By Bharat Bhushan
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assertion that a focus on “rights” has made India weak and everyone must walk the path of “duties” for the next 25 years as penance (tapasya) is puzzling and perhaps alarming. Rights-based interventions neither shrink Indian democracy nor weaken it. They have actually helped expand it by correcting the exclusionary practices and structural inequities of Indian society.
Drawing a link between performances of duties to earn the conferment of rights is a proposition with no constitutional legitimacy. Fundamental rights such as right to equality and non-discrimination, the right to life, freedom of speech and religion, are absolute — not contingent on special kind of behaviour or conduct by citizens. They cannot be taken away from any Indian citizen and are justiciable.
This is not the first call from the top to citizens to prioritise duties over rights. Modi has done so earlier as did Prime Minister Indira Gandhi during the Emergency. So did Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi claimed that he had “learnt from my illiterate but wise mother that all rights to be deserved and preserved came from duty well done (Letter to Julian Huxley 1947)”. However, an ethic reflecting social morality imbibed from one’s mother is not on par with constitutional guarantees. The Constitution of India is a set of legal and moral principles, collectively agreed upon through debate and discussion, by which the citizens of India constituted their state and decided to govern themselves. It was neither given to us by Mahatma Gandhi’s wise mother nor must it be swayed by the rustic wisdom of latter day ideologues.
Eleven “fundamental duties” were introduced into the Constitution–10 in 1976 and one in 2002. They exhort citizens to abide by the Constitution and respect the national flag and national anthem, follow ideals of the freedom struggle, protect the sovereignty and integrity of India, defend the country and render national services when called upon, promote the spirit of common brotherhood, preserve India’s composite culture, preserve the natural environment, develop scientific temper, safeguard public property, strive for excellence and provide education to all children between 6-14 years of age. They are not justiciable–no one can be taken to court and punished for not adhering to them. Prime Minister Modi and his government’s own record of promoting these fundamental duties has been uneven.
So what does his call to follow the path of duties in preference to demanding rights of the state amount to? Duties however morally and ethically desirable as a part of good citizenship cannot be overemphasised to become an instrument for curtailing citizens’ rights. Otherwise collective obligations can become grounds to deny demands for individual emancipation and rights of marginalised communities. Is Prime Minister Modi perhaps ring-fencing his government against rights-based politics?
This is particularly invidious because the Indian state, more so than ever under the Modi regime, has retreated from the economy and key social sectors to make way for corporate capital. State policies are directed to facilitate “ease of doing business” and are not about “ease of living” or “ease of working”, for example. Where are the poor to go with the government handing over natural resources, land, public institutions, hospitals, roads, railways and power generation and distribution to the private sector and reducing investment in education ceding ground to a predatory private sector?
These policies impact the incomes, livelihoods and welfare, in effect the very survival of a vast number of people and communities, threatening their Constitutional rights as citizens. Without a rights-based approach they would not have had the Right to Information Act, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Act, the Food Security Act or the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act. Would the OBCs (Other Backward Classes) have got reservation in jobs and higher education without demanding their rights? Or, more recently, would the controversial farm laws have been repealed?
Yielding to rights based politics makes democracy more stable. It furthers its legitimisation with the masses and situates its actions in the context of Constitutionality. At the policy level Prime Minister Modi’s own government has extended the work of previous ones by introducing schemes that are precursors to right to shelter (through various schemes for housing for the poor), health (Ayushman Bharat and Jan Aushadhi Kendras), education (skill development schemes and even “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao”), sanitation (Swachh Bharat), drinking water (Jal Jeevan Mission) and social security (nominal pensions to farmers, widows and the aged).
However, all these governmental schemes fall far short of becoming rights. They remain merely special entitlements granted through executive fiat or legislative decisions. They do not address structural inequalities and forms of discrimination within a rights framework. They are aimed at political mobilisation.
Prime Minister Modi perhaps realises that a rights-based approach has the potential to challenge his party’s politics of polarisation, marginalisation of religious minorities, curtailing workers’ rights, pushing a free-market in agriculture and facilitating corporate takeover of public resources.
The mainstream political parties do not pose a challenge to him as they have a similar agenda. His real challenge comes from the decentralised struggles of civil society organisations and social activists working amongst the deprived, the marginalised and those who are the targets of his government’s majoritarian and pro-corporate policies. That is why an unprecedented demonization of these organisations and activists is taking place under his regime. Thousands of such organisations have been forced to shut shop under one pretext or the other including Greenpeace, Amnesty International and Oxfam. An atmosphere has been created where those struggling for “rights” and doing their “duty” to society are painted as saboteurs and enemies of the nation.
In this manner the emergence of a democratic culture and an active citizenry are stymied. Authoritarian and non-democratic legacies are revived to shape a submissive attitude in citizens. They are sought to be internalised from a very young age by changing school text books, setting up symbolic rituals and sustaining a public discourse so that they become a permanent feature of citizens’ political consciousness.
(Courtesy: Business Standard)
