Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

80 NEERA M. SINGH
positionings of each layer in a specific historical context. Marshall (1950,
1981) defines citizens as ‘full members’ of a collective or community. Women
have to generally struggle to be accepted as full members of a community
or collective, starting from the domain of the family to various other collectives
and the state.
The case of Ranpur illustrates women’s attempts to claim citizenship
at various levels. By leveraging their increasing acceptance as full members
within the Parishad, these women try to break into political spaces at the
community level to which they otherwise have limited access. Separate
women’s meetings have provided them institutional space to nurture their
self-development and the self-determination that helps them to do so.
The fallouts of the process of self-development and self-determination
are also visible in terms of how women become politically more active in
different political arenas. In the process, the nature and quality of deliberations
taking place within the Parishad have been transformed and so
has the quality of the outcomes of these deliberations. For example, the
kendu leaf problem would not have appeared on the radar of the Parishad
in the absence of women’s deliberation. Women’s presence and deliberations
have helped transform the agenda of the Parishad and there is a
deepening of democracy in the process.
Political inclusion needs to move beyond the simple presence of all
those affected by certain decisions at the time of decision-making, to providing
equal opportunities to be heard and to influence outcomes. This
is a tough call and requires close attention to the forms of internal exclusion
that result from, among other things, subtle institutional norms such
as expressions that are privileged or are more likely to be heard, the agendasetting
processes, the burdens of past exclusion and power relations.
Facilitation for expanding democratic spaces has to pay close attention
to such forms of internal exclusion and inclusion. Simply creating institutional
spaces for women’s presence is not enough; the constraints
that hinder the process of their expression, self-development and selfdetermination
have to be eased out as well. Deepening of democracy and
maturing of women as political actors and full citizens at multiple layers
are challenges that require all our imagination and untiring work.