Rights and duties in liberal democracies are unequally distributed; Prof Bhaskar’s inquiry explores their institutional dimensions, exclusions, and social imbalances, exclusively for Different Truths.
Sitting at a round table in conversation, the rights and duties of the people around the table boil down to a single unit. Sitting on opposite sides of a rectangular table for the same conversation, rights and duties differ. I intend to focus here on institutional rights and duties. Thus, intra-household rights and duties of children, parents or guardians are out of purview here. In institutional rights, I abstain from enlisting here the Fundamental Rights of citizens as incorporated in the Constitution of India, as well as the rights declared in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. My canvas, thus, is narrow. Still, I hope it opens many questions. Let me explain.
Human beings had rights long before the Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, by the United Nations (UN) on December 10. Rights were abused and annihilated also in the criminal history of mankind through war, genocide, slavery, the killing of Adivasis (tribals) and so on. What we talk about now is rights and duties in a liberal democracy post-colonisation.
We and They
The prudent people take pride in talking about duties. They are academic administrators, judges, corporate executives, and political masters. The professors generally talk about duties in a very narrow domain – the duties of the students. Probably their students included the former category in the not-too-distant past.
The subaltern people talk about neither rights nor duties, for they don’t have the time and opportunity to delve into this discourse. They are vendors, rickshaw pullers, head-load workers, masons, plumbers, electricians, sharecroppers, tenants, and paid women domestic workers. And who is going to listen to them?
The determined people are reminded of their duties. The determining people are not reminded. This became evident when a few months ago the corporate executives of India-origin proposed the working hours of labourers to 90 hours per week. It was obviously for wealth of nation – India.
Social Division of Rights and Duties
In caste division of labour, gender division of labour and community division of labour, some people get engaged – either hired or self-engaged – in some types of work as their duty, like that of manual scavengers, barbers, ironsmiths, tannery workers and all. I have reasons to believe that most of them are not being advised to do duty other than what they have been doing for decades, if not for centuries intergenerationally. Occupational immobility may prove this. Migration under distress is not to be read as occupational mobility.
Reciprocity
Rights and duties are two sides of the same coin. It may not be an exaggeration if these are seen as the same. A has the right to live means B cannot kill him. B has the right to live means A cannot kill him. Rights are reciprocal in a society that is composed of interdependent individuals. Probably, that was the reason the United Nations did not declare universal human duties and restricted itself to declaring universal human rights.
Some Examples
It seems unethical to name people who thought it was their pious duty to remind others of their duties. Some of these preachers failed to perform their duties, institutionally speaking. The fact remains that most of the workers, both manual and non-manual, perform their duties to earn, if not for more reputation. I know workers who were very loyal to the companies they were working for, but the companies were not loyal to them – one example is the River Steam Navigation (RSN) company with its spread of operations in undivided Bengal, undivided Assam, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh that got closed end-1966 leaving workers in distress. Political masters are another category who preach ‘hard labour has no substitute’, whereas the hard labour of the head-load workers of Howrah railway station over the decades did not elevate the workers to the height of tycoons. This is not to be read as anti-labour doctrine.
Guardian Mode
The dictum of what others should or should not do generally comes from the guardian mode. If this mode is forced, then it fails because anything that is forced is not real, or the authority that forces it fails to realise the essence of it. Often, India’s culture is in ‘guardian mode’ – be it from the non-state institutions like the Khap panchayats, religious groups like Sanatan, state actors like the judiciary and public administration. Common people cannot decide what to do and what not, other than devoting time to innocuous duties like spending money on food-education-health care for members in households.
Understanding Rights and Duties
The sharecroppers and marginal farmers hardly understand the meaning of rights and duties as their production domain requires both technologies ‘point input-point output’ and ‘flow input-point output’, unlike fixed working hours for labourers engaged in organised industries that follow ‘flow input-flow output’ technology. The nature of labour hours applied differs, and it does not make much sense to ask the workers engaged in cultivation to be as dutiful by time as the industrial workers are. This, at the same time, does not imply that cultivators are less dutiful than the industrial workers.
Teachers, particularly those engaged in research, understand 24-hour duty, though the scientists do not demonstrate that they are engaged in 24-hour brainstorming. What is visible is the contact hours between the students and the teachers in an institutional arrangement. Some duties are 24-hour by the very nature of the work, like that of the military and Border Security Force (BSF) on the border of the country, many emergency services, workers employed in generation-cum-supply of public utilities and so on.
I have reasons to believe that most of the people in the public domain do not have a sense of rights and duties. The state as the authority imposes money-fine on the people who spit large-scale on road or on railway platform after probably chewing tobacco; that does not stop production-sale-consumption of tobacco.
In non-trivial examples, the recent episode of arresting a professor at Ashoka University reminds me of the restricted rights of teachers during national crises, probably reminded by the wise judge also in this case, while granting him interim bail. In some situations, teachers fail to understand the gravity of crises. ‘All teachers need to understand all crises’ seems not to be a mandatory condition to be a teacher.
Most of the types of aberrations and deviations in interdependent living are hardly understood, like ‘honour killing’, suicide, and domestic violence. More than these, the state propaganda on cybercrime transmitted through a choice-neutral voice from a smartphone, once one rings up, creates more panic among the telephone users. Of course, the state is not going to take advice from all on whether it should go for propaganda or not. It is, thus, a ‘no-reply’ situation, like many other pieces of advice from financial institutions. Guardian mode works.
Disproportionate Rights and Duties
Let there be no elasticity of imagination that the rights of an individual and those of the core state are balanced or proportionate; the same is for duties. My point is more than simple. The individual may have the right not to understand his duties in full, while the state does not enjoy this right. My understanding is that the duties of the state are much more than the duties of any individual. The individuals are non-additive on the pedestal of duties. Of course, there is no conflict of interest between the rights and duties of the individual vis-à-vis the state. Often judiciary keeps the balance.
Understanding Existence-value
Any sane, conscious individual tries to understand their existence-value in society, and in that process of understanding, they may skip a constraint imposed, though invisible, by the rest of society. The simple reason is optimisation of the individual is socially constrained. What is not much understood is the rights of the core state in this – maybe the existence-value reached the level of nuisance-value. Most individuals hardly understand that he creates a nuisance like spitting in public. At the non-trivial level, this nuisance value gets revealed in opinions on religion, expressed in malice-hatred with a series of unwarranted consequences. It then becomes the right of the state to arrest the wrongdoers rather than arrest the wrongdoings. It is for the state to decide the modus operandi for how to arrest the wrongdoings.
Methodology: Collection through participatory and disguised observations.
Picture design by Anumita Roy
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