Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

32 SUMI KRISHNA
reduced to functionaries in government development programmes and
their workload increased, but the official perception of them as volunteers
persisted. The sathins’ unionisation and their collective struggle for
minimum wages created a backlash in the form of intimidation and
attempts at suppression. The sathins had fought patriarchal feudal
practices through mobilising groups of women, but their own citizenship
was threatened; the programme that was intended to empower women
turned oppressive when the women began to raise political issues of
entitlements. As Ramakrishnan, Lobo and Kapur say, ‘ideological mists
in the development sector’ cannot simply ‘be analysed away’, but ‘have
to be challenged through collective action’. Women’s struggle against
exploitation is ‘two-fold but integrated … as women and as workers’.
Economic and socio-political empowerment are mutually reinforcing
processes.
III. ENHANCING CITIZENSHIP TO ENSURE
LIVELIHOOD RIGHTS
The right to vote has not changed the marginalised position of the women
in Tanabisu. As internal migrants their right to land and livelihood has
been constantly under threat, and as women they have been excluded
from public spaces, denied even the right to participate in hoisting the
national flag on Independence Day. For many poor women like them
who are ‘free’ to work outside the domestic space, this in itself does not
bring the right to decision-making or liberation from the traditional constraints
of patriarchy, but rather may even exacerbate oppression in both
public and domestic spaces, contributing to what Kannabiran (2005) has
called ‘the violence of normal times’. Gendered critiques of the liberal
concept of a ‘universal’ citizen have helped counter essentialist approaches
(whether conventional or celebratory) that see all women as one, united
by their biological identity. Women are not a homogeneous group; it
is critical to recognise and encompass differences among women.
Individuals are embedded in social groups and marginalised in multifarious
ways, both as individuals and as members of a group. Oppression,
too, takes on many forms undermining the entitlements of people
both as individuals and as groups. So, even as we reject essentialist