Panel Discussion on “Future of Liberal Rights in India”

The times have changed. The word ‘Rights’, which once enthralled the human spirit and fuelled the political minds of the human societies,now appears redundant and clichéd. Scholars and analysts speculate about the ‘end times of right-based-jurisprudence’. It’s a common feature that the central norms of humanity changes when the locus of the global hegemony shifts from one part of the world to another. We have witnessed the shift from modernity to post-modernism, when U.S. took over the ‘position of hegemon’ from Europe. We observed how human societies developed distaste for objective reason, and started preferring subjective human experiences. The Fabric of Universalism, for good or bad, had been cut and stitched, back and forth many times to accommodate the tenets of pluralism. We have reached a phase where the very ‘spirit of Individual’has to concede and rework its ways to escape from the expansion of the communal sphere. The shift of global hegemony from U.S. to the Eastern Nations can easily build inroads to human psychology turning anything that is ‘self-oriented’ into ‘sin’.

Indian societies will be the earliest to adapt themselves into this changing normativity, though it’s doubtful whether India as a nation will have a fair chance to host the global hegemony for the days to come. What does it mean to the people of this nation? Is the tolerance, which people show towards the non-democratic modes of governance a prenatal sign of this change? Or is it an aftermath of a future which we think is yet to come? What about the trends that undermine judiciary and constitutional institutions, glorify cultural integrity and separatism, allow for communal capture of media and reduce the probability of inter-cultural dialogue. Are these mere signs of a future to come? Or is that the future now?

CED&L thinks it’s imperative to investigate into this preposition– a macro-phenomenon having capacity to alter all existing conceptions of life, development, and justice.

Presidential Address:

Dr. Bindu M Nambiar, Principal, Govt. Law College, Thrissur

The panel:

Dr. Sebastian N (Chair), Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Calicut.

Mr. Bastian Steuwer, Research Scholar, London School of Economics, Political Analyst and Columnist in India’s leading newspapers.

Dr. Varun Khanna, Lecturer in Sanskrit, Philosopher-Activist working at the intersection of Sanskrit Grammar, Advaita Vedanta and Social Justice.