Perspectives  and  Horizons

“We need to find new perspectives on the universality of human rights:
in dialogue with other cultural perspectives of reality,
other notions of development, democracy, even dissent,
other concepts of power and governance;
other notions of equality, other concepts of justice.

Because human kind proffers many horizons of discourse. 
We need to develop the social imagination for sustainability
as a basis for sustainable living,
for the language of deficit cutting and economic growth
masks an inability to imagine the world in more sustaining and life enhancing terms.

….we need to develop a new political imaginary
where people of the margins, of the global south
 are subjects of their own history, writing their own cultural narratives,
offering new universals,
constructing a new radical imaginary.”

Corinne Kumar, South Wind: Towards A New Political Imaginary  

Although we initially located our politics within a progressive broad left framework, our search was for a political praxis that transcended the polarities of the Left and the Right. For we felt that Marxism too shared some core paradigmatic values with the ideology of Capitalism; both were products of a European world view that was homogenising and dominating all other systems of life and living outside the mainstream industrialised West. Born out of a universalism rooted in the enlightenment vision of reason, progress and scientific rationality, both were deeply committed to notions of development, technology driven market oriented systems and hard militaristic nation states which ruthlessly marginalised regional and smaller cultures with their different ideas of community, gender, visions of life and ethics.

The search for alternatives, for a just and humane society, is also a search for the relevance of our selves; for institutions and visions to situate these selves in the communities and cultures that nourish it and infuse the same with new energies, new visions and new meanings. The path is not always very clear. It is in fact most often a movement away from the known into the unknown; from the learnt to the unlearnt. The story of the Collective then is not so much a chronological narrative of achievements or a clear statement of policies and programmes; but of responses to the urgent issues of our times; violent times.

Times in which our community and collective memories are dying; times that are collapsing the many life visions into a single cosmology that has created its own universal truths – equality, peace, development; truths that are discriminatory, even violent. Times that have created a development model that dispossesses the majority, desacralises nature, destroys cultures and civilisations, denigrates the women. Times in which the dominant political thinking, institutions and instruments of justice are hardly able to redress the violence that is escalating and intensifying, times in which progress presupposes the genocide of the many; times in which human rights have come to mean the rights of the privileged, the rights of the powerful; times in which the political spaces for the other is diminishing, even closing.

Times in which we need to redefine and reaffirm the right to survive of those people, processes and practices being rendered redundant by the dominant structures of knowledge and of politics; of those whose very lives, livelihoods and life visions are under threat of extinction. A context in which therefore the human rights of the marginalised and the vulnerable would not mean their right to be included in this dominant system but to reject a politics that uses, invisibilises and disempowers them. It means the right to question and challenge the self arrogated right of those in power to fundamentally alter our life realities and determine our destinies as never before.

It means the right to reinvent a democracy and polity that empowers us to regain control over our own resources - economic, cultural and political in such a way that it enhances and not diminishes our potential to be truly just, peaceful and responsible to the most vulnerable within us.

It means the right to reclaim our destinies through modes that have been erased from our collective memories: that of the aesthetic and the affective; the intuitive and the irrational; the spiritual and the sacred. And restore their harmony with the functional, the rational and the secular.

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