Introduction: Are Human Rights Universal?

The idea of human rights predates the present system, which was established in 1945 with the creation of the United Nations (Mende, 2019). “Universal human rights theory holds that human rights apply to everyone simply by virtue of their being human” (Nasr, 2016), however cultural relativism maintains that these rights are neo-imperialistic. “They originated in the West, reflect Western interests and are, therefore…a new form of imperialism” (Shaheed & Richter, 2018). For the sake of this essay, I’ll reply ‘Are human rights universal?’ by a easy sure/no dichotomy. If one takes the attitude that, while human rights ideas can’t be relevant to all state behaviour, the final thought of justice transcends cultural boundaries and isn’t solely confined to Western society (Sundaramoorthy, 2016), then we are able to take human rights as “standards that recognise and protect the dignity of all human beings” (UNICEF, 2015). Any culturally relativistic narrative, one might argue, thus rejects how injustices are acquainted to all cultures, and it’s this collective expertise which constitutes an authoritative basis on which to outline ‘human rights’ (Shaheed & Richter, 2018).

But post-colonialist readings transcend the mere definition of human rights. As Barbra Heron (2007) signifies, post-colonialism is an applicable framework for this research as a result of it traces the ‘colonial continuities’ of up to date actions, specifically ‘human rights’. If we consider that human rights are greater than a Western abstraction, they need to have a common utility, that’s indivisible and inclusive. Critical accounts, nevertheless, level to a propensity to overemphasise human rights abuses within the Global South and assemble a non-Western ‘other’ that requires saving by Western states (Mende, 2019). I’ll study British colonialism’s modern penalties on the human rights of marginalised communities (together with girls and LGBTQ+ folks), arguing {that a} tendency to impose imperial legal guidelines, cultures and norms on colonised nations has created generations with oppressed rights (Conklin, 1998).

Women’s Rights and Decolonising Western Feminism

After the British Monarchy colonised India in 1858, an ambition to ‘civilise the barbaric natives’ motivated many authorized and social reforms. Post-colonial feminists have insisted that an emphasis on the pursuits of colonial rulers, native elite males and British girls solely annoyed the pursuits of Indian girls, who’re nonetheless arguably oppressed two-fold, first by imperialist legacies and second by patriarchal norms. Many students have deemed this ‘civilising’ mission as a approach of emasculating Indian males by claiming that they have been incapable of caring for their very own girls, and this wrestle for political dominance was being waged on the backs of Indian girls (Wright & Chitnis, 2007). With Victorian notions of womanhood (together with chastity, innocence and passiveness) got here patriarchal and protectionist insurance policies, persisting in trendy society. While attainable to make the compelling case that Western enlightenment contributed to the abolishment of kid marriages, sati, purdah and different patriarchal customs together with prohibition of the remarriage of widows, this colonial saviourism nonetheless permeates modern ‘human rights’ considering, stifling the rights of beforehand colonised folks. “The British had set themselves the noble task of reforming the barbaric Indian male, a fictional character that they had, in large part, created” (Wash & Lee, 2007). But British imperialists weren’t all males. According to Antoinette Burton, middle-class British feminists referred to Indian girls as “a helpless, degraded victim of religious custom and uncivilised cultural practises” (2000) who have been in want of imperial saviours’ intervention.

The feminist motion must be decolonised to ensure that girls within the Global South to attain the ‘human rights’ that Western girls take pleasure in. During colonial occasions, “it was the ‘White Man’s Burden‘ to protect Indian women from ‘uncivilised and barbaric practices‘, and Indian men wanted to protect their women from foreigners” (Bhattar, 2022). Women have been seen as “unresisting, inert and passive objects” (Bhattar, 2022) for generations as a result of these historical struggles, and this thinking has modern consequences, with the first waves of feminism monopolised by white women in the West, excluding the ‘submissive, uneducated’ girls of color from the East. Saris have been historically worn naked beneath attributable to India’s sizzling humid local weather. However, the British (viewing Indians by an oriental lens) thought-about this indecent and launched blouses. While the shirt liberated white girls from corsets in Europe, it additionally pressured its customary of public decorum on and institutionally sexualised Indian girls. When thought-about alongside neo-liberal ‘white feminism’, with liberation attitudes main quite a few hijab and burqa bans throughout Europe, we are able to see that colonialism has contributed to an inherently oppressive construction of ‘saving’ girls of color by imposing Western attitudes on them (Ezaydi & Chalabi, 2021). As Cole (2012) finds, “the white saviour complex is not about justice” however “validat[ing] privilege.” In order for girls in previously colonised nations to guard their human rights, we should promote the intersectional feminism of Crenshaw that rejects saviourism, respects cultural distinction, and strikes in the direction of true solidarity. The White Saviour Complex is a “colonial continuity” which has survived the demise of colonialism and is restated in human rights activism, significantly girls’s rights.

LGBTQ+ Rights and the Legacy of Homophobic Legislation 

According to Human Rights Watch, “more than half of the world’s remaining ‘sodomy’ laws criminalising consensual homosexual conduct are relics of British colonial rule” (Whitehead, 2017). Before British colonisation, homosexuality was not unlawful in India – up till September 2018, it was unlawful beneath Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This was a part of the British reform mission, superimposing Victorian concepts of sexual morality on India. Section 377 served as a political instrument to reassert colonial authority after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, particularly over ‘deviant’ teams inside society (Reddy, 2010). “While the hijras have been part of South Asia for thousands of years, their identity stood at odds with Western morality and conception of gender” (Hunter, 2019), and the intolerance of the state and society in the direction of transgender folks has persevered to this present day. Transgender discrimination ranges from impediments in accessing training, employment and healthcare, to harassment, arbitrary arrests and sexual violence (Banerjie, 2018). Evidence of a tradition accepting of sexual fluidity dates again to the traditional Sanskrit texts of 8^th BCE and the Mughal erotic canon in 17^th CE (Benton, 2002). According to Foucault, “bodies are controlled through discipline over centuries, by repressing…sexuality” (Young, 1995), seen within the physique policing imposed by colonial rule, which pathologized non-heteronormative behaviours. We should additionally recognise that colonial legacies aren’t merely undone by reversing these legal guidelines. Despite Hindus embracing numerous gender and sexual identities way back to the Vedic interval (round 4000 BC), sexual and gender minorities in India face fixed discrimination. In ‘Orientalism’, Said examines how the West constructed concepts concerning the East as inferior to create these energy relations which nonetheless disempower beforehand colonised populations right now. Just as they created societal conventions of Indian girls as meek and unassuming, to justify imperial interventions, they imposed Western, Judeo-Christian sexual norms on India’s fluid gender and sexual conventions. Most ironic, maybe, is that twenty years after granting India independence, Section 377 was overturned in Britain, a transfer that was applauded by human rights activists regardless of its criminalising of homosexuality in 42 former colonies.

Enze Han, creator of “British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality,” stated that the British “had this conception that the ‘Orient’, the non-Western subjects, were overly erotic” (2018), the identical Victorian morality that contributed to the subjugation of Indian girls. The conservative attitudes of former colonies are illustrative of the long-term results of British prohibitions on native opinions, together with opinions on homosexual intercourse which have contributed to an increase in hate crime within the Global South. Indian LGBT activist, Jyoti, argued that same-sex communities loathed the legislation as a result of it was “alien” and had not “organically developed in [Indian] society” (Westcott, 2018) however was imposed by colonial powers, inviting discrimination, harassment and assault that harmed the human rights of homosexual Indians. But others argue that homophobia predates the British empire, with Robert Meyers saying “Saudi Arabia, Iran and Ethiopia were never colonised, and are virulently homophobic countries” (Hinton, 2022). More putting is how political leaders (together with India’s ‘Hindutva’ authorities) have, in latest many years, “defended those laws as citadels of cultural authenticity, with homosexuality coming from the colonizing West” (Human Rights Watch, 2008), even if the West introduced within the first legal guidelines enabling governments to forbid and repress it. A stronger perspective, subsequently, is that homophobia and sexism are primitive techniques that weren’t created by colonialism however moderately exacerbated by it. This has wide-reaching penalties on the power of those teams to combat for his or her human rights, manipulating societal norms, legal guidelines, and conventions.

Rising Economic Inequality and India’s Rural Poor

Unemployment, famine, poor sanitary circumstances, lack of entry to training and healthcare, caste-based oppression, non secular violence and gender-based violence are all part of the legacy of colonialism. In 40 years, between 1880 and 1920, British colonialism killed 100 million Indians and, in response to analysis by financial historian, Robert Allen, excessive poverty in India elevated beneath British rule, from 23% in 1810 to greater than 50% within the mid-Twentieth century. Allen and different students argue that previous to colonialism, Indian dwelling requirements could have been “on a par with the developing parts of Western Europe” (Sullivan, 2022). British colonial insurance policies facilitated the exploitation of India’s wealth and sources, which resulted in widening socioeconomic disparities. The financial inequality in India right now could be traced again to the colonial interval, “affecting access to basic services, education, and healthcare, and impeding the realization of economic and social rights” (Oxfam, 2022). Gaps have widened between the propertied and the property-less, with British India’s institutional and business coverage making the wealthy Indians richer and the poor poorer, one thing that has persevered to this present day.

This is particularly true for India’s rural poor, whose human rights are more and more weak. The introduction of the Zamindari system, the place “peasants were often forced to pay exorbitant rents and taxes to zamindars” (Balaji, 2023), typically led to oppressive practises and elevated poverty amongst peasants, with an emphasis on money crops and business agriculture inflicting populations right now to be inclined to rural shocks in addition to exacerbating modern cycles of poverty and debt. Deindustrialisation and an emphasis on British manufactured items contributed to this unemployment and poverty. India’s rural poor “are vulnerable…marginalized, voiceless, and victim of multiple social circumstances” (Bhadra, 2021). Today, the highest 10% of the Indian inhabitants holds 77% of the whole nationwide wealth, making it one of the unequal nations on this planet, with financial inequality including to a society that’s “already fractured along the lines of caste, religion, region and gender” (Himanshu, 2018). This will increase laborers’ danger of falling victims to poverty traps, stifling their fundamental human proper to habitable wages, protected working circumstances, and fundamental companies. However, analysis by financial historian, Roy, discovered inconclusive proof for this declare, stating that the fortunes of the propertied class really fell (Kwatra, 2018). Nevertheless, one can not deny that colonial societies entailed large inequalities in political company, in addition to in social and financial alternatives, if solely alongside the racial divide between European and autochthonous populations.

The Right to Self-Determination in Jammu and Kashmir 

Arguably one of many gravest types of human rights violation is the deprivation of a folks’s proper to self-determination (to freely select their sovereignty), because it impacts a complete nation. In 1960, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which proclaimed that each one folks had a proper to self-determination. This particularly emphasised the connection between the fitting to self-determination and peoples of colonised territories, as each self-determination and the existence of colonial continuities can’t be mutually inclusive. Jammu and Kashmir, the land between India and Pakistan, has been topic to dispute because the partition of 1947, the place British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, acknowledged {that a} referendum would happen to determine the place Kashmir ought to accede to; this referendum by no means passed off. A UN plebiscite in 1948 not noted the fitting of Kashmiris to grow to be an autonomous state and quite a few human rights violations have taken place within the area, together with over 100,000 folks lifeless, 3,400 folks lacking, sexual violence and armed insurgency. Third World advocates, like Georges Abi-Saab, are inclined to see the fitting to self-determination as probably the most elementary proper and “a prerequisite for individual minority rights” (Abdullah, 2006). According to the uti possidetis precept, colonial borders ‘freeze’ on the time of independence, within the absence of a treaty. While handy for colonising powers to acquit themselves and grant independence rapidly, this has created political instability and bloody battle in beforehand colonised nations. In Kashmir, it has additionally given rise to a brand new kind of colonialism – settler-colonialism – with the brand new Domicile Order granting half 1,000,000 non-Kashmiris residency standing, with the goal of fostering a brand new Kashmiri identification by displacement and exploitation. Colonialism has thus given rise to new human rights violations, sparking new rivalries for energy and upholding oppressive social constructions.

Conclusion: Everything is Connected to Colonial Heritage

It is clear that colonialism – particularly, the British Empire – has had extreme penalties for modern human rights. Given the truth that there are, with just a few exceptions, no colonies left on this planet, one would possibly query why a colonial context is even related. However, “the laws, economic structures and cultural basis for European colonialism didn’t disappear when nations gained independence in the mid-20th century” (Ross, 2019). Decolonisation is the whole rejection of the outdated concept that “civilized Europeans” have been entitled to dominate the “uncivilized”. The results of colonialism not solely nonetheless exist however are as grave as ever, not solely within the case of self-determination and territorial integrity, however taking a look at a nation’s wealth and sources, and the financial, social and cultural human rights of its folks. Everything (poverty, human rights violations, ethnic conflicts and minority points) is related to colonial heritage and, thus, a postcolonial resistance is going down. Great injustices occur when folks develop accustomed to them; decolonisation is altering this.

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