Women and Politics in the Third World

WOMEN AND THE STATE IN THE THIRD WORLD 33
and negotiation. Both the state and the civil society form the boundaries within
which women act and are acted upon. To ignore these boundaries can only be
foolhardy for women due to the capacity of the state for violence. Transgression
of these boundaries is a different question, however. Transgression involves
knowing the boundaries that are to be pushed. The knowledge of these
boundaries comes in different ways to people of different classes, races and cultures.
At times boundaries become visible only in the process of transgressing them,
whether the transgressors saw their actions as transgression or not forming a
critical part of the story. Transgression of boundaries also involves countering
strategies that are many layered. Acquiescence and opposition, humility and
pride, anger and conciliation, idealism and pragmatism are all interwoven into a
complex pattern of interaction with the state.
What we must also acknowledge is the unfolding character of the state. From
local government officials to social services, from the police to the judges, women
experience the power of the state differently as their demands and struggles
develop. But it is important to note that this power of the state is not a focused
power bolstering a structure that we can point to. In order to understand the
unfolding character of the state we have to approach the state as a hierarchically
arranged multiplicity of power relations. It is only then that we can follow the
different roles played by different organisations of the state, at different times, for
different reasons. So, for example, since the 1980s the Supreme Court in India
has often taken a social interventionist position in its judgments. The Court has
increasingly taken a stand that ‘in a developing society judicial activism is essential
for participative justice…. Justices are the constitutional invigilators and reformers
[who] bring the rule of law closer to the rule of life’ (P.N.Singh 1981–2, cited in
Cooper 1993: 6). In this spirit the Indian Supreme Court, through a group of
radical judges, has taken the view that ‘constitutional interpretation fundamentally
differs, almost mystically, from statutory interpretation’ (Cooper 1993: 8). In a
landmark case People’s Union for Democratic Rights v Union of India the Supreme
Court allowed the petitioners to charge the Government of India for failing to
uphold the fundamental rights of its citizens. The judgment, in the favour of the
petitioners who had argued that the Indian Government had failed to enforce
Article 23 of the constitution which prohibits ‘traffic in human beings and forced
labour’, established a precedent of interpreting the fundamental rights of Indian
citizens in a more flexible way. The Court judged that ‘in a country like
India, where there is so much poverty and unemployment and there is no
equality of bargaining power, a contract of service may appear on the face of it
voluntary, but it may in reality be involuntary’ (Cooper 1993: 10). A leading
exponent of this view, Justice Bhagwati urged that the constitution ‘must be
interpreted creatively and imaginatively with a view to advancing the
constitutional values and spelling out and strengthening the basic human rights of
the large masses of people in the country’ (ibid.)
As we have seen in our discussion of the various feminist approaches to the
state, strong cases have been made by those who argue for working in and