The Hindu : On human rights and radical evil

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 30, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

On human rights and radical evil

By Kalpana Kannabiran

While there is no question that the genocide in Gujarat is radical evil, what is far far worse and absolutely unforgivable, is the amnesia that set in during election week and has already settled in.

"STATE IS the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly, it tells lies, too; and this lie grows out of its mouth. `I, the state, am the people'." Nietzsche's words ring chillingly true today. 1984, Dangs, POTA, Gujarat, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians, Dalits, Kashmir, Narmada, women... All this is dharma. All else is, to quote Narendra Modi, "appeasement." And in this see saw between "justice" and "appeasement", the space for rights, both on the ground and in our thoughts, has been steadily whittled down, to the point of extinction. And this is not to say we don't see the human suffering in all these and the countless other "episodes" of violence perpetrated or shielded by the state. Thanks to the globalisation of the mass media, especially television, we do. In the very process of producing the spectacle of suffering, the mass media erases the possibility of any structural understanding of suffering, says Upendra Baxi in `The Future of Human Rights' (OUP, 2002). This immediately brings to my mind a poem by a well known Indian poet about the undoubtedly committed work of charity among the destitute and orphaned that opens out worlds of caring to those who have no access to such worlds, a charity which serves but never asks why there is destitution or poverty or hunger or human suffering.

There are lessons to be learnt from each and all struggles. Human rights and civil liberties struggles in India especially have taught us how we can use institutions of justice, the courts especially, creatively, to wrest political rights from an unwilling state in a democracy and have also taught us important and valuable lessons in enforcing accountability on the state and its agencies. Women's movements, Dalit struggles, and struggles of tribal peoples have demonstrated to us the power of biographies of those who have suffered/survived violence in its most extreme, persistent, pervasive forms, making these testimonies of suffering social texts that become tools for change. "The lived reality of sex trafficking, sweat labour, serfdom, workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, dowry murders, rape in peace time as well as a means of doing `politics', torture of women and experimental medicalisation of their bodies (also displacement, child labour, denials of rights to housing, health, education, gainful employment... ) all these and related devices of state and society, present problems of routinisation of terror," says Baxi obliterating in the process the distinction between peacetime and war for entire populations that suffer from and live in this environment. Yet international law makes a doctrinal distinction between the international law of war and peace, reserving languages of pain and suffering for the development of international humanitarian law, while invisibilising them in times of peace, "even when `peace' appears to millions of people as forms of belligerency by other means."

In an era of globalisation, when visions of alternatives to global capitalism are just devoured, Baxi argues, the question of human rights is relegated to a moral language (social justice, equity, redistribution) that is overworn and fails to evoke any positive response from the globalising middle classes. Lawyers and law students, for instance, the traditional constituency for human rights advocacy, increasingly move rapidly into the vortex of chromium and steel high-tech corporations defending both the interests of global capital and the proliferation of repressive legislation and administration, and irresponsible government.

Recognising and contending with the fact of distinct regimes within "human rights", each with its own discursive formations and definitions of what constitutes a violation, has been a critical part of human rights movements as also the transgression of the boundaries of these distinct regimes and these definitions. Domestic violence and starvation induce terror and, by virtue of this blurring, coexist as violations alongside torture leaving, I would argue, the fundamental question unanswered: Who are the terrorists?

Hannah Arendt, writing in the aftermath of the Holocaust, spoke of radical evil as a "structural element in the realm of human affairs" in which human beings "are unable to forgive what they cannot punish and... unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable." For Baxi, radical evil "is the imposition of suffering beyond redress, remorse and rights, and even recall," leading to an organised moral amnesia, which undermines the very foundations of human rights. While there is no question that the genocide in Gujarat is radical evil, as all genocides are, what is far far worse and absolutely unforgivable, is the amnesia that set in during election week and has already settled in. Gujarat is at peace. Our globalised electronic media incessantly beams images of a beaming Chief Minister Modi, runs reports of plans for progress and development in Gujarat, and all else is forgotten. All those thousands of Sikhs who were killed on the streets in 1984 are forgotten. The families that witnessed the violence are told that they did not see, because what they saw did not happen. Delhi is at peace. That the State (in all its naked and brutal power) is in the hands of a group of people with the worst possible criminal record, and that most of our other States share that record by either actively participating or tacitly supporting the Gujarat gang or the Delhi gang or countless other such gangs are facts that get completely swamped by this euphoric amnesia. This is not peace, it is catastrophic for human rights groups, and for the people of this country. It matters little whether Modi is OBC or Advani is Sindhi. What matters is the fact that there have been gross violations of human rights that must be redressed.

It is in the context of radical evil then that human rights resistance is located, and in confronting and interrogating violations, human rights paradigms open up further sites of resistance — by asserting the rights of all peoples to self determination, — "a right to a voice, a right to bear witness to violation, a right to immunity against disarticulation by concentrations of economic, social, and political formations." This immediately foregrounds an ethic of power, which prevents the imposition of violence whether in the name of sovereignty, imperialism or patriarchy or, in our times, community. "(E)ngaged human rights discourse," Baxi argues, "makes possible a deeper understanding of the politics of difference... It insists that the Other is not dispensable. It sensitises us to the fact that the politics of Otherhood is not ethically sensible outside the urgency of the maxim: `Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.' It insists with Rabbi Israeli Salanter that the `material needs of my neighbour are my spiritual needs'."

This finally brings us to the question of the interdependence of human rights, which very simply is that the same order of rights inhere in each person. In an age when identities are fluid and multiply at an alarming pace, when cultural spaces and indeed the nation itself is shrinking through increasing exclusion even while it expands through globalisation, when the only precarious road to survival often is community ghettoisation, we need to remind ourselves constantly of the non-negotiability of basic rights and just governance in each of our contexts.

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