UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ message for the 2024 Human Rights Day is, “Human rights are under assault. This year’s theme reminds us that human rights are about building the future-right now. We must stand up for all rights-always.” The 2024 Theme: Our Rights, Our Future, and Right Now. Human rights can empower individuals and communities to forge a better tomorrow. . By enhancing and trusting the full power of human rights as the path to the world we want, we can become more peaceful, equal and sustainable. This Human Rights Day we focus on how human rights are a pathway to solutions, playing a critical role as a preventative, protective and transformative force for good. According to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, “Human rights are the foundation for peaceful, just and inclusive societies”.

The 2024 theme is a call to acknowledge the importance and relevance of human rights in our everyday lives. We have an opportunity to change perceptions by speaking up against hate speeches, correcting misinformation and countering disinformation. This is the time to mobilise action to reinvigorate a global movement for human rights.

Coming to India, it can be said that human rights of its citizens are the first and foremost casualties since 2014 when the RSS Pariwar union government took over at the Centre. For the innocent victims of repression/oppression under the present electoral autocracy, the night before the dawn of Hope, Peace and Progress seems to be getting longer and longer for the victims of the targeted violation of human rights of our people. People are willfully plunged into the darkness of emotive issues like religious polarizing, communal and divisive agenda in a religion-neutral (secular) constitutional democracy.

The challenges confronting our perseverance have become even more ominous. The hopes of tiding over the fascist rule in the country seem to rise and ebb with each general elections. Amidst all these, while the issues like unemployment, livelihood, education and health remain unresolved; the newer ones keep getting added. Dissent continues to be weaponised/criminalized, bail continues to be denied to students, political and human rights activists, and Dalits, Muslims, Christians, people of other vulnerable sections continue to be incarcerated under draconian laws like the UAPA. The judiciary at occasions seemed aligning with the party in power, functioning as executive courts, drawing more upon divine inspiration than the Constitution of India. The RSS Pariwar governments - both at the Centre and States - day in and day out defile, subvert and overlook the basic tenets of the Constitution of India that are Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, in the process violating with impunity human rights of our people, with little relief from the judiciary resulting in allegations of theirs being mostly complicit. The RSS Pariwar union government and its state protégée have made a bonfire of the Constitution of India while maintaining its structural façade intact.

Buoyed by its electoral victory, the RSS Pariwar have unleashed another spate of attacks on the historical mosques one after the other to keep the communal cauldron boiling to consolidate majoritarian Hindutwa votes. Fresh incidents of violence and some more lives lost have become the only way to remind the country that Manipur continues to burn while the government celebrates engineering of one electoral triumph after another. Attacks on media seem only to become existential condition of Indian democracy. People continue to suffer massive unemployment, rising high costs of living, agrarian distress, attacks on the inherent rights of the tribal and working classes. All such development hampers human rights in the country. The most worrying facts, in view of the foregoing, are very worrisome for the country that there are no human rights prevailing in the country with the government’s inability to protect people’s human rights and the judiciary failing to enforce fundamental human rights.

Breakdown of human rights of the citizens of India has compounded with the collapse of the national watchdog of the human rights of people of India, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), set up in 1993 to protect, preserve, defend and uphold human rights of our people as envisaged in the scheme of the Constitution of India for the individual honour, personal dignity, security, harmony, livelihood, health, peace and progress of the people. Presently, NHRC maintains its structural façade with men/women of straw from RSS stock manning it. NHRC ignores cases of rampant violations of human rights and, if at all, it takes cognizance of some stray cases of human rights violations in non-BJP ruled states just to serve RSS Pariwar’s agenda of divisive, communal and religious polarizing politics for electoral gains. NHRC is another star institution that has collapsed and is well neigh dead now after impartiality of the Election Commission of India (ECI) has become questionable, and some critiques even called it ‘dysfunctional and non-existent’ in respect to its inability to conduct fair, free and non-partisan elections!