Human Rights Movements and Imperialism

Manu Kant

Human rights activists and organisations in India, in the USSR, across the globe–whatever their rhetoric of justice, dignity, or peace–have functioned as the soft arm of imperialism. They parade under the banner of morality, yet their morality is bourgeois, their vision bourgeois, and their actions ultimately serve to undermine struggles of the working class and oppressed peoples. As Lenin warned, “freedom in the capitalist world is nothing but freedom for the slave-owners.”

Human rights are not eternal or universal. They are a specific product of bourgeois revolutions, rooted in property relations. Marx showed in On the Jewish Question that the so-called “rights of man” boil down to the right to private property, the right of egoistic individual, the right to exploit. Stalin made clear that “rights” in a class society are always the rights of a ruling class: “In capitalist society we have the rights of the exploiters to exploit the working people, and the duty of the exploited to submit to this exploitation.” Thus, the concept of “human rights” in capitalist societies cannot be separated from the social relations of production. To demand their universal enforcement without smashing the bourgeois state is to engage in utopian liberalism. In practice, “human rights” discourse is a weapon used by imperialist states to browbeat the oppressed nations, to discipline rivals, and to delegitimise socialism.

The USSR and Human Rights Activists
The history of “human rights activism” in the USSR makes this perfectly clear. Figures like Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents presented themselves as defenders of conscience against a supposedly oppressive state. Yet their activities dovetailed neatly with the geopolitical aims of US imperialism. Sakharov’s campaigns were lavishly amplified by Western media, his awards funded and promoted by imperialist governments. These so-called human rights groups in the USSR consistently targeted socialism while keeping silent about the crimes of imperialism–about napalm in Vietnam, CIA coups in Latin America, and apartheid in South Africa. Their task was not to improve socialism but to delegitimise it, to paint it as irredeemable. As Stalin would have recognized, they were “agents of the bourgeoisie in the workers’ movement.”

Their rhetoric of conscience was the velvet glove hiding the iron fist of imperialism. By the late 1980s, these groups played no small role in discrediting socialism within and outside the USSR, softening the ground for Gorbachev’s capitulation and the capitalist restoration that followed. The lesson is stark: so-called human rights activists act as Trojan horses within socialist societies, undermining them from within.

Human Rights in India
Turning to India, the most famous human rights organisation is the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). Established in 1976 by Jayaprakash Narayan, PUCL has since become the model for civil liberties activism in India. On paper, it claims to defend the rights of all citizens, irrespective of ideology. In practice, PUCL has consistently advanced a bourgeois-liberal line that undermines revolutionary politics. PUCL has published extensive reports on state repression in Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, and the Northeast. It has taken up causes of journalists, academics, and civil society actors targeted by the state. But what is missing? PUCL rarely, if ever, situates state repression within the class structure of Indian society. It does not call for the smashing of the bourgeois state; it does not expose the comprador character of the Indian ruling classes. Instead, it seeks to “reform” the state in the name of bourgeois democracy. Worse, PUCL often lends its credibility to separatist tendencies under the guise of defending “self-determination.” In Kashmir, it has at times legitimised narratives that strengthen reactionary, religious-based separatism. In Punjab, its silences and evasions during the height of Khalistani terror gave indirect succour to separatist forces. Its method is classic bourgeois liberalism: present the state as the only villain, erase the crimes of reactionary forces, and prepare the ideological ground for Western intervention in the name of “human rights.”

Human Rights and Punjab
The Punjab experience in the 1980s reveals the bankruptcy of such activism. Here, human rights organisations–including PUCL, the Punjab Human Rights Organisation, and figures like Justice Ajit Singh Bains–emerged as loud critics of state repression. They documented police atrocities, fake encounters, and disappearances. But their indignation was one-sided. They failed to condemn, with equal force, the horrific crimes of Bhindranwale and Khalistani terrorists. They did not raise their voice when the flower of Punjab–the communists, progressive youth, revolutionary poets like Paash and Bihari, ordinary Hindu and Sikh workers, women and children–were gunned down in cold blood. They did not mobilise outrage when trade unionists, Left cadres, and cultural activists were assassinated. Their silence was complicity. Justice Bains in particular, celebrated in liberal circles, presented himself as a defender of the Sikh community. But in practice, he and his cohort legitimised Khalistani terrorism by treating it as an issue of “state repression” alone, ignoring its reactionary and communal core. This silence demoralised progressive forces and provided fodder for Western propaganda.

Amnesty International
At the same time, Amnesty International played a crucial lobbying role. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Amnesty produced report after report denouncing police atrocities in Punjab. These reports were then weaponised by Sikh separatist organisations abroad to build sympathy in Western capitals. Amnesty consistently downplayed or ignored the fact that Khalistani militants had murdered thousands.

The effect was twofold
1.   International Pressure: Western governments, citing Amnesty reports, pressed India on “human rights violations.” These constrained India’s counterinsurgency efforts.
2.   Legitimisation of Separatists: Diaspora Khalistani groups leveraged Amnesty’s reports to present themselves not as terrorists but as freedom fighters. This was not “neutral human rights activism.” It was imperialist lobbying, providing cover to a separatist movement that served Western strategic aims.

The Material Roots of Khalistan
It is true that the Khalistani movement had material roots. Indira Gandhi and the Congress cynically propped up Bhindranwale in the late 1970s for electoral gain. But by the 1980s, Bhindranwale had become a monster, armed and entrenched in the Golden Temple, while the Akal Takht, Sikh intellectual class, and the Sikh population at large failed to isolate and condemn him. No hukmanama was issued against the terrorists. At that stage, there was objectively no way to root out terrorism except by storming the Golden Temple. The Indian bourgeois state, as is the wont of any dependent capitalist state of the global South, made blunders. Yet the necessity of crushing Khalistani terror was undeniable. The communists had been decimated, progressive forces silenced, and ordinary people slaughtered. In such a situation, it fell to the state to act.

From the 1980s to Today
The legitimisation of Khalistan in the West during the 1980s and 1990s has now borne poisonous fruit. Today, the Khalistani diaspora in Canada, the US, and the UK has entrenched itself into political and economic structures. For India, they are what Lenin once called a “bone in the throat”–an irritant deliberately cultivated by imperialism to keep a strategic rival off balance. These networks are used by the West for several purposes: Undermining India’s Unity: By keeping Khalistan alive abroad, imperialism retains a pressure point against India’s internal cohesion. Prying Open India’s Economy: Diaspora agitation is leveraged to force India toward neoliberal concessions and subservience to Western capital. Geopolitical Control: Khalistan serves as an “insurance policy” to discipline India whenever it leans toward Russia, Iran, or China. Cultural Destabilisation: A victimhood narrative is cultivated among diaspora Sikhs to weaken class-based politics and amplify sectarian identity. In short, Khalistan abroad today is not about Punjab. It is about disciplining India, keeping it pliant to Western interests.

Another feature of these organisations is their constant attempt to stand “above the state.” They present themselves as supra-political arbiters of morality. But as Stalin taught, there is no such neutrality in a class society. To deny the necessity of the proletarian dictatorship, to act as judge over both the bourgeois and socialist state alike, is to serve the bourgeoisie. In India, human rights groups treat the state as the sole criminal, erasing imperialism and ignoring the crimes of reactionary forces. They pretend to float above class struggle, but in practice, they are instruments of bourgeois liberalism and imperialist meddling.

The Real Fight against Repression
Does this mean communists support state repression? No. But the fight against repression cannot be handed over to bourgeois NGOs. It must be waged by the working class, the peasantry, and revolutionary forces. Only communists can link the struggle against repression with the struggle against capitalism itself. As Lenin said: “Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Human rights activists recognise neither. They remain within the limits of bourgeois democracy, and thus they disarm the masses.

The real human rights activists are not the Sakharovs, not the PUCLs, not the Amnesty Internationals. The real defenders of humanity are the communists, the workers, the peasants who fight to abolish exploitation. Those who invoke “human rights” while legitimising separatism, while silencing imperialism’s crimes, while undermining socialist states–these are not friends but enemies of the people.

For only through socialism can the true rights of humanity be realised–not the rights of property and profit, but the right to a world without exploitation. ooo

References:
Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, J.V. Stalin, The Foundations of Leninism, Radha D’Souza, What’s Wrong With Rights? (Pluto Press, 2018) Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, Monthly Review, “Human Rights Imperialism” (2005)

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Vol 58, No. 20, Nov 9 - 15, 2025