Comment in 150 words: The dilemmas of the human rights movements in India. (2014, 10 Marks)
The language of human rights came late to Indian politics: it grew out of post-Emergency civil liberties groups and was institutionalised by the Protection of Human Rights Act 1993. Its dilemmas share one root: the movement has to ask the state to restrain the state.
Five Dilemmas
- Guardian and violator. The main violators (police, army, prisons, detaining authorities) are also the only enforcers. About three in four prisoners are undertrials. AFSPA‘s Section 6 needs Union sanction to prosecute soldiers, and that sanction is seldom given. Preventive detention is written into Part III itself (Article 22). Every remedy won must be executed by the agency accused.
- Security versus liberty. Terrorism, insurgency and Maoist violence are real. Nandita Haksar argues that the movement is tolerated only inside a national-security frame the state defines. Questioning counter-insurgency itself invites the charge of disloyalty. Stan Swamy died in custody on 5 July 2021, untried under the UAPA.
- Non-state violence and selectivity. Human rights law binds the state, but silence about killings by militants invites the charge of selectivity. K. Balagopal left the APCLC and founded the Human Rights Forum in 1998. For him, a rights position that excused revolutionary killing was not a rights position.
- Universal or particular. Individual rights clash with community claims such as personal law and temple custom (Sabarimala, 2018). Amartya Sen‘s reply to the “Asian values” thesis answers the charge that rights are a Western import. Yet the same movement must defend group protections for Dalits, Adivasis and minorities.
- Which rights, which route. The PUCL puts courts and civil liberties first, while the PUDR puts livelihoods and mobilisation first. Litigation wins orders that are rarely enforced. Street protest attracts the “urban Naxal” label. Upendra Baxi warns that donor funding turns movements into professionalised NGOs. Meanwhile the FCRA 2020 amendment (upheld in Noel Harper, 2022) and the pending FCRA Amendment Bill 2026 shrink the resource base.
The Institutional Trap
The NHRC embodies the dilemma. Its findings are recommendatory. Section 19 lets it do no more than seek a report on the armed forces, and Section 36(2) bars inquiry into matters more than a year old. The movement needs its legitimacy but gains little leverage. GANHRI has deferred the NHRC’s re-accreditation since 2023 over its independence, and the review now falls in November 2026.
Conclusion
These dilemmas come with pressing a universal claim on a state that monopolises force. They cannot be escaped, only managed. The movement succeeds when it holds the state to one standard for every victim, and how the state answers is a measure of Indian democracy itself.