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Citizenship narratives in the face ofbad governance: the voices of theworking poor in BangladeshNaila KabeerPublished online: 24 Mar 2011.

To cite this article: Naila Kabeer (2011) Citizenship narratives in the face of bad governance: thevoices of the working poor in Bangladesh, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38:2, 325-353, DOI:10.1080/03066150.2011.559011

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Citizenship narratives in the face of bad governance: the voices of the

working poor in Bangladesh

Naila Kabeer

The complex nature of the challenge posed by state–society relations to therealization of citizenship rights in poorer countries reflects the unwillingness aswell as incapacity on the part of the state to guarantee basic security of life andlivelihoods to its citizens, and its proneness to capture by powerful elites. Identity,affiliations, and access to resources continue to be defined by one’s place within asocial order that is largely constituted by the ascribed relationships of family,kinship, and community. These ‘given’ relationships pervade all spheres of societyand render irrelevant the idea of an impersonal public sphere that individualsenter as bearers of rights, equal in the eyes of the law. This paper explores theproposition that the possibility of belonging to alternative associations whosemembership is chosen rather than ascribed by social position offers pathways to amore democratic social order. Bangladesh offers an interesting context to explorethis proposition both because it embodies many of the problems of badgovernance outlined above and because it contains a large number of civil societyassociations, many of which work primarily with the poor. The paper is based oninterviews with members of some of these organizations in rural and urban areasof the country.

Keywords: citizenship; civil society; working poor

1. Introduction

1.1. Citizenship, collective action, and the ‘capacity to aspire’

The complex nature of the challenge posed by state–society relations to therealization of citizenship rights in poorer countries constitutes a distinct strand ofanalysis in the literature on citizenship (see review in Kabeer 2002). It points out thatthe constitutions of these countries recognize the formal rights of citizenship, butthat democracy continues to have very shallow roots in many of them. Identity,affiliations, and access to resources are defined by one’s place within a class structureand social order that is largely constituted by the ascribed relationships of family,kinship, caste, and so on, the ‘communities of birth’. These ‘given’ relationshipspervade all spheres of society and render irrelevant the idea of an impersonal publicsphere that individuals enter as bearers of rights, equal in the eyes of the law. Indeed,

I would like to acknowledge the excellent research assistance provided by Ariful Haq Kabir incarrying out the interviews on which this paper is based. I would also like to acknowledgehelpful comments from Ruth Lister and Evelina Dagnino on an earlier draft of this paper aswell as those provided by anonymous reviewers on the submitted version. Many thanks also toKirsty Millward for her excellent editorial assistance.

The Journal of Peasant Studies

Vol. 38, No. 2, March 2011, 325–353

ISSN 0306-6150 print/ISSN 1743-9361 online

� 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2011.559011

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given the persistence of deeply entrenched social inequalities, ‘individuality as a wayof social being is extremely precarious’ (Khilnani 1997, 26).

This paper argues that the problem of citizenship in these societies is not so muchthe absence of individualism in the ontological sense, the claim that a society is madeup of atomized individuals and is no more than the sum of these individuals, than itis the absence of ethical individualism, the idea that certain basic rights and dutiesare defined in relation to the individual and that every individual is equal in terms ofthese rights and duties. A commitment to the rights of individuals is perfectlycompatible with an ontological worldview that recognizes the connections betweenpeople, the socially embedded nature of their identities and experiences (Robeyns2005). Indeed, the idea of citizenship may be premised on the principle of ethicalindividualism, but it draws its legitimacy from the collective participation of citizensin drawing up the shared framework of principles and values that define their visionof society.

The challenge faced by such societies is therefore twofold: the democratization ofstate–society relations and the democratization of society itself. The first implies a‘vertical’ view of citizenship, the recognition of the basic rights of all citizens inrelation to the state, regardless of their place in society. Such recognition is unlikelyto materialize in societies where the economic dispossessions of class overlap withsocial discrimination based on caste, ethnicity, gender, and other social identities—unless it is grounded in a ‘horizontal’ understanding of citizenship, the ‘inneracceptance of equality’ on the part of all citizens and its outward manifestation intheir dealings with each other (Betteille 2000). This equality of personhood, which isat the heart of both liberal and radical approaches to citizenship, cannot be taken asa precondition for democracy. It comes into existence as part and parcel of thestruggle for democracy. The democratization of the state and the democratization ofsociety must therefore clearly go hand in hand.

The problem is that the capacity to bring about such radical transformation isgenerally weakest among those who have the greatest stake in achieving it: peoplewho are poor, vulnerable and socially excluded. Lacking the basic means ofproduction, living close to the margins of survival, uncertain of their ability tomeet their basic daily needs, such groups are often forced to bind themselves intohighly asymmetrical patron–client relationships through which they secure theresources they need for their subsistence in return for labor and loyalty to theirpatrons (Smith 1997, Wood 2003). Fear of the loss of such patronage, and themodicum of security it offers, has profound implications for the capacity ofsubordinate groups to express voice on their own behalf and to exercise politicalagency in pursuit of their rights.

Material inequalities are also reproduced through hegemonic ideologies thatexplain and justify their existence, securing compliance on the part of subordinategroups to their place in the socio-economic order: as Scott (1990) points out, thismay be a merely ‘surface compliance’ that conceals hidden dissent waiting for theopportunity to express itself. Or it may be ‘real compliance’ based on theinternalization of inferiority and the hopelessness of change. Hegemonic power ofthis ‘thicker’ kind does not merely deny subordinate groups the capacity to exercisevoice and agency on their own behalf, it also closes off their capacity to imagine analternative way of life, the ‘capacity to aspire’ (Appudarai 2004).

To become a citizen in such contexts is to transcend the constraints of ascribedstatus, to acquire the capacity to question and challenge these constraints, to

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formulate a vision of a more just society and to act in pursuit of this vision. Whilesuch transformation begins at the level of individual consciousness, the recognitionof the injustice of one’s own situation, it is most often through interaction withothers who share their oppressed status that this transformation of individualconsciousness is likely to occur. It is only through their collective efforts thatindividuals find the capacity to challenge injustice: as history has shown, it is not thepolitical protests of isolated individuals but the ‘collective struggles of thedispossessed’ that have won the ‘rights of citizenship’ (Bowles and Gintis cited inFoweraker and Landman 2007, 1).

This emphasis of the collective dimensions of personal transformation resonateswith the ontological perspective noted earlier in which one’s sense of identity and selfdoes not exist prior to, or outside of, social relationships, but is constituted inter-subjectively: ‘. . . it is the kinds of associations which we inhabit that define the kindof individuals we will become’ (Benhabib 1992, 71). It is through their associationswith others that individuals learn to speak, think, and act; to understand themselvesand their place in the world. Interpreted in this way, this ontological perspectivemakes two important contributions to our analytical concerns. First of all, itsuggests that one’s sense of self and identity is not predetermined or fixed but openand subject to challenge and change. In particular, it suggests that subjectivities canbe transformed through participation in forms of associational life, providing areflexive distance from what has hitherto appeared a ‘given’ or pre-ordained place inthe social order, and therefore opening up the possibility of questioning, criticizing,and challenging the justice of this order (Benhabib 1992).

At the same time, it also allows for the fact that not all forms of associations willnecessarily promote the kinds of transformative change necessary for democraticcitizenship. Indeed, many may set out to reinforce pre-existing inequalities or topromote new ones. Associations are most likely to promote personal transformationand democratic practice when they are ‘chosen’ rather than ‘given’ by one’s place inthe social order; when they are inclusive (open) rather than exclusionary (closed) intheir membership; when they draw on horizontal rather than hierarchal loyalties;when they embody democratic rather than autocratic principles of operation; andwhen they seek to challenge the arbitrary exercise of power rather than to bolster thestatus quo.

1.2. Exploring citizenship and collective action in the Bangladesh context

The aim of this paper is to explore some of these ideas about citizenship andassociational life among poor people in Bangladesh. Bangladesh provides aninteresting context for such a study. It appears to exemplify many of the barriers tocitizenship we have been discussing. The country has been under military rule formuch of its history but it is not the presence or absence of formal democracy thatmakes for these barriers. As Wood (2000) points out, the state in Bangladesh hasnever been equally accessible to all citizens, regardless of who is in power. Itsresources have been allocated through pervasive patron client networks that stretchdown to the village level, allowing the family and kinship groups that dominate thesenetworks, both locally and nationally, to monopolize public sector distribution. It isworth noting that Bangladesh was declared the world’s most corrupt country byTransparency International for five years running, during a period when the countrywas under democratic rule.

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Wood uses the metaphor of the prison to convey the idea of Bangladeshi societyas a ‘total institution’, which prescribes all aspects of its inmates’ lives, giving rise toinequalities that are so deep-rooted in the ‘psychology of Bengali society’ that theytranslate into ‘natural’ deference–authority dyads (Wood 2000, 228). This makes itimpossible for the ‘inmates’ to either reform its institutions or free themselvesthrough their own efforts.

Sobhan (2000) is less pessimistic. He notes that although class inequalities havegrown in recent years, they are not as closely bound up with the deep-rootedinequalities based on ascribed identity that characterize the semi-feudal and caste-based social structures of India, Pakistan, or Nepal: ‘Bangladesh society remainsmore fluid with considerable scope for upward mobility . . . Bangladesh’s prevailingsocial hierarchies remain exposed to challenge from below as well as from competingaspirants because the legitimacy of these differences is not widely accepted’ (Sobhan2000, 82).

The idea of the ‘challenge from below’ has relevance in the Bangladesh contextbecause of the large number of civil society organizations in the country. It isestimated that there are around 22,000 of these registered. Most are voluntaryorganizations of various kinds and include trade unions and labor organizations,welfare associations, religious groups, legal advocacy groups, human rights groups,and various feminist, women’s rights organizations, and development NGOs. Whilethe majority of civil society organizations are small and highly localized, thedevelopment NGOs are among some of the largest in the world today and dominatethe civil society landscape in Bangladesh.

The inception of the development NGO sector can be traced to the disastrousaftermath of the war of liberation in 1971, which was closely followed by adevastating famine. A number of organizations began working in the countryside,seeking to mobilize poor men and women to fight for their rights. The contraction ofpolitical space brought by military rule beginning in 1976 led a number of theseorganizations to move away from their radical analysis towards a service deliveryrole, with an emphasis on group-based microfinance services. These changesaccelerated in the 1990s when the donor community began to provide large-scalefunding to development NGOs as a preferred alternative to the state in the deliveryof social services to low income households. Only a small minority of NGOscontinue to give priority to social mobilization of the poor.

As a result, Bangladesh has a somewhat bifurcated civil society. While themajority of trade unions, feminist organizations, professional associations, humanrights groups, student platforms and cultural groups are located in urban areas andhave sporadic engagement with the rural population, development NGOs, with a fewexceptions, are largely focused on the rural poor. The findings of the present studyshow that the scope for the ‘challenge from below’ reflects the urban–ruralbifurcation of civil society in Bangladesh. In addition, as we will show, it also reflectsthe rural–urban bifurcation of the operation of the state with regard to poorersections of society.

1.3. Methodological approach: narratives about citizenship, rights and social justice

My focus in this paper is on the working poor in Bangladesh and the extent to whichthe associations that feature in their lives promote their capacity to aspire to a morejust society.

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The decision to focus on the working poor reflects the assumption that strugglesto earn a livelihood occupy a central place in the daily experiences of the poor. It istherefore in the context of these class-based struggles we are likely to find the mainpossibilities for poor people’s participation in associational life beyond the givencircles of family and kinship.

It was evident from the outset that livelihood struggles and associated possibilitiesfor poor people to participate in chosen forms of association varied considerablybetween urban and rural locations. Most urban poor people do not own residentialland and rent accommodation from private landlords or occupy public land illegally.Most do not have legal access to public utilities, such as electricity and gas, and relyon illegal connections provided by slum leaders at exorbitant prices. Several slumcommunities have been evicted by the government in recent years and have eitherfailed to be rehabilitated, as stipulated by the law, or been rehabilitated to peripheralareas of the city where they are cut off from their livelihoods.

Respondents in urban areas were drawn from jute mill workers and garmentfactory workers, as well as from self-employed informal sector workers. We thereforeexpected to find trade unions to be the most important associations in the lives ofthese workers, but in practice, trade union membership was fairly high among themale jute mill workers and extremely low among the largely female garment workers.The main associations in the lives of our urban self-employed workers were theminimalist microfinance organizations (MFOS), but we also found that a number ofthem belonged or had interacted with the few socially oriented NGOs that wereactive in the urban slums.

Our rural sample was purposively drawn from the membership of three sociallyoriented NGOs: BRAC, Nijera Kori (NK), and Samata. BRAC has been active since1972 but has gone through a number of incarnations. It started out combining socialmobilization with community development activities and moved into the delivery ofgroup-based microfinance to poor women, combining it with education, environ-mental awareness, social forestry, and health-related services. Its focus on socialmobilization weakened in the 1980s, but social development concerns were re-established in the late 1990s. Microfinance remains the core of BRAC’s activities. Asof 2007, it had over six million members in its Rural Development Programme, all ofthem women.

The other two organizations are hybrid in character. They incorporate manyaspects of social movements in their emphasis on mobilizing poor and landlessgroups rather than seeking to play a service-delivery function. However, theirreliance on external funding, initially from international NGOs but more recentlyfrom mainstream donors, gives them some of the characteristics of NGOs in theformality of their organizational structure and procedures. NK was started in 1980by a group of activists who had split from BRAC when it abandoned its focus onsocial mobilization. Samata began as a youth club for young men in 1976 but,through interactions with Oxfam, evolved into a social mobilization organization inthe mid-1970s. The two organizations have much in common, eschewing servicedelivery and focusing on organizing groups of landless women and men to claimtheir rights. Both had over 200,000 members in 2007, around 60 percent of themwomen. NK is active in around 17 districts of the country, while Samata is moregeographically concentrated in around seven districts.

There are therefore very different kinds of ‘chosen’ associations represented inour sample. The older trade unions are membership-based organizations with

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members paying fees towards the organizational expenses. The newer unions, mainlyactive in the garment industry, also stress membership fees but have been lesssuccessful in building membership-based organizations, not least because they areprevented from operating within factories. Relationships with microfinanceorganizations are generally group-based, with members of groups guaranteeingeach other’s loans. There is frequently no relationship between group members of themore minimalist microfinance organizations other than the financial one. BRAC isdifferent because it seeks to combine provision of microfinance with a range of otherservices. NK and Samata seek to build membership-based organizations. Theirgroups operate independently of the NGOs and have their own democraticallyelected structures. The forms of associational life we will be describing therefore varyfrom thin affiliations to active membership.

Given the dearth of research on this topic in Bangladesh, semi-structured, in-depth discussions appeared to be an appropriate way into everyday understandingsof concepts of citizenship and social justice. Seventy-two women and men werechosen from these predetermined categories on the basis of informal contacts and‘cold-calling’ in different rural and urban locations (Table 1). The interviews used aloose life history framework to explore the lives and livelihoods of the workers andthe significance of different kinds of relationships to their well being and agency.Since the sample for the study was chosen on purposive, rather than representative,grounds, the study cannot provide empirical generalizations about the potential forcollective action among the working poor in Bangladesh. However, given that it isone of the first attempts to explore grassroots narratives about citizenship andcollective action in the context of Bangladesh, it can provide some preliminaryanalytical insights into these issues and provide the basis for more systematicresearch efforts in the future.

2. ‘On not being a citizen:’ associational life and collective action in the urban context

2.1. Jute mill workers and the ‘old’ trade unions

Bangladesh’s jute industry was, until the 1980s, the country’s largest industry. It wasdominated by the Adamjee jute mills, whose overwhelmingly male workforcenumbered thousands and was housed in its own township, Adamjee Nagar. As partof the formal economy, the workers were covered by labor laws and social securitybenefits. The five main trade unions in the country were all registered in the industry.As in other parts of South Asia, the main unions were all affiliated with political

Table 1. Respondents: gender, economic category, and residential location.

Urban categories Female Male

Jute mill workers 0 5Garment factory workers 8 3Microfinance clients 15 0

Rural categories

BRAC 5 0NK 9 10Samata 7 10Total 44 28

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parties and union activities were largely driven by partisan politics. Within the jutemills, they focused on the permanent workforce, ignoring the large pool of casual orbadli workers employed on a daily basis. Although by law, casual workers shouldhave been given permanent appointments within two months of joining, the speedwith which a badli worker actually attained this coveted position depended on hisconnections within the union hierarchy. Some obtained permanent contracts shortlyafter joining, others after 15 or 20 years and the payment of hefty bribes.

The steady decline in international demand for jute and the huge lossesincurred by the industry since its nationalization finally led to the closure of themills in 2002. Although closure had been in the cards for a number of years,when it finally happened it was done swiftly with no protest from the unionleaders. Closure led to the redundancy of 25,000 permanent workers and 5,000temporary workers, as well as loss of employment for a further 25,000 whoprovided goods and services to the workers. A bustling community was turnedinto a ghost town overnight.

We interviewed a number of these workers very soon after the closure of themills. It was evident from the interviews that trade unions had featured actively inthe lives of the mill workers but had done little to promote awareness of labor lawsor to fight for the rights of their membership. Instead, our respondents wereunanimous that blame for the closure of the mills should be shared equally betweenthe management, the trade union leadership, and those ‘self-interested individuals inthe political parties’ who had backed the unions. They knew that managers earnedbribes from contracting companies who supplied them with poor quality equipmentat inflated prices, and over-invoiced for the purchase of raw jute. In return forturning a blind eye to management corruption, the trade union leadership wasallowed its own rent-seeking opportunities. Fees charged on the thousands of balesof jute delivered to the mills, ostensibly for the Collective Bargaining Agreementfund, largely went into the pockets of the union leadership. Union leaders alsoearned bribes for arranging the transition from casual to permanent contracts andloyalty from supporters through the daily distribution of haziras, which allowedworkers to collect wages without reporting for work, on the grounds that they wereengaged in union work.

Makbul had been one of the beneficiaries of this system. His cousin had been aunion vice president and Makbul was rapidly transferred from casual to permanentstatus. He soon became a section leader. For Makbul, the closure of the jute millswas more than just a loss of employment, it was the end of his way of life: ‘In all mylife, Adamjee’s closure is the most painful incident I have experienced’. Despite hisown privileged position in the unions, he was forthright about the role they hadplayed in the downfall of the industry: ‘Labor leaders could do anything they wantedin Adamjee . . . They were elected to look after the interests of the ordinary worker,but in reality, they did not bother . . . The reality is that the authorities and the unionleaders had a mutual interest relationship based on corruption’.

Altaf had not had the benefit of Makbul’s networks. He had paid a bribe of 800takas to join the mills as a daily laborer. His goal was to acquire permanent statusand he focused on working hard and avoiding politics in order to achieve it.However, it took him 14 years to accumulate the 2,500 takas bribe to become an adhoc laborer and another three years before he was given permanent status. Withintwo years, the mills closed down. He had worked in the mills for 20 years and leftwith a redundancy payment of 4,000 takas.

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He told us why rank and file workers had never protested union corruption: ‘Allthe laborers knew what was going on in the mills, but their mouths were shut,everyone was concerned about their jobs . . . If even one of the unions had called fora movement against the closures, thousands would have joined. Instead theleadership . . . looked after their own interests’. Ghiyas had worked in Adamjee since1972. He testified to the partisan conflicts that underpinned trade union activism inthe mills: ‘The political parties’ organizations used the ordinary laborers in theirprocessions and meetings. Whenever the time for a procession would come, theywould send a truck to Adamjee’. The fact that rank and file workers had so littleinteraction with the trade union leadership meant that most had not fullycomprehended the degree to which the unions had been co-opted until theyobserved their acquiescence to the closure of the mills.

It would appear from these accounts that workers in the Adamjee jute mills hadno option but to play by the rules of a highly corrupt system based on collusionbetween management and the trade union leadership. Not surprisingly, they had fewillusions about their status as citizens: in fact, for Makbul, the system within thefactories appeared to be a microcosm of the larger collusion between the country’sgovernment and its elites at the expense of the poor: ‘The government never pays anyattention to poor people. Its relationship is with millionaires. It is the rich who areresponsible for the closure of the Adamjee today. They stole the profits while thepoor paid the liabilities’.

2.2. Export garment workers and the new trade unions

The export garment sector emerged in response to opportunities thrown up byeconomic liberalization and established its ability to compete globally through theemployment of a ‘flexible’, non-unionized and largely female labor force—althoughmore men have joined the industry recently. All garment factories over a certain sizeare covered by the country’s labor laws but these are very unevenly observed. Theinternational publicity given by coalitions of northern trade unions, student activistsand concerned consumer groups to working conditions in the sector has led to someimprovement in labor standards in the larger factories.

Protests about wages and working conditions within the industry have tended tobe sporadic and localized. A majority of workers are relatively recent migrants fromthe countryside (Kabeer and Mahmud 2004) and inexperienced in both factory workand industrial action. There is high demand for these jobs but also a high level ofturnover, given the harsh discipline enforced. Fluctuations in the internationalmarket for garments also lead to frequent layoffs. Consequently, none of thegarment workers we interviewed had stayed in any particular factory for anyextended period of time. There was thus little scope for developing forms ofsolidarity with fellow workers that could lead to sustained forms of collective action.

The absence of protest also reflects very low levels of trade union membership inthe industry (Kabeer and Mahmud 2004). Trade unions were until very recentlybanned from the EPZs and actively resisted in the rest of the export sector.Employers frequently resort to hired musclemen in order to intimidate anyoneattempting to organize. Newer unions are closely focused on the particular needs andconstraints of garment workers and tend to organize on a neighborhood rather thana workplace basis, and to opt for negotiation rather than confrontation. Manycollaborate with legal rights NGOs to provide legal training and assess the possibility

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of redress for grievances through the labor courts or the Bangladesh GarmentManufacturers and Exporters Association (BGMEA).

While garment workers were unanimous about the unfavorable conditions intheir industry, they varied in their views about their rights as workers. Variationsappeared to reflect some combination of past history and current experience. In thecase of Rafiq, a male garment worker, a life of injustice had left him convinced thatprotest was futile. He had begun working at a very young as an agricultural laborerand later as a rickshaw puller in the city. He told us how people would often refuse topay the proper fare and how some had slapped him when he protested. The garmentindustry had offered some relief from such behavior but it had its own problems,which few dared protest about. According to Rafiq, it was because they knew theycould be easily replaced: ‘Only the manager, the production manager, the supervisorsand floor in charge staff are paid on time because only they are difficult to replace’.

In any case, he considered protest on the part of the poor to be futile:

Who listens to the poor person on the street? . . . If someone like you1 makes acomplaint, everyone will believe you. If you go to the police station, the Officer inCharge will offer you a seat. But if I go, he will not accept my case, he will not even askme to sit. He would only have to glance at my clothes to know I was a poor man.

Jhorna, like Rafiq, had learnt about injustice early in her life. Her family had lostall their village land because of a disputed claim and their inability to pay thenecessary bribe to the police. She was also aware of the discrimination she suffered asa daughter. She saw little reason to expect justice from others when she had not gotjustice from her own father:

There is no use by talking about rights in this country . . . . What can a poor person doother than praying to God? I try to forget about rights. As a child the rights that I wassuppose to get from my father, did I get them? I could not claim any rights that I hadfrom my father, what rights will the government give me?

She described the oppressive conditions that prevailed in her factory. Herexplanation for the lack of protest by workers was that they had few alternativeoptions in the labor market:

Most of the labourers here are women. They are also uneducated. So they do not know howto get organized and how to identify the causes of discrimination. Most of them are poorand there are no alternative options for work. When I tried for a job as a service worker fora government office, I was asked to pay a bribe of 40,000 taka. Where will I get such anamount?

Salma’s account of the conditions in her factory was informed by the language oflabor laws, more so than Jhorna’s, possibly because she had a higher level ofeducation. She spoke of her employers’ failure to pay proper overtime, restrictionson the use of the toilet, the surveillance of workers through cameras all over thefactory, including the toilet area, the absence of primary health care facilities,prohibition of any kind of political discussion within the factory, and the ban ontrade unions. Like Rafiq, she explained the absence of protest in terms of thedispensability of a work force with easily acquired skills: ‘These are jobs that anyonecould do with a few weeks’ training. Anyone who makes any kind of protest can be

1This was addressed to the interviewer.

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sacked immediately because the country has more than enough unskilled workerslooking for unskilled work’.

These workers tended to deal with injustices on an individual basis, some leavingto find other jobs, others carrying out their own negotiations with management.However, we found some exceptions in the case of workers who had made contactwith trade unions and legal rights NGOs. For instance, when her employer had heldback workers’ wages, Halima and some of her fellow workers had taken advice froma local trade union and organized a strike. The police were called in to throw themout but they continued their protest outside: ‘We arranged press conferences,processions and meetings, informed the BGMEA about our grievances and took thefactory authorities to the labor court’. The movement petered out when the employerpersuaded some of the workers to come back to work. Halima was not taken back asshe was regarded as one of the ring leaders. She believed that the problem forworkers lay in their lack of consciousness: ‘The workers have somehow accepted thewhole unfair system in the industry. If the workers were conscious, how could suchinjustices continue without protest?’

Other workers believed that some change in consciousness was taking place.Growing international publicity about their conditions of work and rising levels ofeducation have meant that recent cohorts of garment workers are more aware oftheir rights and the value of unity. As one female garment leader told us:

Now workers understand the importance of organizations, when a worker loses theirjob but eventually gets it by filing a case through the labor court they stand to gainmuch . . . Now they understand about the ILO convention and the law, and they ask forinformation.

Male workers in the garment industry were generally more likely than women toreport sustained trade union activism. Sakhawat had become involved in trade unionwork soon after he joined the industry. He had been involved in a number ofprotests, taken his employers to the BGMEA arbitration cell and later to the laborcourt, and was subsequently beaten up by the employers’ goons. He then filed a caseagainst the employer, with the support of his trade union. When the labor courtfound against him, he took his appeal to the High Court and won, this time with thebacking of BLAST, a legal rights organization. He believed that greater respect forworkers’ rights in the industry needed combined action on a number of fronts:‘through government pressure on employers’ associations to respect these rights;through building up workers’ knowledge of their rights; through the greaterneutrality of BGMEA . . . and finally, through labor organizations that worked inthe interests of labor’.

2.3. Self-employed workers and microfinance organizations

Working women in urban slums are generally confined to a restricted range ofactivities: waged work in garment factories or small workshops, domestic service,petty trade, and home-based work. We interviewed 15 women who reported someassociation with development NGOs active in the urban slums, most with minimalistMFOs, but a few with the more socially oriented NGOs, such as NK, Proshika, andAction Aid. Women borrowers usually used loans either to purchase a rickshaw forhusbands or sons to pull or to rent out, or to construct additional ‘room(s)’—mainlymake-shift shelters—to rent out. Our interviews were carried out soon after a ban by

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the BNP government on the plying of rickshaws services in the major (‘VIP’) streetsof Dhaka. This had dealt a severe blow to those households who relied on pulling orrenting out rickshaws for their livelihoods.

The women we spoke to had mixed views about the benefits of microfinance.Some considered it a boon because NGOs charged lower rates of interest thanmoneylenders—previously, their only option in times of crisis or for buyingproductive assets had been to borrow on usurious terms. For others, however,microfinance had proved to be a double-edged sword, increasing their assets buttrapping them in debt when these were stolen, burnt, or lost through any one of thehazards of life in the slums.

None of the women considered their association with minimalist MFOs asanything other than a business relationship. Clients had little contact with theorganizations beyond weekly meetings to repay their loans and learnt little beyondbasic financial skills. These tenuous affiliations had done little to promote rightsawareness. Najma Begum had borrowed money from several organizations, but hadnever received any advice from them. She said she knew nothing about rights:

I do not know what sort of right I can claim from the country and government. Peoplein our area are scared of the government; they are worried about the governmentsending army to capture our local people . . . If anyone complains about anything thenpolice will arrest us.

Ayesha Akhter had prospered from her association with microfinance organiza-tions:

It is true that the NGOs do business by giving loans, but I have profited from them. Ihad no capital with which I could have done any type of savings oriented work. But as Ireceived a good sum of money at a time, from the NGOs, I was able to earn a goodamount too.

However, she expressed her anger at the reactions of most of the MFOs to theanti-eviction struggles of slum dwellers in the late 1990s. Many suspended theirlending operations for fear of defaults. Some had remained only because they werepersuaded that default rates on loans would be much higher if the evictions tookplace.2 A few had participated in the anti-eviction struggles but had attempted totake over the slum dwellers’ platform.

She considered the evictions to be part of a government strategy to redistributeland from the poor to the rich:

During the time of election . . . different political parties . . . all gave us promisesthat . . . they would give us the land of this slum permanently and would make moredevelopment of this area. However, when the BNP government came to power, theydid not give us our land. They evicted many of us and let their people build homesthere. Why should all the plots go to the rich, are we not also citizens of thiscountry?

Her contacts with some of the socially active NGOs allowed her to compare thesedifferent organizations. She singled out NK in particular as having taken the side of

2In Sultan’s (1999) study of anti-eviction struggles in a squatter settlement in Dhaka, womenrespondents reported that it was only after they threatened to stop paying off their loans thatNGO workers began to pay attention to their concerns.

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the slum dwellers in their struggles against eviction.3 Her experiences with theseorganizations had alerted her to the importance of consciousness and unity amongthe poor, but she did not hold out much hope that this would happen: Society couldbe changed if all the poor could protest on a united basis. But the poor do notunderstand this, they lack consciousness.

Nilu Begum believed that her understanding of the world had changed as a resultof her interactions with NK. She told us that she had grown up accepting her fatewithout question, but she found herself changing: I am an illiterate woman, so wasmy mother. But I have dreams for my children which my mother never had for us.She was determined to educate her youngest daughter through the college level. Shebelieved that these changes had come about as a result of her association with NK,‘because they have made me aware of so many things’, and she had cut off herrelationships with other NGOs. But this growing awareness did not translate intooptimism about changes in the wider domain: ‘How are we going to protest? Thearmy arrests innocent people. No one can make a procession or meeting for fear.The government leaders use our vote to get into power but they are the ones whoimpoverish us’.

What was striking about the narratives of these self-employed women was theirpervasive sense that no one was listening to them. A number of them referred to thevast gulf that separated rich and poor. According to Shathi, the rich appeared toinhabit a different universe: ‘We live with dirt and garbage the whole day. If they comeinto contact with us, they get sick’. Equally striking was the extent to which theirexpressions of despair, disenfranchisement and injustice revolved around the equationbetween money and power: ‘All talk about rights is useless, only money has a voice’.

It appeared that money could buy anything of value in society. Shahida observedthat it could buy a place at the head of the queue in the doctor’s clinic: ‘When itcomes to medical treatment, poor people have to buy a ticket in order to stand in aqueue to see the doctor. Rich people can just get out of their cars and see the doctor,without even buying a ticket’. Mossamet maintained that it could buy justice:

If I have a problem and I seek justice, then I will have to pay a bribe. I am a citizen ofthis country, my vote has helped to elect the ward commissioner but if I go to him to geta certificate, I will be told that he is busy. Yet I have seen how the same guard will salutethose who have a car.

Some believed it had bought off the leadership of the poor. According to Rohimonn,‘No one will protest the ban on rickshaws because our leaders are nothing but abunch of thieves. If they are given a bribe, they will tell us that there is no need to gofor movements’. Shahida described the traps that kept poor people in poverty:

There is no unity among the people of the slum. Dr. Kamal Hossain organized amovement for the slums and that made our force stronger but we did not elect him whenthe time came. Instead we elected someone who is the biggest thief in thecountry. . . . the need of money keeps us trapped.

Few had faith in the political system. As Rohimon put it, ‘Every election, thepolitical leaders and their workers come to beg for our votes and when it is over, they

3The women interviewed in Sultan’s study also singled out NK as the only NGO they hadencountered that provided political support in their anti-eviction struggles rather thanbehaving like businesses (1999, 220).

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are gone as well. How are they going to look out for us? They are too busy managingtheir own fortunes’. In Jahanara’s view, the rot in the system began with thecountry’s leaders and radiated downwards to all aspects of social life: ‘In a countrywhere the government is constantly lying, why shouldn’t the police take bribes andthe mastaan (hired musclemen) terrorise people?’

However, a somewhat less pessimistic view of the democratic process wasprovided by Fatema. She was a long-standing member of Proshika and it was clearthat her experience in an organisation with a firm social agenda had given her a morehopeful view of the future:

We are citizens. The vote helps us to elect a competent person for the development ofthe country. Now we realize we need to elect somebody from among us. Honest andgenuine people cannot win the elections at present. The election is run by black moneyto earn more black money. Now that we are realizing this, we will elect people from thesame situation as us in the future.

2.4. The limits to collective action in the urban context

It is evident from our analysis that most of the associations featured in the urbancomponent of our study did little to challenge the inequalities proscribed by the‘communities of birth’ of our respondents. Trade unions are primarily regarded asvehicles of party politics (Dannecker 2002, Khan 2001), and, in the Adamjeefactories, had engaged in rent-seeking behavior in collusion with the management. Inthe new export-oriented industries, new kinds of labor organizations were emerging,some women-only, that were evolving new strategies for protecting workers’ rights.These organized on a neighborhood basis and placed emphasis on training workersin legal rights. However, willingness to act appeared to be confined to a minority.The rest were too afraid of jeopardizing their jobs to protest their workingconditions. In the slums it was mainly the minimalist development NGOs that wereactive amongst the self-employed. Only the few of the women in our sample, whowere in contact with the more socially oriented NGOs, reported being treated ascitizens rather than simply as borrowers.

There was little evidence that these ‘chosen’ associations had given rise to anawareness of shared interests among members or willingness to take collectiveaction, except on a sporadic basis. On the other hand, neither did we find evidence ofthe ‘natural deference-authority dyads’ that Wood describes as a pervasive feature ofBangladesh society. Instead we found an active awareness of the injustices of thesystem and vociferous condemnation of those who perpetrated them. The languageof rights and citizenship did not come naturally to all our respondents: rather, it wasagainst the benchmark of justice they expressed their anger at the treatment metedout to them by those in power. If they were ‘prisoners’ of this system, they wereprisoners with a well-developed analysis of the nature of their prison, one which theysaw as constructed by the power of money rather than the power of patronage. Theirlanguage was consequently suffused with a much greater sense of ‘class-like’antagonism towards the rich than is generally to be found in literature on ‘badgovernance’ in Bangladesh.

Our analysis strongly suggests that formal multi-party democracy and the rightto vote on its own cannot deliver substantive citizenship rights in a context where thepolitical system is itself a part of the problem. Aside from a few scattered sociallyoriented NGOs and some of the newer unions, there is little evidence of any

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organizational effort to build a countervailing force for change among the poor. Thelikelihood that such organizations will emerge in the near future also seems remote.On the one hand, the lives and livelihoods of the urban poor are marked by toomany interruptions and discontinuities to allow the emergence of a stable sense ofcollective identity and interests: they seldom live in any place long enough to developneighborhood ties and earn their living through a variety of casual and irregularforms of work, which offer little possibility for building up longer term relationshipsof solidarity.

At the same time, the state appears to be engaged in a war of attrition with urbanslum dwellers, using the coercive tactics at its disposal to drive through policiesthreatening their shelter and undermining their livelihoods. This has made it difficultfor organizations interested in social mobilization to operate. NK, for instance,which had been working in Dhaka slums from 1983, withdrew after the slumevictions in 1999. Despite court orders defending slum dwellers’ rights, the politicalparty in power used its thugs to terrorize slum dwellers and ‘accidentally’ set theirhouses on fire until they finally managed to clear the last slum in which NK had beenworking.4 Their group members were now dispersed all over the city.

3. ‘On becoming a citizen:’ associational life and collective action in the rural context

The picture that emerged from our rural narratives was far more positive. This partlyrelates to the nature of the rural sample and partly to the rural context. Wepurposively focused on three NGOs that had an explicit social orientation. Inaddition, the lives of our rural respondents were relatively more stable than those ofour urban respondents, making social mobilization efforts more sustainable. Themajority of respondents had been living in their present locations for most of theirlives. Those who had migrated to their current location had done so several yearsago. As a result, NGO membership extended in many cases over several years;members knew each other well and had become known as group members to thewider community. It was on the basis of this stable membership that the threeorganizations sought to pursue their goals.

There were some similarities but important differences between BRAC, on theone hand, and NK and Samata on the other. All three organized their members intogroups that met on a weekly basis. All emphasized training in practical matters andlegal rights. However, while BRAC focused on a combination of microfinance andother forms of service provision, both NK and Samata had eschewed serviceprovision and concentrated on social mobilization.

The explicit focus on rights in all three organizations provide us with some ideaof what purposively designed processes to promote citizenship identity and practicesat the grassroots level might look like in Bangladesh. That the process had achievedsome degree of success is evident in the fact that while many of our rural respondentsspoke of barriers to their citizenship, many of these were spoken of in the past tense,of barriers overcome. In other words, they saw themselves as citizens, or at least intransition to citizenship. However, it was evident from our interviews that differencesin organizational strategies had given rise to somewhat different trajectories of

4The land was later developed for various government and donor offices, including those ofthe ADB and World Bank.

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change in the lives of members of these organizations, and somewhat differentengagements in collective action.

3.1. Competing routes to economic empowerment: markets and movements

The most obvious difference between BRAC, on the one hand, and NK and Samata,on the other, relates to their strategies for promoting members’ livelihoods. BRACpromotes access to markets as its primary route to economic empowerment.Microfinance services occupy a central role in its strategy along with various kinds ofpractical information and skills. BRAC’s Village Organisations (VOs) are open towomen only. These hold gram sabhas on a monthly basis to raise awareness aboutspecific issues, build the confidence of members, and develop their leadership skills.Members of the VOs within a single ward formed a Polli Samaj, which acted as aforum for the discussion of various forms of injustice. BRAC has had a legal rightsand legal support program in place since 1986.

The drive for financial sustainability over the past decade or so has meant thatthe program has gravitated towards the moderately poor.5 BRAC members in oursample generally invested their loans in traditionally female activities that can becarried out close to home, such as handicraft production and raising livestock andpoultry. Others gave their loans to their husbands. In addition, we came across anumber of women in less traditional activities: setting up their own shops orengaging in door-to-door trading. The well-documented economic benefits fromloans provided by BRAC include increases in household income and assets as well asinvestments in children’s health and education (Hashemi et al. 1996, Halder 2003,Khandker 1999). Some women in our sample had been able to buy land and buildhouses; others had expanded into new livelihood activities or accumulated savings.

The lower levels of activism amongst BRAC membership relative to the otherNGO members may reflect the fact that microfinance transactions took up a greatdeal of time during weekly group meetings, and social awareness training wasgenerally confined to monthly discussions. Some commentators suggest that thepreoccupation with loan repayments has affected the organization’s ability topromote social change (Montgomery 1998, Goetz and Sen Gupta 1996).

Samata and NK differ radically in their approach to economic empowerment,not only from BRAC but also from the majority of development NGOs inBangladesh, in prioritizing social mobilization. Both used training and discussionwithin group meetings to promote collective reflection and analysis of the structuralroots of poverty and inequality in Bangladesh, to strengthen members’ awareness oftheir rights as workers, peasants, and citizens, and to mobilize their members to takecollective action. Training methodologies draw on the pedagogic approach of PauloFreire, elements of Marxist class analysis and cultural repertoires that borrow frompeople’s movements in the Indian context.

Struggles over land featured centrally in the early history of both organizations.Both recruit their membership from the ranks of landless and near-landless, whotend to come from poorer households than members of BRAC. Many members hadbeen born landless; others had become landless as a result of litigation, fraud, debt,or river erosion. The movements of the rivers in Bangladesh are deeply implicated in

5BRAC has separate programs for the very poor which combine food transfers, savings, andskills training.

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the politics of land struggles: river erosion renders some families landless while newlyformed char lands become a major source of contestation, formally available fordistribution to the landless. However, most landless families were not aware of theseentitlements and were, in any case, powerless to claim them. It was through theirassociation with Samata and NK that these families learnt about their entitlements.

This focus on land rights brought their members into direct, often violentconfrontation with local elites. Samata began its operations in an area where thegovernment’s decision to drain a large beel, or lake, in the early 1960s had led to theemergence of new land. Landless families in the area began to drain and clear theland for cultivation but lost out to local landlords who forcibly occupied the landand hired them as wage laborers. As Momena recalled, Samata took group membersto the Tehsil office and the Land office to examine all the records in regards to khasland. The Thana Nirbahi Officer (a key government official at local level) and thegovernment surveyors were invited to measure the drained land and establish itsstatus as khas land. Landless groups were then able to demand that their landlordsprovide documents proving their entitlement.

Resistance by landlords led to over a decade of confrontation. False cases werelodged against Samata members, often several at a time. These made no reference tothe legality or otherwise of their claims to land but accused them of various criminalacts, including rape, violence against women, murder, and extortion. The accusedwere tied up in court cases and sometimes gaoled for a number of years. Groupsavings and organizational support helped them to survive but it was not until themid-1990s that they finally began to get full ownership of the land.

NK group members from the char areas of Noakhali had similarly been able todo little to claim their entitlements to these lands. Maleka Begum recalled thelawlessness that had prevailed in Char Jabbar: ‘People were afraid to come to thisarea, it was a dangerous environment’. They faced constant demands for toll moneyfrom local industrial elites and landlords, backed by threat of forcible seizure of theirlivestock and possessions if they failed to pay. The landlords had formed their own‘lathial bahini’ (armed force) from some of the ‘money-hungry’ families among thelandless to assist them in these operations.

NK had arrived in the area to provide relief after a major cyclone in 1985 andstayed on to organize the landless. The fierce confrontations that ensued took theelites by surprise: ‘They did not have any idea that the poor, whose only means ofsurvival is land, would defend their land with the last ounce of blood’. Womentook the lead in confrontations with the police on a number of occasions: ‘Wediscarded our burkah and took up brooms and sticks in our hands. In the face ofour resistance to their hired goons, the industrialists began to lay charges ofviolence against women against the men in our area’. By the mid-1990s, the locallandlords began to weary of the confrontations and landless groups began theprocess of taking over the land.

Women’s active part in the land struggles served to raise the level of genderawareness within these organizations, and both NK and Samata adopted thedemand for joint entitlement. Many male members were also affected by women’sparticipation in the struggles, which brought home to them their own internalizationof social norms about women’s inferiority. Abdur Rahman told us:

Before joining Samata. I hardly recognized women’s roles. We really had no idea thatwomen worked as hard as we did in running the family. Now I realize that our family is

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a result of our joint effort. When we received two bighas of land in 1994, it was in bothour names.

Subsequent struggles in the economic domain all relied on the power of collectiveaction that the landless groups had learnt to bring to their demands. Samata’swomen’s groups had campaigned successfully to ensure that public works programsin their locality filled the quota of jobs reserved for women. Both NK and Samatagroups had gone on strike for higher wages or to resist wage cuts. In some cases, theydid not win their demands, but in others they made gains. One major change thatwas widely reported was the behavior of the wealthy towards their laborers.According to Nasir, protests by NK groups meant that the earlier practice of holdingback pay had been stopped. Now laborers were given their pay at the end of theworking day: ‘The importance of our word has increased’.

3.2. Improving access to justice

All three of the NGOs were active in the arena of law and justice. They providedtraining in legal rights, supported group action in the face of injustice and assistedmembers who wanted to take grievances to court. These activities have hadconsiderable impact on the self-confidence of group members. Mossamet Fatemadescribed how change had come about: ‘People gain knowledge on different subjectsthrough discussions and interactions with other people. As a result, women haveslowly started to come out of their world of housework . . . I came to know aboutwomen’s rights after becoming a member’. She found herself questioning practicesshe had taken for granted before: ‘I now know that women face discrimination inmarriage, that it is a crime to give or take dowry. Now, through the involvement ofgroup members, a number of marriages have taken place without dowry’.

Fatema provided an example of how BRAC members approached genderinjustices:

Many men beat their wives, especially in relation to dowry. Our group members first sitwith the husband and wife and try to solve the problem through discussion. We try tomake them realize that both giving and taking dowry are social crimes. We tell themthat the law forbids dowry.

If they were not able to solve the problem within the group, they turned to BRAC’slegal assistance centre. These experiences meant that many BRAC members wereknowledgeable on such matters as how to file a case.

NK and Samata combine their training in legal rights with a structural analysisof socio-economic injustice. Their membership engaged in a wider variety ofcollective actions than those of BRAC, challenging class and gender injustices as wellas taking on religious discrimination and environmental concerns. Jobeda (Samata)described how her group members had campaigned against various manifestationsof gender injustice within the community:

Men and women are equal, but many different kinds of violence and oppression aredone against women in our society, talak (divorce), fatwas, dowry, and so on. Nowomen in this area used to go out without burkha. We have made processions, givenspeeches in the bazaar against such practices. To be able to study and work is also awoman’s right. Aside from the fundamental rights, a woman has the right to movearound on the streets, to speak her mind and to hold jobs.

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NK and Samata group members also took active part in the shalish, thetraditional village-level forum for dealing with conflict. These tend to be dominatedby village elites and their adjudications loaded in favor of the elites and theirfollowers. The growing strength of NK and Samata groups has meant that theirmembers are routinely invited to participate in shalish proceedings. Furthermore,where the traditional mechanism was found to be unsatisfactory and where thegroup presence was sufficiently strong, the organizations set up their own alternativeforums for dispute resolution.

The availability of a justice mechanism not loaded in favor of the rich andpowerful has played an important role in building organizational support among thepoor. It has been of particular importance for women, given that the traditionalshalish had long been used to shore up male domination. As Jobeda from NK put it:

The woman whose husband is refusing to support her, she will not get justice form thevillage leaders. Instead they will accuse her of some fault that led to her husband’sbehavior. Now nobody approaches the village leaders.

This has also had repercussions within the community. According to MossametAkther from BRAC:

When people outside our associations hear that we are capable of solving these dowrydisputes, they also come to us. People of this area know that our group members playimportant roles in solving different problems. As a result, they come to us for adviceregarding various situations.

Evidence that the wider community had begun to recognize the legitimacy ofthese alternative systems of justice was to be found in the changing attitudes of thevillage elites towards the poor. Nurjehan told us that she had complained to thevillage head when her landlord had beaten her son because she had decided to stopworking for him. When she was ignored, she took her complaint to Samata groupmembers who carried out their own shalish and fined the landlord 1000 takas. Thelandlord was forced to pay as he feared that others might refuse to work for him:‘This was when the village elite began to realize that the groups were becomingpowerful. This judgment made us stronger’.

3.3. Accountability struggles in the policy domain

Group members of all three organizations have become increasingly engaged in thedistribution of public goods and services within their community, but to a varyingextent. The primary form of involvement by BRAC group members related to thedistribution of Vulnerable Group Development (VGD) cards, which were intendedto provide destitute women with food transfers, training, and credit. Although mostof BRAC’s members were not eligible for these cards, BRAC’s collaboration on thisprogram with the government and the World Food Program explains their highlevels of involvement.

NK and Samata group members, on the other hand, were engaged in monitoringand lobbying around a wide range of social services and poverty-alleviation schemes,including the allocation of VGD cards. Manan of Samata made an explicit linkbetween his constitutional rights and group demands for greater accountability inthe public provision of social services:

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As citizens of Bangladesh, we have the right to food, clothing, shelter, health, andeducation. It is the state’s responsibility to provide these needs . . . Earlier we didn’thave proper treatment facilities in the Union clinics. We put pressure on the UPChairman who talked to the doctors there so that they provide better treatment.

This exertion of bottom-up pressure via elected officials was one mechanismthrough which groups were able to effect improvements in the delivery of socialservices to the poor. In addition, they took an active part in the various formal andinformal committees responsible for the governance of schools, markets, mosques,and so on. Akash told us that the chairmen and members used to misappropriate thewheat allotted to the poor once they got into power. This was less possible now.

Every month I check at the Union Council about what has been allotted to the poor.Under the VGD program the chairman used to distribute 20kg wheat per head insteadof 30kg. When we stood together to protest this malpractice, he was compelled todistribute the right amount of wheat.

Akash was also on the school committee and saw to it that teachers were takingclasses regularly.

Other kinds of collective action in relation to social provisioning were describedin the interviews. In one area, NK group members had lobbied for the establishmentof a school for their children. In another, groups spoke of their struggle to ensurethat cyclone shelters were built in locations accessible to the landless. A Samatagroup member told us about her group’s efforts to ensure that public works schemesin their area filled the quota of jobs reserved for women.

3.4. Providing leadership to poor people

A number of the rural respondents believed that group membership had provided aseedbed for alternative forms of leadership in the countryside. According to Akash,participation in various village committees was a training ground in leadership fortheir members: ‘We all want that the landless people get more exposure, serveoutside so that they can get valuable experience and with that experience they makemore poor people aware. That’s why we elect new leaders every year by rotation’.Manjura believed that their role in dispute resolution had contributed to theiremergence as leaders: ‘Combining everything we do, we have become a powerfulgroup, parallel to the mattabars . . . Now the poor know we stand for the law and wetry to be fair. As a result the powerful people of the society are forced to listen to us’.

This leadership role has taken on an increasingly political form since therestoration of democracy in 1991. Elections are held for positions in localgovernment at the union level, with reservations for women in elected positionssince the late 1990s. The years of activism have made NGO group members crediblecandidates in these elections. A number of those we interviewed had stood forelections with the support of their organisational networks and some had won.Mossamet Fatema, a BRAC member who had won a reserved seat at the localelection, explained her success in terms of the support provided by her groupmembers: ‘We have been able to make people realize that we are on the side offairness. My group members went to the village with me to campaign for votes’.

For many of the landless groups, political participation reinforced their capacityto ensure greater responsiveness on the part of government to the needs and rights ofthe poor. Kashem, who was active in local committees, believed that holding elected

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positions within local government allowed landless group members to ensure itsaccountability to the poor:

We do not enjoy all our rights yet. We have elected the UP member from our landlessgroup and the Chairman co-operates with us. Now we are preparing to put forwardsomeone from our group to stand as Chairman. We have to win power if we want ourfull rights.

However, for some of the women in our sample, election to local governmentbrought them into new terrains of struggle as they faced the deep-seated prejudicesagainst women. One elected representative, Habiba (NK), responded to dismissivetreatment at the Union Parishad by collecting the relevant policy documents so thather group could learn about the roles and responsibilities of the chairman anddifferent members. They found out that the chairmen of the VGD Scheme andElderly Pension Allowances Committees had to be a female member. She then calleda meeting of all elected women in the ward at which they agreed to withhold theirsignatures from all documents until they were allowed to fulfill their responsibilities.In the end, the chairman had to concede responsibility for the relevant schemes tothe elected women.

Jomila from NK was less successful in gaining a voice. The male members did notgive the women a chance to talk, but she continued to express her views. She failed inher attempt to ensure that women officials were given their due responsibilities,including the distribution of VGD cards. However, she was re-elected and promisedto fight on.

3.5. On becoming a citizen: insights from the rural context

Analysis of these experiences provides us with some insights into the processesgenerated by purposively designed efforts to promote the identity and practice ofcitizenship. First, an increase in awareness was the starting point for change in mostcases, which resonates with the significance given to consciousness in definitions ofcitizenship in the wider literature. What emerged from our rural interviews was theextent to which such awareness could be built up over time through organizationalefforts at training and discussion. Jobeda, who had first learnt to identify the lettersof her name after she joined NK 24 years ago, told us that their previous ignorancehad made the poor silent, afraid, and acquiescent: ‘We had no knowledge then.Whatever the village elders said we used to take as the truth. . . . We thought that toargue with the chairmen was to commit an offence. We do not think that anymore’.

Nurul Islam spoke of the diminution of fear that came with greater awareness:

Before we were scared to even talk to a guard. Now we know the reasons of our fearsand so we can talk to them. Even without having formal education, throughparticipating in NK programs and activities, I have been able to become a fullyconscious human being.

Shanti believed that she had learnt more from being a member of BRAC that shehad from her formal education: ‘Although I have an HSC pass, I learnt more fromthe training I received here than from my studies. The education I got earlier told methat my only duty was to serve my husband after my marriage’.

Changes in awareness took place through an ongoing process of learning,reflection, action, experience, observation, and analysis that raised theoretical and

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practical questions about aspects of inequality, hitherto taken for granted. Theycontributed to a second element in the processes of becoming a citizen: building‘voice’, the capacity to question, dissent, persuade, influence, and challenge. It wasthe capacity to exercise collective voice in the public domain that featured mostfrequently as the hallmark of citizenship. Mussamat Nurban from BRAC said: ‘I amcertainly a citizen of this country. Protesting against child marriage, making sureVGD cards are properly distributed, protesting against violence against women—these are my rights. I have a right to speak out if anybody is involved in corruption’.

For members of Samata and NK, their collective engagements with the structuresof power in the local community ensured that their voices were heard by those withpower. Kalam of NK said, ‘We organize processions, meetings, gheraos to claim ourrights and against bribes and corruption. When necessary, we submit memor-andums. I am an ordinary mechanic but now I stand on the stage and give a speechin defense of our rights’. This ability to exercise collective voice and agency ispremised on the development of a collective identity, a third element in the processesof change reported by our respondents. Economic incentives may have motivatedmany to join NGO-initiated groups but it was sharing life experiences and seekingsolutions to common problems that held them together over time. As Mossamet putit: ‘Being BRAC members, the people of the group have developed strong, intimaterelationships. Now . . . if anyone tries to harm one of the group members then ourwhole group would protest against this unfair situation. All of these became possiblebecause we became organized’.

The relationship between group solidarity and collective action was an interactiveone: group solidarity provided the willingness and courage to act, while collectiveaction helped to build and strengthen group solidarity. The importance of ‘unity’was a common thread running through many of the interviews. One Samata membersaid:

One stick can be broken, a bundle of sticks cannot. It is not possible to achieve anythingon one’s own. To establish your rights you need to struggle, you need to be united. If Iwant to stand in an election, I would need support for that, to vote for me, to run mycampaign. Can I make myself valuable on my own? I cannot.

A fourth important element in the organizational strategies of all three groupswas the significance attached to issues of justice and legality. A concern with legaland constitutional rights was interwoven into the training provided by all threeorganizations. The significance attached to the law was understandable: for all itsimperfections, the law provides the only discourse within the country that holds outthe promise of equality and due process to all citizens, men and women, rich andpoor. One of the major contributions these organizations made in strengtheningrespect for the law was to demonstrate that it could also be used to defend theinterests of the poor. Finding out that they had legal entitlements to khas land intheir area, that they could take their grievances to the courts if they did not findjustice in the local shalish, was an important moment in the process by whichlandless groups shifted from an unquestioning acceptance of the privileges of thepowerful, to a recognition of their own status as citizens.6

6The importance given to legality as a source of validation for their struggles was evident in thefrequent references by members of landless groups to what can be described as the ‘proceduresand paraphernalia’ of citizenship: drawing up agendas and keeping minutes at meetings, filing

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A fifth significant aspect of pathways to citizenship associated with groupmembership was the increasing willingness and capacity to provide grassrootsleadership. Over time, groups began to mobilize on behalf of others within thecommunity. BRAC members emphasized that their involvement in the distributionof VGD cards was largely on behalf of those who were eligible for these cards, veryfew of whom belonged to BRAC groups. They also spoke of their role in disputeresolution and taking up cases of gender injustices within the wider community. BothNK and SAMATA groups also took collective action on behalf of their ownmembership as well as others outside it, including direct confrontations withlandlords and police, strikes, demonstrations, and press conferences.

The capacity to win gains by NGO groups played an important catalytic role indeveloping this leadership role as well as helping groups to sustain and expand theirmembership. By standing up to those accustomed to getting their own way, landlessgroups demonstrated their capacity to act as a countervailing power to establishedhierarchies and drew others to their cause. Habiba from NK emphasized that:

In a village where women rarely left the premises of their homes, such victories can playan important role. They show what is possible through the awareness, unity andorganisation of oppressed women . . . People have come to appreciate what we do andwe are invited to participate in shalish and dispute resolutions.

With the restoration of democracy, NGO groups had moved from puttingexternal pressure on the state to a more direct engagement from within: many stoodfor local elections, a number of them won and some were re-elected. This providedfirst-hand evidence to the group members, and to the community at large, that it waspossible to mobilize the poor behind candidates either drawn from their own ranksor selected for their pro-poor sympathies. In contrast to the cynicism expressed bymany of the working poor in urban areas, rural group members regarded elections asan exercise in democracy. As Akash (Samata) said, ‘The vote is a pricelesscommodity. It is a kind of power. It is through our vote that a person gets electedand commands respect in society. Our votes help to make leaders’. For Korban Ali(Samata), the vote provided a route to power for the landless:

I am a citizen of Bangladesh. Food, clothing, education, health care—these are ourrights . . . To achieve these rights, poor people will have to take power. We have electedour members, next we will elect chairmen from our groups and then afterwards we willbe standing in elections for the MP election too.

A final important dimension in the processes of becoming a citizen related to thesense expressed by many of our rural respondents of a transition from ‘communitiesof fate’, in which life chances were determined at birth, to ‘communities of practice’,which are evolving out of their shared learning and experiences and which haveopened up their futures to new possibilities. Our rural respondents spoke of many ofthe same barriers to citizenship that had featured in our urban narratives: thecorruption of government officials, exploitation by the rich, and the insecurities ofthe poor. As we noted, what was different—and significant—about them were thatthese barriers were spoken of in the past tense. Rural narratives of citizenship were

petitions, measurement and documentation of claims, knowing procedures for claimingentitlements, consultation of policy documents, visiting government offices, sitting in publicmeetings alongside important officials and speaking on public platforms.

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thus largely narratives of change. The nature of this change was exemplified by theaccount provided by Ibrahim from NK, who also had believed that his life wouldmirror that of his forefathers: that the pre-existing system of domination andsubordination would continue to reproduce itself endlessly into the future. Hismembership of NK had opened up a different future defined by new possibilities:

If we are to talk about the main strength of NK, I would say that in the past . . . wethought that we would have to pass our days doing the same things that our forefathersdid, that those with assets would stay rich and those without would stay poor. ThroughNK we came to know that we are not born poor, that the government holds wealth onbehalf of the people, that our fundamental rights as citizens of Bangladesh are writteninto the constitution.

4. Visions of the just society: the ‘capacity to aspire’

In order to explore the extent to which the ‘capacity to aspire’ might be influenced byvariations in the experience of citizenship described in these narratives, ourinterviews included a series of questions about different models of a socially justsociety. Drawing on ILO (2004), we asked whether a just society was one in whichpeople were free to earn as much as they were able to; where everyone earned thesame amount; where people were free to earn as much as they were able to but withan upper limit on earnings; where people were free to earn to the extent of theirability but with a minimum floor to earnings; or where people were free to earn tothe extent of their ability, with government assistance for the poor. These questionswere used as means of stimulating discussion and reflection, allowing respondents toarticulate their own visions of the just society in ways that reflected theirunderstanding and experiences of injustice. Many opted for more than one model,ranking them in order of preferences or combining them as different aspects of theirvision.

What emerged from these discussions was a remarkable similarity in the visionsof justice expressed by our respondents. Government assistance to the poor receivedremarkably little support as a first preference, although it often featured as a second,perhaps because the preferred option was seen as out of reach. It was the idea of aminimum income floor and an egalitarian distribution of income that received thegreatest support.

4.1. Dignity and basic security

A system which guaranteed that everyone could earn at least some minimum level ofincome was seen by many as fundamental to their sense of dignity and self-respectbecause it would allow them to meet their own basic needs rather than relying onuncertain handouts from the government or the rich. Some used the language ofminimum wages to describe this principle while others expressed it in terms of theright to work.

The retrenched jute mill workers were the most emphatic in their support for theidea of the right to work. Their responses expressed the strong sense of entitlement ofa previously privileged group of workers combined with anger at the unfair andabrupt withdrawal of these entitlements. As Giyas said, ‘Without an income thecitizen can have no rights’. Altaf also prioritized the right to work: ‘My first andforemost right from the government is the right to a proper job . . . If I had

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work . . . then I would meet all my other needs, such as educating my children, food,housing’.

For the garment workers, the minimum floor was equated with the idea of aminimum wage. This was Jhorna’s (female) preferred model—‘I hope for a societywhere there will be system for everyone to earn minimum wages. If there was asystem for me to earn some money every day, then I would not have to depend onanyone . . . ’ —as well as Rafiq’s (male garment worker): ‘People with educationhave more knowledge than me, I do not object if they earn more than me. But it isnecessary to have a system that allows the poor to earn a minimum wage so they donot starve’. For Shathi, who had been forced to give up her garment factory job byher husband, the right to work had a special meaning for women: ‘Since my husbanddid not like my working in the garments, I was more or less compelled to give up myjob . . . I want a society where there will be a system for everyone to earn minimumwages’.

Support for some version of a minimum floor had been strongly reinforcedamong many self-employed urban slum dwellers by the government’s ban onrickshaws. It appeared to them that the state was actively attacking their efforts toprovide for themselves in the interests of the car-owning minority. Jahanara saw theright to work as the basis on which she could achieve her other rights: ‘When thegovernment banned rickshaws, it did not simply ban my source of income, it alsostopped my other rights such as education, health and shelter’. Similarly, for Salma,the ban of rickshaws, the right to work and her children’s right to education wereclosely tied: ‘They said the rickshaws created jams on the roads and people could notget to school or office on time. But we have no cars. Do our children not also need togo to school?’

Rural workers related the right to work or the right to a fair wage to the questionof social justice. For Momena (Samata), a just society provided employment to all atfair wages: ‘A worker has a right to a fair wage. There is no way that one personshould earn 50,000 taka and another earn nothing. That is not right’. Similarly,Ibrahim (NK) said, ‘What we need for all our people is the guarantee of work,adequate food, and a more egalitarian society’. For Habiba (NK), the right to workwas the basis for the voice and agency of the poor: ‘One thing is clear: the rich areunited in their ability to exploit but the poor are not united in their ability to resistexploitation. This is because they are financially weak. So we need a society in whichthere will be scope for some minimum level of earning’.

4.2. Security of shelter and the right to an address

Although it was not explicitly factored into our models of the just society, the rightto shelter was emphatically singled out by a number of workers as a fundamentalexpression of citizenship. The strongest articulation of this right came from thosewho had been forced to migrate into the city, who lived in makeshift shelters, andwho faced the constant threat of homelessness above all because of the periodicefforts by successive regimes to evict them from land they were deemed to haveoccupied illegally.

In some cases, the right to shelter was invoked as a constitutional right. Alongwith the various material meanings attached to shelter (a roof over their heads,protection from the elements, a basis for livelihoods), it represented a fixed point inlives characterized by uncertainty and flux, a recognized ‘place’ in society. The

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majority of workers in both urban and rural areas expressed their identity primarilyin terms of the place where they were born, their desh. For those who had beenforced to leave their desh behind, the absence of security of shelter signified theabsence of a secure identity and therefore secure relationships in society. As RaziaKhaun put it, ‘In Dhaka city we have no land or home. Everyone has to have anaddress, but we don’t . . . The slum evictions take away even our place to sleep. Ihave nothing left, what kind of identity can I have?’ Rasheda was most explicit inmaking the link between shelter and citizenship, arguing that denial of security ofshelter was an abrogation of a fundamental human right:

More than seven thousand people live in this slum. If the government evicts us, it willturn us into homeless people. . . . If I cannot give an address, even to my children, howcan I be a citizen of this country? The question of rights and citizenship is irrelevant in acountry which cannot even give me assurance of accommodation.

In the rural context, it was land, rather than housing, that signified security of‘place’. For Hashem (male, NK), ‘Land is our birthright. Among the fivefundamental rights, there is also the right to accommodation. If I had land, I couldbuild my home on it. I could meet my other fundamental rights by cultivating land’.Mossamet Shanur (female, NK) made a similar point:

If I have a permanent and safe place to stay then I would be able to manage our foodmyself. But the society doesn’t want to give me this simple right to a safe place to live. Weare people uprooted by river erosion. Everything that we owned had perished in the river.

For Chobura (female, Samata) land represented a permanent address as well asprotection from domestic violence:

I am a citizen of this country . . . if I do not have any land, any permanent address, howcan I claim to be a citizen? As long as my feet are on the ground, I will feel strong. Andwhen women have property, their husbands cannot torture them.

4.3. Equality as shared humanity

A third set of interpretations of the just society was sparked by the idea of anegalitarian distribution of income, but often referred in various ways to broadervisions of how society should be organized and opportunities distributed. A numberof people invoked the idea of shared humanity as the rationale for a fairer world.Amerunessa (female, urban self-employed) said:

I want a society where there will be no discrimination between rich and poor. Everyonewill be equal. We are all human beings, we have the same blood flowing through ourbodies, we were created by the same god and when we die, we all go the same way.

A similar argument was made by Jahanara (female, urban self-employed): ‘I want asystem in the country where there will be no discrimination among people.Everybody would live at the same level and enjoy equal opportunities. If birds andanimals can live in a similar way to each other, why can’t human beings?’

Rasheda (urban self-employed), who had been without work for the last sixmonths, had prioritized the idea of a minimum wage floor. However, her most

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eloquent argument was for a society based on equality of opportunity in whicheveryone could realize their own potential:

I want a society where there will be no difference between people . . . If everyone getsequal opportunity, then everyone can express their merit. I teach children in the slumsand observe that their intelligence is no less than others. But they will not even have theopportunity to finish primary school.

For Fatema Akhter (female, rural, BRAC), arguments about equality extendedto equality between men and women:

It is necessary to have a society in which what is fair and right will win. Everybody willstand up to injustice. Everyone will get equal opportunity to work. Women are paid lessthan men for the same amount of work. In a just society there would be nodiscrimination.

For many members of NK and Samata, the egalitarian model of society conformedmost closely to their view of justice because it would eradicate the inequalities ofpower and privilege that defined injustice in the present society. Johura of NK said:

We see that in this society the rich can get away with anything because they have money.So we want a society where justice is impartial. There are so many disparities . . . theyget richer and we remain trapped in the same poverty. Yet the rich have the same twohands and two legs that we have.

Shajahan (male, rural) of NK also expressed equality in terms of justice:

If a family has eight members who are passing their days starving and you do nothingfor them, is that right or wrong? The sunlight is distributed equally, air is distributedequally but when it comes to land, you say, ‘this land belongs to some big business manof Noakhali’.

5. Conclusion: constructing citizenship in the face of bad governance

The research on which this study was based was premised on the assumption that theorganization of poor people’s livelihoods and the social relationships these generateare an important site for understanding their comprehension and experience ofcitizenship. It is evident from our interviews that livelihood activities did indeedconstitute a major preoccupation for poor people as well a major source of injusticein their lives. It is also evident that their economic location had an important bearingon their social relationships, including their relationships with state officials, marketactors, and civil society organizations.

The relations of different groups of workers with the state varied—across failingand competitive industries, across public and private enterprise, and across theformal and informal economy—but it was variations across urban and rurallocations that emerged as a major factor in differentiating experiences of citizenship.The state was experienced as a largely malign presence by urban respondents.Various events in their lives had generated a great degree of antagonism towards andsometimes direct confrontation with the state. In addition, the absence of the state incritical aspects of their lives, such as provision of health, education, water, andsanitation, was equally damaging to their struggles for survival. There was alsoconsiderable antagonism towards the wealthier classes for their exploitative use of

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the labor of poor people, and for their ability to reap the benefits of state actions. Incombination, these barriers to realizing rights took on an insurmountable quality.

Rural narratives offered a different picture. Here the actions of the local elitefeatured far more frequently as the primary source of injustice in the lives of poorpeople. While the corruption of local government officials also featured, there weremany examples of the more positive manifestations of the state in the form oflegislation recognizing the rights of the landless to khas land, poverty reductionprograms, political decentralization and the opportunities it offered to organizedgroups of the poor to contest elections, and the protection provided by the lawagainst the depredations of the rich.

There were also marked differences in the implications of participation in civilsociety organizations in rural and urban contexts. This was partly a reflection of ourpurposive decision to focus on socially oriented NGOs in rural areas, and limitscomparison across the two contexts. At another level, however, differences inexperiences of citizenship and collective action reflected real underlying differences inthe two contexts, including the active rural bias of government strategies for povertyreduction, and the much greater stability of rural communities even for poor people,underpinning the more established character of their social relationships.

These differences in underlying conditions gave rise to different configurations ofcivil society associations. Urban respondents have associations, of varying degrees,with old trade unions in the jute mills, newer trade unions in the garments industry,and minimalist microfinance organizations in the urban slums. Our rural sample wasdrawn from the membership of the more socially oriented NGOs, but these differedin the priority given to collective action and a social change agenda.

Given these differences it is not surprising that meanings and expressions ofcitizenship varied considerably across our sample. The Adamjee jute mill workersspoke forcefully about their economic rights as workers, particularly their right towork, and expressed their anger at the failure of state responsibility in upholdingthese rights. Members of socially oriented NGOs were also extremely articulateabout their rights vis-a-vis the state, relating these to basic socioeconomic securityand social justice, while also expressing a strong sense of ‘horizontal’ responsibility,their obligation to stand up for the rights of other poor and disenfranchised sectionsof the population.

The rest of our respondents, garment workers who had sporadic encounters withtrade unions and self-employed workers who were ‘thinly’ affiliated to minimalistmicrofinance organizations, tended to frame their responses in terms of the wrongsthey suffered as human beings rather than as violations of their rights. Theirbenchmark was justice rather than citizenship: how could a society in which somepeople ate well and regularly and others were routinely hungry be described as just?

In terms of the broader challenge of constructing citizenship in difficultcircumstances, therefore, it is clear that state–society relations in Bangladesh exemplifymany of the barriers to citizenship that we outlined in our introduction. But whetherthe metaphor of the prison used by Wood is a particularly helpful depiction of thenature of the problem is a different matter. Certainly we found evidence of ‘prisoner-like’ behavior amongmany respondents in the urban areas: the compliance by the rankand file workers in the Adamjee jute mill with the corrupt practices of their trade unionleadership; the fear of unemployment that led garment workers to accept employers’violation of their labor rights; the despair expressed by many of the urban slumdwellers that they could ever find leaders who could be trusted to represent their

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interests. Yet even these groups were able to provide eloquent articulations of theirvision of a more just society, a vision that evoked the principles of natural justice anddenounced the unfairness of the society in which they lived.

Our rural interviews, on the other hand, offered a less prison-like picture. Whatdistinguished these narratives was that barriers to citizenship were spoken of in thepast tense, suggesting that at some significant level, there has been a real shift in thebalance of power. Rural respondents spoke of unpredictability in the more positivesense of a future that was no longer dictated by their circumstances at birth butdefined by evolving possibilities. They saw themselves as citizens, or in transition tocitizenship. These gradual, diffuse, and sometimes unanticipated ways in whichsocial change was occurring are poorly captured by the prison metaphor. Rather,they have greater resonance with Sobhan’s view of the relative fluidity of socialrelations in Bangladesh and the possibility of mounting challenges from below.

The anger with which both rural and urban respondents spoke of the injustices intheir lives, their antagonism towards privileged sections of society and their view thatgovernment acts on behalf of the rich bear out his contention that the legitimacy ofsocial inequalities is not widely accepted in Bangladesh. This raises questions aboutthe kinds of associations that are likely to give voice to this dissent and to forge thechallenge from below.

While there has been a rapid proliferation of civil society organizations inBangladesh, many of which are geared to the needs and constraints of the poor, it isclear that they are not necessarily capable of challenging power relations, or are evendesigned to do so. Most see themselves as enabling poor people to engage with themarket. There is an implicit assumption that economic agency will translate intopolitical agency. Yet it is clear that the political process operates through corruptand clientilist structures. In the absence of a democratic and responsive state,economic improvements in the lives of individuals are constantly undermined byvarious forms of unruly practice on the part of more powerful sections of society.Survival and prosperity does indeed require conforming to the rules of the game andhence remaining imprisoned within these rules.

It is here that organizations like BRAC, NK, and Samata hold out the possibilityfor real change. These organizations share a belief in the transformative potential ofgroup learning and solidarity. They have demonstrated that it is possible to developalternative models of social relationships in the countryside, replacing the verticalpatron–client relationships with relationships based on horizontal solidarities witheach other. They have demonstrated that it is possible to transform consciousnessthrough collective training, analysis and reflection. They have also translated thisinto a collective willingness and capacity on the part of poor and landless womenand men to act in pursuit of their vision.

These changes have clearly not emerged spontaneously—they have been built upover time through what we described as ‘purposively designed processes’ to build thevalues, identities and practices of citizenship. But the organizational commitment tothese forms of change, and the hope they offer for the longer-term democratizationof state–society relationships, is today the exception rather than the rule in the NGOsector. Part of the explanation for why Bangladesh has performed so poorly on thegovernance front is that a key force for social change within the country, itsdevelopment NGOs, have been transformed over time from organizations willing tochallenge socioeconomic injustice into organizations largely committed to the valuesof the marketplace.

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Naila Kabeer is Professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies, London University. She has extended experience in teaching, research and advisorywork in the field of development, with a particular focus on concerns with gender, poverty,labour markets and livelihoods, social protection and citizenship. Her recent publicationsinclude ‘Gender and social protection in the informal economy’ (Commonwealth Secretariat/Routledge) as well as ‘Can the MDGs provide a pathway to social justice? The challenge ofintersecting inequalities’. She was also the lead author of the UN’s World Survey of Womenand Development 2009. Email: N.Kabeer@ids.ac.uk

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