Five notions of Haq: exploring vernacular rights cultures in Southern Asia

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 only important to investigate the originary histories of the words but also to identify the sociological and political relationships that these words signify/uphold and are implicated in. And finally, in identifying the different justificatory premises of Haq, I hope to provide not only descriptions of citizenship articulations in non-western contexts but also conceptual articulations of its core referent: rights. A note of caution however, must be inserted here. Any research of this kind that aims to traverse cross cultural intellectual terrains is always in danger of falling prey to several kinds of intellectual danger. In respect of this particular research, there are at least four types of intellectual dangers: we need to be wary of not only orientalist representations of the non-western political subject, but also equally wary of reverse orientalism or occidentalism2, of crude indigenisms or dangerous neo-nativisms which pay inadequate attention to the multiple sources which feed into the making of conceptual histories and of thinking about rights and citizenship as evolutionary and necessarily progressive by attending to the exclusions and 'othering' which takes place both through discourse and practice. In this paper, I shall first identify and outline the important questions central to the study of vernacular rights cultures. I proceed to provide a brief etymological and intellectual description of Haq which is the principal literal term within Urdu/Arabic to denote a right in Northern India and Pakistan. …