We, the people of India, are engaged in a daily tryst—read: struggle—for basic human rights. For the seemingly well-to-do, the wish list includes constant water supply, clean air, safe roads, punctual public transportation, and crime-free neighbourhoods. For those further down the ladder, the struggle is starker: food that fills the stomach, water that doesn’t sicken, medicines that don’t kill, houses that don’t flood, habitats at safe distances from polluted streams or garbage piles, and exploitation-free environments in the public institutions they are compelled to navigate.
The tragic beauty is that many of the issues plaguing those at the bottom routinely afflict those higher up as well. But that is a story for another day.
This list could just as easily have been written 30, 20, or even 10 years ago. These challenges have stood like mountains. Generations have grappled with the same set of issues without meaningful change. What has changed are two things: first, people have more money, so they attempt to buy their way out. Second, information flows ceaselessly through technology-enabled devices, making people acutely aware of how miserable they are compared to others.
Growing up in the 1990s, many of us found consolation in believing that China and India were bound by similar constraints due to overpopulation. We were told we were greedy for fantasizing about the standards of the developed world. We were not supposed to compare, as we supposedly belonged to a crowded world. We could dream by watching Bollywood movies shot in the calm pastures of America and Europe, but we were expected to stop short of demanding that life—because of China.
Within a decade or so, that consolation was snatched away brutally. China hosted the Olympics in 2008; we hosted the scandal-ridden Commonwealth Games in 2010. Suddenly, we had no one left to compare ourselves with. We were alone in our material miseries. We were—and I had suspected it all along—slow, full of excuses and self-pity.
We then resorted to commentary on human rights, claiming superiority through democracy. We pointed to China’s poor record on civil liberties and suppression of dissent. There was truth in this—not because Indian liberals said so, but because foreign (read: Western) media echoed the same sentiments. On such matters, Indians trusted Western media implicitly. But even then, no one claimed India was categorically better than China overall. There was always doubt in the minds of ordinary citizens: how could we, or for how long could we, claim superiority on human rights that felt too vague or abstract? Meanwhile, the fight for basic human rights—the ones ordinary people can relate to—remained constant and fierce.
I am no authority qualified to make expert comparisons between India and China on human rights. But I fear we may fare worse than China in the medium to long term on civil liberties, dignity, and equality simply because we remain mired in a quagmire where millions are denied basic rights for decades at a stretch. Signs of this already exist, as Western media now describes India as a backsliding democracy with questionable press freedom and civil liberties. The only difference is that we no longer trust Western media as we once did.
The information flowing through fibre optics has already made us feel miserable. What’s worse is that Indians no longer need to compare themselves with the developed world or with China. The majority can simply look at the lives of privileged Indians and feel more wretched than they actually are.
The maids, drivers, and security guards entering gated communities across India don’t just reach their workplaces—they enter a different world, one they envy, aspire to, and dream about. Meanwhile, the residents of these gated communities scroll past the luxurious lives of those in India’s Camellias and Dahlias, who in turn complain about the chaos surrounding their paradise and compare themselves to the orderliness of Singapore or Dubai.
It seems that citizen rights remain a mirage almost everywhere in India.
To make these rights a reality, Indians are making every effort to purchase public goods. They want to control the quality of their lives through money: drinking water, breathable air, reliable transportation, quality healthcare, privileged education, personal security—you name it, and Indians are scrambling to buy it. They neither want to burden nor trust governments with the essentials of their lives.
Public goods—once a beautiful concept taught in economics classrooms—have become private luxuries in India, nothing more.
This phenomenon of buying out one’s rights opens up disturbing possibilities for more and more human rights to be put on sale. We may end up making our society more humane simply by commodifying abstract human rights. And perhaps, in that strange future, we might finally claim superiority over China.
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Vikas Gupta is a disabled entrepreneur representing himself in a landmark writ petition before the Delhi High Court. His case highlights serious abuse and neglect of disabled persons by multiple state agencies, including Delhi Police, Tihar Jail, and key central ministries. The petition—one of India’s largest disability rights cases to date—seeks accountability, compensation, and systemic reform to uphold human dignity in India’s law enforcement and justice systems
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