Information Society Watch

This posting is part of a larger discussion on a list serve and is in response to a previous email which challenged the notion of ‘Right to Development’ and collective rights as a concept. This writing talks about why collective rights are important.

Rights to me are a set of basic conditions and purposes of political association of human groups. They are basic, and therefore they cannot be each and every thing which is decided by the concerned political community. However at the same time the nature of political association, and of a political community, is not static. Its members today have the same right to pull together some ‘basic’ conditions and purposes of their association as someone had in say circa 1823.

We know that nature of political communities have undergone great change through history, and the conception of rights can be said to have undergone a corresponding change. It can be no one’s case that we have reached the end of history, so I find this thing about lets stick to existing rights a bit difficult to swallow. It is more difficult to accept this for someone from a society that is in the middle of more rapid political evolution than someone in a relatively mature political system. And since, as discussed, changes in conception of rights has directly to do with evolution of a political community, I have a great problem with how most analyses of rights as have been seen on this list mostly simply refuse to factor this angle in. (this evolution of political communities also cannot be taken to be going in a given specified direction, a la modernization theory.)

Another issue of relevance here is this distinction of some rights needing spending of resources, as if others don’t. Go to the stateless parts of Afghanistan, or Sudan, or insurgency bound areas of Kashmir, and you will begin to understand what kind of resource expenditure and systems need to be put in place to ensure the right against bodily harm, what to speak of FoE. Ensuring any right needs work to be done. And doing any work/ effort means expenditure of resources. So this distinction too, at the bottom, is very fallacious.

This is not to say that all political claims are rights, or even that all rights are equally important. Depending on our individual and collective political preferences, some may be more important than the other. And some are most important for all of us. For instance, we will all agree that the right against bodily harm is something extremely basic and important. But there are many grey shades here as political communities evolve. Does the right of children not to work in relatively dangerous conditions derive from this right? (Or, the right not to work at all.) Which all other ‘child rights’ derive for this right and from others. What are dangerous conditions? At some point just working long hours can be considered dangerous. Can then working long hours for adults also be considered dangerous?. Does then, the right to have a decent livelihood without working in ‘dangerous conditions’ become a right derived from the right against bodily harm. Does it mean anything, or help, to christen a new set of rights as child rights or labour rights, or is it blasphemous to the basic ideals of human rights. Who decides when this point of blasphemy is reached?

It is amusing that people could argue that we should close the list of rights - as the list of states who can legally pursue nuclear weapon programs is official closed – when we, for instance, in India, see daily struggles of people to claim basic political rights, through grassroots movements, constructing these rights collectively, through new political consciousness. There is this right to livelihood struggle by tribals whose forest inhabitation is taken away by ‘civilized’ people carried self-certified documents based on right to property, and its ‘legal’ adjudication (reminds of something long back in the US ??). People dying with AIDS in millions when there are medicines that are not allowed to be produced by them (local companies) for self-consumption in the name of intellectual property rights. And therefore there is a (counter) political assertion of a right to health. This are only a few vignettes of the political struggles of a big number of people which are very conveniently sought to be excluded by some, from conceptions of what is political most important and non-negotiable – ‘our’ rights (whose??).

This doesn’t mean that we can talk about rights loosely. No not at all. These are, by definition, issues of highest importance to human life. But neither one should seek to freeze an arbitrary codification for everyone about what is of highest importance to human life for different political communities (including for the global community, whose ‘political community’ nature is increasingly stronger, and therefore we should be more careful than ever of political dominations, even if in the name of human rights.)

In fact, at a seminar organized by IT for Change a few years back a social activist strongly challenged the conception of ‘communication rights’ as being un-connected to any people’s movement or people’s perspectives. She was strongly of the opinion that one has to be careful putting things in a ’rights framework’, and not doing so devalues people’s struggles (not only Indian people’s struggles but as much as those of French, and American whose struggles underlie some very important rights). I have not brought this subject up with her but I expect her to criticize a conception of a possible ‘right to the Internet’ from the same perspective. I don’t think she will be right in doing so, but I do agree with her framework of critique.

But I don’t agree with the frameworks of defending ‘existing rights’ and negating any other conceptions that seek refuge in UDHR as ‘the’ rights document or in negative-positive right distinctions. Instead, let us be tuned in to people’s political realities and struggles which give shape to rights. There is no other yardstick of ‘deciding on’ what can be or cant be rights. Such essentialism is self serving for the respective political ideologies professed by the protagonists. (No, it is not neo-imperialism - at least, not yet :-) )

Since we are discussing rights as a part of an advocacy group (which concerns social change), I think we should, in my view, be more tuned with real frontiers of social change, and deep political realities of these frontiers. And since this is a global group, I think its political legitimacy lies in being globally inclusive in conceiving of what is highest in terms of our political priorities as a global political community.