In a recent conversation with Mohan (name changed), a 22-year-old Dalit youth from Bihar, I learned that by the time he reached class 12, he had already worked in 6 different places as a migrant worker across states from Assam to Haryana.
The examination centre for his class 12 board exams was in a town 50 kms from his village. He had to relocate to the town for the duration of his exams because commuting daily for his exams meant spending 5 hours on the road. But, relocation meant incurring additional costs for food and renting a room. With no savings or financial support, two months before his exams, he migrated again to West Bengal to work as a daily wage labourer earning Rs 350 a day. With these earnings, not only did he have to sustain himself during his stint in West Bengal but he had to also save to support himself to write his board exams.
Mohan – and millions like him – serve as extraordinary examples of dogged resilience. However, his struggles spawn several haunting, uncomfortable questions. Why should certain segments of the population be disproportionately subject to a stress test of resilience? What is the role of the government in this ? What are the implications of these to citizenship at large?
By putting an individual’s well-being at the centre, Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argued that the government can play a pivotal role in expanding human capabilities so that each person is able to ‘be’ and ‘do’ what they value. Being well-nourished, not having to work as a child, having access to quality education, not being discriminated against and having equal access to justice are vital for this. When these conditions are not adequately met, an individual is deprived of physical and analytical capabilities to actively participate as a citizen. In India, citizenship is at least premised on having liberty of thought, worship and action, equality in status, opportunities and access to justice. When the pre-conditions among individuals owing to accidents of birth are so varied, there is extra onus on elected governments to create an enabling ecosystem ensuring that such essential ingredients of citizenship are honoured. As such, we need to understand poverty as lacking human freedoms, to engage as a citizen.
The black American writer and comedian, Baratunde Thurston, runs a podcast called ‘How to citizen’ where a citizen is reimagined as a verb instead of a noun. In such an interpretation of citizen as a verb, ‘to citizen is (a) to participate, (b) to invest in relationships (c) to understand power and (d) to value the collective.’
Such a reframing of citizenship can help us go beyond the putative, to develop more actionable barometers of enfranchisement. In other words, are citizens able to go beyond survival and engage? Being economically secure is a necessary condition for ‘doing’ citizenship and needs to be thought of as one of the inputs in a bouquet of non-negotiable basic rights for democratic engagement. Baratunde’s framing of ‘doing’ citizenship is premised on the state being able to deliver the platform for citizens to ‘be’ and ‘do’. Any political regime’s performance review must involve interrogation by its polity on whether citizens are actionable agents to ‘do’ or are being rendered passive. As a caveat, ‘doing citizenship’ must not violate the constitutional values of liberty, fraternity, dignity and equality.
Where does India stand today on all this?
On the economic front, we are experiencing damaging levels of wage stagnation and inequality. Based on an analysis of government’s National Sample Survey data from 2012 and Periodic Labour Force Survey data up to 2022-23, a report titled ‘Ten Years of NDA · A Guarantee Check’ by the civil society platform, Bahutva Karnataka, observes that 30 crore workers in India earn less than the recommended national minimum wage of Rs 375 per day.
Not just individual income, but even the entire household income of at least 1 in 3 households, nationally, is less than Rs 375 per day. In Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, the household income of more than half the households are less than this while nearly half the households in Madhya Pradesh and Bihar are earning less than these threshold daily wages.
A committee of experts on wages, called the Anoop Satpathy Committee, at the behest of the BJP government in 2019, had made these minimum wage recommendations using the amount of money needed for a daily balanced diet. However, the recommendations have been ignored without any rationale.
Bahutva’s report also demonstrates that wages across all types of employment categories have been stagnant since 2012 and women workers across the spectrum are at the bottom of this earnings pyramid. Effectively, owing to their economic situation, a significant majority are deprived of building their capabilities and are rendered to be in a situation where they can’t ‘do’ as a citizen.
Contrast this with the fact that the nominal per capita GDP has increased by 60% between 2012 and 2023. Another recent paper authored by Thomas Pikkety, Lucas Chancel, Nitin Bharti and Anmol Somanchi of the World Inequality Lab demonstrates historic levels of wealth inequality in India with the top 1% holding 40% of the national wealth. What are the implications of such high levels of wealth inequality from the standpoint of power, citizenship and capabilities?
On power, paraphrasing Eric Liu, Baratunde says that ‘it is the ability to have others do what we want.’ Owing to high concentration of wealth among the few, the wealthy elite in India will inevitably bend political parties for favours with contracts and tax cuts in lieu of quid pro quo like political funding. This is precisely what the electoral bonds scam has revealed. When a few are able to wield such extraordinary pull with political parties, it bodes disaster for India as it can lead to mass disenfranchisement.
For others to exercise power, as conceived by Baratunde, it is imperative that the poor have an equal say as the elite. But the playing field is highly uneven. To mitigate this, the annual budget, seen as a moral signal of the government’s priorities, needs to create a level playing field. However, from the budget allocations, the government’s continued tilt towards the elite becomes obvious.
The budget allocation for health, education, and employment are all one-third or one-fourth of what they should be. In conjunction with low incomes, worsening quality of public education and expensive privatised healthcare pushes the poor to be under-nourished, run helter-skelter for good education, face discrimination and remain stuck in a cycle of debt trap. In summary, the poor are left to scavenge the crumbs of crony capitalism. Such a structural deprivation of human freedoms further marginalises the poor. When plagued with such hazardous levels of asymmetry and lopsided abilities to influence the political class, how will those from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds ever be able to exercise power in the way Baratunde has laid out?
Citizenship has also been a vital plank for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to garner Hindu votes by targeting Muslims. There is a wealth of evidence to suggest that under the BJP regime, there is State sanction in subjugating Indian Muslims. Documenting the cruel callisthenics of power, Amnesty International observed that just between April and June 2022, there were a total of 128 demolitions, robbing numerous Muslims – and only Muslims – of their basic rights by rendering them homeless. Recently, the government has announced the formulation of rules for the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). It cannot be mistaken that, seen along with the National Register of Citizens, the CAA is an obvious attempt to legalise religious discrimination and a mechanism to further strip the ability of Muslim citizens ‘to be’ and ‘to do.’
What we are witnessing therefore is a structural stripping away of enfranchisement on communal lines and of those from socio-economically marginalised backgrounds. While a handful can exercise a broad suite of freedoms, the majority are deprived of even basic freedoms. It makes the Mohans of the country appear to be living in a virtual reality show where they are made to run on a treadmill as the scenery around them is altered to create a make believe world of progress. This process has assumed a more expansive form as any form of dissent is being crushed. Indeed, the repeated crackdown on any kind of protests, incarcerating peaceful dissenters, curbing academic freedom and by arbitrarily shrinking the space for peaceful resistance against government actions, the regime has attempted to further reduce the essence of citizens ‘to be’ or ‘to do.’ The systematic targeting of opposition parties further narrows the space for common people for ‘doing’ citizenship. When the amendment of citizen as a verb is near completion, how will Indians lift themselves out of being passive nouns ?
No matter what one’s political persuasion is, it must worry us all that the kind of politics brandished by the BJP regime is a dangerous precedent from the perspective of imagining citizens as a verb owing to the systemic impoverishment of our mental and physical capabilities. At present, only a handful of affluent are able to disproportionately exercise their power. We need to choose what kind of citizenship we want. Do we want to be clipped of capabilities and be abstract nouns or do we want to be truly engaged in democratic nation building as active verbs? The choice is ours.
Rajendran Narayanan teaches at Azim Premji University, Bangalore and is affiliated with LibTech India. The views expressed are personal.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Laavanya Tamang for valuable feedback on an earlier draft.
