Privacy Versus Family and Community: A Contradiction?
The recent unanimous judgment by a nine-judge constitutional bench of the Supreme Court recognising privacy as a fundamental right has been hailed by libertarians as a momentous milestone in Indian jurisprudence. But there has been some disquiet over the judgment as well. In a recent commentary, Swapan Dasgupta wrote that the court has “reinforced the conventional Western — and at the same time, not very Indian — view that the individual is at the core of Indian nationhood. This is in direct conflict with the other communitarian facets of the Indian Constitution that accords generous space to caste, class, religion, region and gender. Each of these presupposes a community as the unit and implicitly contests the notion of absolute privacy……….What has preoccupied the conservative imagination is the notion of the community and its collective wisdom accumulated over the ages. The very notion of family values conflicts quite sharply with individual choice and individual privacy.”
Without getting into the thrust of Dasgupta’s arguments in this column (that seek to deal with the implications of the judgment on the role of the state), these specific comments delineate a conservative unease with granting too long a rope to individual rights, fearing that privileging the individual by granting her/him a right to privacy will lead to an anarchic erosion of communitarian and traditional wisdom. This fear is echoed in the case that the government (unsuccessfully) sought to argue during the Supreme Court hearings, by pursuing a definition of privacy as a right that is Western and elitist, not applicable in the Indian context. Is there an inherent conflict between individualism and community? We need clarity on this question, and to achieve it we must approach it from the viewpoint of culture and not merely from law.
If the individual’s identity was primarily derived from community, our history would largely consist of a cyclical repetition of traditional wisdom. But change does occur, and India’s history of dealing with change is replete with individuals who are venerated. To name a miniscule and very incomplete list that randomly comes to mind: Gautama Buddha, Mahavira, Adishankaracharya, Meera, Basavanna, Swami Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Rabindranath Tagore. These individuals did not just roll over with the status quo: on the contrary, they embodied a resistance to, and constructive critique of, the status quo. Each individual’s resistance and critique was founded on the specific wisdom embodied by him/her. The fact that they could each develop their own wisdom means that they possessed the autonomy to do so: and the possibility of autonomy rests on a foundation of privacy.
The question is whether any of these individuals, given the autonomy they embodied, could be considered as anarchic. To most people who encountered them, it was far from so: their contributions were embraced as empowering, leading to the enrichment of community tradition. But some may have considered them anarchic: if you were a British colonialist you would have considered Gandhi as anarchic, and if you cling to the notion of upper caste purity and dominance you would consider Ambedkar as anarchic. Individual autonomy and privacy is troubling to power more than it is to the ideal of community. At the level of the state, it troubles power associated with governance. And at the social level, it troubles power associated with patriarchy, caste and class.
The reason why so many consider the individuals named here to be empowering rather than anarchic is because their message struck an intuitive resonance with the innate quest we are all born with: the desire to feel the rapture of being alive, a sense that the potential in one’s autonomy and freedom is unchained, and one is not reduced to the robotic and obedient repetition of traditions dictated by other humans. This resonance carries a significance that we must examine, for it is necessary to both individual and community.
At the level of the individual it is necessary to complete the definition of self: one cannot define oneself as an isolated island, completion of one’s sense of self calls for the recognition of how we are called upon by others. The sense of self and the recognition of otherness are inextricably implicated in each other. And when the self finds resonance of significance in the other, the foundations of community are born, for in that resonance lie the discovery of love, joy, laughter, creativity, and all the foundations for a rich community tradition.
One cannot privilege either individual or community: it is the dialectical discourse between the two that is important. Privilege the individual over community, and you are likely to breed anarchy. But privilege the community over the individual, and you begin to demand a large-scale obedience that suppresses creative energy, repressing the diversity and exploratory energy that builds resilience to change. A community that represses individual autonomy is like a body that kills its immune system, for a rich diversity of individual creativity is the equivalent of the immune system. A body without immunity can survive only when conditions remain unchanged, which we all know is an unrealistic expectation. Disease is to the body what change is to a community, and fighting it requires greater and greater degrees of power: more virulent drugs or artificial isolation within sterile conditions in the case of the body, and escalating levels of suppression, power and violence in the case of community.
Family and community are not contradicted by autonomy and privacy. It is the opposite: achieving resilience in family and community wisdom is predicated on the protection of individual rights, including the right to privacy.
