Human rights movements in India

Abstract

This article is an attempt to trace the various phases of the human rights movement (HRM) and the assumptions underlying each of them in terms of the inter-relationships between the state, civil society and democracy. The 1970s witnessed the first phase of the HRM— the ‘civil liberties phase’—working within the framework of state-civil society complementarity. HRM along with emphasising the autonomy of institutions also struggled to recover a ‘rights based civil society’, where all citizens could have access to fundamental rights. The 1980s were marked by a shift to the second phase—the ‘democratic rights phase’—with a new state versus civil society framework. During this phase, the HRM made efforts to construct civil society as a pure ‘realm of freedom’ that stood squarely outside the state and consisted of various militant and radical social movements. Towards the end of the 1990s, the third phase—the ‘human rights phase’—reconstituted itself on a new civil society versus political society framework. The new political society stressed the importance of locating and condemning human rights violations at the civil societal level, including those committed by radical social movements. Finally, the contemporary moment is ironically striving to move beyond the political by basing itself on an abstract moral dimension