Human Rights in India, the tradition of Human Rights in Indian context: ancient, medieval and modern

Every 6 December, lakhs of people gather at Chaityabhoomi in Dadar to remember a man who demanded that the Constitution of a new India treat everyone as an equal. Some two thousand years before him, a king had carved his rules for governing on rocks across the subcontinent. Both were answering the same question: what does a person owe to another, and what may a person demand? Indian thought did not wait for Paris or Philadelphia to talk about dignity. The question for this topic is what the Indian tradition actually contributed, what it failed to deliver, and how it reached Part III of our Constitution.

In two minutes

India’s human-rights tradition has three layers: ancient and medieval thought on dharma, duty, tolerance and the ruler’s welfare duty, modern social reform and the freedom movement’s demand for rights, and the Constitution of 1950, which turned those demands into enforceable Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles.

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