This is an excerpt from the case of ‘Sukanya Shantha v. Union of India (2024)’
What does the future hold for India? Dr Ambedkar had expressed this concern in his last address to the Constituent Assembly. The concern holds true even today. More than 75 years since independence, we have not been able to eradicate the evil of caste discrimination. We need to have a national vision for justice and equality, which involves all citizens.
As Jamal Greene noted: “There is also such a thing as rights. Those individual people and families have hopes and fears that matter but that conflict with the fears and hopes of their fellow human beings. Their aspirations and worries don’t depend on what Framers believed, or how Madison phrased the Bill of Rights, or whether some judicial opinion says “strict scrutiny” applies to a case. They depend on what people’s expectations are, how they are treated by others, and why.
We are bound to experience the rights we have differently than anyone else does—this is what makes them ours. The central challenge for any system of justice has always been that we dream alone but we live together.”[1]
Therefore, we need real and quick steps to identify the instances of existing inequalities and injustices in our society. Words, without action, would mean nothing for the oppressed.
As Paulo Freire noted in the “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”:
“The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor— when he stops making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in the praxis. To affirm that men and women are persons and as persons should be free, and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmative a reality, is a farce.”[2]
We need a compassionate approach, as Alan Paton had described: “It is my own belief that the only power which can resist the power of fear is the power of love. It’s a weak thing and a tender thing; men despise and deride it. But I look for the day when […] we shall realize that the only lasting and worth-while solution of our grave and profound problems lies not in the use of power, but in that understanding and compassion without which human life is an intolerable bondage, condemning us all to an existence of violence, misery and fear.”[3]
We need an institutional approach where people from marginalized communities could share their pain and anguish about their future collectively.[4]
We need to reflect and do away with institutional practices, which discriminate against citizens from marginalized communities or treat them without empathy. We need to identify systemic discrimination in all spaces by observing patterns of exclusion. After all, the “bounds of caste are made of steel”– “Sometimes invisible but almost always inextricable”.[5]
But not so strong that they cannot be broken with the power of the Constitution.
Reference
Sukanya Shantha v. Union of India, (2024)
[1] Jamal Greene, How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights is Tearing America Apart, Mariner
Books, 2022, p. 248
[2] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (translated by Myra Bergman Ramos), Penguin 2017, p. 24
[3] Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country, Vintage Books, 2002
[4] Bell Hooks, Salvation: black people and love, Harper Perennial, 2001; pp. 214-15
[5] Nusrat F. Jafri, This Land We Call Home: The Story of a Family, Caste, Conversions and Modern India, Penguin
(2024), p. xv