The attempt by the Indian Government to denigrate human rights Organizations like Amnesty International has the overt support of an influential section of the intelligentsia.
This has been evident in the Sustained campaign that some newspapers have run against these Organizations and in the uncritical purveying of the briefings of the Union Home Ministry to eminent editors columnists and correspondents alike. It is also evident in the pompous public pronouncement of retired bureaucrat’s police officers and politicians that it is the terrorists who violate human rights and the State only reacts to them. They argue that human rights organizations ought therefore to investigate the former instead of telling sovereign States what to do.
The opinion making ability of this minuscule group of self-appointed defenders of the Indian State is considerable. For a large section of the people whatever they say assumes axiomatic significance. Like junk-food driving out good food their ready packaged opinions backed as they are by an approving State become the staple of the unthinking.
That is the State which guarantees human rights and not militant outfits and that it is the State which goes and signs the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and not say a self-styled Lieutenant General of a militant group operating in Punjab should be self-evident. But it is not my intention here to counter the absurd arguments of these intellectuals aligned with the State against human rights organizations. They have been answered else-where by human rights activists and much more competently.
A more interesting question is: Why is a vociferous section of the Indian intelligentsia defending the violation of human rights in the country? Why in its eyes is it not right to show a mirror to the Indian State and say that what is professed in the Constitution of India about human rights is at variance with what is happening in the country? Why do they think that Amnesty International is adopting amorally superior posture by condemning torture when the entire might of the Indian State cannot be used to even arrest policemen responsible for chopping off the testicles of a suspect in a police station a few miles from Delhi in the state of Haryana? How can such criticism be sustained when during the Amnesty team’s visit the police involved in a custodial rape case in the nation’s capital are suspended reinstated to their jobs and suspended again all in one week?
It cannot be anyone’s case that these critics of the human rights organizations are either insane or do not understand modem statecraft. Some in fact have been part of that statecraft while others hope to play a more important role in it. So the explanation of their behavior must lie outside the residual category of madness or ignorance.
Two common explanations have been offered for this behavior and both are descriptive in nature. The first of these is that the Indian elite have lost its erstwhile moral passion as there has been a hardening of habits of arbitrary exercise of power by it. The second explanation posts that there has been a rapid emergence of large middle class in India whose primary preoccupation is consumerist and which therefore has no time to get indignant over human rights violations.
These are both good first approximations at understanding the indifference of sections of the Indian political elite to human rights violations. But they do not help explain why they have become actively statist. Two hypotheses can be offered to understand the behavior of the present Indian State and the intellectuals aligned to it first the Indian State which began as a reformist State is sliding into the role of an adversary State seeing itself pitted against the people in trying to get their obedience. And second because of the expediency of legitimizing its behavior it is increasingly getting into what political scientists call “consent contracts” with those who wield clout in society but are not direct employees of the State
This process has to be viewed against the backdrop of the collapse of communism. The failure of the communist idea has had disastrous consequences for the Reformist State in the Third World and more than the communists it has affected the liberal intelligentsia there. The collapse of the limiting case of a reformist state i.e the Soviet Union has delegitimized the entire spectrum of ideas associated with such a State. An important consequence of this has been the hardening of the arteries of liberalism in the Third World and India is no exception.
In this country to the prestige and legitimacy once associated with fighting injustice involvement in popular causes and more movements is fast disappearing as a more aggressive and antagonistic State has come into being. Any activism against its organs whether on behalf of those at the receiving end of the States misdemeanors the ethnic and religious minorities those outside the ambit of the market economy or the ousters of development projects is derisively dismissed by the State as politically motivated This new macho State sees itself as being above politics and unaccountable.
It is a State which for a variety of reasons has failed to live up to its erstwhile reformist image and as a throw-back has abandoned itself to the mercy of unbridled market forces which it had found abhorrent in its earlier avatar because of the ingrained structural inequalities of Indian society. Its past failures coupled with the uncertainty associated with the outcome of the new mantras being chanted by it have made it unsure and therefore increasingly aggressive Every Criticism is seen as a threat to its very being. All means are considered valid to maintain what it calls “law and order.” However in the process the rule of law itself becomes a casualty eroding the very legitimacy that the State is seeking in the first place.
The Indian State has always been the most important dispenser of status in society. However with the erosion of liberalism the sources of self-affirmation outside the State have tended to get depleted giving the Indian State an unprecedented role as a patron. Growing political apathy and cynicism among people is one outcome of this.
The other is the opportunity it has opened up for those intellectuals willing to openly seek a rewarding patron-client relationship with the State. In their statist pronouncements they not only seek self-affirmation as defenders of the Indian State but the more loudly and effectively they make such pronouncements the more they increase the chances of rewards from the State. Sometimes such rewards may be tangible in terms of securing political appointments as Governors ambassadors or in some advisory committee or the other. But they may also be in terms of better access recognition as an intellectual celebrity or even as an honorary arm of the State.
Article extracted from this publication >> December 11, 1992
