Communication Rights and Neoliberal Development: Technopolitics in India

Abstract

Although no univocal definition of CRs exists, UNESCO and various international and national forums have established a set of normative terms concerning ‘the right to inform and be informed, the right to active participation in the communication process, the right to equitable access to information resources and information, and the right of cultural and individual privacy from communication.’² I would argue that these normative terms should be assessed with the same critical scrutiny and insistence on the ‘paradoxes of rights’ (Brown, 2000) as have similar terms used within the parallel fields of women’s rights and human rights. By contrasting the dissonance between a ‘progressive’ rights-based agenda and the dominant discourse of CRs, in this chapter I am interested first in examining how the normative logic of CRs easily collapses into neoliberal rationality as a function of contemporary technologically driven modernization. As Wendy Brown, amongst others, has argued, beyond a set of economic policies (such as promoting ‘free trade,’ opposing fiscal spending and so on), neoliberalism is a normative project that promotes market rationality in all spheres of life, and in geopolitical terms it redefines ‘global democracy’ as a ‘thoroughgoing market rationality in state and society’ (Brown, 2003, p. 17). The movements for CRs, and for development communications, have separate points of origin and intent. In speaking to the themes raised in this volume, my second objective is to trace the historical continuities of the dominant discourse on CRs between colonial and contemporary eras, and in doing so to contribute to research that emphasizes the historical specificity required to translate universal claims of communications rights into practice.

I wish to thank the editors of this volume for their patience and thoughtful comments.