From rights to duties: The deliberate remaking of the citizen

It was well past midnight on a miserably hot and dusty night at a community centre in rural Rajasthan, roundabout 2008. I was with a group of social auditors (local activists, students and volunteers) preparing for a citizens’ ‘audit’ of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) in the area. The purpose was to verify government records with the lived experiences of workers. The audit would culminate in a public hearing, with the government in attendance. Citizen-auditors would make public their findings and workers seeking redressal would present their testimonials to government.

In preparation, my team was tasked with compiling and simplifying government documents, muster rolls (attendance registers) and payment records. This was a complex and tedious task, and by midnight it was clear we were not sleeping that night. “Should it really be this hard”, said an exhausted team member, “to ensure people receive their meagre wages?” I too wondered. What was the point of a “right”, a “law” if even extracting Rs 100 of daily wages from the State is such a fight?

Days into the audit, and especially at the public hearing where some workers who’d been denied wages were given their due, in full public view, I came to recognise the power of these “rights”. It was the State’s reluctant recognition of citizens’ ‘right to work’ that empowered workers to demand accountability and gave their demands legitimacy in our democracy. Of course, it shouldn’t be this hard, but without State recognition of rights and entitlements, there would be no accountability, and no recourse.

I thought back to those social audits as the nation was reminded from the bully pulpit on our 76th Independence Day of the “duties” we citizens have and must fulfil toward the nation. Citizen duty above all, the Prime Minister said in his speech, is the fifth of the “Pancha Pran” (5 commitments) that would guide us to our 100th year.

At the heart of this reminder of duty is a deliberate reshaping of citizen-State relations, inverting the constitutional scheme of guaranteed rights and expected duties to one that equates duties to, or even places them above, citizens’ rights. This has significant implications for how we may or may not be able to
pursue democratic accountability from the State.

This emphasis on duties has been an oft-repeated appeal by the PM. I have no quibble with a discourse on citizens’ duties, indeed all citizens are duty-bound. The challenge is in how the terms of this discourse have been framed, casting the government’s obligation vis-a-vis the citizen not in terms of “rights” but in terms of her being the “beneficiary” or “labharthi” and therefore bearing duties in return for what the government doles out. This is the old mai-baap sarkar in ‘new India’.

This is a limited view of citizenship. Citizens in this formulation are enablers of government working toward fulfilling its goals, rather than active, rights-bearing stakeholders for whom the government works and to whom it must be accountable.

“It is the job of the government to make efforts to provide 24 hours electricity”, the PM said, “but it is the duty of the citizen to save as many units as he can. It is the responsibility…of the government to supply water to every field, but a voice should come from each of my fields that we will move forward by saving water.” The citizen-State relationship in this framing is transactional. I give you X, and you do Y. Hidden from view is the idea that this “job” is the State’s duty toward rights-bearing citizens, and thus accountability is shifted to the citizen’s shoulders from the State’s.

When citizenship is thus circumscribed, so too are ideas of active agency vis-a-vis the State. It effectively turns the notion of citizenship on its head by freeing it from a framework of rights and liberties, instead, as a project of civic duty vis-à-vis the State, in exchange for the State doing whatever it decides is its duty. In this milieu, if you start feeling like you are living under the Chinese Constitution and are beholden to the Chinese Communist Party – where the Social Contract is that the Party, which is also the State, will ensure basics and keep the nation’s economic engine humming in return for you, the citizen, obediently performing duties it lays down -- you wouldn’t be wrong. And it is through this emphasis on duty that the repeated “sacrifices” imposed on citizens by the State through demonetisation or lockdowns have been legitimised and, I would argue, valorised.

As I look back at the social audits from the vantage point of today’s remaking of the Indian citizen, I have come to realise that their value lay in the potential enabling full citizenship. This was not merely about ensuring that workers got their wages on time (many readers will argue that technology can do this better, but that’s a debate for another day). Rather, it was about the emancipatory potential of citizenship, of making the shift away from being supplicants to a mai-baap toward emerging as rights-bearing individuals with dignity a tangible reality.

Democracy in India is, as Ashutosh Varshney described, a battle half-won. Our founding moment empowered us with procedural democracy through the right to vote. But our Constitution placed the duty of fighting for substantive democracy on all of us citizens. The battle has barely begun, and the small victories so far have been hard won. In a democracy, citizens are duty-bound to fights for their rights and secure their freedoms. That’s their duty. Not to be supplicants, not to be obedient to the all-giving State.