The State and Citizenship | Mona Das | The Book Review, October 2012

CHALLENGES TO CIVIL RIGHTS GUARANTEE IN INDIA | By A.G. Noorani

South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre| Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 283

Rights delineate relationship between the State and the individual hence; they are some sort of parameters to determine the nature of any State. Individual and group rights, including a gamut of second generation rights called civil and political rights, when guaranteed by a State serve as milestones to mark democratization of society. Advocacy for protection of Civil Rights, in the present era of hegemonic discourses on cross-border terrorism, insurgency, everyday commonplace security threats, is more complex than ever before.

Rights are the smallest price that a Nation State is more than willing to pay in return for security and peace. In this context the book under review is an attempt to empower citizens of India through dissemination of information and educating them on civil rights, as admitted in the preface to the book which quotes Francis Bacon’s aphorism ‘Foreknowledge itself is power’.

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