Human Rights in Postcolonial India

This volume looks at human rights in independent India through frameworks comparable to those in other postcolonial nations in the Global South. It examines wide-ranging issues that require immediate attention such as those related to disability, violence, torture, education, LGBT, neoliberalism, and social justice. The essays presented here explore the discourse surrounding human rights, and engage with aspects linked to the functioning of democracy, security and strategic matters, and terrorism, especially post 9/11. They also discuss cases connected with human rights violations in India and underline the need for a transparent approach and a more comprehensive perspective of India’s human rights record. Part of the series Ethics, Human Rights and Global Political Thought, the volume will be an important resource for academics, policy makers, civil society organisations, lawyers and those concerned with human rights. It will also be useful to scholars and researchers of Indian politics, law and sociology.

The State of Human Rights in Postcolonial India, 1947–2014: Postcolonial and Anti-Colonial Terrains Part I. Education and Social Value 1. The Paradox and Promise of Children’s Rights in Indian Schools 2. Education as Empowerment? Gender and the Human Right to Education in Postcolonial IndiaPart II. The Body and Autonomy 3. Truth-Telling Techniques: The Aditi Sharma Case and the Implications for Human Rights in India4. Experiencing Torture and Human Rights Violations: Reflections on Self-Experience5. Writing Disability and Rights in Naseema Part III. Legal Subjectivity and Civil Rights 6. Reflections on the Use of Fatal Force by the Indian State: Colonial and Postcolonial 7. The Subject of Rights: Conflict Violence and Transitional Justice in India 8. Gender, Politics, and Development in Rural India Part IV. Violence, Women, and the Girl-Child 9. On a Different Footing: Has "Nirbhaya" Turned India Around? 10. Human Dignity and Social Justice: Locating Agency in Dalit Women in the Pudukkottai District of Tamil Nadu, India Part V. Negotiating Globalization and Capitalism 11. What’s Old Is New: How the West’s Neoliberal Reforms Seek to Re-Enslave India12. Free to be Gay": Same-Sex Relations in India, Globalized Homophobia and Globalized Gay Rights

Om Prakash Dwivedi is Assistant Professor in English at Shri Ramswaroop Memorial University, Lucknow, India. He has co-authored Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (2014) and co-edited Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market (2014). Dwivedi is also the editor of Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (2014). V. G. Julie Rajan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, USA. She has lectured in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as on political violence and women’s human rights for the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University, USA. Her research interests include women and militarism, violence against women, terrorism and human rights. Rajan’s monographs include Women Suicide Bombers: Narratives of Violence (2011) and Al Qaeda’s Global Crisis: The Islamic State, Takfir, and the Genocide of Muslims (2015). Among her edited collections are Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate (2008, 2015) and Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras (2011). Rajan’s current research concerns genocide, gendercide and femicide in the territories claimed by The Islamic State globally.