than

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subaltern autonomy; and integral autonomy is better than partial autonomy. This graded

conception of autonomy is one of the core ideals of inclusive citizenship. There has to be a

continuous search for autonomy of the subaltern subjects by a political society corresponding

to one of these core ideals. However, it must be said that there could be no final outcome of a

political community. There are ever-flowing intersections of self and other, inclusion and

exclusion, autonomy and interdependence. I therefore reject a teleological account of

inclusive citizenship which ends up in glorifying inclusion by eliminating exclusion. This

account ignores the twin facts that exclusion may also be democratic and also subalterns may

now depend on the other to acquire their autonomy later. Simply said, Kabeer’s self-

determination could not do the job for inclusive citizenship.

Let us now discuss the case study of land struggles of Sukumbasis in the Terai region of

Western Nepal as brilliantly recounted by Katsuhiko Masaki. Sukumbasis were (and still are)

landless squatters, asset-less people and socially subalterns being ethnic minorities and are

also from a lower caste position, Dalits and non-Dalits. But their social position was worse

than the Nepalese Dalits as they were not legal citizens before 1990s. They are non-Nepalese

squatters brought by upper caste landed Pahadis to cultivate their land over a long period. So

they were outside the pale of citizenship rights of a landless Nepalese citizen. They were (are

still) vulnerable for exploitation by the upper caste Pahadi landlords to do free service for the

villages where they are settled at their outskirts in exchange of recognition of their

Sukumbasis status. It was in this scenario for Sukumbasis where there was no hope for

citizenship rights, they launched land struggles, used pre-existing corvee duties for permanent

housing plots and community forest rights. Sukumbasis are ethnically divided into three local

groups: Pahadi (non-Dalit tillers), Deshi (Dalit labour) and Tharu (Dalit bonded labour).

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Land hunger was predominant among them as all were landless squatters up to 1990, when

Nepal opened up to a multi-party democracy. With many political parties competing for their

patronage, patron-client relations began to reverse. Now Pahadi Sukumbasis got upper hand

due to the proximity to landed upper caste Pahadis from main political parties. Under the land

distribution programme, the local Sukumbasis Udyog Samiti was formed and Pahadis among

Sukumbasis managed to get lands for cultivation and houses as well. They used skilfully their

pre-existing dependence network on their old patrons to receive new citizenship property

rights and reverse their own dependence and unstable future. They are now legal settlers

rather than illegal squatters.

Their new find citizenship however produced intense competition among “immanent others”

like Dalit Sukumbasis, Tharus the bonded labourers and the Deshis, forest workers. Both felt

left out by the political system. Tharus moved towards the NGOs, the non-state political

system who demanded to implement the new declaration on the abolition of bonder labour in

1992. Due to communist peasant movements from below, the state has to enact many

egalitarian policies. And Tharus claimed land rights through the NGOs to get rid of their

bonded status. When there was a flood in the village in 1995, other Sukumbasis got exposed

to the state, the NGOs and development processes. As part of flood control measures, Deshis

were under pressure to let the state road pass through their streets. They quickly realised that

by sacrificing for unpaid work, a traditional corvee practice, on a road construction project,

they could strike a double blow: get legal housing plots on either side of the road and work

towards abolition of corvee duties through the NGOs. Free labour or corvee duties, a practice

Sukumbasis would love to hate, was ironically used by them in search for land titles for

houses. Strike the iron when it is hot. This is Sukumbasis’s way of what John Locke calls the

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transformation of natural rights of being human subjects into civil and legal rights of citizens.

Or, simply said, that is how subjects become citizens.

Meanwhile, landless women Sukumbasis were not to be left alone on the issue of women’s

community forest programme initiated by national government in 1992. They formed groups

by aligning with male party activists from different political parties seeking their patronage

now. They brought pressure on the DFO of the area and formed three community forest

groups (out of 10 groups in the area), sat with male party activists from Nepalese background

and decided who should share what kind of minor forest produces, cut branches for fuel

wood, and cut leaves for their animals. They learned from male party colleagues how to

conduct meetings and maintain accounts and distribute savings among members. Gradually,

the presence of male party colleagues declined and now they are managing the forest

committees themselves and face the DFO’s staff with a sense of dignity and confidence.

While using male party colleagues, women gained a new sense of solidarity and dignity to

conduct their own activists which, as Neila Kabeer says, are two key values of inclusive

citizenship.

Conclusion:

Commenting on above story of Sukumbasis, Masaki argues, “Power does not always

subjugate the underprivileged into subordinate positions, but can also be turned into an

advantage.” Normalising functions of power that induce powerlessness can also be used to

regain autonomy, sense of dignity and self-confidence, and can help subalterns move from

subjugated positions like landlessness, homelessness and agency-less to acquiring land rights,

housing rights, and agency. Chatterjee’s account altogether misses power as contested

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relation and does not recognise the contradictions and pressures within power relation, as if

by contacting power, subalterns reproduce power. In Chatterjee’s theory, subalterns need to

move outside power – law and civil society- to recover their subjectivity. His concept of

political society is a domain outside law and civil society which are instruments of neo-liberal

governmentality. That is why Chatterjee is wary of admitting the mediations by the NGOs

who are seen by him as neo-liberal instruments of power. He thus suppresses the theoretical

potential of the empirical richness in his story. His empirical account upholds a different

theory which is indeed the story that Masaki tries to narrate: subalterns use instruments of

normalising power – parties, NGOs, public policies and exclusionary practices - to gain

citizenship rights and recover their subjectivity. While his empirical account proves Masaki’s

theory right, Masaki is not wary of admitting that subalterns help themselves with a war of

manoeuvre mediated by the NGOs or political parties or male party colleagues to get

autonomy from all of them by including themselves as citizens at the intersections of nation-

state’s “welfare governmentality”. Masaki clearly argues that nation-state’s welfare policies

offer both constraints and opportunities for subalterns and it depends on their agonistic

struggles to both expand citizenship, while they recover subjectivity. Their success also

depends on peasant movements from below that put pressure on the state to adopt welfare

mentalities, a point not well recognised by Chatterjee’s political society.

Masaki further argues that there could be double-edged nature of their agonistic struggles.

While, one group leaves out the other adversary group in agonistic struggles instead of

joining them in common struggle, it propels then others left-behind to act together now and

gain autonomy at an appropriate time. Agonistic struggles of a group may indicate double-

edged nature of inclusive citizenship positioned at the intersection of inclusion as well as

exclusion of immanent others who are members of the same society of landless squatters.

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Pahadi’s land struggles excluded Tharus but induced the latter to resent it and inspired them

to work with non-party formations to get land while abolishing traditional corvee duties.

Similarly, non-Nepalese women’s struggles for community forest rights include men party

colleagues from Nepalese background and exclude them gradually. Masaki concludes that

inclusive citizenship as a strategy intersects with inclusion and exclusion. To Masaki’s list, I

would like to add: inclusive citizenship also operates at the intersection of autonomy and

dependence. To present inclusive citizenship as a linear ideal with a final destination may be

far from the real picture, as the subalterns ceaselessly search for the elusive “autonomy” and

seek to share the governance space through a meta-ideal of inclusive citizenship. I agree with

Masaki that inclusive citizenship is thus a never-ending ideal but remains an ideal to be

fought “for ever”, as Gramsci would have said.

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