On the occasion of the International Human Rights Day, the Indo-Caribbean Cultural Centre hosted an online discussion on Mahatma Gandhi’s contribution to Human Rights on Sunday 8 December 2024. The full discussion can be streamed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LX0-JNguwKc.
Fakir Hassen captured some highlights from the presentation by Mohamed Keshavjee.
SPEAKERS:
PROF. GOOLAM VAHED (South Africa) – A History Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal with research interests in colonial encounters, transformations of Indian identities, and the role of Islam and Muslims in South Africa.
PROF. DEVA KOURMARANE (France) – Originally from Pondicherry, India, he migrated to Réunion and then to France. He speaks Tamil, writes poetry, and studied Tamil culture, French language and literature, history, and political science.
DR. MOHAMED KESHAVJEE (England) – A barrister and author of four books, he is the first Indian from Africa to receive the prestigious Gandhi King Ikeda Peace Award for his global contributions to peace and human rights education.
Gandhi’s philosophy could be used to rethink a global human rights regime – mediation expert
A narrative of and online discussion hosted by the Indo-Caribbean Cultural Centre on Sunday 8 December 2024
A reflection by FAKIR HASSEN
Johannesburg, 9 December 2024
Gandhi’s philosophies of non-violence could be used to develop a new global human rights regime, internationally-acclaimed cross-cultural specialist on Mediation and Alternative Dispute Resolution, Dr Mohamed Keshavjee.
“I think we need to rethink human rights based on the principle of duty and see how duty and rights could be equitably balanced in the way Gandhi lived his own life,” Keshavjee said.
“We can ask today what might Gandhi say of the excessive violence perpetrated on the poorest of the poor? I think that’s where Gandhi’s philosophy would come in, in a rethink of a fit-for-purpose human rights regime,” Keshavjee told an online conference organised by the Indo-Caribbean Cultural Centre in Trinidad on Sunday.
The theme of the conference was ‘Mahatma Gandhi’s Contribution to Human Rights’.
Keshavjee said that people like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and others, whose perennial search was for social justice and human dignity, were inspired by Gandhi’s philosophy.
“I think basically what we see through all this is that Gandhi believed in a duty based charter. I think today’s world in human rights is sort of suffused, if not burdened, by a rights-based discourse, rather than a duty-based vision,” he said.
Keshavjee explained what a Gandhian charter on human rights might look like.
“According to UNESCO, Gandhi offered an expanded definition of violence that included oppressive structures that erode and damage human dignity and prevent human beings from achieving their fullest potential.
“What would Gandhi say about the violence perpetrated on the planet through pollution in all its forms? What might Gandhi say today about the mass killing of the millions of people throughout the world through the egregious violation of human rights? I think what is required is a holistic vision,” he suggested.
Reflecting on the UN General Assembly declaring in 2007 Gandhi’s birthday on 2 October the International Day of Nonviolence, Keshavjee said this was because Gandhi had made “a solid historical contribution”.
He said this had included the eradication of the indenture system, the application of Satyagraha towards the independence of India in 1947, and inspiring the African Freedom Movement through leaders such as Nkrumah (in Ghana), Julius Nyerere (in Tanganyika), Kenneth Kaunda (in Zambia), Albert Luthuli and Nelson Mandela (in South Africa).
“An important factor of the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s is that it was inspired by Martin Luther King, who also drew his inspiration very much from Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy. So there is that solid historical contribution,” he said, adding that the principles that Gandhi would have used in a human rights charter based on a duty-based system was enunciated by him as early as October 1925.
“And I think they lay at the heart of the entire global discourse today. Wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity. It should be humanity and not humanities. A religion without sacrifice, politics without principle.
“I would make the submission that globally today, if you look at human rights inflections, they touch on these major social sins and more that have developed and evolved since Gandhi’s death in 1948,” Keshavjee concluded.
Keshavjee, who was born in South Africa, was forced to leave the country due to apartheid and again from Kenya, after neighbouring Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin’s expulsion of all Asian-origin residents at short notice in the 70s created a psychosis of fear. He is now based in London.
