Rights as Usual

This post by Dr Nairita Roy Chaudhuri is part of the Symposium: The Many Faces of Human Rights: Revisiting Imperialist Legacies? Dr Roy Chaudhuri is a research fellow for the project Imperialism, Business & Human Rights, hosted at Tilburg University.

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In this blog, I show how climate-affected rural farmers in the Indian sub-continent have become powerful faces of human rights, using constitutional entitlements like the right to life and demands for a legal right to a Minimum Support Price (MSP) to resist food, water, and income crises amidst rising climatic uncertainties and disasters. The MSP is a state-guaranteed price at which governments procure crops from farmers through designated bodies, aimed at protecting them from price volatility in global and national markets. Originally introduced during the green revolution to promote modern farming and intensify crop production, the policy has since contributed to a shift toward monocropping and intensive agriculture. Ongoing farmers’ struggles vernacularise human rights in both language and practice by rooting climate adaptation rights in historical and contemporary resistance to imperialism and postcolonial state repression, while advancing emancipatory grassroots alternatives, as revealed through my fieldwork.

In 2014 and 2015, India faced consecutive nationwide droughts that caused severe crop failures and triggered widespread farmers’ protests. In response, a civil society organisation filed a public interest litigation before the Supreme Court, invoking the constitutional right to life (Article 21) to demand drought relief for farmers. Simultaneously, since then, farmers have been protesting to demand a legal right to a MSP for all crops to ensure fair income while limiting private corporations from regulating the agricultural market.

Climate change laws on adaptation and mitigation often rely on universal and state-centred ideas of human rights, and development. When these laws ignore subaltern situations and postcolonial histories, they risk perpetuating neocolonial structures of oppression by states, corporations, and transnational organisations, and erasing alternative ways of making legal claims. The term ‘subaltern’ refers to a diverse and intersectional group whose voices and agencies are systematically silenced and erased across climate governance and broader structures of class, academy, caste, gender, and coloniality.

Levitt and Merry argue that vernacularisation involves translating and reconfiguring human rights discourses into local institutions, meanings, and practices. Drawing on qualitative study conducted in 2022 on rural community-based and sustainable adaptation practices to overcome climate-aggravated water insecurities in Puruliya district, West Bengal, India; I will discuss how vernacularisation of climate change adaptation (CCA) rights opens pathways to challenge both epistemic and material imperialism by fostering transformative legal regimes grounded in the subaltern notion of limits. Reorienting climate laws and rights around everyday subaltern struggles is essential to dismantling oppressive structures that sustain global, national, and local colonial inequalities. 

Situated normativities: Tensions between rights and limits

According to the common law system prevalent in rural India, access to water is mediated through access to land. If one owns a plot of land, they can dig a personal dugwell or tubewell without being legally accountable for unlimited extraction of water. In a village named Bidu in Puruliya, Dalit farmers shared during focus group discussions (FGDs) that, in response to acute water scarcity, they verbally instituted collective rules to limit water use. As Gogo, a Dalit man, explained, “Water scarcity was a major issue last year, which is why we institutionalised this rule of less than half farming… it was more of a verbal discussion.” This reflects a vernacularised ethic of collectively-imposed limits where shared responsibility, community agency, and informal consensus, despite the absence of formal governance, emerge as adaptive tools to manage scarce resources.

Another focus group discussion with farmers in a different village, Podda, revealed that sustainable water solutions are fundamentally constrained by the persistence of private land rights, which cause unequal access to water between the haves and the have-nots. A man named Montu exclaimed, “How can we have sustainable solutions when things are privately owned? Farming will suffer, and ultimately we will suffer.” The tension between individual claims and collective needs became clear when Binod remarked, “We have to figure out collective ways of living in harmony wherein we have to compromise while meeting our individual needs. If somebody claims that this is my water, and I will use it as I please – that is not a solution. We have to live through mutual understanding and listening”. The discussion highlights tensions between private land ownership and collective water needs, with participants arguing that sustainable adaptation requires shared responsibility and limits on private resource rights. They vernacularly articulated an ethic of limits (mutual compromise), emphasising that shared responsibility for long-term climate resilience must take precedence over unlimited individual rights. Similarly, in Podda, Dalit farmers emphasised local rules aimed at limiting water wastage, asserting that “equitable land-water regimes require collective responsibility-based approaches”—an ethico-legal framework that resists individualism and accumulation.

These voices highlight the material limits of unlimited water access under private property regimes, due to their detachment from land-water ecosystems and social ties crucial to address ecological limits and shared survival imperatives under the climate crisis. In particular, private land and water entitlements can reinforce structural injustices by restricting equitable access, perpetuating artificial scarcity, and maladaptation. The persistence of unequal land distribution and unrestricted water access on personal lands prevents the formation of collective water harvesting structures, such as traditional dug wells and ponds, highlighting the unsustainability of individualised rights in the face of shared climate vulnerabilities.

 Vernacularisation transforms the epistemic limits of universal rights-based claims, revealing pluralistic practices and embedding resource governance within collaborative and autonomous limits rather than the accumulative, commodifying, and rivalrous logics that underpin property regimes. This argument echoes D’Souza’s critique of rights discourses that entrench the logic of thingification that converts all forms of nature and relations into things through zero-sum individualism, “we are entitled to own this thing, not you”. Responsibility-based limits, contrarily, enable decommodification because they centre situated normativities that resist the thingification of land, water, labour, and life.

Addressing these challenges demands a shift towards equitable land-water governance grounded in collectively imposed socio-ecological limits. Locally framed rules, shaped through shared accountability, serve as vernacular expressions of such limits, helping to minimise resource wastage and prioritise essential needs. This calls for epistemic transformations that prioritise collective limits and usership over individual rights and ownership, advancing a relational and responsibility-oriented legal framework for the governance of scarce resources.

When assessed through situated normativities based on collective limits and shared responsibility, two key tensions emerge in framing MSP as a legal right. First, while the invocation of constitutional rights to demand MSP reflects subaltern strategies to secure their human right to food, water, and income amid climate and planetary crises, this approach is agnostic to the global-neoliberal policy architecture premised on imperialism and unending economic growth. WTO law—particularly the Agreement on Agriculture—classifies MSP as a trade-distorting subsidy, undermining sovereign efforts to guarantee fair prices for subaltern farmers, revealing the structural limits of liberal legalism. Second, framing MSP as an individual entitlement risks reinforcing the commodification of crops, displacing collective and traditional imaginaries of farming as a relational and socio-ecological practice rooted in reciprocal ties between farmers and rural ecosystems—including crops, plants, animals, and the rural commons more broadly. By reducing agricultural crops to individual economic or productive value, such a rights-based framing alienates vernacular (situated and traditional) climate-resilient farming practices that rely on collective and reciprocal ways of relating to nature, thereby undermining the development of equitable and ecologically sustainable food and water systems.

Hegemony and imperialism

The urgency to vernacularise CCA rights arises from the tension between universal human rights frameworks and subaltern praxis in postcolonial contexts, where climate law’s object is social and environmental justice that transforms hegemonic relations. Gramsci’s theory of ‘cultural hegemony’ alerts us to how ruling classes and elite groups naturalise dominance not just through coercive force but through cultural, political, and ideological persuasion, framing their epistemic and political authority as universal, superior, and commonsensical. In postcolonial contexts, vernacularisation is not merely semantic but transformative, enabling subaltern communities to embed rights within collective limits. This enables affected actors to embed claims within a dialectical mix of rights and limits that attempt to challenge hegemonic structures across scales. The dialectic lies in the contradiction between the epistemic erasure of vernacular claims such as collective limits and subaltern emancipation from corporate hegemony through the language of right to a MSP, oddly blending resistance and reproduction of pre-existing hierarchies.

Failure to vernacularise CCA risks perpetuating epistemic and economic imperialism, because the hegemonic imagination of rights and laws, anchored in Western liberal epistemes, reinforces unjust socio-ecological interdependencies. Epistemic imperialism, inspired by Mäki, is the dominance of metropolitan disciplines like economics (mainstream human rights laws in this case), extending their methods and theories into areas traditionally studied by ‘other’ fields or in ‘other’ ways. For instance, Dalit farmers in Puruliya highlight how privatised land ownership—a legacy of the colonial and common law regime—constrains communal water governance, perpetuating artificial scarcity and inequality. Additionally, the right to food via guaranteed MSP in India is facing WTO resistance, as neoliberal trade policies prioritise free market principles, empowering corporations. This aligns with Chimni’s critique of the ‘imperial global state’, where transnational governance systems dominated by powerful states and corporations reproduce economic imperialism by privileging market-liberalisation over subaltern emancipation.

Conclusion: The dialectics of vernacular claims

Vernacularisation in the postcolonial context offers a counter-hegemonic and dialectical praxis through its alignment with subaltern resistance and reproduction (of hierarchies). Climate-affected farmers complement rights with limits to enforce state (not corporations) regulation of crops, as well as responsible usership within socio-ecological limits. Such a praxis challenges universal human rights by invoking anti-imperialist struggles and opting for other approaches to adaptation, including the recognition of limits. Ultimately, vernacularisation is a radical reimagination of legal claims as dialectical tools towards transformation. It demands redirecting the object of law to dismantle the epistemic and material hierarchies upheld by imperialism, supporting climate action that transcends the hegemony of the West, state, corporations, and dominant knowledges.

Overall, I argue that the face of human rights, as seen through the struggles of climate-affected farmers in India, is inherently dialectical—situated at the crossroads of resistance and reproduction. As farmers mobilise the fundamental right to life and demand a new legal right to MSP, they navigate the ever-evolving tension between reinforcing dominant structures and norms—such as state authority and the commodification of agricultural crops—and advancing counter-hegemonic tools for liberation grounded in a collective, responsibility-based language and politics of limits.