In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that the sovereign derived his legitimacy from an unwritten social contract by which the individual forfeited their natural liberty in order to secure their natural right to life, which would otherwise be threatened by the “war of every man against every man.” Human beings were willing to concede their freedom over to an emperor in order to secure social peace. They found it preferable to a state of war.
The word freedom is defined as the state or fact of being free from servitude, constraint, or inhibition. The fact of freedom is that there is no absolute freedom, for man, even that of a hermit, depends on his surroundings to survive. Man is free when he is free to choose his own cage. For the sake of argument, freedom is defined here as 1. freedom of expression – the freedom to express our thoughts; 2. freedom from discrimination – the freedom to live as our authentic self.
It is well recognized that civil liberty is suppressed in an authoritarian regime, even that with the highest living standard such as Singapore. In asserting “Asian values” against “Western decadence”, the government of Singapore exercises control over numerous aspects of its citizens. From housing, transportation, to corporal punishment, it is, in many ways, not too different from an East Asian patriarchal family system. To encourage public transportation, the government makes it prohibitively expensive to own a car. Before even being allowed to purchase a vehicle, a license to operate must be acquired. An engine of 1600cc or below costs a minimum of US$76,000 for a 10-year Certificate of Entitlement. To ensure diversity representation, housing is strictly controlled through the ethnic integration policy. It enforces every neighborhood to integrate different ethnic groups by a specified percentage in proportion to the country’s ethnic representation, including Chinese, Malay, and Indian. In 1994, an American teenager, Michael Fay, was sentenced to be lashed six times with a cane for vandalism. Then in 2010, a Swiss national, Oliver Fricker, was sentenced to five months in jail and three strokes of the cane for trespassing a rail depot to vandalize a metro train. The Human Rights Watch reports that the Singapore government uses draconian criminal laws and civil defamation suits to harass and prosecute critical voices, including activists, bloggers, and journalists, and freedom of assembly is non-existent.
But even in a democracy, individual freedom is not guaranteed. While the state may not be to blame, it is restricted as a result of cultural clashes, such as those of India. Indian citizens frequently suffer from religious, ethnic, and gender violence. In 2018, tension over the Bollywood epic Padmaavat about a 14th century Muslim emperor and a Hindu queen angered right-wing Hindu groups and led to violent protests. Rioters ransacked shops and torched vehicles. Then in 2023, the Hindu Meitei community and the Christian-majority Kuki tribal group in the state of Manipur attacked each other in an outpouring of recrimination and revenge. Angry mobs and armed vigilantes burned down homes, churches, and offices, killed hundreds, and displaced thousands. The Human Rights Watch reports that The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government continues systematic discrimination and stigmatization of religious and other minorities, particularly Muslims. Consequently, BJP supporters increasingly commit violent attacks against targeted groups.
The caste system, which forms the bedrock of Indian society, is to blame for the ghastly violence against the Dalit group of people. Due to their caste status, the Dalits are deemed polluting and therefore “untouchable.” They are forbidden to enter places of worship or to draw water from public wells. They are made to dig the village graves, dispose of dead animals, clean human waste with their bare hands, and to wash and use separate tea tumblers at neighborhood tea stalls. Most Dalits live on the brink of destitution, barely able to feed their families and unable to send their children to school or break away from cycles of debt bondage that are passed on from generation to generation. At the end of day, they return to a hut in their Dalit colony with no electricity, kilometers away from the nearest water source, and segregated from all non-Dalits, known as caste Hindus. Abuses against the Dalits range from economic retaliation to horrifying violence. In 2016, a Dalit couple was hacked to death by a shopkeeper because of an unpaid loan of 15 rupees, about 22 US cents. Yet local police officials routinely refuse to register cases against caste Hindus or enforce relevant legislation that protects them. The violence against them is actually amplified by police abuse.* Just as alarming as ethnic violence is violence against women. In 2012, Jyoti Singh, a 22-year-old physiotherapy intern, was beaten, gang-raped, and tortured in a private bus while travelling with her male friend. There were six others in the bus, including the driver, all of whom raped the woman and beat her friend. Despite amendment in laws to better protect women afterward, violence against women has gone up by 50% in the last decade since the Nirbhaya case.
Violence against women is rampant worldwide, even in our own backyard. It has been and is happening in the farming fields of America, where female farm workers suffer from sexual assaults. An estimated ⅔ of cases is never reported, and even less in undocumented workers. Today that number is ½ million of mostly undocumented women farmers. Being raped by coworkers and supervisors in the fields, they nickname them field of panties and the green motel, where they trade in sex for work. Yet their stories never come to light for fear of deportation, and no perpetrators or criminal charges have been brought to justice. It’s no surprise that the conditions of working on farms have been compared to slavery.
Even though slavery officially ended after the Civil War, its shadow is still casted through the lens of racial discrimination in the U.S. In 1992, four Los Angeles policemen were acquitted of the savage beating of Rodney King. Caught on camera by a bystander, graphic video of the attack was broadcasted into homes across the nation and worldwide. Fury over the acquittal spurred riots for 6 days. Residents set fires, looted and destroyed liquor stores, grocery stores, retail shops, and restaurants. Then in 2020, the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota policeman started another series of global protests and riots. Beside headline news that attract world-wide attention, racial discrimination is systematic and prevalent throughout U.S. institutions and society, from the criminal justice system, housing, banking, education, to employment.
In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Beyond essentially extending the Bill of Rights to people of color, legislative enactment to alleviate racial discrimination shows to be ambiguous in its effectiveness, and often comes with unintended consequences. A case study is the Affirmative Action, which aims to redress the disadvantages associated with past and present discrimination through access to education and employment. The list of critics against Affirmative Action is long, including economists, Supreme Court judges, and even the states themselves. In its most recent drama, Asian Americans filed the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, which alleged that the university’s undergraduate admission practices violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In its landmark decision in 2023, the Supreme Court held that race-based Affirmative Action programs in college admissions processes violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
*Human Rights Watch, Broken People – Caste Violence Against India’s “Untouchables”, III. The Context of Caste Violence.
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