The idea of human rights has raised both hope and concern. The hope is for universality, that every person matters, and matters equally, and therefore that everyone has equal rights. The concern is that human rights are a Trojan horse concealing implicit attacks on non-Western cultures and values. Even though a delegate from India was included in the committee that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Western thinking was regarded as the paradigm, and only a minority of the countries that now exist voted on the Declaration in 1948.
An important contribution to resolving this conflict can be made by exploring the insights and rich resources offered for an intercultural understanding of human rights that come from India.
This volume offers pioneering essays that approach the question from theoretical, social, legal and political perspectives, contributing to a global understanding of human rights. The contributors develop new methodologies for examining what all may learn-including the West-from Indian articulations of human rights.
Contents: Introduction. Part I: Theoretical issues: 1. Rights and relativity/Sonia Sikka. 2. Ethical naturalism and human rights/Nigel DeSouza. 3. Two concepts of overlapping consensus/Jay Drydyk. 4. Developmentalism, human rights and gender politics: from a politics of origins to a politics of meanings/Sumi Madhok. Part II: Normative sources and intellectual traditions. 5. Human moral obligations, dharma and human rights/Shashi Motilal. 6. Autonomy and human rights in ancient and modern Indian Buddhism/Gordon Davis. 7. Human rights, Indian philosophy and patanjali/Shyam Ranganathan. 8. Human rights, justice and political toleration in India: multiplicity, self and interconnectedness/Ashwani Peetush. Part III: Social Practices and Applied Contexts. 9. The rights of man: a Gandhian intervention/Bindu Puri. 10. Invoking human rights: Dalits and the politics of caste violence in Gujarat/Gopika Solanki. 11. The state as religious gatekeeper: human rights, resistance, and Indian anti-conversion laws/Amar Khoday. 12. The rights to have rights: taking Hannah Arendt to India/Niraja Gopal Jayal. Index.
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