Empowerment & protection
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: September 05 2015 -
Political and economic empowerment as a concept does not mean much if the very process of empowerment fails to truly identify real causes of extreme deprivations.
Despite the difficulty of defining poverty and deprivation, efforts had been made by social scientists and economists in generating quantitative and qualitative parameters for assessing the same.
However, no homogenous economic identification had been possible except for clubbing individuals and groups into workable categories based on perceived dynamics.
Empirical research has enabled the economic measurement of temporally and spatially deprived groups. The essence of methodology adopted also depends on capturing the dynamics of upward and downward mobility of groups.
While taking cognisance of the data accumulated, the launch of state sponsored measures also triggers politics of empowerment as distinct from protection.
Most of the politics here is based on the considered maxim that economic empowerment is the prime mover to eradicate poverty and deprivation.
However, over a period of time, even the notion of empowerment has been misplaced with the idea of protection.
Policy planners accept the truism as an ethical goal.
The procedure of ameliorating the economically deprived citizens has also been tied to social and value based contingencies. Hence, the idea of protective laws takes precedence over the actual process of empowerment.
Certain economic and political decisions taken by ruling dispensations are also based on pressures put on by the communities depending on competitive interests.
The stereotyping of communities and groups of people also accentuate the competitive interests into clash of interests at times leading to perceptible potentials for bigger conflict.
This is why there is a need to reassess the application of all protective and empowerment laws meant for all communities in the Northeast region of India.
Since, the region’s experience is qualitatively different from the rest of India due to a complicated history, certain presuppositions on economic and political discrimination need to be deeply analysed.
The share of discomfiture experienced now has a lot to do with distancing oneself from the core of competitive interests based on socio-economic history quite different from the type of dynamics that exists in other parts of India.
It will also be a fruitful exercise if an attempt is made on redefining the notion of “caste” and “tribe” in the Northeast so as to correct the pervasive maladies in the region.
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