Recensione.

Fonte: The Hindu, May 7, 2002

Human rights: theory and action

'THE FUTURE OF HUMAN RIGHTS': Upendra Baxi; Oxford University Press, YMCA Building (FF), Jai Singh Road, Post Box 43, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 495.

THE BOOK under review "seeks to decipher the future of social action assembled, by convention, under a portal named human rights. It problematises the very notion of human rights, the standard narratives of their origin, the ensemble of ideologies animating their modes of production, and the wayward circumstances of their enunciation." These are the twin opening passages from Prof. Baxi's tough work. He takes human rights seriously and the reader must take him seriously if he is to understand his diction and not flounder halfway through the book. This brilliant writer leaves you fazed or dazed unless you share his purposeful perspective of "people in struggle and communities of resistance", so different from standard scholarship.
Human rights, he holds, are not the "gifts of the West to the Rest". The politics of human rights, he insists, is different from the politics for human rights and his central concern is the troubled relationship between human suffering and human rights. To come to terms with this deeply humanist jurist you need a demanding preparedness for hermeneutic adventures since he is no easy author, has harsh things to say and a hard message to convey. But I love his writings because, at the end of the battle with his words and thoughts, you gain an unusual wealth of ideas, at once original, elevating and vigorous. Indeed, he asserts: "This work stands addressed to a whole variety of `implied' readers and interpretive communities, including variegated conglomerations of international human rights lawyers, human rights activists, and human rights enunciators and peoples/communities in struggle. It, perforce, runs a thousand narrative risks!... . A majority of international human rights lawyers, as already noted, may remain disappointed with this work as transgressive of customary, and therefore familiar, ways of reading the human rights `law' and jurisprudence. Some may even go so far as to say that this book has little to do with human rights, let alone their futures. To the latter, I immediately need to say that no enterprise at reading the future of human rights is possible within the existing technocratic doctrinal thought formations."
I have said enough to discourage superficial human rights activists who merely browse to "sip every flower and change every hour" and get away with it. Those who have profound concern for the human condition will learn much from every page and ponder over what he has read for a critical appraisal of human rights futurology and a social theory of human rights. Baxi laments the lack of a meaningful exploration of human rights movements as social movements, whether old or new. In his view, analyses of the impact of mega-science and hi-tech on the theory and practice of human rights have yet to inaugurate themselves. And the costs of human and human rights violations have yet to be fully addressed in terms of law and economics and political economy. This collection of essays attempts to redress this lack in some preliminary ways.
Baxi is at his best when challenged by rules of uncommon jurisprudence. The book under review is itself a "challenge to half a century's attainment of an Age of Human Rights". There is so much new thought, imaginative ideation and crusade against old notions that, at the end of the journey, one feels redeemed and refreshed. He is not happy with the regimes of techno-scientific power that sustains the New World Order Inc. He is Marxian enough to claim that the task now is not merely to understand these developments but to transform them in directions more compatible with competing notions of human rights future.
The chapters are not many, the book is not heavy but every chapter is weighty. The first chapter - "An age of human rights?" deals with the profusion of human rights enunciations. The next one is titled "Two notions of human rights: modern and contemporary".
Human rights realism, Bureaucratization of human rights and other odd sub-titles make up the chapter, "The practices of contemporary human rights". A poignant sub-heading "Freedom's children and midnight's children" brings the chapter to a close. Chapter four, "Too many or too few human rights?" starts off with a discussion on our over-production of human rights. In characteristic Baxiesque style, he observes "This riot of perceptions concerning right normativity arises due to the titanic clash of two cultures of the politics of human rights and those of politics for human rights."
The next chapter deals with "Politics of identity and difference." I quote some penetrating words of the author which bring out his thought: "Indeed, it has been recently suggested that the `monoculture' of human rights continues the cultural imperialism of colonialism, perpetuating the belief that the `underdeveloped' cultures are too poor or primitive to promote the good of their people, while imposing the dominant cultures' notions of human well-being. On this view, grassroots groups and initiatives that `do not fall victims to this Trojan Horse of recolonisation' deserve celebration."
It will be a functional perversion of a brief reviewer if he launches on a discussion of every chapter. Nevertheless, do not omit the powerful pages on "human rights movements and markets". He exposes the "techniques" of commodification of human suffering. Likewise, he expands on the materiality of globalisation. I excerpt just one passage from the creative chapter, "The emergence of an alternative paradigm." He writes: "The paradigm shift cannot be understood outside the materiality of globalisation. By this expression, I wish to signify the technoscientific mode of production and the accompanying organic ideology (in a Gramscian sense) that presents itself as redemptive of human suffering. That mode presents itself in several unfolding moments; in the civilian use of nuclear energy, the incredible growth of information technology (digitalisation); and the development of new biotechnologies. Each one of these, singly and in combination, threatens us all with the prospect of rendering contemporary human rights language obsolescent."
After indicating the hostility of the so-called, safe and eco-friendly industries and human rights, Baxi, with burning cynicism, projects an acid criticism: "The amniocentesis of human rights was thus predetermined by patterns of state-industry collaboration, which normalised risk-analysis to the point of industry-oriented, rather than human rights-oriented, risk analysis and management. Movements, both social and human rights specific, were thus constrained, from the start, by the logic of this state-industry combine. Pitted against the state/technoscientific combine, social movements, including human rights movements, were reduced to confrontation over locale decisions, nuclear waste disposal, and eventual decommissioning public choice decisions. The might of the state-industry combine has proved, however, overwhelming for human rights theory and action."
I stop here with quotational functionalism and wind up with a tribute to Baxi for his book, which is hard to digest but healthy once assimilated. It is not fair to conceal that Baxi, in his profusion of acknowledgements writes: "The acknowledgement of activist friends is not complete without the mention of judicial activist friends. It is my privilege to record in full measure the `churning' made possible by Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, P. N. Bhagwati, D. A. Desai and O. Chinnappa Reddy. Till today I remain exposed to Justice Krishna Iyer's tempestuous summons, protesting the `Little done, the Vast Undone.' "
I close my review with a "thank you" for the kind reference.

V. R. KRISHNA IYER