ABSTRACT
Progressive legalism, developmentalism and empowerment govern the discourse on women’s rights in India. These occupy specific historical periods in India’s colonial and post-colonial political history and are influenced in large part by prevailing domestic political imperatives and transnational trends. Feminist scholars and activists in India have engaged variously with these-challenging, critiquing, interpreting and expanding these with a view to retool them for feminist politics. As a result, these feminist engagements with rights provide a rich site for tracking the way in which not only rights operate within different discourses but also the use they are put to by different political constituencies. In attending to the specific discursive contexts within which rights have been invoked within the Indian feminist movement, I wish to draw attention to the political nature of rights, their curious workings and paradoxical outcomes, and to the political and legal conservatism that an avowedly progressive rights politics can result in. While many of these concerns are now well documented within elements of feminist scholarship within India and internationally, I suggest here that feminist scholarly reflections on ‘rights worries’ must be read alongside the increased vibrancy of the rights-based mobilizations in recent times. Despite their politically conservative outcome and workings, it is, in fact, the case that rights have been used forcefully and creatively in various grass-roots political mobilizations in India, paving the way, in some cases, for innovative public policy formulations. There must be a way, therefore, to provide an account for both the intended and the unintended conservatism of rights thinking and for the fast-fading faith in rights radicalism within intellectual circles, on the one hand, and their increasing articulation and continuing ‘enchantment’ within social mobilizations, on the other.
