It is proposed in this chapter to deal with the policy developments in the context of debt bondage. To this end, this chapter provides an overview of the various measures taken since 1947, which culminated in the formulation of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976. It discusses the policymaking process in general and within the context of the Act, the role of the Union Ministry of Labour, inter-ministerial consultations, consultation with the state governments, discussions in the Parliament, etc.

Initial Efforts

The Provincial Labour Minister's Conference held in November 1947 was of the opinion that forced labour was prevalent in certain states and unless a general enquiry was undertaken, the subject would not be tackled effectively. On 11 August 1948, the Ministry of Labour, Government of India appointed P. S. Dhamne as Officer on Special Duty to study the various legal enactments and to submit a report indicating the extent to which the existing legislation was inadequate and what further legislation was required. The Officer on Special Duty in his study adopted two broad divisions of forced labour. The first category included forced labour authorised by law, while the second category included forced labour under debt bondage. The Report contained proposals for repeal or amendment of the off ending provisions in various enactments allowing exaction of forced labour, in order to bring them in conformity with the International Labour Convention on Forced or Compulsory Labour.

Before discussing the problems in the implementation of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, it is important to deal with the question of the number of bonded labourers in India. This question was for the first time raised by Surendra J. Patel. He was very cautious in hazarding the numerical size of this type of agricultural labour due to lack of data both in the 1921 and 1931 Census. As in the Census of 1921 and 1931, the data regarding ‘farm servants’, i.e., bonded agricultural labourers and full-time free-wage labourers was grouped together. He was of the opinion ‘at best that the number of actual bonded labourers may not exceed three million. If so they form less than one-tenth of total agricultural labourers and about less than three per cent of the agricultural working population’. He also emphasized that the practice of bonded labour is mostly restricted to southern and central India, Bihar and Orissa. He further opined that the significance of the problem of bonded labourers should not be seen in the context of its numerical size but in the re-enserfment of a certain section of the agricultural population.

There has been a raging controversy since 1975 about the number of bonded labourers in India. This controversy is partly a result of the denial of the prevalence of bonded labourers by a large number of states and Union Territories.

The official assessment regarding the rehabilitation of released bonded labourers started immediately after the commencement of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Ordinance. It was felt that a systematic strategy for the economic rehabilitation of bonded labourers was necessary. The following are the main features of the strategy:

• To provide consumption credit to the freed bonded labourer till his income exceeds the subsistence level;

• to ensure that bonded labourers get preferential treatment in respect of the distribution of vested land;

• a scheme for lower interest rates for the bonded labourers should be worked out;

• the state governments should lay down rules for keeping registers, to show how incomes of bonded labourers are increasing and also to record the number of bonded labourers who revert to some form of servitude;

• before launching rehabilitation programmes, it is necessary to locate the areas where it is prevalent, identify the persons being employed as bonded labourers and ascertain the magnitude of the problem;

• the bonded labourers have to be provided sustained rehabilitation so as to break the link from their past. The programme for the re habilitation of the bonded labourer has to be an education-cum-economic programme;

• […]

Appendix A

THE INDIAN SLAVERY ACT, 1843 Act No. V of 1843

An Act for declaring and amending the Law regarding the condition of Slavery within the territories of the East India Company.

First. ‘It is hereby enacted and declared that no public officer shall in execution of any decree or order of Court or for the enforcement of any demand of rent or revenue, sell or cause to be sold any person on the ground that such person is in a state of slavery.’

Second. ‘And it is hereby declared and enacted that no rights arising out of an alleged property in the person and services of another as a slave shall be enforced by any Civil or Criminal Court or Magistrate within the territories of the East India Company.’

Third. ‘And it is hereby declared and enacted that any person, who may have acquired property by his own industry, or by the exercise of any art, calling or profession or by inheritance, assignment, gift or request shall be dispossessed of such property or prevented from taking possession thereof on the ground that such person or that the person from whom the property may have been derived was a slave.’

Fourth. ‘And it is hereby enacted that any act which would be a penal offence if done to a free man shall be equally an off ence if done to any free person on the pretext of his being in a condition of slavery.’

It is indeed an honour to contribute a few words by way of introduction to Professor Ramesh Kumar Tiwari's excellent monograph concerning the law and public policy on bonded labour in India. This work, historically rich in its sweep, remains also fully contemporaneously relevant.

Professor Tiwari remains primarily concerned with the problem of debt bondage. Within this broad theme, he looks into the ways in which the problems of policy/law/implementation emerged in colonial and postcolonial times. He thus highlights, historically, two totally diff erent systems of governance, yet converging on similar outcomes from the standpoint of the people held hostage to the debt bondage system. The overall conclusion of this work, based on a sustained sociological analysis, is simply this: ‘The democratic system with all its trappings including media, NGOs and the civil society’ (to use a succinct formulation conveyed by the author to me in a personal communication) continues to reproduce structural political injustice against India's unfree labourers.

We travel with the author some vast territories of the origins of the bonded labour systems and the itineraries of continuity between the colonial and postcolonial ‘legality’. Of particular importance here is the narrative in Chapter 2 reminding us of the feat of the Charter Act, 1833, the Indian Law Commission 1841 Report on Slavery in India and of the subsequent 1843 Slavery Act.

This study primarily deals with the process of policy-making (legislation) in the context of the Indian Slavery Act, 1843 and the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976. Comprehensive coverage has been given to the role of the various institutions and the intricacies involved in the formulation of the legislation. It has also brought to the surface some important issues regarding the indifference of the state governments and the collusion of the district machinery with the vested interests at the time of enforcement. The judicial intervention provided a fresh lease of life to the problem of bonded labour. Several judgments and directions made by the Supreme Court of India led to a more comprehensive definition of bonded labour and cast aspersions on the ineffective enforcement of the Act. It also gave a certain amount of dynamism to the activists and NGOs.

My interest in the problem of debt bondage started in the early eighties when I was assigned studies dealing with the rehabilitation of bonded labour sponsored by the Ministry of Labour, Government of India. These studies were carried out in different parts of the country: Tehri Garhwal (Uttar Pradesh), Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh), Monghyr (Bihar), Koraput (Orissa), Medak (Andhra Pradesh) and Chickmagalur (Karnataka). The purpose was largely to evaluate the rehabilitation of the released bonded labour. These studies also marginally looked into the sociological and economic aspects of bondage.

Historically speaking, Indian society has been a society with a high degree of inequality. This gave rise to the exploitation of the rural labour in various ways. Besides being a caste-ridden society, the lower castes also faced multiple complexities in the social sphere. The British began prohibiting these practice through legislation. In due course of time, a large number of laws were enacted to contain these problems. After independence and with the laying down of the Constitution, the provisions of the Directive Principles of State Policy and Fundamental Rights carried forward the momentum to bring about a social change so as to mitigate these inequalities. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the drawing up of legislation is totally different from its enforcement. Partial enforcement of these legislations over a period of time has belied the hope of bringing about social change through laws.

The statutes of 1843 and 1976 on slavery and bonded labour respectively provide a comparative perspective in the making of social legislation in two different historical settings and political systems. Besides, they also provide the beginning of the social legislation in India with particular reference to finer points as well as criticism of the statutes, keeping in view the objectives of the legislation. In this context, the statute of 1843 did not reveal much understanding of the nature and extent of slavery, and it addressed the legal status of slavery without specifying who might be regarded as a slave.

The apathy of the state governments in accepting the existence of bonded labour as well as the methods employed by some state governments for identification led to the emergence of NGOs/activists who took up the cause of the bonded labourers. In all such cases, the NGOs/activists sought judicial intervention. A number of cases under Public Interest Litigation (PIL) were filed in the Supreme Court as well as in other courts since 1982.

Some Important Cases

Some of the important cases dealt with by the Supreme Court are as follows:

• N. Jayakumar vs. State of Andhra Pradesh, (Source: Certified copy of the Supreme Court of India, Record of Proceedings, Dated 10.11.1982);

• Bandhua Mukti Morcha vs. Union of India, AIR 1984, Supreme Court 802;

• Vivek Pandit vs. State of Maharashtra, (Source: Certified copy of the Supreme Court Order Dated 1985;

• Neeraja Chaudhary vs. State of M.P., AIR 1984, Supreme Court, 1099;

• Mukesh Advani vs. State of M.P., AIR 1985, 3 Supreme Court Cases 162;

• Santhal Pargana Antyodaya Ashram vs. State of Bihar, (Source: Certified copy of the Supreme Court Order Dated 19.12.1986);

• P. Sivaswamy vs. State of Andhra Pradesh, (1988), 4 Supreme Court Cases 466.

• Kameshwar Prasad Sharma vs. State of Bihar, (1993), 3 Supreme Court Cases 19;

• Balram and Others vs. State of M.P., AIR 1990, Supreme Court 44;

• Public Union for Civil Liberties and Others vs. State of T.N., (1994), 5 Supreme Court Cases 116.

An attempt has been made in this chapter to provide insights into the factors which culminated in the framing of the anti-slavery legislation, the complexities involved in the enactment of the legislation, the institutional framework of law-making and the problems in law-enforcement. Over the last 50 years, a large body of literature in the social sciences has emerged, mostly relating to the colonial period, which has provided deeper insights into the complexities of the enactment of legislation as well as its enforcement in the area of social legislation.

Origins of the Social Policy

The earliest social policy of the East India Company was the preservation of the status-quo and non-intervention in the social and religious life of the people of India. This policy was statutorily accepted by the Pitt's India Act, 1784. However, the 13th Resolution forming the proposal of 1813 submitted by the Government to the Parliament declared, that ‘it is the duty of this country to promote the interest and happiness of the native inhabitants of the British dominions in India, and that such measures ought to be adopted as may lead to the introduction amongst them of useful knowledge, and of religious and moral improvement’. As a matter of fact, the Charter Act of 1813 for the first time provided an opportunity for the expression of liberal principles in relation to India. However, it was not so easy to decide the kind of welfare which was to be promoted.

There is an interesting contrast between the fictional portrait of women in media and the roles they play in the creation of media texts. In this essay, I shall speculate on the reasons for this divide and on ways to bridge it creatively, taking examples from television.

Women in Soap Operas

Let us consider the fictional portraits first. Much analysis of the portrayal of women in the media confines itself to the vapid and insensitive characters created for popular soap operas by poor writers (or by cynical teams of uncoordinated writers). One is unsure if any of the writers of these soap operas are actually women, although there does seem to be at least one woman producer behind these serials. If we are to move away from saasbahu and family sagas which often seem completely unreal, we need to have authentic writers who know the contexts that they are writing about – some of these may be men, but surely there would be a majority of women writers here.

This is not to say that we should not have saas-bahu sagas. The fact that they have an audience suggests the relevance of the theme. Human relationship is the broad area of the soap opera – human relationships rooted in local realities. Infidelity, loss, honour, society, family – these are also the themes of the great classic novels.

There is a basic connection between a woman's experiences in real life and a woman's experiences in visual media, which essentially forms the relationship between the spectator and spectacle. It is assumed that women are generally taught to be objects of spectacle in their everyday life and they have something in common with the image of women on the screen/visual media. The woman enters into the mediated world of film or television with a context that is structured wholly for her absence/invisibility, which of course, often mirrors her real life. Feminist film critics Laura Mulvey has said that, “The woman is not visible in the audience which is perceived as the male” and Claire Johnston observes, “The woman is not visible on the screen, as she is merely a surrogate for the phallus, a signifier for something else.…” (Gamble, 79)

The visual media codes have manipulated the absence of the woman to such an extent that the limited choices allowed to her are – to identify firstly with the image of the woman (structured by the male) on the screen, secondly with the male audience sitting by her side in the theatre and finally with the heroes in the films and their super human actions. The narrative of the film places the woman spectator with the ‘hero’. The emotions of the women accepting ‘masculinization’ (a term used by Laura Mulvey, 1975) while watching the actions of the hero are enriched by the emotions of a heroine of a sentimental comedy.

“Because I'm worth it!”! This punch-line for a TV (and print media) advertisement, uttered in a very confident tone by a ‘reigning beauty’ of our times, endorsing a high-priced imported range of cosmetics, encapsulates many aspects of what the media has come to represent. It has an obvious visual-cum-celebrity appeal, wide reach, and is tapping ‘aspiration’-al (a clichéd word by now) desire among the target audience; the impact it makes, reinforces the fact that the media is ‘objectifying’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘commodifying’ women, the feminine, female sexuality, and so on.

This paper attempts to go a little beyond this litany of charges nailing the media for perpetuating patriarchy. The objective of the paper is to contextualise what appears to be an ‘unstoppable’ phenomenon and to interrogate the place of feminist theory in all this. A brief appraisal of critiquing media portrayal will be followed by a postulate to understand the role played by the interplay of the ‘two economies’ involved. The dominance of the media, particularly that of the technological media, appears ‘unstoppable’ as the communication industries are proving to be among the most lucrative of all avenues, generating profits in mindboggling numbers world-wide. In India, as consumers, we are witness to the astonishing rise of communications technology and the related entertainment industry. These have certainly resulted in more employment opportunities, more revenue and given the electronic media's obvious control over its own hype, the whole thing has ‘come of age’ – a recurrent cliché which translates into appreciating all the programmes/products which are closely modelled on everything that is the current rage in the West.