The techno-politics of human rights: The case of the National Food Security Act in India

Abstract

To attend to the techno-politics of human rights is to bring into focus how tacit assumptions and norms about human dignity are rendered into technical, or implementable, legal frameworks and governmental interventions. Drawing on legal geography, an analytics of governmentality of human rights, and Nancy Fraser’s “politics of need interpretation,” this article presents an ethnographic examination of how the right to food, and its related normative principles, were translated and ratified, or not, into a food entitlement law, called the National Food Security Act (NFSA). It scrutinizes how the judiciary, para-public, and legislative lawmaking spaces in India have framed the formulation of what the hungry may need and how the state develop legal tools to satisfy (some of) those needs. Human rights policy-making is complex and messy. As this article shows, bringing into focus the technical and procedural process of human rights lawmaking reveals how which interpretation of food security needs were legitimized and which ones were not.