Care, Justice, and Social Policies in India: Forced Labour or Labour of Love

Care is foundational to human society, enabling procreation and social reproduction. Work is valued more than care, especially caring for people with disabilities or illnesses such as HIV/AIDS or older adults, which is stigmatised. It has been challenging for feminist social policy thinkers to present all forms of care as an economic activity that requires political recognition. In Justice Interruptus, Fraser (1997) proposes the ‘universal caregiver model’ that dissolves the ‘workerism’ of the universal breadwinner model and the ‘domestic privatism’ of the caregiver parity model, and she proposes the ‘Universal Citizen Model’[1]. This justice paradigm holds potential in low-middle-income countries such as India, where women still perform the bulk of care work within families and are primarily concentrated in low-quality, underpaid jobs in the informal economy. In this paper, I explore care as a vital intersection between intimacy, love, and femininity that shapes women’s relationships with work and society. I developed the concept of ‘care complex’ to understand the ideational elements of care-work intersections in a relatively poor society marred by structural inequalities of patriarchy, race, caste, class, ethnicity, and geographical disparities that are exacerbated by the climate crisis and ethnic and political tensions. It enables the reconceptualisation of ‘care’ at the intra- and inter-household levels and deepens the understanding of ‘universal citizen models’ in the Indian context. The paper concludes that all forms of care are the bedrock of human society and that ‘all care is work and all work is care’. As Indian society struggles socially and economically to establish social provisions for its citizens, women’s entitlements remain weak. Therefore, the paper argues in favour of paradigm shifts in mainstream policy thinking towards a ‘universal citizen model’ that holistically reconceptualising gender justice in India.