Right to Dignity
“Azadi is the freedom to tell the maalik to fuck off when you want to” — Aman Sethi — A Free Man
I grew up in Kota, Rajasthan, in the seventies. On the banks of river Chambal. It was then, a burgeoning industrial city — a reflection of Nehru’s socialist ambitions but also India’s attempt to catch-up on its lost place in the world.
Its carefully chosen location on the strategic Delhi Mumbai railway route, allowed easy transport of coal to fire the massive thermal power plant, which, in turn, supplied electricity to the various manufacturing units — producing everything from fertilizer to textiles to electronic components for telephone exchanges.
The city had become a test lab for Nehruvian economic policies and ambitious development plans. Indira Gandhi came visiting in 1971 to witness its accomplishments — the fruits of socialism, firsthand, before she decided to bomb Pakistan and free Bangladesh. There was a strange optimism in the air. A whiff of can-do attitude. And even though we were barely adults, we could feel the confidence. India indeed had a place on the earth. It was time we reclaimed it.
At peak in the early eighties, Kota had achieved significant economic progress. It was reflected even in the quality and attitude of its well-trained workforce. The profusion of immigrants, the planned residential enclaves with trees and flower beds, libraries, parks, good schools, and little crime. The vibrant and endearing cosmopolitanism of a small soulful city that had come to inhabit it — bursting in freshness; reveled in an inexplicable, inflated hope.
Then in the nineties, it all began to fall apart. We learnt that the factories were running on government subsidy, and it would come to end. The mandarins at the Planning Commission in Delhi woke up to the realization that same goods could be produced cheaper elsewhere in private hands. Gorbachev announced Perestroika — the dismantling of Soviet Union and the closure of its monstrous inefficient factories. Indian economy, it was thought, also required urgent reforms. Markets… and not government planning was to decide the way things went.
People did not know what hit them. Jobs were cut overnight. Workers retrenched or retired off. Residential quarters emptied. Parks shut. Cinemas closed. Life brought to standstill. Some left. Many remained — unsure of their future life and uncertain of their fate, in a city that had taken them in with so much love and was now starting to spit them out with such cruelty.
Years later, Kota was to find a new life — as an educational hub — where students arrived in thousands to prepare for competitive exams.
India’s short-lived tryst with socialism had ended. No city more than Kota witnessed it. We had left. Even ‘leaving’ is an act of will. We could never be sure whether we ‘left’ or we were ‘eased’ out by circumstances. That hurts. To be detached from the city you grew up. To be told ‘migration to a larger city was a sign of progress’.
The immigrants of the seventies were retiring in 2020 and converting their homes into paid student accommodations to earn an extra buck. Their children settled in Delhi and Mumbai and Bangalore and coming ‘home’ to see them once in a while. Some were running canteens, though, serving the expanding student population and engaged in other small businesses. Finding hope again. This time, in the services sector, that opening of the markets had brought about.
Then Covid19 struck.
Threats to livelihood can be devastating for people dependent on the uncertainties of market force. It takes away their confidence. It brutalizes their soul, renders them useless and prevents them from planning ahead. I have seen families torn apart. People commit suicide. Become depressed. Forced into alcoholism and drugs and the youth take to crime.
People with respect switched off — unable to show face. Hide themselves. Turn into living ghosts.
Article 21 of the Constitution of India, 1950 provides that, “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty”
It is my case that ‘Life’ in Article 21 of the Constitution is not merely the physical act of breathing. It does not connote mere animal existence or continued drudgery through life. Right to life is fundamental to our very existence without which we cannot live as a human being and includes all those aspects of life, which go to make a man’s life meaningful, complete, and worth living.
At the outset, I would argue that lack of basic necessities of life such that a human being is unable to meet his essential needs for proper nutrition, shelter, clothing and comfort to allow him a peaceable mind is a violation of the very right to life.
Protection of the right to life, therefore, requires that the basic needs of every citizen are met from the resources of the state. It is with this legal provision of basic wealth and essential income only; an individual can feel adequately empowered and capable of protecting his dignity.
An important lesson of Second World War, commented Justice AK Sikri, was the realization by the Governments of various countries that human dignity needed to be cherished and protected. The word ‘Dignity” is therefore placed in the very preamble of the Indian constitution.
Even the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, begins its preamble with the acknowledgment that the rights contained in the covenant “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person”. This may not explicitly define a connection between dignity and law as such, but it certainly purports to identify a wholesale connection between dignity and the branch of law devoted to human rights.
One of the key facets of twenty-first century democracies is the primary importance given to the protection of human rights. From this perspective, dignity is the expression of a basic value accepted in a broad sense by all people, and thus constitutes the first cornerstone in the edifice of human rights.
Therefore, there is a certain fundamental value to the notion of human dignity, which some would consider a pivotal right deeply rooted in any notion of justice, fairness, and a society based on basic rights.
Within two years of the adoption of the aforesaid Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, India attained independence and immediately thereafter Members of the Constituent Assembly took up the task of framing the Constitution of this Country. It was but natural to include a Bill of Rights in the Indian Constitution and the Constitution Makers did so by incorporating a Chapter on Fundamental Rights in Part III of the Constitution.
However, it would be essential to point out that there is no mention of “dignity” specifically in this Chapter on Fundamental Rights. So was the position in the American Constitution and human dignity as a part of human rights was brought in as a Judge-made doctrine.
Same course of action followed as the Indian Supreme Court read human dignity into Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution. Page 8 of 27 HUMAN DIGNITY AS A HUMAN RIGHT UNDER INDIAN CONSTITUION: Articles 14 and 21 of the Indian Constitution read as follows: “14. Equality before law. — The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.”
“Protection of life and personal liberty — No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.” Apparently, there is no specific mention of human dignity as no such expression is used in the aforesaid Article. Yet, Indian Supreme Court introduced a judge-made doctrine of human dignity by reading the same into these articles of the Constitution, on the same lines as it was crafted by the American Supreme Court.
In shaping and giving true meaning to the fundamental rights enshrined in Part III of the Constitution of India (which are nothing but the human rights), is the concept of human dignity which has been in the forefront as well as at the back of the mind of the Supreme Court.
For, Indian Supreme Court has read “right to life” enshrined under Article 21 as “right to live life with dignity”. And it is linked with right to grow as a human being.
Likewise, human dignity is used as lodestar for equality and to counter unfair discrimination while interpreting Article 14 of the Page 9 of 27 Constitution, thereby providing a clear linkage and connection between dignity, equality and unfair discrimination under Article 14.
The reason for enacting this provision in the Chapter on Fundamental Rights is to be found in the socio-economic condition of the people at the time when the Constitution came to be enacted.
The Constitution-makers, found that they had the enormous task before them of changing the socio- economic structure of the country given its precarity; and bringing about a regeneration with a view to reaching social and economic justice to the common man.
The political revolution was completed and it had succeeded in bringing freedom to the country but freedom was not an end in itself, it was only a means to an end, the end being the raising of the people to higher levels of achievement and bringing about their total advancement and welfare.
Political freedom had no meaning unless it was accompanied by social and economic freedom and it was therefore necessary to carry forward the revolution with a view to creating conditions in which every one would be able to enjoy basic human rights and participate in the fruits of freedom and liberty in an egalitarian social and economic framework. It was with this end in view that the Constitution-makers enacted the directive principles of state policy in Part IV of the Constitution setting out the constitutional goal of a new socio-economic order.
The basic spirit of Indian Constitution is to provide each and every person of the nation equal opportunity to grow as a human being, irrespective of race, caste, religion, community and social status.
The Constitution, although drafted by the Constituent Assembly, was meant for the people of India and that is why it is given by the people to themselves as expressed in the opening words “We the People”. What is the most important gift to the common person given by this Constitution is “fundamental rights” which may be called Human Rights as well.
Respect for human rights is the root for human development and realization of full potential of each individual, which in turn leads to the augmentation of human resources with progress of the nation. Empowerment of the people through human development is the aim of human rights, and all this has genesis in human dignity.
Once we accept that people are to be respected and treated with dignity, this conception of dignity gives them right to grow fully. In a country like India, where 1/3rd of the population is living below poverty line and human beings have no means to have adequate food, clothing, shelter and education, it not only becomes the duty of the State to provide these facilities to the citizenry, it becomes the human right of such persons to exact such rights from the State.
The development of human capital has been recognized by economists to be a key prerequisite for a country’s socio-economic and political transformation. Among the generally agreed casual factors responsible for the impressive performance of the economy of most of the developed and the newly industrializing countries is an impressive commitment to human capital formation.
This has been largely achieved through increased knowledge, skills and capabilities acquired through education and training by all the people of these countries. It has been stressed that the differences in the level of socio-economic development across nations is attributed not so much to natural resources and endowments and the stock of physical capital but to the quality and quantity of human resources.
Human resources are a critical variable in the growth process and worthy of development. They are not only means but, more importantly, the ends that must be served to achieve economic progress.
Country develops if the human resources develop; it leads to increase in productivity; it contributes to the eradication of social and economic backwardness; enables augment of entrepreneurship; and brings about social revolution.
It has now become an accepted notion that human dignity is the true measure of development. This stands well recognized by the protagonist of human rights. It is for this reason they point out that if human beings are not treated with dignity, that leads to starvation deaths, caste atrocities, police brutality and even where there is corruption, that amounts to violation of human dignity leading to violations of human rights. Human dignity, therefore, has become fulcrum of human rights.
Jurisprudentially, therefore, “if some were to argue the question ‘Why are human rights valid?”, the answer would be that it has roots in human dignity which provides justification for human rights”.
The above excerpt from a paper titled “HUMAN DIGNITY AS A CONSTITUTIONAL VALUE” by Justice AK Sikhri — a retired Judge of the Indian Supreme Court in confirms the duty of the state to protect the dignity of every citizen in India.
Is there dignity in homelessness? Or in hunger? Or in destitution? Or in the inability to be with your family? Or being forced to migrate for economic reasons? Or in manual scavenging? Toilet cleaning?
The state’s obvious failure to protect the right to life and dignity is visible in the squalor we witness around us — no survey or research is required, just a walk in the neighborhood shall suffice.
It is ironical that the state has tried to side-step the Right to Dignity by introducing other rights — such as Right to Food and the Right to Work as if providing a meagre meal and 100 days of work digging canals is sufficient to ensure dignity.
Article 39(a) of the Constitution, enunciated as one of the Directive Principles, fundamental in the governance of the country, requires the State to direct its policies towards securing that all its citizens have the right to an adequate means of livelihood.
Consider why the right to work is meaningless unless citizens are provided with the right to dignity — and the means to satisfy its fulfillment — without having the option to choose work or to not work at all.
There is a monumental myth that work provides fulfillment and while it may be partly true — the quality of work is equally important — once again — for instance working on building a road knowing very well that it will be washed out in the next rain.
In 1936 the economist John Maynard Keynes recommended increased government spending to help employment. When his proposals were rejected by the conservatives, he suggested an alternative: have the government bury bottles full of cash in disused coal mines, and let the private sector spend its own money to dig the cash back up.
Without doubt, even useless public spending can create jobs including digging for cash bottles, but these are exactly the kind of soul-destroying jobs people do not want.
More importantly, if it is people’s money (whether from a current account or through debt) that is to be spent — to create jobs — to justify payments — why not pay people straight away?
Real-life activity of gold mining, Keynes later reminded was exactly like this. Gold miners were, after all, going to great lengths to dig cash out of the ground, even though unlimited amounts of cash could be created at essentially no cost with the printing press. And no sooner was gold dug up than much of it was buried again, in places like the gold vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where hundreds of thousands of gold bars sit, doing nothing in particular.
The idea is simple — government creates money and gives it back to people and then asks them to spend it to buy stuff so that manufacturing can go on and wages can be paid and both wages and spending is taxed when they spend, and the cycle continues.
What it does in effect is turn perfectly happy individuals into money making machines — money not for the wage laborers but for producers and service providers who do nothing more that skim away part of the money in the process and call this activity as their labor, effort and ingenuity. In effect it is a state sponsored scam.
Labor has been publicized as the intrinsic need of man. It is that activity which gives life a meaning. Yet, in pre-industrial societies labor was only performed by slaves.
The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labor: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind.
The right and the capacity to remain idle is therefore central to the idea of dignity. It is only when a person is armed with the power to say No to work — he can be genuinely redeemed.
The Cuban born French revolutionary, Paul Lafargue in his pamphlet ‘The Right to be Lazy’ criticised the Marxist perspective on work as dogma and ultimately false by portraying the degeneration and enslavement of human existence when being subsumed under the primacy of work, and argued that freedom, combined with human creativity, is an important source of human progress.
In pre-industrial societies, people worked in their own self interest and the interest of the community and not in the interest of an impersonal corporation or an entrepreneur who is following his own whims and dreams, often incompatible with yours.
The thoughts of American writer Bob Black in his widely published essay ‘The Abolition of Work’ are more radical. He insists that “for humans to be free they must reclaim their time from jobs and employment and turn necessary tasks into free play done voluntarily” and that “no-one should ever work”, because work — defined as compulsory productive activity enforced by economic or political means — is the source of most of the misery in the world.
We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. How shameful is that?
Black quotes the scientist, designer and futurist Buckminster Fuller “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
That brings me to the important question; how do you sustain a society without work. And that requires a paradigmatic shift in the way we conceive “work” itself.
You see, it is important to recognise that money only represents a value that has either existed in nature (land) or derived from it ( farming) or adopted ( currency, law, enforcement) and that the modern system of capitalism is a giant machinery conceived and controlled by a few ( protected by the police and armies of the state) to transfer that value into their private pockets. Work and jobs and employment which we hold so dear and sacrosanct and essential to our life is a part of that illusion.
The factory in which my father worked, I vividly recall, had posters on the shop floor proudly displaying “Work is Worship” and “Work Hard” and I grew up believing that work is life. Take work out of life and you are like a fish out of water?
One way to look at it is to believe that our minds have been wired to such an extent that we seek our life’s purpose and fulfilment in nothing more than work. The other way is to recognise that the system has taken away from us our ability to think for ourselves — to live and work according to our own will, our moods, our preferences and our own likings — not just the mental and psychological choices we deserve but the opportunity itself.
A false dichotomy has been placed before us, instead.
You are either a consumer or a producer. Even when you are both, as economic texts tell us, you are largely a consumer — such as a labourer who will produce only a small amount ( working at a factory) but consume the equivalent of whatever he produces ( paying from his salary) or largely a producer ( like car manufacturer) who is also a consumer — in a way he needs food and clothing and entertainment but that is a minuscule part of his earnings.
Producers are glorified whereas consumers are condemned — although it is clear there cannot be a society without consumers whereas a society without producers can be easily conceived.
The many users of Google and Facebook for instance, as is increasingly being recognised’ are not passive consumers they are significant producers in the ecosystem. Unfortunately, the entire ‘production’ is monetised by these platforms for their own benefit by way of charging the advertisers.
In an ideal world, part of the Google and FaceBook earnings, a large percentage to be fair, should go back to users but the corporate and legal system works in such a way that it lands up in the pockets of entrepreneurs.
Justin E.H. Smith, a philosopher at the University of Paris, in his book, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, claims that the state should redistribute profits of corporations such as Amazon and Facebook by taking away about 99.9 percent of the fortunes of Bezos, Zuckerberg, and others, and turning the big tech companies into public utilities. That would be a real justice to the consumers; in his view.
Ironically instead of asking a fair share in their profits, we applaud them for taking away from us what is our moral right and our legitimate due. We protest high taxes and we hail entrepreneurs as wealth creators, change agents, futurists and saviours of the society. Most people are unaware that Facebook pays out less that 1% of its revenues as salaries to its staff. Even Walmart the Darwinian retailer — responsible for the death of small neighbourhood store, by contrast paid 40% to its employees.
Bezos runs a cloud monopoly that even smart people are unable to understand. And he can fight the US government.?
We know that jobs are not being created — whatever your government tells you. In fact, the pressure to further save costs and use automation in the US will result in 3m job losses in India, reported the Economic Times recently.
In the 1970s in the Western countries, many people used to work for a few months, then to go away for a journey, then back to work for a while. This was possible in times of almost full employment and in times of egalitarian culture. This situation allowed people to work in their own interest and not in the interest of capitalists, but quite obviously this could not last forever, and the neoliberal offensive of the 1980s was aimed to reverse this.
The ability to reject work comes from the option to do something else — such as carrying on a business of one’s choice, pursuing arts and music and travel without having to worry about food, clothing, accommodation and basic healthcare and entertainment.
One way to ensure that people are provided with an option to perform work of one’s choice is to ensure that the economic value produced in a society is proportionally distributed. Think of dividing the GDP by the number of people and handing it over to them in equal proportion. What we see is the top 10% of the society accrue 70% of the GDP produced.
Each person therefore has a right on the fruits of economic progress.
This can be achieved by making available to everyone, whether or not he or she holds a job, a minimum salary sufficient to cover housing, transportation, education, medical care and some discretionary income — which could be accomplished easily by instituting a fair distribution of the GDP. This is no favour government will be doing to citizens, it is only paying the legitimate due for economic value add that they help produce — by the process of consumption.
Empowering every individual with some of essential income will provide freedom to reject work. Put another way, every individual will be protected from selling himself/herself into the slavery of repulsive work. In India, many people are forced to take up jobs as manual scavengers, latrine cleaners and road sweepers etc. because they are devoid of any choice and possibilities of alternative work.
Right to Dignity actually makes the Right to Work irrelevant in so far as the objective of work is to acquire the means for a livelihood. Right to Dignity is much more than the Right to Work. It forces the state to institute “policies and techniques to achieve steady economic, social and cultural development and full and productive employment under conditions safeguarding fundamental political and economic freedoms to the individual” as provided for in the Constitution itself.
THE Preamble of our Constitution defines the ‘idea of India’ as a secular and democratic republic committed to securing for all its citizens, justice, liberty, equality and fraternity, all aimed at securing the dignity of the individual — “the cornerstone in the edifice of human rights”.
References
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/opinion/krugman-bits-and-barbarism.html
