Explained: This article explains the political background, key decisions, and possible outcomes related to Explained : ‘Whither Human Rights in India’ imagines a new kind of libertarian politics and Its Impact and why it matters right now.
A book edited by a leading civil rights activist and public intellectual like Anand Teltumbde — and that too dedicated to the memory of Father Stan Swamy and Prof GN Saibaba — is bound to arouse the interest of all those who are genuinely concerned with the fate of Indian democracy. Indeed, what unites the 17 essays is a shared concern: the way the violation of human rights seems to have become the new normal in contemporary India.
Since 2014, Teltumbde says in his introductory note, there has been a “decisive break” because the new regime has followed “a fascist playbook, unleashing systematic and impudent assaults on human rights”. Look at, for instance, the way some of the contributors — ranging from Kalpana Kannabiran to Virginius Xaxa; or, from Harsh Mander to Lancy Lobo — have sought to understand this phenomenon theoretically as well as empirically.
While reflecting on the cult of Narendra Modi, the normalisation of Hindu nationalism, the revival of religious myths as national narratives, the growth of the propaganda machinery and the emergence of the “merchants of hate”, Vineeth Srivastava Bhagyanagar has sought to understand India’s transformation into what he regards as a “fascist society”. Is it the reason why every voice of dissent is stigmatised and even criminalised? No wonder, Ajay Gudavarthy and G Vijay have referred to the “ghost of urban Naxal” in their quite perceptive essay. Irrespective of one’s political belief, every dissenter is castigated as an “urban Naxal”; it has become a “flexible tool to target any social activist opposing social hegemony and unchecked accumulation of capital”.
It is this sort of Hindu supremacist doctrine that, as Subhash Gatade has explained, can be seen in the way “bulldozers have become symbols of terror for minorities in India”. In another analytical essay, Gautam Navlakha writes about the plight of undertrials. As he points out, “Prisons are now more about long-term detention for undertrials, who make up 75 per cent of the prison population, rather than housing convicts who have been found guilty after trial.” Moreover, the “stringent bail rules”, he says, reveal the “grim reality” of the criminal justice system where a person can be “incarcerated without trial or conviction”.
Because of the arrogance of power and the resultant moral decay, it is not surprising if we find ourselves in a society where even the rapist and the molester, as Ranjana Padhi has written with intense pain and anguish, can be protected without any shame. The women from marginalised and vulnerable populations face “immense structural barriers and institutional indifference — from filing an FIR at the police station to navigating the subsequent legal process”.
It is this “intersection of majoritarian politics, patriarchy and state power” that explains, for instance, the tragic fate of a young Dalit woman at Hathras who was sexually assaulted and raped by a bunch of upper caste goons in 2020.
Padhi does not want us to forget the way the entire state machinery unleashed a “litany of lies and fabrications” to protect the rapists. Likewise, Bittu KR has made us aware of “the struggle of trans and queer individuals to survive against systems of Brahminical patriarchy and colonial legacies”.
The narratives of this politics of oppression and humiliation can also be seen in the essays written by Aakar Patel and Teesta Setalvad, or, Irfan Engineer, Vernon Gonsalves and Maharukh Adenwalla. What is sad is that even the oppressed, as Teltumbde’s essay seeks to indicate, tend to fall into the trap of this politics. Well, Mr Modi often uses “Ambedkarite symbolism”; but then, “many Dalits, moved by Modi’s symbolic gestures, overlooked his government’s dismantling of constitutional principles”. Likewise, it is equally frightening to see, as Mihir Desai’s essay suggests, how at times even the judiciary seems to have “rubber-stamped the executive’s questionable decisions”.
This sort of portrait of the “devastation of human rights” ought to make us alert, and imagine a new kind of libertarian politics. Otherwise, as Teltumbde cautions us, it will be “immeasurably more difficult for future generations to reclaim and restore these rights”.
— The reviewer taught sociology at JNU for more than three decades