there are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.

There are clearly remediable injustices around us which we want to eliminate.

Class

Caste 

Gender

However, the central point in dealing with this question is that prejudices typically ride on the back of some kind of reasoning – weak and arbitrary though it might be. Indeed, even very dogmatic persons tend to have some kinds of reasons, possibly very crude ones, in support of their dogmas (racist, sexist, classist and caste-based prejudices belong there, among varieties of other kinds of bigotry based on coarse reasoning).

"Parisians would not have stormed the Bastille, Gandhi would not have challenged the empire on which the sun used not to set, Martin Luther King would not have fought white supremacy in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’, without their sense of manifest injustices that could be overcome. They were not trying to achieve a perfectly just world (even if there were any agreement on what that would be like), but they did want to remove clear injustices to the extent they could."

"practical reasoning must include ways of judging how to reduce injustice and advance justice, rather than aiming only at the characterization of perfectly just societies"

reject the quiet tolerance of chronic hunger (for example in India, despite the successful abolition of famines).*

Democracy has to be judged not just by the institutions that formally exist but by the extent to which different voices from diverse sections of the people can actually be heard.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS BY PROF. AMARTYA SEN PROFESSOR AMARTYA SEN: I feel deeply privileged and honoured by the opportunity to speak here at our parliament, on the invitation of the distinguished Speaker, giving the Hiren Mukerjee Lecture, in memory of a political thinker and leader for whom I have very great admiration. In probing the idea of social justice, it is important to distinguish between (1) an arrangement-focused view of justice, and (2) a realization-focused understanding of justice. Sometimes justice is conceptualized in terms of certain organizational arrangements-some institutions, some regulations, some behavioural rules-the active presence of which indicates, in this view, that justice is being done. This approach has strongly influenced the leading theories of justice in contemporary political philosophy. In contrast, a realization-focused understanding of justice broadens the evolution of justice to the assessment of the actual world that emerges, which includes the institutions and arrangements that are present, but also much else, including – most importantly – the lives that the people involved are able to lead. Two distinct words – “niti” and “nyaya”- both of which stand for justice in classical Sanskrit, actually help us to differentiate broadly between these two separate concentrations. Among the principal uses of the term niti are organizational propriety and behavioural norms. In contrast with niti, the term nyaya stands for actual social realizations, going beyond organizations and rules. For example, classical legal theorists in India talked disparagingly of what they called matsyanyaya, “justice in the world of fish”, reflecting the kind of society we can see among the fish, where a big fish can freely devour a small fish. We are warned that preventing matsyanyaya has to be an overwhelming priority. Realizations of justice in the sense of nyaya is not just a matter of judging institutions and rules, but of judging the societies themselves. In the lecture I shall illustrate the distinction by examining the varying roles of two important institutions in the Indian context viz. (1) democracy, and (2) trade unions of organized labour. I will discuss how the realization of justice is critically influenced by the alterable ways in which these institutions actually work and impact on the society. A realization-focused perspective of nyaya also makes it easy to see the importance of preventing manifest injustice in the world (like matsyanyaya), rather than dreaming about achieving some perfectly just society, or about instituting some flawless set of social arrangements. When people agitated for the abolition of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were not labouring under the illusion that the abolition of slavery would make the world perfectly just. It was their claim, rather, that a society with slavery was totally unjust, calling for immediate removal. It was on that basis that the anti-slavery agitation, with its diagnosis of intolerable injustice, saw the pursuit of that cause to be an overwhelming priority. That historical case can also serve as something of an analogy that is very relevant to us today in India. There are, I would argue, similarly momentous manifestations of severe injustice in our own world toady in India, such as appalling levels of continued child undernourishment (almost unparalleled in the rest of the world), continuing lack of entitlement to basic medical attention of the poorer members of the society, and the comprehensive absence of opportunities for basic schooling for a significant proportion of the population. Whatever else nyaya may demand (and we can have all sorts of different views of what a perfectly just India would look like), the reasoned humanity of the justice of nyaya can hardly fail to demand the urgent removal of these terrible deprivations in human lives. A government in a democratic country has to respond to on-going priorities in public criticism and political condemnation. The removal of long-standing deprivations of the disadvantaged people of our country may, in effect, be hampered when the bulk of the social agitation is dominated by new problems that generate immediate and vocal discontent, to the neglect of the gigantic older problems of persistent deprivation of human lives, tolerated without much political protest. Justice demands that we make a strong effort to identify the overwhelming priorities that have to be confronted with total urgency. We have to ask what should keep us awake at night. (For full version of Prof. Amartya Sen’s Lecture, \




Kautilya, the ancient Indian writer on political strategy and political economy, has sometimes been described in the modern literature, when he has been noticed at all, as ‘the Indian Machiavelli’. This is unsurprising in some respects, since there are some similarities in their ideas on strategies and tactics (despite profound differences in many other – often more important – areas), but it is amusing that an Indian political analyst from the fourth century bc has to be introduced as a local version of an European writer born in the fifteenth century. What this reflects is not, of course, any kind of crude assertion of a geographical pecking order, but simply the lack of familiarity with non-Western literature of Western intellectuals (and in fact intellectuals all across the modern world because of the global dominance of Western education today)


we may miss out on possible leads in reasoning about justice if we keep our explorations regionally confined.

niti and nyaya. The former idea, that of niti, relates to organizational propriety as well as behavioural correctness, whereas the latter, nyaya, is concerned with what emerges and how, and in particular the lives that people are actually able to lead.

Consider any of the great many changes that can be proposed for reforming the institutional structure of the world today to make it less unfair and unjust (in terms of widely accepted criteria). Take, for example, the reform of the patent laws to make well-established and cheaply producible drugs more easily available to needy but poor patients (for example, those who are suffering from AIDS) – an issue clearly of some importance for global justice. The question that we have to ask here is: what international reforms do we need to make the world a bit less unjust?

the idea of global justice without a world government is a chimera

‘minimal humanitarian morality’