Rethink Indian human rights activism

Human rights organisations in India have consistently felt unable to respond to religious polarization and communal violence. While their efforts in combating the Hindu revivalist extremism did result in occasional ‘success stories’, more often they were too little to the enormity of the challenge. Sitharamam Kakarala, associated with the Pluralism Knowledge Programme, analyses the challenges to human rights activism in India and offers some ideas for new strategies.

India has struggled with violence between religious communities for decades. Many cases of ‘communalism’ concern Hindu-Muslim conflict which has a history of decades if not centuries. After the large scale violence that killed more than a thousand Muslims in the state of Gujarat in 2002, many more attacks happened on Muslims and Christians, especially in Karnataka and Orissa. While ‘communal conflicts’ usually said to involve two warring factions (sometimes in a mutually reinforcing cycle), independent reports have repeatedly pointed at one party. Hindu revivalist organisations and their supporters are being held responsible for a high level of intimidation, harassment and systematic violence against disenfranchised groups such as Muslim and Christian religious minorities.

One cannot explain these conflicts with one set of ‘root causes’. Economic disparities within and between communities play a role, as do historic tensions and localized intolerant practices. Very often existing tensions are being fed by electoral politics. The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a political force to reckon with shows the success of Hindu right-wing politics in the mobilization of people on the grounds of communal polarization. Although the BJPs steady climb in popularity was stopped in some states at the latest elections in 2009 – and therefore the political space is a contested one – Hindu revivalism is increasingly dominating the social space. The ever rising number of associations around the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the ‘mother’ of the Hindu revivalist movement – is just one indicator of this phenomenon. The comparative inadequacy of the response by human rights organisations in effectively checking such mobilisation of people has led to and increasing frustration about ‘losing ground’ in the battle against fundamentalisms.

If one agrees with this analysis, what should follow is the question as to why human rights organisations are no longer able to reach a larger audience. While it is undoubtedly a million dollar question and there cannot be a single straightforward answer, the following is an attempt at a schematic diagnosis.

Human rights activism is based, broadly speaking, on one core premise: states have subscribed to universal human rights principles. They should be reflected in the national constitution and detailed in statutory law. Civil society then, in particular human rights organisation, hold the state accountable for implementing these laws.

In India today confidence in the role of the state is crumbling, especially as regards the prevention of communal violence. Hindu right-wing dominated local (state) governments have more than once lend tacit or express support to the Hindu revivalist organisations at incidents of communal conflict. Many years after anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat (2002) and Mumbai (1993) offenders still wait to be sentenced. The recommendations and findings of commissions appointed, which often took more than a decade to publish their reports, remain to be implemented. It makes one wonder whether the Indian state is willing to be an impartial arbiter in cases of religious tension.

A second core premise of human rights activism is the belief that the only cure to communal conflicts lies in increasing secularisation of the ‘public sphere’. That is, to make individuals give up their religious symbols, orientations etc in their public functioning. Yet not just in India but in many liberal democracies across the world, religious and other ‘primordial’ identity markers are more and more visible in the public sphere and represent challenges to the abstract ‘secularised’ citizen. The increasing assertion of communal identities through religious, caste, tribal or region markers made the abstract citizen virtually disappear from the political space. Mere lamenting of the decline of citizenship orientation and the growth of ‘parochial tendencies’ has not helped us in finding answers to, or even an adequate understanding of, the phenomenon.

Some critical debate within academic circles on the question can be summarised as follows: many of the existing normative constructions (such as citizenship and human rights) tend to ignore the ‘culture question’. That is, how do such abstract concepts acquire ‘life’ by becoming part of everyday practice of individuals? Arguably, abstract ‘universal’ categories obtain different meanings in diverse socio-cultural settings. For people who feel that their rights are continuously violated (irrespective of the constitutional guarantees to the contrary) concepts like ‘human rights’ may not automatically become meaningful. Insisting on the same terminology unfortunately just doesn’t do the trick.

Besides, there is no unanimity about what human rights could mean in the daily lives of people in societies where the social relationships are already entangled with entrenched markers of hierarchy and power. Can human rights be ever immune to the problem of entrenched hierarchies? Assuming that perhaps they cannot, then in what way should we reconcile the two in a meaningful way? Should the notions of equality, liberty or dignity necessarily be understood only outside these markers?

The point is not to suggest that these principles should be given up. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has worldwide appreciation as an achievement for human dignity that transcends the Western/liberal context. However, if the principles are laudable but do not consistently reflect the social practices, what could be the ways and means of bridging the gaps in a ‘democratic way’? That is, without necessarily judging everything non-liberal and non-secular as immoral and oppressive

The conventional wisdom was to seek ‘social reform’ through ‘modernization’ of social practices. However, the history of social reform (of ‘evil practices’) through law and secularisation is fraught with contradictory results. More recently, this approach has met with sharp negative reactions from communities who feel to be pushed to chose between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernisation’ - raising questions about social transformation that is both democratic and sustainable. The coerced social reform through the power of state and law, however laudable the objective may be, seems to stand on thin ice.

A third issue of ‘effectiveness’ should be added to the above two challenges before human rights activism. How to make human rights relevant and meaningful at a time when social orientations, especially among the young people, towards ‘norms’ are drastically changing. It might be worth exploring in which way ‘moral and political correctness’ can be sacrificed to ‘being more effective’ in mobilizing people and opinions.

This can be illustrated with an experience from Karnataka, the pink chaddi (pink underwear) campaign in 2009. It developed as a response to attacks of Hindu right wing groups that started with beating up women in a pub in Mangalore for their alleged immoral (and ‘un-Indian’) behaviour of visiting a pub. Journalist Nisha Susan called upon women through Facebook and a personal blog to send a pink chaddi to the offices of the Sri Ram Sene, the Hindu group.

Nearly 60.000 people joined her group on Facebook and replicated the call in other blogs. More than a thousand chaddis were delivered in one day. Widespread media coverage, both by social media such as Kafila or Gauravonomics Blog and the mainstream press (see for instance BBC, Times of India or The Hindu) – produced a heated debate that caused the police to hold the 140 people of the Sri Ram Sene in preventive custody on Valentine’s Day – the day chosen as climax for the campaign.

The campaign has shocked the sensibilities of some traditional human rights organisations. It has shown, however, that unconventional means (and perhaps a conscious choice for simplification) could be effective in reaching a certain target group. The ‘pink chaddi campaign’ has helped coin a new type of citizen engagement - ‘Facebook-activism’. This is illustrative of possibilities before new age human rights activism.

In summary, the challenges before human rights social action is partly in being reflexive in redefining human rights through contextualisation processes and partly rethinking strategies beyond state centric social transformation.

Read the full paper of Sitharamam Kakarala ‘Human Rights, Pluralism and Civil Society. Reflecting on contemporary challenges in India´.