 As we are witnessing widespread hunger and unemployment as the result of the pandemic and the lockdown imposed in response to it, a discussion on socio-economic rights, participative democracy, and empowerment becomes more important than ever. Today we have with us activists Aruna Roy Nikhilde and Rakshata Swaben for a discussion on these issues. Welcome Aruna Nikhil and Rakshata. Our discussion today is based on a book edited by the three of them which was released recently. The title of the book is We the People, Establishing Rights and Deepening Democracy. My first question is about the rights-based legislations that the book talks about. In the introduction you mentioned that from 2004 to 2014 we have witnessed an important period in Indian democracy as this period marked enactment of various rights-based legislation. However, post 2014 these legislations and the rights ensured in them have been undermined. Could you elaborate on this point? 2004 to 2014 was kind of a golden period for rights-based legislation. It was also very pioneering across the world because up until 2004 and the 2004 elections saw this great slogan about India shining but actually the electorate did not necessarily see it as shining, at least a large number of people in the electorate and that message came through loud and clear and therefore it became clear that what people needed was very basic access to services and they needed it as rights and that had been part of the manifesto of several of the parties that came together to form the UPA. So the UPA one had a national common minimum program which put many of these rights-based legislations right to information to be strengthened because there was a law which was not implemented at all. The right to work became the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, Forest Rights Act, the Street Wenders Act, a whole series right to education, a whole right to food, very importantly. So a series of laws that were earlier schemes at best or not even conceived of at all became justiciable laws and therefore they moved in a sense from the directive principles towards legislation which was justiciable and that was the idea of the directive principles at the time that the Constitution came in. 2014 saw a reversal in a sense of the dominant discourse in government because right up till 2014 from UPA one to UPA two, the strength in the rights-based legislations went down but after the 2014 elections there was government said that these are all handouts these are we want the market to provide to empower people by giving them proper jobs. They said that this is not something that the state should be doing so this entire reversal actually we've seen in COVID times as threatening people's right to life because NREGA and the right to food are two things that have actually saved people if anything at all and COVID is a very good time to review and see how effective this has been. The book has a series of essays from different angles whether it's from marginalized communities like Dalit's or whether it's from the point of view of the economy or from the point of view of governance or from the point of view of education and health it's got a whole it comes at the social sector from different angles in a sense to bring this point together. Actually let's I want to see it from the movement point of view. Look at what happened with the movements as soon as we got independence we just felt that everything would land on our lap because the constitution was given a guarantee and we agitated continued to agitate it for the delivery of all those various demands to various whether it was for not building a big time or whether it was fish workers wanting their rights whether it was people who were being you know vilified by corrupt practices in smaller lower bigger levels we all thought that the system should deliver and the system was monitored and propelled by the constitution. It came as a realization to the MPSS and many others that actually if you want to make the system work then you will have to have the right to proceed against them for non-deliberation but if you don't have the right to lodge a case against that person or lodge a complaint against that person for non-deliberation with the fruits of that complaint being a working order or a speaking order there was no way it would become effective for years and it's not because it's not the lack of effort because it is very good people even in the system who've tried very hard to deliver but the delivery has never taken place so for that simple reason the translation of a demand to a right was a very important conjunction and I think it led up to it it was not that it happened in a day the decade before 2005 was a very important decade when this was led up to it and it so happened that in 2004 when the UTA won the election they gave a statement of their intent called the national common minimum program and in that program they made promises to the people of India and the first one was an Indian R&D and the other one with the most painful right here actually appealed to us and there were other acts that they promised in the process or rights they promised the rights that we were demanding if you wanted the right to information the right to food security the right to employment the right to education the right to forest rights they understood in a sense the better part of the political system and the democratic system kind of understood that this was necessary for for for the country to function so they set up the national advisory council which invited many civil society people to be part of it not all civil society it was composed of members of parliament it was composed of members of planning commission etc but also civil society members and it gave us the space to ensure that these rights-based draft legislations which we already had many of them were enacted and that's why that period was so important because participatory democracy at its best and and that's why it was a very important period an extremely important period of the history of not only of the rights of people but of Indian democracy. Rakeshita would you like to talk about what has changed post 2040 how what the undermining of these rights has meant how has it unfolded? Yeah so I mean it's also that the undermining of these rights was like was also pointed out before it did begin from the UPA two time onwards and we saw the ways in which that manifested so it began with a cutback in expenditure underfunding became the first obvious way of undermining these rights and of course post 2014 we've seen that magnify in a very large proportion so the the way showed by a previous dispensation was really built upon and underfunding so NREGA the food security act you had you had critical pieces of legislations not being provided the adequate amount of funds that it needed to be able to show the kind of an impact it was set to create then post 2014 we've also seen this culture of debasing these rights so it was not just mechanistically undermining them but you had say a prime minister on the floor of the house in parliament mocking NREGA and saying that what use the only purpose that this law should be kept alive is to remind people of the failures of India so that is that is an undermining which is not quantitative in nature but it really shows it sets a it sets a sort of a a dictate down the line to that bureaucracy to the administration so that kind of a debasing of laws has really begun 2014 onwards and we've seen these rights based legislations as being seen and called the complete opposite which is doles are being given to people these are handouts which it's actually completely the opposite of and the whole conversation has now begun around any social welfare is looking at insurance models involving private sectors so the imagination of social development and welfare is now leaning towards like a model which is more of an atman and package or contributory pensions and not rights or just disabled rights and the one thing that I just wanted to mention in regard to your previous question is how are they I mean how these laws being undermined are affecting covid relief and recovery it's also showing that at the end of the day after all that these rights were blamed for by this dispensation they've had to rely only on these rights to be able to bring any semblance of recovery in rural areas so one has to rely on the national food security add to be delivering pensions the NREGA to give basic minimum wages so it's also shown the power of these rights that in spite of any political dispensation at power these rights are actually what the state resorts to to be able to look after if we look 2014 to 2020 and if we look at all the kinds of social policy related interventions made by this government they are not going towards just disabled rights it's arthman irma programs of Ayushman Bharat which is insurance based health care or model villages of Pradhan Mantri, Aadash, Gram, Yojana which are convergent schemes so and the social security pensions which are contributory so it's the one can only comment on what is the nature of these policies that this government is introducing by looking at the nature of these schemes which are non-justice that's what I can add to what Ashukar is saying that very simply the previous period looked at legislations of empowerment post 2014 there are just programs and if you have been or have any acquaintance with civil service jargon you will understand that a legislative law is empowering and is permanent a procedural program in just a program and this program not only is a program but doesn't really lead to any empowerment it's a handout so there's a great deal of difference between empowering you to access and a handout building on what you said earlier Aruna that certain schemes and relief programs are replacing concretely guaranteed rights under legislations do you think this approach of our current government of undermining rights on one hand and handing out relief schemes on the other hand do you see this approach as exclusionary and non-participated this government has not really enacted major policy so but it has tried to reduce the extent of all these laws the scope of these laws where there's the right to write to other laws like rights-based legislation but it has it cannot as Ashukar says tamper with the basic law and this it was and set it aside in parliament so these are laws but today if you look at the period of 2014 as contrasted with the previous two terms of the parliament the difference lies in the fact that the people were involved in a very systematic and completely integral form with the framing of policy between 2004 and 2014 systems were set up by which people's views could be taken on board there were consultations apart from consultations there were also websites where information was posted today most of these decisions are not only not taken in consultation with people they are taken by very few people so you don't even have an entire planning commission which has to be constructed you have a NETIO with three people or four people who are visible we don't know how many take the decisions then there is no difference to parliament for most of these important decisions decisions are taken arbitrarily by the prime minister with the two other people this first thing is that it's taken in a very small group and does not reflect democratic process the second is that there is no sharing of information so it's completely non-transferent whereas every policy should be put in the public domain to elicit people's opinions and opinions and reservations before policy becomes law in this case they haven't done it and if you go back to the book which argues that there should be a welfare state the welfare state as was set up in 1950 really argues for a structure in which there is a balance development and in the balance development which balances there are many balances but I prefer to this balance equal a balance of people and the power structures that they elect to govern us that there should be a permanent continuing structural participative process which has been absolutely denied so in the process what has happened is that we're getting these grand gestures of handouts but which are only scratching the surface they're not really going through the basis of these problems that we have and people have innumerable problems with those even those services that I hand out but have no platform to voice their issues or to be heard so really all in all it's a completely non-participatory process top-down mainly of course procedures of procedural and programmatic approach to development and to governance which is limiting as a rest of them the only thing that I wanted to add was actually to further if need be repeat Arunaji's point about these these laws also the way they came through I mean the National Advisory Council had a really institutional role to play in in this time in this decade of 10 years where so many of these diets came and the and the even the National Advisory Council played a role in a participatory pre-legislative process so it was what are these platforms which through which inputs are going to be sought and deliberations are going to take place and one legacy that not only did this period leave us with these rights which are which we continue to see are so valuable like the food security forest rights at NREJ but it also left a legacy of what a transparent and a participatory pre-legislative process can look like so in 2014 this is something that's hardly ever really showcased and discussed but one contribution of the National Advisory Council was also to leave with the Ministry of Law and Justice which is a direction an order issued by the Ministry of Law saying what are the steps that should be followed before government enacts a law how do you seek inputs from public how do you consult and proactively consult with people who are going to be most affected how do you demystify all these jargons and laws and explain to people what will be the potential impact so there are all these standards that were also laid out which we see are being flouted literally on a daily basis we've seen so many laws and policies come which are not adhering to any semblance of a consultative process that's it's also that the last set of questions that I have are first what impact do you see of of this type of a government which is clearly moving towards a very centralized approach to governance and it's it's really a power aggregating government what impact do you see it having in the recent years the second question is what immediate relief measures would you suggest for for responding to the current situation of pandemic and the unemployment hunger that is resulting because of it see what has happened is that every single step in which government is active whether it is the enactment of policy legislation or in terms of consultation through various institutions that were set up for consultation consultation has completely uh has gone to a downslide so you see that not only are public people they would the public domain like us it's a society not consulted you see that the federal structure itself is harmed because you don't have the states consulted in many and there's a choice of only those states which have the same political view as the center consulted or maybe go opted into a system but for the rest when there are differences of opinion they're not even considered so really it is for all of us to think about how much pressure we should put also on our representatives and our political other political parties in the opposition could demand that they get the federal equal federal system working in a manner in which it should so that's one thing and the second thing that I want to remark on this is then I hand over to the team the kind of parga that we all have had to put on in terms of the fear of the disease and in terms of mobility and in terms of mobilization that it has really put a parga on the kind of activity that would have forced the government at some point of time to take note of us so because of that huge centralization has occurred and there has even been that kind of massive protest that would have been if we hadn't been trapped by the disease and fear of infection. First say that there are a couple of chapters in this book that talk about the contrasting of ideas you talked about centralization centralization is an idea and even though the BJP had talked about federalism a lot when it was in opposition it is absolutely clear that it has centralized and covid has been used even more to centralize so the contrast is there is a chapter from Thomas Isaac who is the finance minister of Kerala and Mr Vijayanan who spent decades looking at Kerala's decentralization process about how a bottom up approach can be and that chapter was written before covid came but it actually shows you how Kerala dealt with covid in a completely decentralized manner and that's therefore it has been so much more powerful in its response so it is a contrast of ideas can a vast country like India deal with a crisis in that fashion the I will request Rakshita to talk about because the chapter that she looks at is a bottom up approach to monitoring how do public audits social audits how do people themselves monitor so she will talk about that so that chapter also looks from bottom up but so do the others so do the there's a chapter on question of inequality look at it what what has actually happened but at the bottom so does the chapter on Dalits and tribals look at it in that kind of fashion so these are and when you come to the question of ideas we have discussed that is this an opportunity actually when you face a crisis to see can you have a completely renewed idea of that welfare state can that be the answer to the crisis and can that be what we were looking for all along so like the new deal in America when there was a great depression we have said in the chapter for instance that Rajendran and Annie Raja have about employment norega has had they've had to increase by 40 000 crores there are huge demands for the much larger norega there's a demand for an urban employment guarantee act so can you have a new deal for India where education where health these all basic rights these are not luxuries but can you meet them at a time of crisis and that this book should be able to lead to that debate a little bit right and just to add to this point itself of what even the book is trying to show as a way but also in response to this kind of a crisis a social and economic and actually a political crisis that this COVID has shown us a few things that even the book talks about and demands that are being repeatedly made by people's campaigns and movements is to expand of the entitlement existing entitlement of NREGA from 100 days to 200 days entitlements that are made available to families be in fact be made available to individual workers the urban and equivalent of an NREGA to be launched in urban areas the urban employment guarantee laws then to universalize pds and pensions because we've also seen the inadequacy of the NFSA coverage during these COVID times so these are some of the urgent what you had requested socioeconomic measures that can be introduced which the relevance of which has been outlined in the book but is also being repeatedly made by people's campaigns and movements in every public platform possible I want to say yeah one thing that the title itself we the people establishing rights develop deepening democracy I think that title says a lot about the point of view of the book that it is from people's campaigns that it draws its lessons and people's movements over the years that it combines development with democracy and it seeks to continually establish rights as a way in which people will have a greater say thank you Aruna Nikhil and Rakshita it was a very insightful discussion with the three of you