For most of the poor and oppressed group, the local social structures in which they negotiate their lives determine their life chances and opportunities. Where are they placed in the hierarchy of the social status determines access to basic entitlements. In the recent years we see an increasing tendency within the civil society groups to project the demands of the poor and oppressed groups in the language of rights. What does this mean for the agency of a community at the margin of body politics? The implementation of the right-based claim tends in practice, to define state authorities and agencies as the primary duty-bearers in protecting and promoting rights and emphasises individual citizens as rights-holders. This shifts the burden of negotiation from society to state pitting individual actor against the state. The state is also afar easier target to pressurise for the enforcement of rights than families, clans and caste structures. This paper focuses on a specific case of mediation by a voluntary agency on the behalf of a migrated tribal group for securing fight to food and livelihood in a town area. The politicisation of #hunger death within #Ghasia community became a rallying point for acquiring various government entitlements and the increased presence of community was felt in the public sphere.
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For most of the poor and oppressed group, the local social structures in which they negotiate their lives determine their life chances and opportunities. Where are they placed in the hierarchy of the social status determines access to basic entitlements. For some this even means witnessing hunger deaths year after year. For communities like Musahars and Ghasias in Eastern Uttar Pradesh who are the deprived underbelly of the depressed caste, and report largest number of hunger deaths from the State, managing two square meals a day is the biggest struggle of life. Though the processes of democracy have interalia aroused their consciousness, but they are still caught in the web of multiple marginalities. The developed assertiveness and self awareness (brought about by witnessing the development processes and the experience of democracy) fit awkwardly with the prevalent patterns of economic and social dominance. This rise of consciousness tends to create contradiction and challenges. What is the way out? A quick look at the ways in which such contradictions have been attempted to be resolved in the recent past across the nation by similarly placed group brings forth three reactions: spontaneous violent outburst among the marginalised (the case of naxalite resistance); increased participation of those at the margin in the institutionalised democratic processes (dalit movement); or action mediated by an outside agency committed for increasing democratic space and life chances of those at the margin. The first option requires ideological commitment and has an obvious limitation of unleashing reactionary forces from the state creating instability, the second requires substantial mobilisation along with electoral leverage to generate effective ripples, and the third operates on a seemingly available but fragile domain of negotiations. For a community that has neither the ideological commitment nor the electoral leverage and the third option is far more attractive. They get easily persuaded by the claims of various intervening agencies to fulfill their half realised citizenship.
Such interventions acquired political salience in the mid 1970s and have continued to be active on a variety of issues which, in their perception are directly or indirectly related to what they see as their long term goal of democratising development and transforming society, these emerging international and national intervening agencies/social action groups at the grassroots level, are centrally concerned with forcing greater responsiveness from the State by securing the state given entitlements to the target population. …
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