by Amartya Sen
Attention must be paid to the extensive evidence that democracy and political and civil rights tend to enhance freedoms of other kinds (such as human security) through giving a voice, at least in many circumstances, to the deprived and the vulnerable. That is an important issue, and closely linked with democracy’s role in public reasoning and in fostering ‘government by discussion’. Democracy’s success in preventing famines belongs to democracy’s many-sided contributions
* India is also a counter-example to the thesis that is sometimes entertained that a country’s per capita income has to be reasonably high for the stability of the democratic system.
† What must also be noted here is that, despite the dominance of befuddled economic policies in India for many decades, the democratic system itself allowed – and made way for – some of the necessary reforms that could make economic growth much faster.
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t h e p r a c t i c e o f d e m o c r a c y in advancing human security, but there are many other fields of application as well.*
The protective power of democracy in providing security is, in fact, much more extensive than famine prevention. The poor in booming South Korea or Indonesia may not have given much thought to democracy when the economic fortunes of all seemed to go up and up together in the 1980s and early 1990s, but when the economic crises came (and divided they fell) in the late 1990s, democracy and political and civil rights were desperately missed by those whose economic means and lives were unusually battered. Democracy suddenly became a central issue in these countries, with South Korea taking a major initiative in that direction.
India has, without doubt, benefited from the protective role of democracy in giving the rulers excellent political incentive to act supportively when natural disasters threaten. However, the practice and reach of democracy can be quite imperfect, as it is in India, despite the achievements that are undoubtedly present. Democracy gives an opportunity to the opposition to press for policy change even when the problem is chronic and has had a long history, rather than being acute and sudden, as in the case of famines. The relative weakness of Indian social policies on school education, basic healthcare, child nutrition, essential land reform and gender equity reflects deficiencies of politically engaged public reasoning and social pressure (including pressure from the opposition), not just inadequacies in the official thinking of the government.† Indeed, India provides an excellent example of both the significant achievements of democracy and its
* See the report of the Commission on Human Security, set up jointly by the United Nations and the government of Japan: Human Security Now (New York: UN, 2003).
I was privileged to chair this commission jointly with the visionary Dr Sadako Ogata, formerly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. See also Mary Kaldor, Human Security: Reflections on Globalization and Intervention (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
† The Indian press can also be faulted for the lack of reach in dealing with persistent but not immediately fatal deprivations. For an analysis of this problem from one of the most distinguished editors in India, see N. Ram, ‘An Independent Press and Anti-hunger Strategies: The Indian Experience’, in Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen (eds), The Political Economy of Hunger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). See also Kaushik Basu, The Retreat of Democracy (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e specific failures connected with an inadequate utilization of the opportunities offered by democratic institutions. There is a strong case for going beyond electoral niti to democratic nyaya.
d e m o c r a c y a n d p o l i c y c h o i c e Only in some parts of India has the urgency of social policies been adequately politicized. The experiences of the state of Kerala provide perhaps the clearest example, where the need for universal education, basic healthcare, elementary gender equity and land reforms has received effective political backing. The explanation encompasses both history and contemporary development: the educational orientation of Kerala’s anti-upper-caste movements (of which the current left-wing politics of Kerala is a successor), the early initiatives of the
‘native kingdoms’ of Travancore and Cochin (which stayed outside the Raj for domestic policies), missionary activities in the spread of education (their effects were not confined only to Christians, who constitute a fifth of the Kerala population), and also a stronger voice for women in family decisions, partly linked to the presence and prominence of matrilineal property rights for a substantial and influential section – the Nairs – of the Hindu community.6 Over a very long time now Kerala has made good use of political activism and voice to expand the range of social opportunities. The utilization of democratic institutions is certainly not independent of the nature of social conditions.
It is hard to escape the general conclusion that economic performance, social opportunity, political voice and public reasoning are all deeply interrelated. In those fields in which there has recently been a more determined use of political and social voice, there are considerable signs of change. The issue of gender inequality has produced much more political engagement in recent years (often led by women’s movements), and this has added to determined political efforts at reducing gender asymmetry in social and economic fields. There is a long history in India of women’s prominence in particular areas, including in leadership positions in politics. While those achievements were certainly linked with the voice of women (helped by the opportu-350
t h e p r a c t i c e o f d e m o c r a c y nities of participatory politics in recent years), their reach has been largely confined to relatively small segments – mostly the more prosperous sections – of the population.* An important feature of the strengthening of the voice of women in contemporary Indian public life is the gradual broadening of this social coverage. India still has a long way to go in removing inequalities in the position of women, but the increasing political involvement in the social role of women has been an important and constructive development in democratic practice in India.
In general, possibilities of public agitation on issues of social inequality and deprivation are now beginning to be more utilized than before, even though engagement on these issues was eclipsed for several years because of the sectarian politics that diverted attention from these concerns. There has been much more action recently in organized movements based broadly on demands for human rights, such as the right to school education, the right to food (and, in particular, to midday school meals), the entitlement to basic healthcare, guarantees of environmental preservation and the right of ‘employment guarantee’. These movements serve to focus attention on particular societal failures, partly as a supplement to broad public discussions in the media, but they also provide a politically harder edge to socially important demands.
Democratic freedom can certainly be used to enhance social justice and a better and fairer politics. The process, however, is not automatic and requires activism on the part of politically engaged citizens. While the lessons of empirical experiences studied here have come mainly from Asia, particularly India and China, similar lessons can be drawn for other regions, including the United States and European countries.†
* While most of the female political leaders in India have come from the urban elite, there are a few cases of remarkable political success of female leaders of rural low-caste groups, coming from the more affluent sections of those groups.
† Indeed, the practice of democracy remains still quite imperfect in the world’s oldest democracy in terms of barriers to participation and the reach of media coverage (even though with Barack Obama’s election as President one big barrier to participation seems, at last, to have been breached at the top). On the problems of democratic practice in the USA, see the illuminating book by Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
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I turn, finally, to what is undoubtedly one of the most difficult issues that democracy has to tackle. The recognition that democracy has to be concerned both with majority rule and the rights of minorities is not a new idea, even though (as was discussed in the last chapter), in the organizational context, democracy is frequently seen entirely in terms of balloting and majority rule. A broader understanding of democracy as public reasoning (discussed in the last chapter), which includes the use of ballots but goes much beyond that, can accommodate the importance of minority rights without ignoring majority votes as part of the total structure of democracy. The eighteenth-century pioneer of social choice theory, the Marquis de Condorcet, had warned against ‘the maxim, too prevalent among ancient and modern republicans, that the few can legitimately be sacrificed to the many’.7
There remains, however, the problem that a ruthless majority that has no compunction in eliminating minority rights would tend to make the society face a hard choice between honouring majority rule and guaranteeing minority rights. The formation of tolerant values is thus quite central to the smooth functioning of a democratic system (as was discussed in Chapter 14).
The issues involved also apply to the role of democracy in preventing sectarian violence. The problem here is more complicated than the easy recognition that democracy can eliminate famines. Even though famine victims form a small proportion of any threatened population, democracy prevents famines because the plight of the minority is politicized by public discussion to generate a huge majority for famine prevention, since the general population has no particular reason to entertain any hardened hostility – or exploitable animosity – towards potential famine victims. The process is far more complicated with sectarian strife when inter-community hostilities can be fanned by extremists through demagoguery.
The role of democracy in preventing community-based violence depends on the ability of inclusive and interactive political processes to subdue the poisonous fanaticism of divisive communal thinking.
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t h e p r a c t i c e o f d e m o c r a c y This has been an important task in independent India, especially since that multireligious and secular polity was born in a period of huge communal strife and violence in the 1940s, a period that was short in the number of years but long in casting a huge shadow of vulnerability.
The problem was explicitly discussed in this form by Mohandas Gandhi, in his clarification of the importance of inclusiveness as an essential part of the democracy sought by the independence movement that he led.8
There has been some success in this respect, and the secularism of democratic India has broadly speaking survived intact, despite occasional strains, with mutual tolerance and respect. That survival has not, however, prevented periodic outbursts of sectarian violence, often fed by political groups that benefit from such divisiveness. The effect of sectarian demagoguery can be overcome only through the championing of broader values that go across divisive barriers. The recognition of the multiple identities of each person, of which the religious identity is only one, is crucially important in this respect; for example, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians in India not only share a nationality, but, depending on the individual, can share other identities, such as a language, a literature, a profession, a location and many other bases of categorization.* Democratic politics allows the opportunity to discuss these non-sectarian affiliations and their rival claims over religious divisions.† The fact that, after the murderous attacks in Mumbai in November 2008 by terrorists from a Muslim background (and almost certainly of Pakistani ancestry), the much-feared reaction against Indian Muslims did not emerge was to a great extent due to the public discussion that followed the attacks, to which both Muslims and non-Muslims contributed richly. The
* Similarly the Hutu activists who committed dreadful violence against Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, not only had their divisive Hutu identity, but also shared with Tutsis other identities, such as being Rwandan, African, possibly a Kigalian.
† India, with a population that is more than 80 per cent Hindu, currently has a Sikh prime minister and a leader of the ruling political coalition (and the leading party, Congress) who has a Christian background. Between 2004 and 2007, these two were supplemented by a Muslim president (there were Muslim presidents of India earlier also), so that in that period none of the three principal governing positions of the country was occupied by a member of the majority community – and yet there was no noticeable sense of discontent.
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t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e practice of democracy can certainly assist in bringing out a greater recognition of the plural identities of human beings.9
And yet communal distinctions, like racial differences, remain open to exploitation by those who want to cultivate discontent and instigate violence, unless the bonds established by national democracies serve as an effective safeguard against this.* Much will depend on the vigour of democratic politics in generating tolerant values, and there is no automatic guarantee of success by the mere existence of democratic institutions. Here an active and energetic media can play an extremely important part, in making the problems, predicaments and humanity of certain groups more understood by other groups.
The success of democracy is not merely a matter of having the most perfect institutional structure that we can think of. It depends inescapably on our actual behaviour patterns and the working of political and social interactions. There is no chance of resting the matter in the ‘safe’ hands of purely institutional virtuosity. The working of democratic institutions, like that of all other institutions, depends on the activities of human agents in utilizing opportunities for reasonable realization. The practical lessons from these empirical accounts would seem to complement, broadly, the theoretical arguments explored earlier in this book. The conceptual case for invoking nyaya, and not just niti, in the pursuit of justice is strongly supported by the lessons of the empirical experiences presented here.
* The organized riots in Gujarat in 2002, in which close to 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, died, remains a huge blot in the country’s political record, just as the opposition to those events in the rest of India pointed to the strength of secular values in democratic India. There is evidence, based on electoral studies, that this shameful episode did strengthen the electoral support of the secular parties in the 2004 general elections that followed those terrible events.
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17
Human Rights and
Global Imperatives
There is something very appealing in the idea that every person anywhere in the world, irrespective of citizenship, residence, race, class, caste or community, has some basic rights which others should respect. The big moral appeal of human rights has been used for a variety of purposes, from resisting torture, arbitrary incarceration and racial discrimination to demanding an end to hunger and starvation, and to medical neglect across the globe. At the same time, the basic idea of human rights, which people are supposed to have simply because they are human, is seen by many critics as entirely without any kind of a reasoned foundation. The questions that are recurrently asked are: do these rights exist? Where do they come from?
It is not disputed that the invoking of human rights can be very attractive as a general belief, and it may even be politically effective as rhetoric. Scepticism and anxiety relate to what is thought to be the
‘softness’ or the ‘mushiness’ of the conceptual grounding of human rights. Many philosophers and legal theorists see the rhetoric of human rights as just loose talk – well-meaning and perhaps even laudable loose talk – which cannot, it is presumed, have much intellectual strength.
The sharp contrast between the widespread use of the idea of human rights and the intellectual scepticism about its conceptual soundness is not new. The American Declaration of Independence took it to be
‘self-evident’ that everyone had ‘certain inalienable righ
ts’, and thir-teen years later, in 1789, the French declaration of ‘the rights of man’
asserted that ‘men are born and remain free and equal in rights’.* But
* The declaration of the ‘rights of man’ came out of the radical ideas associated with the French Revolution, a seismic political event which not only reflected growing 355
t h e i d e a o f j u s t i c e it did not take Jeremy Bentham long, in his Anarchical Fallacies written during 1791–2 and aimed against the French ‘rights of man’, to propose the total dismissal of all such claims. Bentham insisted that
‘natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts’,1 by which, I take it, he meant some kind of an artificially elevated nonsense.
The dichotomy remains very alive today, and despite persistent use of the idea of human rights in the affairs of the world, there are many who see the idea as no more than ‘bawling upon paper’ (to use another of Bentham’s derisive descriptions). The dismissal of human rights is often comprehensive and aimed against any belief in the existence of rights that people can have simply by virtue of their humanity, rather than those they have contingently on specific qualifications such as citizenship, related to provisions in actual legislation or in the accepted
‘common laws’.
Human rights activists are often quite impatient with this intellectual scepticism, perhaps because many of those who invoke human rights are concerned with changing the world rather than interpreting it (to recall a classic distinction made famous by Karl Marx). It is not hard to understand the reluctance of the activists to spend much time in trying to provide conceptual justifications to convince sceptical theorists, given the obvious urgency to respond to terrible deprivations around the world. This proactive stance has had its rewards, since it has allowed the immediate use of the generally appealing idea of human rights to confront intense oppression or great misery, without having to wait for the theoretical air to clear. Nevertheless, conceptual doubts about the idea of human rights must be addressed and its intellectual basis clarified, if it is to command reasoned and sustained loyalty.