Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Recasting Citizenship for Women’s Livelihood and Development 13
rights (such as freedom of speech, assembly and movement, and equality
under the law), political rights (to vote and stand for election), and socioeconomic
rights (welfare and security). Some rights may cut across the
civil, political and socio-economic domains, such as the right to collectively
bargain with the state for particular benefits. Under colonialism
and discriminatory regimes such as apartheid, as also under post-colonial
independent governments, citizenship rights have been denied to many
powerless groups. Independence movements have involved struggles for
civil and political rights, and the right to control and manage natural
resources such as land, water and forests, and the produce from ecosystems.
The modern concept of citizenship is based on a liberal framework
of individual rights and criteria of individual inclusion and exclusion.
Such a concept of citizenship does not easily encompass the rights of
citizens in relation to one another or the collective rights of social groups,
especially when this relates to the natural resource-based livelihoods of
poor peasants, fishers, artisans, and migrant and nomadic people. However,
as Yuval-Davis (1997b: 22) points out:
Once the notion of citizenship is understood as a concept wider than just
a relationship between the individual and the state, it could also integrate
the struggles of women against oppression and exploitation in the name
of culture and tradition within their own ethnic and local communities
and transcend the politically dangerous but intellectually sterile debate
which took place in the UN conference on human rights in Vienna in 1993
about whether the struggle for human rights should be on an individual
or a ‘group’ level. Power relations and conflict of interests apply within
‘groups’ as well as between them. At the same time, individuals cannot be
considered as abstracted from their specific social positionings.
In the pre-Independence Constituent Assembly debates, Jawaharlal
Nehru supported the recognition of woman’s rights as an individual and
not as a member of a community; yet he saw equity as applying not to the
individual but to the community, introducing a complexity that continues
to this day. Mazumdar (1998) argues that unlike Gandhi, Nehru did not
grasp the political significance of gender equality in nation-building. She
says (citing Sarkar 1998) that he also could not understand Kamladevi
Chattopadhya’s objection that women’s fundamental right was for attention
and not for protection, and that the concept of protection was patronising.