The govt must commit itself to undoing injustice

Neera Chandhoke

Political Scientist

THE first International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture was held in Paris from June 21 to 25, 1935. Writers aligned with the Left, surrealists, the avant-garde, liberals and pacifists denounced the rising tide of fascism in Europe before an audience of thousands. The speakers were ‘engaged writers’ — those who believe that art and politics go hand in hand and that one cannot exist without the other. Held at the Palais de Mutualite, a traditional meeting site for the Left Bank and progressive intellectuals, the conference was swamped by Parisians. This was the same city that had witnessed anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus affair in the late 19th century.

By the 1930s, political solidarity among intellectuals could no longer be confined to cafes of radical neighbourhoods. Anxiety over fascism in Europe produced international solidarity. André Gide, a famous French writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1947, memorably said that each one of them had a “right to inspect his neighbour’s territory”.

In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights delivered the same message. When regimes violate the basic rights of a section of their citizens, other states and international agencies have the “right to inspect their territory”. In effect, the declaration legitimised concern for the rights of all people, even if they live in faraway lands. Rights are universal. Intellectuals, wherever they may be, must speak up against fascism and the harm it causes to vulnerable groups.

Over the past decade, a number of international organisations have reported that the authorities in India have violated the rights of minorities, jailed civil liberty activists and journalists and suppressed civil society. In September last year, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues described the deteriorating rights situation in India as ‘massive, systematic and dangerous’. At a meeting of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, the rapporteur, Fernand de Varennes, stated that India risked becoming one of the world’s main generators of instability, atrocities and violence. He described the massive scale of violations and abuses that targeted Muslims, Sikhs and Christians as symptomatic of religious nationalism. He especially referred to major violations of basic rights in Manipur, particularly the degrading treatment meted out to two women from the Christian Kuki community.

Numerous human rights organisations have expressed concern about hate speech against Muslims, the destruction of their properties and the fundamentally discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act. The Human Rights Watch, in its World Report 2024, stated that India had undermined its aspirations for world leadership as a rights-respecting democracy with persistent policies that discriminated against and stigmatised religious minorities. We find more of the same in other reports that assert a legitimate right to “inspect their neighbour’s territory” to identify injustice.

The leadership and the cadres of the ruling party should learn a lesson from its diminished mandate in the recent General Election. Hopefully, the government will launch a project of reparative justice to right the wrongs committed in the past 10 years in the name of Hindu nationalism. Reparative or corrective justice is different from the principle of redistributive justice. Redistributive justice is a norm that governs the fair allocation of resources in a society. Reparative justice concentrates on the harm done to citizens — violation of physical integrity through lynching and murder and affronts to human dignity caused through slurs and hate speech — and tries to rectify the wrongs. This avatar of justice identifies the offender as well as the person or group that has been harmed. The offender in this case is the government, which inflicted harm through the indiscriminate imprisonment of dissenters and condoned violence unleashed on citizens.

The concept establishes a relationship between power elites who harm or tolerate harm and those who have been harmed. It focuses on the restoration of justice in a society that is composed of many social groups, many of whom are extremely vulnerable to majoritarianism. The logic of reparative justice is to repair the harm done to the minds and bodies of citizens. Reparative justice is, thus, the conceptual companion of redistributive justice. In the case of the former, the government accepts responsibility for past wrongs done for morally arbitrary reasons.

Throughout history, many regimes have apologised for the harm done. But an apology is not enough. An erring government has to commit that these harms will not be repeated and that the dignity and physical integrity of all citizens will be respected. Reparative justice demands that the balance between social groups, fragile at best, be re-established, relationships repaired and fraternity rebuilt.

This is important because, as BR Ambedkar told the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, liberty, equality and fraternity “form a union of trinity in the sense that to divorce one from the other is to defeat the very purpose of democracy… Without fraternity, liberty and equality would not become a natural course of things. It would require a constable to enforce them.” Indian society, he said, lacks fraternity: “What does fraternity mean? Fraternity means a sense of common brotherhood of all Indians — of Indians being one people. It is the principle which gives unity and solidarity to social life.” The results of the General Election have resoundingly established that the people of India do not want this trinity to be disturbed. The NDA government has to understand the popular mood and launch the project of reparative justice.

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