Why should we care for and protect the victims of forced displacement? The “we” here refers to those who have not had experienced displacement themselves, yet harbour some form of an ethical commitment to the victims of forced displacement. The ethical language therefore is expected to establish some form of a connection between us and them, between those who are not forcibly displaced and those who are. Ethics in other words cannot but be dialogical. Its language in no way denies agency to the victims. CRG’s studies in the partition ‘refugees’ in the east, for example, underline a plethora of self-help initiatives undertaken by them. Ethical language therefore is a language of universality that cuts across the given boundaries of the victims’ groups and communities. While ethical language has to be universal, the phenomenon of forced displacement is not. It is true that the incidence of forced displacement has alarmingly been on the rise – thanks to the forces and processes of globalization, their number is still considerably smaller than that of the world’s settled population. Much of what the displaced persons do for themselves will not be construed as ethical practice. Ethics is essentially about the self caring for and holding itself responsible to the other. Ethics, as Levinas reminds us, ‘will never in any lasting way be the good conscience of corrupt politics’ (Levinas 1989:295). Caring the other however may be the means of caring for the self.

As the ethical connection can only be established through dialogues, that is to say, through arguments and reasoning between the parties involved in them, the terms of such arguments and reasoning need not be identical. We care for the displaced persons and our practices of care and protection may have been issued from diverse foundational principles. That we differ on the ethical principles does not put an obstacle to the very act of caring and protecting others. The dialogue must cut across the established divisions of ethical and moral systems and elaborates itself in a way that it does not remain captive to any given modality of ethical practice. While plurality of such systems and modalities is helpful in building the much-needed ‘consensus’ around these principles, rigour and coherence in our arguments and reasoning may more often than not turn out to be a liability for those who feel committed to the care and protection of the displaced persons. That is the reason why scholars like Peter Penz argue for more self-consciously uncertain and middle-level theories of ethics.[1]

The importance of ‘moral reasoning’ in initiating organized responses can hardly be exaggerated. That the principles underline the necessity of organized responses does not mean that there are no unorganized (like, the reflexive and instinctual) responses at all to the problem under review. But we must keep in mind that the organized and unorganized responses take on two rather distinct ethical trajectories. Most of the empirical studies on unorganized, altruistic responses in general (not necessarily towards the displaced persons) seem to indicate their un-self-conscious character. That is to say, those who care for and protect are not at the same time bothered about the fact that they are actually involved in any ‘extraordinary’ act that otherwise begs ‘moral reasoning’ (Monroe 1996:197-215). On the other hand, responses get organized, ordered and orchestrated precisely through an act of self-consciousness. It is by way of consciously entering into some form of argumentation and reasoning with others that we evolve the principles that are ‘binding’ on us. Mere abstinence or abhorrence will not do. Ethical writings are elaborated in the spirit of self-consciously deciphering the ethical basis of our responses to the problem.

Organized responses face the perpetual challenge of excising power from the ethics of care and protection. The challenge is perpetual because we hope to meet it only unsuccessfully, notwithstanding our best endeavours. There is no denying that what we do in the name of care and protection is structured in the power relations prevailing in the society. The question of care and protection in that sense can never be disentangled from that of power. Foucault shows how our care for others involved some form of self-empowerment and subjectivity on our part (Foucault in Rabinow ed. 1994:269-80). Samaddar for example, points out how our humanitarian responses geared to the objective of protecting life are scripted in and thereby reproduce, the imperial ‘power of death’ (Samaddar 2002). But the irony is that we as ethical agents always refuse to conflate what we do in the name of care and protection with what we ought to do and seldom confer moral recognition on the former. The ethics of care and protection imposes on us the painful obligation of denying the existence of power in the public sphere while at the same time being shaped and structured by it. The attempted, albeit tragic, erasure of power is a precondition of the functioning of public sphere as well as ethics. It is important to see how we effect the erasure through the language of ‘argumentation and reasoning’ in our attempts at making the ethical principles ‘binding’ on us.

What we see is the presence of a wide variety of argumentation and reasoning offered by us in justification of our advocacies for care and protection of the displaced persons. First of all, there is the rights-based argument. Care and protection according to this argument, will be construed as our ‘duty’ insofar as the ‘well being’ of the displaced persons becomes ‘a sufficient reason for holding us to be under this duty’ (Raz 1986: 166-8). The problem recognized by almost all the exponents of this argument is that the right against displacement is not an end in itself and cannot per se be regarded as the ‘sufficient reason’ for holding us under this duty. Sufficiency of reason does not reflect itself in the same way as in the two advocacies for the right against displacement and say, the right to life. If one’s displacement becomes a necessary condition for another’s enjoyment of the right to life – often understood as decent life, we can say that the former is derogable and the latter is not. Thus, the right against eviction routinely carried out in the metropolitan cities of South Asia – whether in Dhaka, Kolkata or Islamabad or elsewhere, has to contend with the argument for development and decent life defined everywhere as a ‘collective goal of the community as a whole’ (Dworkin 1977:82-5). The successful assertion of the right against displacement therefore entails some form of abrogation of ‘the collective goal’. Many of those who were evicted from the banks of the Beliaghata circular canal of north Kolkata had been living there for more than one generation. Yet all of them were the illegal occupants of land. In the absence of any legal title, they are unlikely to sustain their claim to land in the first place, in any court of law. The UN Guiding Principles (1998) too revise the right as only a limited right against arbitrary displacement. While we cannot compromise with the ‘collective goal’ we can certainly reduce the sufferings of the displaced through compensation, relief and rehabilitation. Conversely and by the same logic, we should be prepared to accept that the importance of the same right will vary if it ever becomes a necessary condition for the enjoyment of one’s non-derogable rights including that to life. What if it becomes impossible to carry out displacement without simultaneously violating ‘the rights to life and freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’? What if displacement involves violation of the victims’ right to life and livelihood? Displacement in that case is bound to be illegal for it leads to derogation of an otherwise non-derogable right enshrined in the Constitution or law. By basing itself on the rights-based argument, the ethics of care and protection remains beholden to the contingent nature of the relationship between the right against displacement on one hand and any of the non-derogable rights recognized by the court of law on the other. An argument is often made to locate the rights of the displaced persons within ‘a radical democratic perspective’, bravely redefine the lines of derogability and non-derogability and thereby extend the sphere of their rights beyond the given limits of law by constantly waging and organizing political struggles (Jayal 1998). This in fact turns the rights-based argument by its head by basing rights on ethics and ethical reasoning and not vice versa.

This takes us to the heart of our second argument. According to it, care and protection always follow the established lines of community and kinship. Organizing responses beyond these lines proves particularly difficult especially in South Asia where community and kinship ties are found to be exceptionally strong. The community-based argument evidently has its limits: in course of organizing the responses, it not only reinforces the traditional lines of rivalry, but reenacts the inequities and asymmetries otherwise internal to these bodies. Various reports emphasize how life in camps, allocation and utilization of aid and assistance for the displaced persons reinforce the kinship and community lineages and become the fertile ground for future tensions and ethnic strife.

The limits of the community-based argument are sought to be overcome by what we call, the humanitarian argument. A somewhat old-fashioned version of the argument looks upon care and protection as a form of ‘moral exercise’ that we require for making our individual selves ‘pure and perfect’. Helping others according to this version is a form of self-help, of achieving one’s higher moral self. The objective of self-help does not however rule out the necessity of organized responses. Learning to work with others is also a means of helping oneself and the proponents of this argument recognize the importance of institutions and organizations in accomplishing this objective. Today however, the humanitarian ethics seldom turns on one’s own self. It instead considers others as equal ethical agents in the sense that they are as much entitled to ‘purity and perfection’ as we are. Viewed in this light, our care and protection are a tribute to their ethical entitlements, of which they are otherwise deprived.

Humanitarian ethics thus has two presuppositions: first, displacement in South Asia cannot be fathomed without the metaphor of home for it is not simply where we live or to which all of us are morally entitled like many other objects of our social existence, but it is the fountainhead of all our moral and ethical entitlements. Almost all the South Asian societies make a distinction between the home we simply live in and the home (e.g. ghar in Marathi or aamar gharkhon in Assamese) that helps shape what we aspire to become and therefore invest us with our moral identities. Any involuntary displacement is a disjuncture between home and home, between what we are and what we want to become, between our senses of lack and fulfillment. Secondly, should a conflict arise between our and their moral entitlements, humanitarian ethics always settles for a minimalist course. Those of us who have the commitment to and power of taking care and protecting the displaced persons will be under any moral obligation if and only if by taking care and protecting them we ‘do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance’, that is to say, our own right to life and livelihood (Singer in Markie ed. 1998:800).

The variations in the tenor and accent of our ‘moral reasoning’ can hardly escape our attention. But they should not be blown out of proportions either. The rights-based argument may well be subsumed under the humanitarian argument or for that matter, the community-based argument, though of course it will be difficult to accommodate the community-based and the humanitarian arguments within the same ethical philosophy. In many ways, the arguments cut across each other and can hardly be considered as mutually exclusive. While in our ‘moral reasoning’, we face the challenge of extricating ethics from power, most of the studies in this respect point out how the practices of care and protection continue to be governed by power and security considerations. The camps and shelters built for the displaced persons represent sites where war is continued ‘by other means’. The budgetary allocation is paltry and irregular. The camp-dwellers are deprived of the non-derogable freedoms, the Guiding Principles propose to secure. Life is poor and insecure. Search for any durable solution ironically makes us confront power and negotiate its terms. Our attempts at disentangling ethics from power too are a power game.

Suggested Readings

Bose, Pradip Kumar (1999): ‘Trust and the refugee experience’ in Refugee Watch, June 1999.

Dworkin, Ronald (1977): Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Foucault, Michel (1994): Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954 – 1984, Vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin.

Jayal, Niraja Gopal (1998): ‘Displaced persons and discourse of rights’ in Economic and Political weekly, XXX (5), 31 January.

Levinas, Emmanuel (1989): The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Monroe, Kristen Renwick (1996): The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Penz, Peter (2000): ‘Development, displacement and international ethics’ (mimeo.)

Raz, Joseph (1986): The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon

Samaddar, Ranabir (2002): ‘Caring for the refugees: Issues of power, fear and ethics’ in Three Essays on Law, Responsibility and Justice, SAFHR Paper 12. Kathmandu: South Asia Forum for Human Rights.

Samaddar, Ranabir (2003): ‘In life, in death: Power and rights’ (mimeo.).

Singer, Peter (1998): ‘Famine, affluence, and morality’ in Stephen Cahn & Peter Markie (eds.), Ethics: History, Theory and Contemporary Issues. New York: OUP.

[1] Peter Penz (2002) describes it as ‘middle level analysis’ that situates itself between boundary-conscious ethical and philosophical systems on the one hand and simple and boundary-blind ‘moral intuitions’ on the other. He also calls for ‘engaging different theoretical perspectives in a “dialogue” with each other’.