The wrongs of a right

The Cabinet has cleared the Employment Guarantee Bill, which is likely to be introduced in Parliament within the next few days. This has been preceded by a vigorous debate which has raised a number of issues.

One of the least focused on of these concerns the Bill's attempt to make rural employment, albeit for only a 100 days every year, a legal right. It seeks to ensure that if a person demands work, he would have to be given it.

Laudable though the idea might sound, it is worth exploring whether something like rural employment should be made a legal right at all, falling within the general rubric of rights.

If so, whether such a right would be enforceable; if not, what penalties would follow and upon whom; and, most importantly, whether unpunished non-implementation would, over time, dilute other rights as well (as is already happening with the mandated right to education).

The activists who have forced the government's hand via the National Advisory Council, headed by Sonia Gandhi, would do well to pause and consider these aspects as well, instead of focusing exclusively on the economics of it. The economics is important, no doubt, but so are the surrounding issues.

Rights are presumed to have a strong moral basis. Moral injunctions and precepts are the link between all rights. Yet, there has not been much agreement over whether legal rights can be equated to moral rights.

Most philosophers and jurists have steered clear of what is obviously difficult terrain. Essentially, the disagreement is over the obverse of rights, namely, duties.

If A has a right, B has a duty. Or does he? The problem is yet to be resolved, which is why the government wants to dilute the Bill by making the right to employment a very weak one.

Its duty will also be a correspondingly less onerous one as it can revoke the right at will simply by denying its duty. The activists, who insist that a legal right is unalienable from a moral one, are furious over this.

Philosophers and political scientists have also made a distinction between entrenched rights and the rest. The former have priority over everything else and are absolute in the sense that they cannot be taken away or abridged.

They also usually follow from Constitutional provisions. But sometimes absolute rights can be created by legislation as well, or even through rulings by courts. The activists are trying to do so through legislation.

What needs to be decided during the debate in Parliament and then in committee is whether it is practicable to create such an absolute right, in the form of a legal right. The question arises from the unavoidable political reality that no government will have the courage to take away the right.

The guiding principle also has to be not just practicability but where the new right fits in with other, existing legal rights. These are complex issues but they are being neglected in the downpour of "hard" facts and suspect statistics. This will not do when legislation with such far-reaching consequences is being contemplated.