On the 19th of November, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his decision to repeal the three contentious farm laws that incited a year of protests in India. It would be a misconception to see this act as nullifying the revolutionary politics of a Movement that challenged state abandonment and produced a nourishing way of life. This paper reads the Sikh praxis of seva as a form of radical friendship through which the failure of rights to prevent state abandonment is challenged.
Seva, as a revised understanding of ‘friendship’, presents political possibilities beyond Western enlightenment universal ideals of freedom. My reading of ‘friendship’ starts with Foucault, who recognised that rights were not pertinent for finding freedom and spoke instead of a way of life. Whilst Foucault’s largely underused work on friendship helpfully refocuses our gaze on alternative ‘practices’, it falls short of a radical reimagining of rights because of its limited understanding of ethics, relationality and cosmic consciousness. Using the lens of radical Sikhi, I stretch the meaning of Foucauldian friendship to view it as a way of life that refuses the liberal frame of rights to think freedom as a political and spiritual project. Focusing on the Farmers’ Movement, I read practices of seva-langar as at once collective care and a powerful form of revolt and revolutionary praxis that makes a renewed and non-juridical rights claim. In sites of protest, friendship performs a relational right to nourishment in fulfillment of not only the ‘self’ but of aatma, the ‘spirit’, which as always relational and possesses a cosmic consciousness that refuses state abandonment.
Bal Sokhi-Bulley (Speaker) works in Sussex Law School where she writes and teaches on critical approaches to human rights. Her recent work looks at forms of radical friendship as revolutionary rights praxis. Most recently, she has written on the Shamima Begum case and on the local UK lockdown in her hometown of Leicester as recolonisation and a space for radical friendship. She is currently working on a project called ‘After Rights? Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics’ – you can find more details on The Sussex Centre for Rights and Anti-Colonial Justice pages.
Hasret Cetinkaya (Chair and Respondent) is a Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies, LSE, where she is teaching on human rights, feminist epistemology and decolonial/postcolonial thought. She has a Ph.D. in international human rights law from the Irish Centre for Human Rights (NUI Galway).
Sumi Madhok (Respondent) is Professor of Political Theory and Gender Studies at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE. Her latest book is titled Vernacular Rights Cultures: The Politics of Origins, Human Rights and Gendered Struggles for Justice (Cambridge University Press 2021).
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