Law and Social Exclusion in India and South Asia
May 13 & 14, 2011, Luce Hall
As part of a larger and multi-year project interested in the inter-disciplinary study of Law and Justice in India, this workshop seeks to bring together a small group of scholars and legal professionals interested in the relationship of law to social exclusion in India and South Asia in the last century. After independence in 1947, several south Asian nation-states, especially India, developed social and democratic constitutions that came to inform law making and the evolution of rights. A number of historically practiced forms of social exclusion based in economic, caste, and gender discrimination were identified and legally invalidated. In these cases law was reformist in its intent and equalitarian in its aspiration. Basic resources and opportunities for social development were to be made available by law to all citizens. The fate of such law and jurisprudence is of interest to us. Another aspect, perhaps more recent, is the rapid increase of rights-based social movements and associated social awareness across the region. There are arguably several inspirations for the growth of rights-based conceptions of citizenship in India and South Asia. Some may be the universal ideals of human rights and environmental movements, which predicate rights for all people in all places and even rights, if you subscribe to certain variants of environmental ideology, for non-human life in human terms. Others are more regional and historical processes that have arisen through the working of democracy and its necessary entanglement in the identification and enforcement of rights, as well as the ever-present tension in democratic polity between individual and group rights.
Indeed, the reformist agenda of the Government or of citizen’s movements, and more generally the actual implementation of the law, have to co-exist with the realities of everyday relations of power. This is all the more important as some of the commitments that India has made both at national and international level create a number of new situations. They may either create tension, conflicts or misunderstandings, whenever state commitment goes against local forms of relationships or local economic or political interests; or they can create reciprocal adjustments and adaptations whenever the state or society tries to seek alternative solutions or negotiations. We hold that justice and the subject of law should not be considered in terms of legal juxtaposition or hybridism, but should be studied as elements of social and political interaction. The study of the process leading to a Judge’s decision, and of the negotiations and interactions that take place inside and outside the Court, is crucial for understanding how law is informed by, and confronted to actual relations of power, and to which extent its entanglement in the conflicts of social transformation gives effective room for dealing with social exclusion. We are interested in these phenomena as well. And we wish to organize our discussions, through session on environmental, personal, and family law on issues of government and inequality, giving a particular focus on the study of court cases and legal interactions. We see this as an inter-disciplinary dialogue among anthropologists, legal scholars and practitioners, and historians that considers law and forms of social exclusion in all its aspects, from the second world war to the end of the twentieth century.
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