The Human Rights Forum (HRF) was formed in October 1998. Most of the members of HRF were members of Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee, who fell out on the question of what should be the perspective of a rights organization. The HRF strongly believes that the state alone is not the center of rights violations.

We as members of HRF hold a view that violation or denial of rights arises in all situations of structured oppression and the democratic aspirations arising from all such situations, and resistance to such oppression, whether organized or not, whether collective or isolated, are equally important for the Rights movement: theoretically, practically and organizationally. The political structure of the state and the socio-economic structures of class, caste, and gender have received some recognition as oppressive structures, but are yet to assume equal importance in the eyes of the Rights movement.

We also believe that the aspect of the State where it is seen as the suppressor of militant political movement need not be the defining aspect for the Rights movement. The State as the carrier of democratic or welfare responsibilities can be an equally important aspect of Rights movement.

The HRF holds that the welfare responsibilities of the state are the legacy of people’s struggles and democratic reform. We therefore believe that the struggle to preserve and extend the rights and responsibilities that have historically served to democratize the state to some extent and open up some democratic space for political action is as important as to criticize and expose State repression on militant political movements.

And if we are ready to learn equally from the dalit movement and women’s movement, and the politics of various minorities, religious, ethnic or linguistic, we would learn to look at opportunities for enlarging or opening up democratic political space as an important dimension of the Rights agenda. These movements have mostly sought to empower themselves by making use of and enlarging the democratic political space and the civil and political rights available in the present state and the political system, in order to fight oppression located in social relations in civil society.

We also believe that too much of attention to the problems of rights violations faced by organized movement has led to neglect of the right of people who are not even in a position to organize themselves. The right to struggle is extremely important, but the rights of those who cannot even struggle are liable to become invisible even to Rights activists.  

We believe that while the human rights movement can never defend the use of violence for even the noblest purpose, it need not condemn all violence in a society like ours where it is endemic in the social and economic structures. For the rights movement, it is more important to understand the roots or the context of the violence and to help society to understand it, than to either support it or condemn it. But the Rights movement can convince people to look at the context or roots of violence only if it canvasses this view as a genuinely independent movement. This appeal can evoke response from society only if it proceeds from a broad democratic perspective, and not from a surrogate of any political struggle.

We believe that unjust and unfair use of violence even by a popular movement must be openly condemned, not because it is violence but because it is unjust. The idiom of the Rights movement is that of justice and it cannot keep silent in the face of injustice in the name of people. More generally, the Rights movement is answerable to the people more than to people’s movement.