ABSTRACT
Unsurprisingly, more than five decades of the working of the Indian constitutionalism have spawned whole varieties of institutional practices in the promotion and protection of human rights. Its working has also significantly impacted the social, and human rights, movements. The overall robustness of judicial protection of fundamental rights to freedom of speech, expression, association, conscience, and religion has contributed to the creation and sustenance of social space for different social movements, legal pluralisms, and flourishing diverse fighting faiths. In the process, we also find that the constitution is, of course, not the only source of thinking about human rights; the sources and scope of rights and obligations vary within, and across, religious and cultural traditions, which also historically commingle.1
Thus once we avoid egregious generalizations concerning the “absence” or “lack” of human rights in these traditions,2 the task of attempting even a bare review of the human rights discourse in India becomes even more formidable; the cultural life of human rights is never exhausted by the doings of legislatures and courts.
