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Victim's Right to Communicate
Although in common parlance victims of forced displacement are often
clubbed together as a single and monolithic category, there are
significant variations in the nature and extent of victim-hood suffered
by them. Thus, the victims of development-induced displacement
constitute a category separate in many ways from those who have been
displaced as a result of say, interethnic conflicts and violence. The
first category of victims may have lost their homes or cultivable lands
but may continue to subscribe to the same development paradigm and view
displacement as one of its necessary costs that one should bear albeit
with great pain, in the collective interest of the nation. The same
person on the other hand, may look upon ethnic violence as simply
macabre and senseless and hence is detrimental to the nation and its
development. It could as well be the other way round. One who finds
ethnic violence as an inevitable and unavoidable means of asserting
one’s identity is unlikely to discover any virtue in the development of
the nation as a vibrant, multicultural entity. The graded nature of
victim-hood therefore should not escape our notice.
Communicating rights claims
Accordingly their rights can hardly be of one and the same type. One
wonders whether it will ever be possible for us to evolve an agenda of
rights common to all of them. Notwithstanding the differences that their
respective agendas might reflect, the elementary principles on the basis
of which they make their claims to rights including the right to
information and communication are unlikely to be substantially different
from each other. For it involves the fundamental task of transforming
the victim into an active and creative subject who can communicate her
claim to rights and thereby transcend her victim-hood. Victim’s rights
first of all imply positioning her as a rights-bearing subject who can
take part in the society’s ongoing discourse on rights. It is by way of
claiming the rights that the victim hopes to make a difference in her
own life and also in the social life as well and exercises her
creativity. Rights according to this view, are inconceivable without
creativity.
The term ‘rights’ in our context may be used in two rather diametrically
opposed senses – universal and communicative. In the first sense, all
human beings by virtue of being human beings are entitled to some rights
that are defined as the conditions of their survival as human beings.
These rights are usually known as human rights. One’s right to life may
be regarded as an example of such rights. In other words, one does not
have to make a case for and argue in favour of these rights. They are
too obvious and self-evident to be claimed. There are indeed problems
associated with such a universalistic notion of rights. While all human
beings qua human beings are entitled to human rights, there is certainly
no guarantee that all of them will be successful in enjoying them.
Entitlement certainly is not enjoyment. Ironically, while a mechanism
for enforcing these rights becomes necessary, there is hardly any
guarantee that it will remain ever so faithful to these universal
rights. Moreover, what if the rights are violated on the ground that the
aggressor does not consider the victims as human beings so much so that
violation of their rights does not amount to human rights violations?
One of the running themes of the hate literature that grew at the time
of the Gujarat carnage (2002) is that the so-called victims, for whom
the ‘pseudo-secularists’ seem to be shedding tears, do not deserve to be
called ‘human beings’ in the first place. The invectives hurled against
them actually smack of ‘animal’ imageries. Violation of human rights
especially during group violence is usually preceded by such
de-humanization.
Rights in the second sense, exist primarily as claims couched in reasons
put across and expounded by those who claim them, that is to say, the
claimants. The reasons they advance must be both intelligible and
plausible to those from whom they are claimed. Unless they sound
intelligible and plausible, the claimants cannot ‘hold them under some
obligation or duty’ that is essential for their entitlement to and
enjoyment of these rights. Rights in the second sense therefore
presuppose a communication between the claimants and their adversaries –
an individual, a group or any of their combinations and of course, the
state. Liberal theory of rights looks upon the state necessarily as a
potential violator of rights.
Communication contra nation
It is in the context of the communication between the two apparently
opposing parties that the victim’s right to information and
communication acquires some importance. Although claimed in the same
breadth, right to information will have to be distinguished from right
to communication. For one thing, victim’s right to information is taken
to mean merely her right to be informed of her displacement reasonably
well before the actual displacement takes place presumably by being
served with a notice and most importantly, of her entitlements and
compensations if there are any, in the event of any such displacement.
She is the passive recipient of this information and it is now up to her
to adjust her to the whole process and accordingly make it less painful
for her. Right to communication on the other hand is her right to act on
the information. This for example, gives her the right to organize the
victims, create a common political platform for them and protest against
the policies that lead to displacement and so on and so forth. Right to
communication confers some form of subjectivity on the victim. For
another, right to information is claimed and enjoyed without
interrogating in any manner the sacrosanct nature of the so-called
‘collective goal’ that displaces or threatens to displace her. It is
always in the interest of ‘national security’ or ‘national development’
that one gets displaced. Displacement per se is neither unconstitutional
nor illegal in India. Displacement as we have said is the ‘necessary
cost’ involved in accomplishing some ‘collective goal’. When in the wake
of the attack on Indian Parliament the entire Indo-Pak border and the
line of control were heavily mined and the people and the cattle had to
lose their lives and limbs, many of us think that it is in the interest
of the nation that such sundry losses are suffered and the doctrine of
‘necessary cost’ is invoked to justify them. Right to information in
short is constitutive of the grand collectivity that we call, nation.
Right to communication on the other hand cannot be claimed without
opposing in some way or the other, the ‘collective goal’ that is
invariably invoked while displacing the victims. It is a right that
individuates the victim and isolates her from the collectivity. While
claiming this right, she always runs the risk of being stigmatized as
‘anti-national’ and ‘unpatriotic’.
Right to information viewed in this light is of limited value. First of
all, it is critically dependent on the availability of information and
unless the provider obliges, one can hardly enjoy this right. The victim
has her reasons of being informed as much as the state as the potential
provider has its reasons of denying it. It is a right that is predicated
on the provider’s prerogative. What if in the interest of the nation,
certain types of information are classified as sensitive and are
withheld from public consumption? The imperative of nationhood sets
forth the broad parameters within which information is provided and
accessed and is supposed to circulate and be exchanged. Secondly,
information we may have, but what do we do with that information? The
Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) of Rajasthan for example, launched
a movement in the early 1990s demanding the villagers’ right to access
the files relating to public works of the government and obtain duly
authenticated copies of the official papers. By 1994, the organization
became only partially successful. The government decided to open the
files for people’s inspection, but did not grant them the right to
obtain photocopies, let alone, the attested and authenticated ones. It
only means that the people may have the information about corruption at
high places of government, but they cannot establish it in any court of
law for they do not have the information that has any juridical status
worth its name. Implicit in it, there is the subtle distinction between
truth and the establishability of truth: that we know the truth does not
mean that we can successfully establish it by way of following the same
rules and protocols that the society’s established ‘regime of truth’
imposes on us. This is perhaps the reason why rape victims more often
than not find it impossible to bring the convicts to book.
Communication and its limits
The imperative of making the rights claims intelligible and plausible to
those who are responsible for the displacement of the victims imposes
restrictions on the communication by the victims. It renders certain
claims to rights simply incommunicable and screens them off from the
public domain. Right to communication is not necessarily the
communication of rights. Rights in simple terms, do not exhaust the
entire field of communication and in our pursuit of this right, we must
not lose sight of those other means of communication through which
victims try to communicate their claims. I propose to elaborate this
argument by way of referring to the narrative that one can reconstruct
from an interview of Ms. Arati Dasgupta facing the threat of being
displaced from what she considers as her home as a result of the
government’s decision of widening the Beliaghata Circular Canal (in
north Kolkata) as part of urban planning. It is interesting to examine
the reasons she expounds in support of her claim to the right against
displacement. When asked how she had come to settle in the place from
where she now faces the threat of being evicted, she replies:
With God. I came here holding the hands of God. Don’t you believe? This
is my motherland. I had nobody. On the other hand, I had everybody. My
mother died after giving birth to me. I have never seen my father. The
people on the banks of this canal raised me. One grandma raised me up
during my childhood at her place. She too died when the ice factory had
caught fire. Believe me, my dear sister (in a reference to the
interviewer, SKD), I grew old by crawling on this soil and bathing in
this canal. You will see, no one will be able to evict me. I came here
holding the hands of God. God will lift me. It does not matter whether
my home is destroyed. How can they deprive me of this soil and sky?
(Trans. mine)
A careful reading of the above narrative brings us face to face to face
with at least three major reasons that run counter to those of the
modern state. As a result, they will sound unintelligible and
implausible to it: First, Dasgupta seeks to establish her right to home
through what once was known as, the divine theory. It was through the
accident of her birth and the quirk of circumstances beyond her control
that she was born as a child without home. While a child’s home is
always the home of the parents, she was deprived of it. It was only due
to God’s will that she could grow up and live without a parental home.
In her case, home did not precede her existence; it was her existence
that preceded her home. Doesn’t the fact of her living existence entitle
her to a home? She got the home only in consonance with the will of God.
Secondly, she proposes to establish her claim by way of emphasizing the
fact that she was raised in the same place, crawled on the soil and took
bath in the same canal. It was an altogether different home of
neighbours that she discovered here. Thirdly, she also feels that she
has a right to the place on the ground that the bounties and endowments
of nature (like, soil and sky) are for everyone to enjoy.
Each of these reasons goes against the Reasons of the modern state.
One’s existence does not automatically entitle one to one’s home as much
as the fact of one’s being raised at a particular place does not justify
one’s claim to it. The state understands only the language of ownership
titles established by the due process of law. Why do the Chakmas who
lost their homes and cultivable lands in Chittagong Hill Tracts of
Bangladesh in the mid-1960s when the Kaptai dam on the river Karnaphuli
was constructed, find it difficult now to merely prove that they were
once the inhabitants of the same land? Precisely because they inhabited
it for generations without ever bothering to get their titles
registered. Precisely because their ancestors never considered it as the
means of establishing one’s right. Besides, the endowments and bounties
of nature are now being put increasingly under state or private control.
With the shrinkage of people’s access to common property resources,
people thriving on them are facing an unprecedented threat to their
livelihood. Today the Reasons of the modern state threaten to gobble up
many a reason of Dasguptas and the victims of their ilk.
Don’t the reasons of the modern state render their reasons
incommunicable through the dominant language of rights? Doesn’t
communication as a strategy call for a certain disentangling of these
two kinds of reasons? Communication of the victims’ reasons is possible
only by transcending the rules and limits set forth by the public
domain.
By Samir Kumar Das
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