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In "Righting Wrongs," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak contends:
'Human Rights' is not only about having or claiming a right or a set of rights; it is also about righting wrongs, about being the dispenser of these rights. The idea of human rights, in other words, may carry within itself the agenda of a kind of social Darwinism-the fittest must shoulder the burden of righting the wrongs of the unfit-and the possibility of an alibi.1
Spivak's quote makes two points: (1) human rights mean having or claiming and dispensing rights; (2) the stronger must right the wrongs of the weaker. At first glance, we might take these points as simply repeating what most human rights scholars and activists typically assume to be central premises of human rights promotion and protection. These central premises include (1) with rights come responsibilities; (2) the powerful- often the state-must protect the rights of the less powerful-the poor, the discriminated, and the tortured; and (3) the claim by the powerful to protect the less powerful can also be an excuse to dominate them. But a closer read suggests another interpretation. It opens the possibility that the unfit may claim and dispense rights for themselves: they may right wrongs for themselves. If human rights mean having or claiming and dispensing rights, then the subject of human rights-the holder of human rights-is (or can be) at once claimer and dispenser of rights. If the subject of human rights is (or can be) at once claimer and dispenser of rights, then the weaker need not rely on the stronger to right their wrongs, or be oppressed by the stronger who claim to have their interests in mind. Instead, the weaker may right wrongs by themselves, wrongs often perpetrated by the stronger. If the poor were to right wrongs, what wrongs would they right, and how would they do so?
This essay considers what the righting of wrongs by the poor might entail by analyzing Aravind Adiga's novel, The White Tiger.2 The first part of the essay examines the logic that leads the novel's protagonist, Balram Halwai, a poor subaltern, to identify the problem of the rich growing richer at the expense of the poor as the most egregious wrong, and to right this wrong by...