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Policies
and Practices 20
Primitive Accumulation and Some Aspects of Work and Life in India in the
Early Part of the Twenty First Century
A brief commentary on the persistence of what
is called as degraded labour, unorganized labour, un-clarified labour
process, whose existence defeats the loud claims of globalization, reforms,
filtered growth, all round development of society, wealth of nations etc,
the paper shows the broader significance of the existence of labour in terms
of accumulation, capital’s logic, and the social separations or divisions
(of work and property, labour and wealth, producer and the product etc.),
and therefore relations, which capital as an embodiment of accumulation
represents. There is a lot of talk at present about the space of gainful
manual work shrinking away, almost to a point of vanishing; and that
everywhere we find only white collar labour and digitalized work, and
therefore, it is irrelevant to discuss quality of work, its degradation etc.
Precisely at this point, we also hear talks of abolishing labour protection
laws because these laws prevent production; they are stumbling blocks to
progress and union power needs to be curbed severely. On the other hand,
trade unions acts have suddenly become bones of contention. There is an
increasing membership of the trade unions and they have not been
de-politicized. Organized trade unions and the new forms of labour
organizations around unorganized labour—both are more and more representing
the unorganized workers. With labour market flebilisation, the nature of
bargaining is also changing. More than ever, suddenly taken direct actions
by workers are combining today with old style bargaining. All these show
that the preponderant form of work has deep influence over the politics of
work also now. It is against this background, that the paper tries to find
answers to questions like: Whither India in this early part of the twenty
first century? How can we characterize work and life—at least one part of
it—from the point of labour? When shall we realize that the eternal fate of
labour is to keep on struggling to come out of the representations forced on
it by the regime of capital?
Essay by
Ranabir
Samaddar
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Policies
and Practices 19
Three
Studies on Law and The Shifting Spaces of Justice
As the title rightly suggests, this report,
fourth in the series of short status reports on social justice in India,
deals with the complicacies of legal methods resulting in the shifting
spaces of justice in India. The first paper by R.Niruphama talks of the ‘Need
for Sentencing Policy in India’. In the absence of a proper sentencing
policy, the judgments preceding the sentences are often at the discretion of
the judge. With no specification or guideline on sentencing, it is mostly at
the discretion of the judge to decide the factors he/she will take into
account while giving the judgment. This discretion often gets abused due to
application of personal prejudices. It goes on to describe, briefly, the
Sentencing Procedure under Criminal Procedure Code, 1973. Uses of vague
phrases like ‘circumstances of the
crime’ and ‘mental state and
age’ often results in confusion in the judgmental proceeding. Indian
legal criminal proceeding are often fact specific, which means that the
guidelines vary from case to case, and are often not followed by the lower
courts. The immediate need of the hour is a proper sentencing policy in
India to avoid prejudices and confusions regarding the judgment. The second
paper by Saptarshi Mandal, ‘Dalit
Life Narratives as Ethnographies of Justice’ tries to situate
marginality for the Dalits through three Dalit autobiographies written over
last twenty-five years. They are in the nature of experiences of pain
transformed into narratives and speak of caste-based oppression and the
resultant resistances. The three narratives, ‘Joothan’, ‘Akkarmashi’,
and ‘Anasphot’ are manifestations of the shifting of a Dalit narrator
between the individual ‘I’ and the collective ‘we’. The last paper ‘The
Creation of Social Space for the Articulation of Gender Justice—A Case
Study’ by Shritha K. Vasudevan uses case studies of sexual assaults
that women face in everyday life in public spaces, like the public bus, to
throw light on the fact that such sexual advances have over the years have
come to be considered as ‘normal’ behavior by a regular women traveler.
Sexual assaults are perceived as a ‘social’ phenomenon and have become a
component of a larger patriarchal whole. These violations of human rights of
women pose a grave threat to the existence of the democratic state. Not
simply reacting to such blatant patriarchy, but other factors like improving
economic conditions of women and educating them is the need of the hour. In
states where the Rule of Law does not exist, only political movements with
women’s rights as their mainstay can bring about changes in the
patriarchal practices of society.
Essays by R. Niruphama, Saptarshi Mandal and Shritha K. Vasudevan
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Policies
and Practices 18
Prescribed, Tolerated and Forbidden Forms of Claim Making
Claim-making, amidst state atrocities and apathy,
forms the mainstay of this study, third in a row of status reports on social
justice in India. Development, as an index of democracy, came into the
scenario much later, but marked its presence through both coercive and
resistive displays. It is also a study in claim-making by those victimised
and the process of consensus building, adopted ruthlessly by the government.
Claims and counter-claims made by the victims, protestors and the government
agencies tear the political and administrative milieu apart. This study
presents these forms of claim making—prescribed, tolerated, forbidden, for
us to understand the nuances of democracy. With West Bengal as its case
study, it deals with the transformation of the state from a peasant-friendly
one to a labour-friendly one and finally to a capital-friendly one. The
Left-regime of West Bengal facilitates those who follow prescribed claim
making (like dialogues, petitions); tolerates certain claims even though it
may dislike them( strikes, public protests, disruption of traffic, vandalism
to certain extant), but punishes those who indulge in the forbidden forms of
claim making(disruption of governmental actions, resistance to armed force).
The forms of claim making it prescribes and permits must conform to the
given ways of negotiations and representation.
The forms of claim-making are not inherent in a system, but rather
are created, transformed and modified as the situation might demand. This
collection is a unique study in questions of claim-making in the age of
bio-politics and question of the divergent phenomenon of electoral
majorities and social majorities in modern democracies.
Essay by Ranabir Samaddar
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