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Five Notions of Haq: Exploring Vernacular Rights Cultures in Southern Asia1
As India and Pakistan mark sixty years as postcolonial nations, an impressive feature of their uneven experiments with democracy is the confident and fluent employment of the language of rights to claim entitlements due to persons or groups from the State. While the lofty ideals of democracy, rights and citizenship have received intellectual support from South Asia's elite, it is their poor, marginalized and dispossessed whose everyday struggles for rights that have protected and animated them. The dynamism of this grassroots activism, which articulates rights for multiple groups, identities and practices and citizenship claims for governance reform needs empirical investigation and a theoretical and historical elaboration. Despite the meteoric rise of social mobilisations in South Asia and in India in particular, there are no studies which have examined the language within which demands and entitlements are articulated or the philosophical assumptions underpinning the use of rights language in the region. And finally, there has been little attempt to pursue a comparative and integrative study of theoretical and empirical exercise of rights across the Southern Asian region.
This working paper is a preliminary effort to document the various contemporary rights meanings in South Asia. It focuses on the etymological and vernacular history of the literal term used to denote a right in Southern Asia, which is the Arabic/Urdu literal term 'Haq'. In order to map contemporary meanings of Haq or rights in India and Pakistan, I put forward and examine five different justificatory premises upon which Haq is popularly predicted. By attending to the justificatory premises underpinning rights meanings, I investigate the ways in which rights are grounded in specific empirical contexts; address conceptual and empirical histories, political practices and contemporary politics of human rights in Southern Asia and think about political practices and political cultures outside the western world in a manner that avoids standard misdescriptions and misrepresentations of these. More specifically, through this paper, I wish to think about the relationship between our conceptual vocabularies and our moral lives and in doing so, examine the ways in which language reinforces and contributes to the construction of social hierarchies based upon asymmetrical relationships of power, exclusion, status and privilege. Thus, it is not...