Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

200 DEEPAK K. MISHRA AND VANDANA UPADHYAY
The gender question in Arunachal Pradesh has to be viewed in the
context of the twin dangers of portraying the existing gender relations as
egalitarian and that of clubbing all demands for equality as being against
tribal traditions. As long as civil society continues to follow the basic
framework of identity politics and categorises people on the basis of their
identity, the gains from popular mobilisations are going to be fairly modest.
A selective invocation of democratic principles and a hierarchical
categorisation of the victims would, in the final analysis, perpetuate discrimination
and exclusion. It is high time that the democratic credentials
of those seeking ‘justice for the community’ are brought under critical
scrutiny. The more such voices come from within the community, the
better. This, in a sense, is the fundamental challenge before those who
wish to struggle for a just and democratic order. ‘Finding a way to liberalise
a cultural community without destroying it’ is the task that the liberals face
in a number of multi-ethnic contexts (Kymlicka 1989: 170, quoted in Gupta
1999). In Arunachal Pradesh, the key challenge to developing a nondiscriminatory
framework for governance without compromising the
basic collective rights of the indigenous population is to be able to address
particularistic demands within the framework of universal norms. This,
by all counts, is a tough challenge before the decision makers of today and
tomorrow.
NOTES
1. During 1990–91 to 1995–96, the share of manufacturing in NSDP at current
prices declined from 5.11 to 3.27 per cent, while that of public administration
increased from 13.52 to 14.15 per cent (Bezbaruah and Dutta 2001).
2. These problems are not unique to the study of the position of women in
society. One of the major problems associated with understanding the process
of social change in Arunachal Pradesh, as in many other similar contexts, is
that the paucity of written accounts and the extreme biases that are reflected
in whatever written accounts are available make any objective assessment a
complex matter. Apart from the divergence between the oral memories
of the indigenous tribes and the ‘outsiders’ during the colonial period, in
recent times, too, much of the writings by indigenous and non-indigenous
scholars, notwithstanding the innate difficulties in using such categories,
are coloured by various shades of romanticism, populism, distrust or plain