The battle for democracy and human rights must go on

Democracy as an organizing principle of government is conventionally associated with Athens in ancient Greece. Pericles’ speech famously adumbrated the virtues of democracy, emphasizing the freedom of Athenian citizens to express their mind freely, take part in the making of laws and in holding public office. Such democracy, however, was limited to men who could trace their ancestry putatively to one of the 12 founding families of Athens. Women, Greeks belonging to other city-states and the very large number of slaves were excluded from the category of citizens and thus consigned to inferior roles in the overall functioning of state and society.

Plato held democracy in unmitigated contempt while Aristotle was fearful that it would mean the rule of the irresponsible majority who would be the poor and ignorant sections of society.

Democracy went into oblivion after the dissolution of Greek city-states and was superseded by the Roman Empire to be followed by the medieval order where the Catholic church and temporal rulers vied with one another to exercise absolute power over the mass of population. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment paved the way for a revival of free thought and concomitant ideas of rights, which the Social Contract theories of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau advanced.

The 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Revolution are generally considered to have paved the way for expanding the right to vote and hold public office, but that right was still confined to white, property-owning Christian men.

RISKY TO EMPOWER THE POOR?

However, even as late as the 19th century democracy was considered a dangerous form of government because it empowered the poor majority which could not be trusted to act responsibly and rationally. J. S. Mill expressed such a view in his famous treatise, On Liberty. Mill however favoured an open elite into which, through education, talented individuals from the lower order could be co-opted. On the other hand, socialists campaigned for the right to vote for working men, with Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels in particular leading such a campaign.

Women remained largely disenfranchised till the beginning of the 20th century. They were granted the right to vote first in New Zealand, but such a right did not extend to the country’s aboriginal people. The Soviet Union granted the right to vote to women in 1917. Kemalist Turkey granted women the right to vote in 1934.  In much of the Western world, women were granted the right to vote only after they waged protest marches and faced police repression.

Religious and ethnic minorities continued to face discrimination even if in some countries they were granted formal citizenship. It was only after the horrors of World War II, which caused unprecedented bloodshed and destruction and also shocked the conscience of Western societies because of atrocities such as the Holocaust, that fundamental changes in constitutions and laws were made. Social attitudes turned against racism, fascism and dictatorships.

DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Such transformation was epitomized by the founding of the United Nations in 1945. The UN Charter proclaimed the beginning of a new era in which war and the use of force would be supplanted by peace, cooperation and democracy, and human rights would become the norm for legitimate governments. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, although a non-binding resolution, elaborated 30 civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights which were expected to be incorporated by governments. Western democracies went the farthest in undertaking constitutional changes in the light of the UDHR while the emerging states in Asia and Africa too adopted constitutions inspired by it. 

However, except for India, where the freedom struggle had been led by enlightened leaders acutely aware of world trends and a broad consensus was obtained among them and the urban middle class on a secular, democratic, inclusive and pluralist democracy, and Japan, where a militarist past gave way to democracy under US presence, elsewhere the Cold War drove the emerging Asian and African states into blocs led either by the US or the Soviet Union. Some states strove to steer clear of such polarizing trends by joining the non-aligned movement.  

Latin America, treated as its backyard by the United States, faced the full wrath of its power, and governments were subverted one after another in favour of military juntas. In much of Asia and Africa, weak socio-economic development complicated matters and military coups took place in many countries, while in the oil-rich Middle East the Cold War lashed severely in terms of ideological polarization between Islamist and Arab nationalist regimes.  

The worst sufferers were the nations of Latin America which were literally treated as the backyard of the United States and any attempt by them to challenge that hegemony was met with the full force of American power.

COLD WAR & PROXY WAR

These trends continued into the 1970s but from around 1977 onwards, the Cold War began to lash most violently in south-central Asia. In July 1977, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq overthrew the government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; Marxists captured state power in Afghanistan in April 1978;  a backward-looking revolution in the name of Islam led by Shia clerics in Iran came to power in February 1979; and in December 1979 the Soviet Red Army marched into Afghanistan to help the beleaguered Afghan communists facing an internal rebellion which had been helped by Pakistan.

What followed was a decade of a proxy war between the United States and the Soviet Union in which Muslim warriors were recruited from all over the world, brought to the northern city of Peshawar in Pakistan, indoctrinated in the ideology of jihad and trained to kill, and sent to fight Russians and Afghan communists. The overall military operation was conducted by the Pakistan Army and its much-feared Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI).  

In 1989 the Soviets left Afghanistan, but by that time the radicalization of Muslims had taken place on a worldwide basis. More importantly, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. People prematurely began to celebrate the end of the Cold War and of history and proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy sooner or later all over the world.

Two developments nullified such a simplistic projection about the future. Firstly, the United States had been working hard since the early 1960s to widen the wedge that had taken place between the Soviet Union and Communist China. Already during the lifetime of Mao Zedong, liaison between the United States and the Communist China had been established. Under Deng Xiaoping, such a relationship was set on firmer grounds as the US and the World Bank assisted the Chinese to develop capitalism but without liberal democracy.

This policy inadvertently helped the Chinese not only become the second biggest economy of the world but also the second most powerful military power.

Equally, the international mujahideen proved to be a veritable scourge for the world. Believing in a messianic mission to spread Islam all over the world, the mujahideen carried out daring terrorist activities. Terrorism’s targeting of Indian Kashmir and India at large produced a Hindu nationalist reaction, while Western democracies were made to tighten their security systems after the infamous 9/11 2001 onslaughts masterminded by Al-Qaida on the United States.

Attacks in London, Madrid and several other places provoked an anti-immigration, practically anti-Muslim, reaction among apprehensive sections. The centre of such activities was identified in Pakistan where democracy had never taken root, and the bureaucracy and military had been calling the shots from the beginning. Needless to say, radical Islam not only rejected democracy but human rights and women’s rights as understood in international law and UN declaration and conventions. 

In India, rightwing Hindus embarked upon a concerted offensive to challenge the secular-democratic state which the erstwhile Indian leadership had envisaged through their Constitution. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first led a campaign against the Babri Masjid which allegedly had been built on the site where the Hindu god Lord Rama was said to have been born. On 6 December 1992, Hindu activists managed to attack and destroy the mosque. The anti-Muslim momentum continued but it spread also to Christians in some places. The BJP met electoral success first in 1996 but could form a stable government only in 1998.

BJP’s Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee did try to sort out relations with Pakistan, but his peace mission of 1999 was sabotaged by General Pervez Musharraf and his trigger-happy peers who instead provoked the Kargil miniwar after both India and Pakistan had demonstrated their nuclear power capabilities in 1998. International diplomacy intervened to prevent a major catastrophe in South Asia. However, things continued to deteriorate from bad to worse and on several occasions both nations were drawn towards war but were dissuaded by international forces from going to all-out war.

UNIVERSALIZING HUMAN RIGHTS

The most dramatic rise of Hindu nationalism took place when in 2014 Narendra Modi was elected prime minister. Modi unabashedly blamed Indian Muslims as invaders, conveniently ignoring that the vast majority of them were local converts. BJP strategy aimed at consolidating the Hindu vote (about 80% of the population). In 2019, it won the election even more handsomely. It claimed credit for economic development and overall stability. The BJP’s advance was accompanied by the cultivation of the cult of Modi as some sort of infallible man of destiny. Such trends received a dramatic setback when in the 2024 election the voters in significant numbers voted for the opposition parties. The BJP did manage to form a coalition government, however.

The universalization of democracy and human rights, which the UN Charter of 1945 had envisaged, has not been realized in full measure, not even in significant ways, but it remains a goal which has not been abandoned either. The evidence of the years since 1945 suggests that there are preconditions for democracy and human rights to become universal forces, and that these preconditions include international cooperation, socio-economic development, and obtaining a consensus.

Perhaps it is time to start a global debate on all that needs to be done to make democracy and human rights substantive rather than just pious values and goals.