Absence of civil liberties leads to violence

Neera Chandhoke

Political Scientist

HISTORIC moments arrive in the life of a political society when its members begin to think, reflect on, debate and reiterate the foundational principles of their democratic polity. The first such moment came in the aftermath of the internal Emergency proclaimed by Indira Gandhi (1975-77). Till then, we were fairly confident that our civil and political liberties were safe because they had been fought for by the freedom struggle and enshrined in the Constitution. No doubt, millions of Indians were steeped in poverty, ill-health, disease and malnourishment. But we believed in the basic tenets of liberalism: that social and economic rights follow the right to freedom of expression, the right to association, the right to assemble peacefully and without arms, the right to the sanctity of life, the right to not be arrested without due cause, the right to privacy, and above all, the right to vote for a democratic government.

Comprehensive restrictions imposed on basic freedoms during the Emergency jolted India. We realised that it is not enough to grant rights. Rights have to be constantly reiterated, asserted and fought for. Otherwise, a state hungry for unlimited power will hijack them. It is significant that the ending of the Emergency catapulted a number of associations in India’s civil society. One of the most important movements that spread rapidly across the country concentrated on the indispensability of civil liberties. The movement proliferated, often through divisions in the parent body. All organisations devoted to the cause focused on the constitutional right to life and liberty, the right to not be arrested without due cause, the right to not be tortured, the right to bodily integrity and freedom from external impediment.

Today, we once again need to retell, re-emphasise, elaborate, justify and launch a struggle for the reclamation of these rights. The cluster of the rights to freedom has not been formally suspended, as during the Emergency. Yet, citizens are arbitrarily thrown into prison for a tweet, for social media posts, for mild criticism of politicians, for a piece published in the newspaper and for lampooning petty power games. There, they languish without any possibility of redress, without hope that the judiciary will, for a change, prove unpredictable and take on the executive, and without any expectation that the powerful media will take up their cause, and fight for fellow citizens who have been banished to the damp, dark dungeons of India’s infamous prison system for reasons that a mature democracy would consider puerile and not worthy of being taking note of.

Cynics will, of course, ask why corporate houses which own the media should bother about people condemned to jail even if they have not committed a crime. That is not the point. The task of the capitalist state, famously theorised by political philosopher Nicos Poulantzas, is to save capitalism from the capitalists. Left to themselves, capitalists bleed their own societies dry. It is the state that staves off revolutions by the grant of political and civil rights. Wielders of state power should take note of another famous political philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, who had been thrown into jail by Mussolini. Revolutions do not happen when a society possesses civil society, he wrote. They happen in states that exercise brute power, a la Tsarist Russia. Therefore, the need for rights.

There was a time when we were caught in the trap of Cold War rhetoric, which divided political and civil rights on the one hand and social rights on the other. The first fell within the provenance of liberal capitalist democracies and the second within actually existing socialist societies. The end of the cold war, thankfully, terminated this artificial distinction. A human being is not free if she is hungry. True. But a well-fed individual who is denied the liberty to follow her muse is also not free.

Freedom lies at the heart of a coherent theory of rights. Equality is a much more difficult concept; it is too intellectual. Liberty forms part of a natural human impulse to break free. The emergence of freedom in political vocabularies proclaimed a rupture in the biography of the political. It signified, according to JS Mill, the struggle between liberty and authority. The ideology of freedom rescued people from slavery and serfdom, from subordination to social hierarchies, from colonialism and from arbitrary post-colonial states.

Freedom is a romantic term; it creates the conditions within which human beings make and remake their world along with others. In Sleep and Poetry, Keats put the idea thus: ‘Though no great minist’ring reason sorts/Out the dark mysteries of human souls/To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls/A vast idea before me/and I glean/Therefrom my liberty.’ This imaginative, creative, poetic human being needs to be free of censorship, have the freedom to do what she wants within the bounds of reasonableness, wear what she wants, marry whom she wants, trace the wisps of her dreams, speak back to a history not of her making and, in short, be an individual who can realise her potential.

The precondition of agency is freedom. Take away people’s freedom, and a society will have nothing but diminished human beings on its hand. Their only recourse will be violence; they can deploy only violence to be free. Freedom does not create violence, it is the absence of freedom that creates violence.

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