Silence and speech are part of the universal human condition. But silence and speech acquire a particular salience when they emanate from those in positions of power (and, presumably, responsibility). In recent times, the Prime Minister of India has maintained silence (or at least is not reported to have made any public declaration) on what many have interpreted as an open call for genocide at a ‘Dharam Sansad’ held in Haridwar over December 17-20, 2021. What the Prime Minister has said is carried by The Hindu (among other publications). In a report, ‘Focus on rights made India weak, says PM’ (January 20, 2022), we have:
Mr. Modi was addressing the launch of the Brahma Kumaris’ year-long programme of events as part of the government’s celebration of 75 years of Independence, Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav...
“In the last 75 years, we only kept talking about rights, fighting for rights and wasting time. The talk of rights, to some extent, for some time, may be right in a particular circumstance, but forgetting one’s duties completely has played a huge role in keeping India weak,” Mr. Modi said.[1]
Not that the Prime Minister’s dim view of rights does not have distinguished precedence. Jeremy Bentham, the renowned 18 th/19 th century English philosopher and jurist had this to say about the notion of natural (or human) rights in his Anarchical Fallacies (1796): “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, – nonsense upon stilts.” Bentham had no use for non-legal rights, rights that are not written into a nation’s law books. This seems to miss the simple point that what humans write into their law books is up to them. If they believe that human beings are endowed with natural rights at birth, as did Locke and Hobbes before Bentham, and Thomas Paine at the time of Bentham, then such a view of rights can be fought for as entitlements worthy of being guaranteed in their books of statute, and will find their way into them.
Paine’s Rights of Man
Paine’s Rights of Man, published in 1791, is a passionate plea for such a view of the world. Earlier, in 1789, the National Constituent Assembly of France had passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. By December of 1791, most of the U.S. States had ratified the Bill of Rights. In December of 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted, through a Resolution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which begins with this extraordinary preamble:
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, …,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people, …
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge, Now, therefore, The General Assembly, Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations,…
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, together hailed as an International Bill of Human Rights, were adopted by Resolutions of the UN General Assembly in 1966, and came into force in 1976.
The Constitution of India guarantees to its citizens six fundamental rights: the right of equality; the right of freedom (of speech and expression, of assembly, of association, of movement, of residence, and of profession); the right against exploitation; the right of freedom of religion; cultural and educational rights; and the right to constitutional remedies 1. These fundamental rights are, for the most part, rights to ‘negative freedom’—more commonly understood as ‘liberty’—which are designed to ensure that citizens are not subjected to arbitrary restraints in the pursuit of matters that may be properly regarded as residing in their respective ‘personal protected spheres’, to borrow the language of John Stuart Mill.
These fundamental rights are, for the most part, rights to ‘negative freedom’—more commonly understood as ‘liberty’.
Other rights, such as the right to employment—or more specifically the ‘right to work’ and the ‘right to public assistance in cases of unemployment’—are in the nature of rights to ‘positive freedom’, and are concerned not just with ensuring non-interference in the pursuit of liberty but with actual enablement in the pursuit of what Amartya Sen has called valued human functionings.
While the right to work is provided for in the Constitution’s Directive Principles of State Policy, and is not in the list of Fundamental Rights, there are other rights to positive freedom, such as the Right to Education (Article 21-A), providing for free and compulsory education of all children from the ages of six to fourteen, which figure in the list of Fundamental Rights. The National Food Security Act (NFSA 2013)—commonly hailed as securing for India’s citizens the ‘Right to Food’—is another example of a right to positive freedom. In this case, the concern is with the ability of people to be adequately nourished. The NFSA provides for citizens’ entitlement to food security under such government programmes as the Midday Meals Scheme, the Integrated Child Development Services and the Public Distribution System.
This is an achievement that would qualify for the profoundest admiration as the product of a jurisprudential architecture of the greatest moral and political splendour.
Briefly, the Constitution of India has provided, under the categories of both Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles, for the entitlement of the country’s citizens to rights as they relate to aspects of both negative and positive freedoms. 2 For many, this is an achievement that would qualify for the profoundest admiration, as constituting the product of a jurisprudential architecture of the greatest moral and political splendour, and one that is a moving testimony to effort, perseverance, commitment, principle, and wisdom.
And now we are told that this marvellous and bitterly-fought for achievement is, to one who happens to be the elected leader of this country, a waste of time that has weakened the nation.
To stretch the demands of fairness and patient enquiry to their uttermost limits: might there, after all, be some philosophical basis to such a perspective? Under duress, one might be led, in this context, to the commonly held (even if contentious) principle that ‘rights imply duties’. More elaborately, the view is that for a right to be entertained as a practically meaningful claim, it must have a correlative duty attached to it, in the sense that it should be possible to assign a duty to some identifiable agency—the state, society, some institution, or some (collection of) individual(s)—which has an obligation to deliver the right in question. This could be seen as one version of the argument which holds that ‘ought implies can.’ That is, for a right to be entertained as a right, it must be realizable: it must not fall foul of binding resource constraints.
And now we are told that this marvellous and bitterly-fought for achievement is, to one who happens to be the elected leader of this country, a waste of time that has weakened the nation.
A major difficulty with such a proposition is, precisely, that it is often very difficult, on the ground, to tell when a constraint is indeed a genuinely binding feasibility constraint. A classic example is available in the phenomenon of famine. Amartya Sen’s major work on famine suggests that starvation is often not so much a matter of there not being enough food to go around, as of some people not having access to it. The problem may not be one so much of overall food decline as of entitlement failure caused by human intervention through hoarding and the like. In a general way, the refusal to recognize certain categories of human rights as legal rights might just be an unprincipled state’s refusal to undertake the effort of loosening the tightness of perceived constraints on feasibility. This would be the convenient way out for a lazy and uncaring state to avoid the messy complication of possible litigation over a justiciable right in a court of law.
In extinguishing rights one is also extinguishing the correlative duties that are required for the realisation of these rights.
The ‘rights imply duties’ argument is, at best (i.e. worst), a case for extinguishing rights. But in extinguishing rights one is also extinguishing the correlative duties that are required for the realisation of these rights!
Whence, then, the emphasis on the primacy of duties?! Perhaps (in the interests of intellectual charity) what is intended is the progressive principle that even though rights may imply correlative duties, duties do not necessarily imply correlative rights. This principle is often invoked in the cause of discussions relating to whether citizens of rich countries have an obligation to assist the distant needy in poor countries. In response to the proposition that the deprived populations of poor countries have no rights-based claim on the resources of rich countries, it has been pointed out that certain obligations do not require correlative rights to trigger them.
Thus, the philosopher Peter Singer has held that the rich in affluent countries have a positive duty to help the poor in deprived countries, simply because the sacrifice involved would be so small, and to refuse to undertake such sacrifice would be a monstrous moral failure. Another philosopher, Thomas Pogge, would underline the negative duty of not imposing harm on others; and to the extent that many affluent countries have inflicted harm upon, and contributed to the impoverishment of, other countries, through practices such as colonialism and unfair trade regimes, there is a case for assistance-as-reparation.
On reflection, the ‘duties do not imply correlative rights’ construction as a possible interpretation of the Prime Minister’s sentiments is less than convincing. For in the former view, the existence or otherwise of a prior rights claim is, simply, not seen as being relevant to the moral salience of duties: the proposition does not, and is not intended to, rubbish rights or to hold them to be a waste of time.
The less forbearing explanation is to be found in the simple notion that ‘rights’ are essentially entitlements to privilege for a small elite group of people.
Perhaps, in the end, one seeks too much subtlety in the mazes of moral and political philosophy to understand what it might mean to hold rights in low esteem and duties in high esteem. The less forbearing and vastly more plausible explanation than the ones earlier sought is to be found in the simple notion that ‘rights’ are essentially entitlements to privilege for a small elite group of people: entitlements which dwindle their way down to non-existence as one works one’s way through a stratified hierarchy of humans sorted out by religion, caste, gender and economic status, even as the burden of duties works in the opposite direction. What better template for such a view of the world than the edicts on Dharma contained in Manusmriti?
For consider the drift of things as the drift is presently discernible. The wealth-tax was abolished in the budget of 2016-17 and corporate tax was reduced in 2019: the only right that matters, it seems, is the inalienable right of the very rich not to be parted from their wealth; recent legislation on child labour, forest rights, land acquisition, labour ‘reform’, and agriculture is compatible with little or no respect for the social and economic rights of the asset-constrained and labouring poor; legislation on citizenship and conversion displays similar disdain for the cultural and religious rights of minorities; the prosecution of cases under draconian laws such as UAPA is a manifestation of the contempt in which the right to freedom of thought and expression is held; the list threatens to run on and on.
Meanwhile, in the wake of what has been an economic disaster wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic for most citizens of the country, the IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2020 informs us that the wealth of those with a net worth exceeding ₹1,000 crore grew at a rate of 20 per cent over the previous year’s stock (there were 827 such entities in 2020). What weakens the nation, one is invited to believe, is any suggestion that rights may be seen to be grossly violated when MNREGA workers are not paid their wages; when frontline health workers fighting COVID-19 do not have adequate personal protective equipment; when victims of the pandemic do not have access to oxygen cylinders or hospital beds or ventilators; when voters at the time of election complain about unemployment and inflation and arbitrary arrests, detentions and encounter killings.
You have a right to do your duty, but you are not entitled to its fruit. Does this sound familiar?
It cannot be a matter of comfort that this immutable ‘civilizational’ template of rights and duties has had its votaries in the not too distant past, in parts of the world far removed from India. This is reflected in the histories, of less than a hundred years ago, of Spain, Italy and Germany. Thomas Mann’s concluding lines in his 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, written in the immediate aftermath of the German cataclysm, should grip the heart of any sentient Indian at the present juncture:
Today, clung round by demons, a hand over one eye, with the other staring into horrors, down she [Germany] flings from despair to despair. When will she reach the bottom of the abyss? When, out of uttermost hopelessness — a miracle beyond the power of belief — will the light of hope dawn? A lonely man folds his hands and speaks: ‘God be merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my Fatherland! ‘
Endnote:
1. The Hindu. 2022. Focus on rights made India weak, says PM, January 20. [https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/system-being-created-where-there-is-no-place-for-any-discrimination-pm-modi/article38296828.ece].Return To text.