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Session #1: Tuesday, 28 December, 9.00 - 10.45 (Tagore 4)
Panel coordinator(s): * (*)
Chair/discussant: Sitharamam Kakarala (*)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
Human rights is a framework that is undeniably pivotal in articulations regarding and interventions in a dizzying range of issues like custodial violence, displacement, sexual harassment, extra-judicial killings, death penalty, prostitution, child lobar, domestic violence etc. While human rights activists are able to intervene in several of these issues in order to highlight violations and to seek various kinds of remedial action, the framework is also faced with several challenges in its ground level activities. I would like to look at some of the issues that human rights activity in India has been involved with, and examine the effectiveness of the interventions made. What is the nature of the intervention that the rights framework is capable of making, and does it have any limitations? For example, does understanding the Naxalite and State violence as a human rights issue allow us to usefully analyse and engage with the phenomena? What are the conceptual limits that the human rights framework comes up against in its engagement with various issues within India? I will also examine in the paper if there are any specific characteristics to the manner in which the human rights discourse channelises articulations on the nature of violation and demands remedial actions. How will such an understanding enrich the task of analysing social and political events and devising more effective methods of dealing with them? What is the charge, purchase and effect of this concept at the various levels of its deployment? How far and how well has the framework carried us in both thinking through and acting on the various exigencies that make up our everyday realities?
Complex circuits of ‘concern’ around poor children, that traverse both state and civil society, underlie the recent Right to Education Act. Although legal discourse usually traces this to the Unnikrishnan case and its expansion of Article 21, it is not ideas of injustice but rather an economic-managerial logic that underlies specific aspects of the RTE. Within this it is the ‘technical’ provisions in the Act that become cause for disagreements between state and civil society, disagreements that ironically produce, circulate and naturalize a particular imagination of schooling in the lives of the poor children. This growing faith in law to re-order these lives symbolizes an historical moment in which the figure of the poor child is being made available for wider consumption. The hubris of believing that one’s actions can make a difference in someone else’s life has become commonplace in the middle class imagination of the poor child, particularly in recent campaigns around teaching these children and sponsoring their education. This constellation of various communities of concern do not necessarily see their role as aiding the state in implementing the law (particularly the 25% reservation for the poor in private schools!) but view their work as urgent precisely because this emergent apparatus of the legal puts into circulation certain ethical certitudes of what constitutes an ideal childhood with education forming its greatest truth. The proposed paper invokes what this legislation sets in place as a series of affects that have produced a new language around poor children and communities, care, rights, ethics, responsibility etc. The naturalization of the sensibilities contained in this terminology is schooling’s assumed role as the self-styled bearer of modernity. This role, largely overdetermined within legal and policy discourse, remains provocatively unsettled in poor children and their communities everyday negotiations with school, and it is this that the paper attempts to discuss.
This paper shall critique the failure of contemporary human rights to alleviate global poverty in the face of economic globalisation and how such failure necessitates a discussion on identifying and investigating alternative strategies for addressing the human rights deficit in addressing global injustices. This is where the emerging discourse on responsibility can inform poverty reduction policies and programmes, both at the national and international level.
The author shall also argue, that an ethic of responsibility finds limited expression through an obligation of international cooperation and assistance in international human rights law based on an understanding of ‘shared responsibility’ and signals the practical way forward in addressing global poverty and suffering.
The dominant language, dynamics and politics of human rights, often overshadow the need to specify who bears the responsibility to deliver on those rights. In a world of extreme poverty, deprivation and suffering, it becomes necessary to identify those particular agents who are able, obliged and willing to relieve such suffering. The philosophy of assisting the distant stranger may be explained through cosmopolitan theories of justice. The works of Nancy Fraser, David Miller and Iris Marion Young further shapes this approach which moves away from a purely statist view of justice by generating obligations on political, social and economic multilateral institutions.
An ethic of responsibility shifts the focus towards challenging the unfair power structures that abuse the universal human rights regime to perpetuate poverty and injustice worldwide and offers practicable remedies or solutions to the problems at hand. . The moral distance between human rights and multilateral institutions like the IMF/World Bank results from a denial of their institutional role in the perpetuation of global poverty. It is such ‘diffusion of responsibility’ that the ethic of responsibility seeks to redress through the duty to assist that emerges from ideas of global justice and not mere charity.
Past decades have seen increased litigation on socio-economic rights in many countries. India has been a pioneer in this field, including litigation on the right to health. As health rights litigation grows in other countries, an examination of the Indian experience is warranted to ascertain and evaluate the factors behind such litigation as well as its impact on the formation of health policy and the delivery of health services.
Such an evaluation is particularly important since India’s performance on basic health indicators remains low when compared to similarly-situated developing countries. Ranked the fourth lowest in the world in terms of public spending on health as a percentage of GDP, the situation appears incongruent in light of India’s high rates of economic growth, and broader social justice commitments made by the government, including toward realization of the UN Millennium Development Goals.
This paper seeks to identify the major contributions of health rights litigation towards the realization of the right to health in India. In so doing, it examines health rights litigation from the perspective of claims formation, adjudication, implementation and corresponding social outcomes to health rights litigation. Following this analysis, it appears that India’s health rights litigation has made important contributions to norm formation, ensuring access to justice for marginalised groups and creating/sustaining channels of communication and negotiation between affected groups and state actors to reach remedies that appear workable to all parties.
Indian courts have played a significant role in health rights litigation by recognizing basic goods and services as legally enforceable entitlements. Whether and how these developments result in measurable social outcomes will have to be considered more extensively over time as broad-based needs begin to be more systematically addressed by this litigation. However, court-imposed remedies remain insufficient to bring about systemic changes in health and economic policies needed at the macro level to deliver a basic standard of health services throughout the country.