Context:

• The ongoing protests by farmers against the three hastily promulgated agriculture laws have drawn international attention, with the denial of democratic rights to them by the government’s construction of military-grade barriers and shutting down of the Internet at protest sites getting strong statements of support from numerous international celebrities.
• The official response of the Ministry of External Affairs was disproportionate to the provocation, but it was not merely the reaction of a thin-skinned government.
• The argument put forth by the government pushed a more fundamental premise: it warned the concerned global voices that these matters — democracy and human rights, left unstated — were India’s ‘internal affair’.

 

Universal Rights:

• Being respected, not having their dignity violated and having a sense of security is what everyone, anywhere should get, whether it is Syrians on an Italian shore, the Rohingya in Myanmar, Hindus in Pakistan or stateless refugees on a border in Mexico.
• No government has immunity because it violates human rights in its jurisdiction.
• Prime Minister Narendra Modi could not have been more misplaced as he was, when he spoke of ‘Foreign Destructive Ideology’ in Parliament to refer to global concerns for rights of protesting farmers.
• The belief that what India or what any other nation does to its people is an ‘internal matter’, is as misdirected a defence as the one a wife-beating husband deploys with his neighbors — that it is not their business.

 

Nation and the idea of rights:

• India played a signature role in drawing the world together to oppose the apartheid government of South Africa, and it took till 1962 to override the sovereignty shield used by the government to continue oppressing the Black population.
• India stayed firm from the 1950s till a resolution was adopted and a United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid was set up by the United Nations.
• India’s work, in consistently creating awareness and resistance against the demonization of Nelson Mandela via the Rivonia trial in 1963, checked the Apartheid regime from awarding him the death sentence.
• The principle document signed in the last century, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights laid down the terms for the post-war world, and it enshrined the rights and the freedoms of all people, living everywhere.
• It was not something that was forced down India’s throat by its colonial rulers. India was a member of the first Human Rights Commission, which was to draft the ‘international bills of rights.
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted from January 1947 till December 10, 1948, when it was eventually adopted by the General Assembly.

 

Rights are indivisible:

• The makers of the Indian Constitution did not invoke paranoia about respecting Indian tradition, customs or hiding perverse practices.
• Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan famously said while commending the Objectives Resolution, or the basic road map of the Constitution, to the Assembly, that the endeavor was “a fundamental alteration in the structure of Indian society, to abolish every vestige of despotism, every heirloom of inorganic tradition.”
• The triad of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ engraved in the Preamble, drew significantly from the slogan which had proved influential following the French Revolution.
• It flowed from the realization, in B.R. Ambedkar’s words, that given the vice-like grip of the “graded inequality” of the caste system, all three elements, together, were absolutely essential if Indians were to realize their full potential.
• To quote B.R. Ambedkar who on the eve of the adoption of the Preamble explained how Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were connected and locked into each other firmly.
• Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative. Without fraternity, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Without fraternity, liberty and equality could not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them.

 

New Delhi’s recent moves:

• To cite Atmanirbhar as a counter to international concerns about freedoms, equality and the right to dissent amounts to hiding behind the flimsy excuse of sovereignty to escape the bitter truth of the slithering slope of democratic rights India appears to be going down.
• The case the Indian government is making is all the more specious as its own immediate concern expressed, officially by its External Affairs Minister when visiting Sri Lanka, on the Sri Lankan government needing to do more to safeguard Tamil lives belies this principle.
• The starkest case where India made human rights of citizens of other countries its business was in 2019 when the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, offered a home for certain persecuted citizens of three foreign countries.
• When it comes to universal human rights and international attention, the premier example is of the liberation of Bangladesh which India led and shepherded by invoking these principles.

 

The issue is a reality problem:

• The Prime Minister and his government have actively courted foreign approval. Two dozen foreign envoys were taken on a guided tour of Kashmir last week because getting a favorable opinion from foreigner’s matters to the government.
• At the height of tensions and the shutdown there, before Indian Members of Parliament were allowed, a delegation of far-right European Parliament members was bussed around deserted streets.
• The Prime Minister has personally appeared with celebrities in foreign lands during his numerous trips, seeking their approval.
• The craving for approval is natural for any publicity-seeking politician, but a democracy cannot be reduced to only demanding praise from the rest of the world and raising the bogey of ‘internal matters’ when international voices express solidarity with dissenters and raise serious concerns.

 

Conclusion:

• Global concerns about democratic rights in India cannot be dealt with by arresting messengers, bullying ‘amplifiers’ or shutting down social media accounts. India does not have an image problem; it has a reality problem.
• Changing the reality and adhering to best democratic practices inside is the only durable solution if the Modi government wants its image ‘fixed’.

 

https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/human-rights-are-everyones-business/article33918145.ece