Holding the State Accountable: Feminising Work and Responsibility

Introduction

In her paper advancing the concept of women’s ‘political work’, Kaveri Haritas (2021) highlights the multifarious tasks that women of urban poor households perform in order to secure access to low-cost housing and welfare benefits in resettlement sites in the peripheries of Bangalore. As a researcher studying women’s self-help groups (SHGs) in Tamil Nadu, I have come across numerous instances when the responsibility of ensuring that the state fulfils its commitment to provide basic services such as water, subsidised food and other essential household commodities, public transport and health care, is shouldered by women. This is seen to be the case not only in resettlement or rehabilitation sites of the kind that Haritas (2021) has documented but also, more routinely, in villages and urban slums. Notably, these issues were widely accepted as women’s specific and legitimate concerns both by the women themselves and the larger public. What SHGs did was to provide women an organised platform from which to demand resources, whether civic amenities and facilities for their village panchayats, the smaller hamlet villages that may have been starved of resources or scheme-specific welfare benefits for vulnerable population groups such as the homeless Scheduled Caste poor or elderly widows living alone. Women’s SHGs kept the pressure on the authorities in a sustained manner until the goods were delivered or some form of agreement was reached.

Feminising Responsibility

How might we understand this apparent feminisation of the formidable challenge and laborious work of holding state actors accountable for the survival and well-being of working class and land-poor communities, whether urban or rural? A part of the answer at least may be traced to the growing share of the responsibilities for household survival that women have had to assume over the last decades. Making a case for what she terms the ‘feminisation of responsibility and obligation’, Sylvia Chant (2008) draws on research from the Gambia, Philippines and Costa Rica to show that women are often at the frontlines of dealing with poverty. Overwhelming evidence points to the stark gender differences (between men and women of the same households) of time and labour inputs invested in household survival. In other words, the onus on women to cope with household distress has been increasing (Chant, 2008). Closer home, studies of caste-oppressed and landless daily wage labourers in Tamil Nadu’s Trichy district (Kapadia, 1995), artisanal fish workers in South Kerala reeling under capitalist modernisation of the sector (Aswathy & Kalpana, 2019) and of women workers in the home and neighbourhood-based, food-making industry of North Chennai (Kalpana, 2016) likewise attest to the disproportionate and asymmetrical contribution of women, in the absence of which the subsistence and reproduction of their working poor households may well have been in question.

We may also seek answers to the question posed above by turning our attention to state developmental policies that construct women as the primary actors who ought to take charge of the well-being of communities living in poverty. In the last two decades of the 20th century, bilateral and multilateral development institutions and aid agencies have represented women as those deserving and worthy of development resources such as credit, productive technologies and other forms of anti-poverty assistance. The agenda of ‘investing in women’ was seen as enhancing multiple social gains such as child survival, an increase in family incomes and consumption spending on the basic needs of household members, the attainment of food security and so on (Razavi, 1997). Since the late 1980s, the social safety nets that evolved as pragmatic policy responses to the structural adjustment programmes implemented in many parts of the developing world, aimed to promoted private entrepreneurship and absorb surplus labour in the informal economy, thereby mitigating the income inequalities that were intensified by the neo-liberal economic reforms (Weber, 2002). Women-targeted microfinance and micro-enterprise programmes, a vital component of these safety net packages and an emergent ‘poverty agenda’ of the 1990s, sought to activate and harness women’s time, efforts and labour in the service of household poverty alleviation (Mayoux, 2002).

Irreducibly Political Claims

In my book on SHG-based microfinance in India (Kalpana, 2017), I show how rural women from households below the poverty line are urged and encouraged to work on themselves ceaselessly so as to become diligent savers, fiscally prudent borrowers (of micro-loans), effective managers of their group finances and the vigilant enforcers of timely loan repayment, their own and their co-members’ repayment. SHG-based microfinance aimed primarily to responsibilise women vis-à-vis two distinct actors: their peer groups comprising other women residents of their neighbourhoods on the one hand and their impoverished households, on the other. SHG-banking in India has enjoyed state patronage, and the highest tiers of financial policymakers (including the Reserve Bank of India) have incentivised the nation’s nationalised banks to make loans to women’s SHGs. And yet, the SHGs have had to relentlessly conduct complex negotiations with an array of institutional actors such as nationalised banks, the rural development administration/Block Development Office (BDO), the staff of NGOs promoting SHGs and district-level project offices of governmental bodies such as the Tamil Nadu Women’s Development Corporation, in order to realise their state-endorsed entitlements and secure the bank-linkage and anti-poverty loans (ibid.).

Often playing one institutional actor against the other, the women members and leaders of the SHGs exploited the schisms and dissonances between them as spaces that allow for manoeuvre, thereby advancing their claims to a specific linkage loan or a subsidy-bearing loan. The women would appeal to an ‘honest’ bank manager for protection from a ‘corrupt’ BDO officer or, alternatively, persuade BDO officials to curb an over-enthusiastic bank manager who was threatening to inspect the women’s (non-existent) micro-enterprises. Sometimes, the SHGs attempted to build rapport and cement the social ties of friendship and trust with bank personnel and BDO officials alike in order to escape the predatory clutches of a promoter NGO (Kalpana, 2017). As Haritas (2021) does in her field work in the rehabilitation sites, I observed that the SHG women had to evoke the sympathies and secure the patronage of more powerful actors, appeal to their conscience where necessary, assure their patrons of their allegiance and loyalty (in a competitive climate in which several institutions sought association with women’s SHGs) and perform the labour of manipulating the emotions and earning the goodwill of those who had the power to sanction low-cost bank loans. These loans were, undoubtedly, a valued development resource in the context of the fragile and precarious livelihoods that sustained their households.

In summary, the women engaged in high-cost, effortful, time-intensive, risk-fraught and exhausting negotiations with uncertain outcomes. A group could fail to secure a much sought-after loan, when other SHGs in the village may succeed in obtaining theirs. It was not uncommon for the women to reach out to the village panchayat president or even the local MLA as possible mediators who might help sway a recalcitrant bank manager in their favour. In my book, I discuss the parallels between women’s negotiations and arduous efforts to secure development resources from public sector banks and the rural development administration on the one hand and the strategies deployed by the denizens of ‘political society’ (Chatterjee, 2004) who make demands upon local state actors for access to public amenities (water, electricity, the right to occupy land) when they have no legal rights to back these claims, on the other. The SHGs, like the groups in political society that Partha Chatterjee (ibid.) discusses, forged multiple connections with more privileged and influential groups, government functionaries and political parties and leaders in order to secure their loans, even though their credit entitlements were recognised and endorsed by the state (Kalpana, 2017).

I argue that it is in this sense that women’s claims to the anti-poverty loans and the bank linkage loans may be regarded as ‘irreducibly political’ (Chatterjee, 2004, p. 60) as they were fought and won (or lost) through ‘contingent’, ‘contextually dependent’ negotiations conducted on a ‘political terrain’. The women in the SHGs honed their skills of negotiation and cultivated tactical alliances and friendships in order to ‘pick their way through an uncertain political terrain’, as Chatterjee (2004, p. 40) describes it (cited in Kalpana, 2017). This terrain is informed both by electoral calculations in a representative democracy and the ethical/moral obligations of governments to make some provision for the survival of dispossessed classes and communities, who cannot be entirely abandoned by the state (Chatterjee, 2004).

Skill-Building and Exhausting Labour

I see that the term ‘political work’, as Kaveri Haritas describes it, can also be usefully deployed to encompass the range of strategies and negotiations and the sheer labour that the SHG women invested in their efforts to realise their entitlements by holding the state accountable for what was due to them. Framing this as ‘political work’ allows us to recognise the ‘irreducibly political’ (Chatterjee, 2004) nature of women’s claims and negotiations as well as better appreciate that this work was as skill-building as it was draining and exhausting for the women who performed it, not unlike many other kinds of work. Adopting this term enables us to also map the overlaps with and differences from similar types of work that the women of working poor households may be performing in other regional, country and institutional contexts. It is worth noting, however, that the skill-building effects of this work are likely to be unevenly distributed. For instance, not everyone in the SHGs developed the capacities or acquired the know-how to negotiate the maze of state departments, banks and bureaucracy. Ironically enough, those who did—usually the group leaders—could lose the trust of their co-members if they were seen as being too savvy, too knowledgeable, too close to the government bureaucracy they cultivated and not above securing a cut/commission for themselves in the money flow that lubricated the transactions between the SHGs and the other players (Kalpana, 2017).

We may reasonably surmise that these fraught interactions between women and a diverse range of actors (state and non-state), where the former vigorously claim access to welfare and other development resources to which they are entitled by state policies, are only likely to increase in the foreseeable future given the continuation and expansion of social protection schemes in a liberalising India that has not followed the script of a classic withdrawal of the ‘social state’, as is generally noted (Chatterjee, 2008; Gupta & Sharma, 2006). This may not have changed very much in the post-2014 era insofar as it appears that the electoral appeal and successes of the two central governments led by the BJP may have had as much to do with a robust delivery of welfare programmes as with a muscular majoritarian agenda (Daniyal, 2022; Tewari, 2021). We note that some forms of women’s action vis-à-vis state actors are likely to be collaborative and yet others more conflict-ridden in nature. As is argued, women’s struggles that are waged ‘in and against the state’ (Rai, 2008, p. 50) will necessarily be complicated by the dispersal and fluidity of power within the state that we may more usefully perceive as a ‘multi-layered and conflictual ensemble’ (Gupta & Sharma, 2006, p. 291) rather than a monolithic entity or an undifferentiated whole.

Agitational Forms of ‘Political Work’

I turn next to the oppositional/agitational forms of collective action that women (also) undertake when striving to hold state actors accountable for the survival of their low-income households and communities. As part of a research project studying solidarity-based practices and economies in India and Latin America (Verschuur et al., 2021), I met with and interviewed the leaders of trade unions of women manual workers in the informal sector. All the unions that were part of the study—whether those mobilising construction workers, self-employed and home-based workers, petty-vendors or domestic workers—were grassroots organisations whose sole source of funding was membership subscriptions. The unions were, therefore, free of ‘upward accountability’ pressures (to donors or funders) and could pick up their cues on which issues to represent or battles to fight from their women workers’ expressed priorities. As the trade union leaders testified, the issues for which their members sought mediation were as likely to be ‘area problems’ (non-functioning of ration shops, conflicts with the Slum Clearance Board) as they were ‘social problems’ (domestic violence, abandonment of a wife, marital disputes). The range of concerns in which the trade unions intervened, perforce, spanned workplace and domestic domains given a context where the boundaries between work and home were porous and many women worked, part-time or full-time, in and around their neighbourhoods.

Take the case of the Domestic Workers Union, Penn Thozhilalar Sangam, active in Chennai and its adjoining districts, that had built its local branches in the residential areas of its women members by systematically taking up neighbourhood issues. The union leaders found themselves preparing petitions and organising agitation-centred public action on issues such as the poor maintenance of roads ridden with gaping potholes, open drains that over-flowed, the intermixing of drinking water and sewage, garbage heaps that grew by the day and streetlights that did not work. As a local union leader explained to me, ‘This is why the women [workers] even come to us in the first place’. If water lorries and tankers did not arrive regularly and on time, the women domestic workers would show up late to work, sparking off arguments and quarrels with their middle-class employers and possibly leading to a loss of employment. If infants, young children and the elderly fell ill due to the poor quality of sanitation and hygiene-related infrastructure in their neighbourhoods, the burden of women’s care work within the household would intensify. Sensitive to its members’ life-circumstances, the Domestic Workers’ Union recognised that it had to organise women around shared local issues in neighbourhoods and thereafter build the idea of a trade union gradually.

Another key issue that the Domestic Workers Union took up was the fight to preserve the neighbourhood itself. This involved multiple battles with local, city authorities to stall slum evictions, with the women even courting arrest on occasion. As the domestic workers and their union knew well, a re-location to a distant location could spell disaster for the women’s livelihoods. Women’s primary responsibility for infant, child and elder care and other forms of reproductive labour limited their mobility, making available only those employment opportunities that were located within a reasonable proximity of their neighbourhoods. Domestic workers, who were re-located to the city’s suburbs, spent 2–3 hours daily commuting to their workplaces after re-location, leaving their homes in the early hours of the morning. Women’s greater embedding within their localities and neighbourhoods gave them a concrete, material stake both in fighting to protect their neighbourhoods from eviction as well as demanding the infrastructure and services that could discernibly improve the quality of their lives.

However, we note that women’s performance of this labour was not without significant costs. All the trade unions reported high rates of dropouts of local, branch-level organisers who were unhappy with the volunteerism that was expected of them and demanded monetary remuneration for their time and services. Sometimes, they were suspected and even accused by the other women workers of receiving pecuniary benefits that they were (allegedly) not transparent about. These allegations notwithstanding, the local organisers acknowledged that their rich, cumulative experiences had brought them intangible rewards that included skills in leadership, a blossoming of self-confidence and a sense of self-worth and personal growth. A woman leader in a fishing colony testified to feeling ‘gripped by a power’ when she realised that her capacity to rouse and mobilise en masse the women in her neighbourhood had earned her the respect of the local politicians and even the police. Women spoke with pride of their street-fighting tactics, the strength of the collective that allowed them to operate fearlessly and the invaluable lessons they had learnt on how to, alternatively, confront and negotiate with government authorities. However, the performance of this ‘political work’ entailed trade-offs for the women, be it the local leaders or the other members, not the least of which was the loss of the daily wages that women domestic workers or construction workers suffered when they had to set aside time for their agitational activities. And therefore, women’s performance of the lion’s share of this work challenges researchers to both acknowledge and identify the complex implications of this feminised labour and the prospects it offers (if any) for a substantive transformation of women’s lives.