‘After rights’ is friendship: on abandonment, obligation and the stranger

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article presupposes that legal rights cannot remedy the ethical problem of abandonment. It questions how we might live better together as/ with abandoned subjects of the postcolonial state through examining the Shamima Begum case and deprivation of citizenship. Can we imagine a way of life ‘after rights', that translates into a right not to be abandoned for the racialised, maimed subject of the postcolonial state (‘the stranger')? I argue that ‘after rights' is friendship as an ethics of seva (‘selfless service), in which the response to the stranger is informed by hukam (‘obligation'). It engages in a ‘retooling’ of received concepts, like obligation and ethics, with concepts from Sikhi to argue for a radical reimagining of rights as a way of life that performs political spirituality as a counter-conductive practice of collective care. I thus inject rights, obligation and ethics with a feminine poetic consciousness inflected with radical Sikhi, which I argue has the potential to create an obligation towards the maimed. It also has the potential to change our understanding of the subject from the Western liberal self to aatma (spirit), informed by a cosmic consciousness and able to embrace Begum as a stranger.