The Hindu : Human rights and security

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Sep 21, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Human rights and security

By Neera Chandhoke

Individuals have rights and states deliver security when they respect these rights.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS theory has generally been preoccupied with a state-centric concept of security, which is concerned with territorial integrity and with military and nuclear superiority vis-a-vis troublesome neighbours. In the last two decades, however, we have become acquainted with the idea of an expanded concept of security — human security. This turns our attention to the ways in which ordinary human beings can live their rather ordinary but nevertheless valuable lives in some degree of freedom from the shackles of pervasive uncertainty and deep-rooted fear. Or, the concept of human security is pre-occupied with the way individuals can live out their lives the best they can, without being constantly threatened by physical suffering, material deprivation and affronts to human dignity.

And this is of the utmost importance for two reasons. One, the life of every individual has to be free of fear as a matter of his/her right. This is the foremost obligation that the state owes its people. The very legitimacy of state power is premised on this assumption — that the state will protect its people from any kind of threat whether material or physical. If this reason can be considered as falling within the domain of normative thinking of the state, the second reason is pragmatic. Unless people are guaranteed security, any given society will be troubled with discontent and unrest, all of which can easily translate into violent conflict. In India this is more than apparent in the many struggles that dot the political landscape. From the militancy in Kashmir that casts a constant shadow over India-Pakistan relations, to the naxalite movement, to the insurgency in the Northeast, to the battle against big development projects, the country is rocked by both strife and insecurity.

However, despite the fact that the shift from a state-centric to a human centric concept of security is desirable, the very proliferation of works on human security causes some unease. Because, the concept of security has now been widened to such an extent that it may risk implosion through overuse. For one, consider that what has normally been thought of in political theory as a right to certain goods is now being conceptualised as security of these goods in international relations theory.

But security cannot be identified with rights simply because it is a property that is attached to a specific state of affairs — that of confidence, assurance and freedom from fear. Correspondingly, people are free from fear only if and when the state respects their fundamental rights. I am secure only if my rights to life, liberty and dignity are recognised and respected by the state, which protects me both from its own coercive institutions and from armed groups in civil society as a matter of my right. Second, the assertion of a right places a corresponding obligation on the state to guarantee whatever human beings have — right to life, freedom, justice, equality and satisfaction of material needs.

When our state does so, and when we are reasonably confident that the police will not come knocking at our door at midnight and arrest us without any justification, we are secure in the possession and exercise of our rights. Note that the state does not make us secure in the possession of our rights as a matter of benevolence. It does so because rights have been asserted, and when rights are asserted they compel obligation. Security, therefore, is both supervened upon and is a co-relate of rights. Individuals have rights and states deliver security when they respect these rights.

Arguably, the concept of security is supervened onto three kinds of rights. First, security is a co-relate of political and civil rights. Individuals are safe when their right to freedom and their right to participation in the political life of the country are secured through codification of political and civil rights. Second, security is a co-relate of social and economic rights. Individuals are secure when their basic right to shelter, food, education, health and income is satisfied by the state, when they are not left destitute and impoverished, and when they are not stripped of dignity because they have to beg for what is rightfully theirs. Third, security is a co-relate of the right to one's community and culture.

The third set of rights — the right to community and culture — is a comparative newcomer in the political terrain of rights talk. It has emerged as a response to two distinct developments in the global arena, one of which is political, and the second of which is cognitive. Politically, the issue of the right to culture emerged in direct response to the exigencies of building nation-states in multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies.

By the end of the 20th century it was clear that the nation-state may prove one of history's most grim blunders. For, almost everywhere, the bid to construct a hyphen between the state and the nation has led to majoritarianism on the one hand, and the marginalisation and often the oppression of minorities on the other. Even as they try to build nations out of disparate belief systems, most of the states in South Asia are marked by intractable, vicious, and perhaps un-resolvable conflicts between the majority and the minority.

Cognitively, the idea that people have the right to their culture and community has been catapulted onto the scene of political theory by a major shift in the way we conceptualise the individual. The idea of individualism, which was originally born in Europe, was transplanted to the colonised world through a variety of means.

By the 1980s, however, this idea had run out of steam. For, scholars had realised that in the real world individuals are embedded in specific cultures, religions and languages. They gain their sense of the world, how to make sense of the world, and how to evaluate the world from their culture. It follows that if individuals are deprived of their culture, if this culture is attacked, or disparaged, or dismissed as non-valuable, individuals lose their identity, their sense of the self, and their dignity. Deprive individuals of access to their culture and we deprive them of self-hood; deprive them of access to their meaning systems and we have so many diminished individuals on our hands.

Whereas the argument, that individuals need access to their culture, is a general principle, it acquires particular salience in the context of minorities. For, all over South Asia, it is precisely the minorities who are being denied the right to their religion, language and culture. Minorities are insecure in India, because the consolidation of religious radicalism or Hindutva has systematically violated their fundamental rights. But somewhat ironically the excesses of Hindutva have also produced collective fear and neurosis. For, no one in India is secure today, neither the minority trembling under the onslaught of perverse and demeaning stereotypes and systematic pogroms, nor the majority fearing a backlash from the forces of "international terrorism". Just witness the paranoia that grips the country on national commemorative occasions. They have become moments for the display of the coercive power of the state rather than celebratory affairs. We have paid a heavy price because the state has not taken human rights seriously, and because it has failed to deliver security.

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