Mihir S Sharma: What freedom means

The most basic element of freedom for any individual is protection from arbitrary state action -- something India has failed to provide to its citizens

The cry of “Azadi” in Kashmir can no longer be ignored in New Delhi. When Parliament gathered this week to debate the protests in India’s northernmost state, in which dozens have been killed and hundreds injured, a subtle change was apparent. India’s representatives could not pretend that this was all about Pakistan. They were forced to confront the fact that thousands of citizens of liberal, democratic India had poured angrily into the streets, shouting the word “freedom”.

Whatever else, this fact is a failure of the Indian state. But what sort of failure is it? The answers to that question continue to divide us, as was also visible in that Parliament debate.

Any real answer would require us to take the word “freedom” seriously. We need to take it as seriously as our Constitution does; and as seriously the Supreme Court of India did, in a landmark recent judgment.

Addressing allegations of unaccountable extra-judicial executions in another disturbed state, Manipur, the Court said: “"If members of our armed forces are deployed and employed to kill citizens of our country on the mere allegation or suspicion that they are ‘enemy’, not only the rule of law but our democracy would be in grave danger… There is no concept of absolute immunity from trial by the criminal court...[For] a citizen living under the shadow of a gun that can be wielded with impunity, outright acceptance of the proposition advanced is equally unsettling and demoralising, particularly in a constitutional democracy like ours.”

In Kashmir, as in Manipur, as in other parts of this country, the Indian state is not held accountable for its acts. This is, as the Court points out, a grave danger. Yes, it “unsettles and demoralises” citizens – more, it makes them feel unfree.

The most basic element of freedom for any individual is protection from arbitrary state action. This is what India has consistently failed to provide to its citizens in Kashmir. The second basic element of freedom for any individual is protection from violence inflicted by anyone else. This, too, India has failed to provide to its citizens in Kashmir – including to the Kashmiri Pandits, more than 25 years ago. This freedom is the foundation of the compact between any liberal democracy and the individuals that comprise it.

When that compact is allowed to fray, then, yes, angry demands for “freedom” may erupt. But here’s the problem: the “freedom” that is being demanded in Kashmir today is a collective freedom, a “national” “self-determination” that sits uncomfortably with liberal values. There is little place in this articulation of a collective “freedom” for the Pandits, or the Shias, or Ladakh’s Buddhists. There is, thus, much reason to resist it.

Sadly, our denial of freedom to individuals has led to worrisome cries of “freedom” for a group.

The Indian state has made this error often and egregiously, and not just in Kashmir. Consider the other news that took up Parliament’s time this week – Dalits marching in Gujarat to demand their basic rights, after a video emerged of upper-caste men brutally beating some Dalits for carrying a cow carcass they intended to skin for leather. In the video – which is hard to watch – the representatives of the state, the police, stand by watching as this summary punishment is handed out.

Think, again, of the state’s failure to provide individual freedoms on display here. It did not protect these Dalit workers against random violence; it, instead, enabled it. And there is an additional element here too. For it is because of their profession, because they are leather-workers, that the Dalit men were singled out for violence.

The third basic element of freedom is the right to make your own way in the world, to find work or create a business that provides you with a decent living. It doesn’t matter if you work with dead cows, and that enrages and disgusts some bigot. It is this freedom, too, that the upper-caste mob chose to attack in that video; and it is this freedom, too, that the Indian state has failed to guarantee.

And just as in Kashmir, this failure to guarantee individual freedom will find its response in collective demands; and the “politics of caste” that so many liberals decry will continue to matter.

It is not just the marginalised, Dalits and Kashmiris, to whom the Indian state has denied basic individual freedoms. This very state of Gujarat was, relatively recently, convulsed with protests when the Patidar community –politically, socially and economically powerful – took out violent demonstrations to demand greater representation in government jobs.

But what did the Patidar agitation have to do with freedom? Consider this: the community demanded group-based reservation because it felt disadvantaged in the modern economy. Why? One major reason is that they have been unable to convert their domination of land ownership into success in the modern economy. Most individuals in the Patidar community are small landowners or run small enterprises; India’s refusal to allow land consolidation, and the crippling regulations that prevent small enterprises from growing into big ones, has kept these individuals from prosperity. It is the state that has stifled their economic freedom. So they seek economic security instead, through collective demands on the state. And this was the case, too, with the Jat violence in Haryana and the Gujjar violence in Rajasthan and the Kapu violence in Andhra Pradesh.

Nothing should be more important to a liberal democracy than the political and economic freedom of individual citizens, their right to live and prosper in security. The Indian state, over its seven decades, has not always thought of these freedoms as important. And that’s why cries for other, more disturbing, kinds of freedom are beginning to resound everywhere.

m.s.sharma@gmail.com; Twitter: @mihirssharma