Ratna Kapur

Human Rights in the 21st Century: Taking a Walk on the Dark Side

This article unpacks three normative claims on which the human rights project is based and exposes the dark side of the project. The author examines the larger context within which human rights has taken shape, and critiques the claim that human rights is part of modernity’s narrative of progress; interrogates the assumption that human rights are universal, challenging its dehistoricised, neutral, and inclusive claims; and unpacks the atomised, insular liberal subject on which the human rights project is based and its correlating assumptions about the ‘Other’ who needs to be cabined or contained lest she destabilises or undermines this subject. The author makes some tentative proposals as to how we can engage with human rights once its dark side is exposed.

Brutalized Bodies and Sexy Dressing on the Indian Street

Two recent protests in postcolonial India have questioned the potential of gendered bodies in the protest sphere to disturb gender categories and dominant sexual norms. One was the response to the brutal gang rape and murder of a twenty-three-year-old student on a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012. The specter of her brutalized body formed the backdrop against which thousands of young people poured onto the streets of major metropolises demanding justice. It marked a rare moment when violence against women was foregrounded as a political issue in a liberal democracy. The SlutWalks were an earlier movement that took place sporadically in towns and cities across India in 2011. Sexy dressing rendered the body itself the site of protest against the remarks of police in both India and Canada that suggested that women could avoid rape if they did not dress like sluts. In the course of both protests women amassed on the streets to stake a claim to the public, countering the very conception of politics as operating exclusively along the axis of the public/private distinction and vocalizing their opposition to the state’s politics of gender and sexuality. The female body became a political body and a powerful site of resistance. But it was also subjected to harassment, derision, and violence by the state’s law-and-order apparatus and confronted by intractable normative injunctions. In both protests, sex and gender emerged as part of a regulatory practice that, as Judith Butler argues, produces and effaces the bodies it governs. The inability of the gendered body to escape from the clutches of prevalent norms by which recognition is conferred compels several challenging questions that require deeper reflection: Can gendered bodies in the protest sphere ever be an exercise moving toward freedom? And what possibilities of being are opened up through the refusal to protest within the terms set by this always already colonized and regulated space?

The Two Faces of Secularism and Women’s Rights in India

In this chapter1 I examine several concepts that are important to un- derstanding the impact that the rise of the Religious Right has had on women’s human rights in contemporary India. In particular, I discuss the ways in which equality and secularism, the cornerstones of a liberal de- mocratic state, have been deployed by the Hindu Right, and to some ex- tent, validated by the Indian Supreme Court. I also address how the Hindu Right’s agenda for women is related to its secular project.

A Leap of Faith: The Construction of Hindu Majoritarianism through Secular Law

This article describes the competing models of secularism that have been debated and contested in post-colonial India. I focus on the constitutional legal discourse and judicial pronouncements on the meaning of secularism in India and on the increasing influence of the Hindu Right — a conservative and religious political movement seeking to set up India as a Hindu state — on shaping the contours of secularism in contemporary law. The struggle over the meaning of secularism came to a head in an Indian High Court decision in 2010. The case involved a dispute over the legal title to a piece of land in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya, where a sixteenth-century mosque once stood and was destroyed by the mobs of the Hindu Right, and the Hindu Right’s claim that the site marks the spot where the Hindu God Ram was born. The case reveals how the right to freedom of religion has been used to establish and reinforce Hindu majoritarianism through secular law in India.