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| India-Pakistan | |
| India : Shift from Citizens' Rights, to Duties. People whine as they're told they have duties. | |
| 2019-12-03 | |
[ThePrint.in] Modi's new love: Fundamental duties Indira Gandhi inserted in Constitution during Emergency
Then it was reported that the Ministry of Human Resource Development has sent a letter to all institutes of higher education, laying out the guidelines on how to celebrate Constitution Day. What is striking about the letter is its repeated focus on fundamental duties for this year's celebration. But this is not a one-off incident. There was a letter sent out in 2016 too wherein fundamental duties were similarly given special attention. It is quite clear that Modi and the state apparatus under him seem to believe that the thrust of constitutional education and constitutional discourse must be centred around fundamental duties. I'll skip a bit. Modi's citation of M.K. Gandhi in The New York Times article to support his emphasis on 'duties' is indeed correct. However, Gandhian thinking on rights and duties represents only a sliver of India's constitutional tradition. Most of Indian constitutional thinking, forged in the crucible of our freedom movement, emphasized rights and not duties. Apart from one or two instances where members of the Constituent Assembly echoed Gandhi's idea on rights and duties, we find no evidence that remotely suggests that the framers of our Constitution seriously considered adopting something that resembled fundamental duties. While they might have had moral and political convictions about the links between rights and duties, they did not find it appropriate for these to be encoded into the Indian Constitution. Fundamental rights were given the most emphasis. And here it is... Authoritarian regimes emphasize duties over rights This is not to say the idea that citizens must perform certain duties towards their fellow citizens and society is not important. A lot of what we have in our fundamental duties chapter is laudable and must be aspired to. However, when political leaders and the state equate duties with rights, or worse, elevate the former over the latter, alarms bells should ring, especially when this happens in a political ambience flush with majoritarianism and under an authoritarian leader. But why would the Modi government want us to pay less focus on rights to freedom, equality, non-discrimination, minority welfare, etc and instead obsess over our fundamental duties inserted during Indira Gandhi's Emergency? Well, authoritarian regimes know that they can profit immensely from such a 'paradigm shift'. First, this shift allows the state to erect a mask over violations of citizen's rights. When citizens are exclusively concerned about the performance of duties, issues of rights are relegated to the fringes of their attention. We would focus on state-assigned homework to ensure our streets are swachh (clean) and remain oblivious to the rights of manual scavengers. By using the language of 'duties', any call for accountability of state action that violates rights can be dismissed as a form of selfishness: 'You keep talking of rights but what about your duties' was something that was heard during the JNU-Kanhaiya Kumar episode. Kanhaiya Kumar is a Marxist activist. The students' claims to right of free expression and protection against state violence were responded with some form of 'you are a student. It is your duty to study, not protest'. But God forbid ! A student... study ?! A republic that is brainwashed into thinking that fundamental duties are the crème of the Constitution, can slowly begin to worship the very concept of duty itself - even if this duty has nothing to do with the actual content in the chapter on fundamental duties in the Constitution. The BJP government is stellar at handpicking certain fringes of India's constitutional tradition that it finds agreeable and dressing them up as the Constitution's core. It performs fancy footwork around India's constitutional and political history to dazzle the citizenry into confusion about the republic's founding ideals. The citizenry, according to Marxists being dolts who are meant to be dazzled, seduced, entrapped, and 'managed' to death. They cannot have their own convictions, surely ? They haven't even read the Manifesto or smoked pot ! The author is the senior associate editor for Constitutional and Civic Citizenship at the Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bengaluru ... An incosequential dweeb really. | |
| Posted by:Dron66046 |