Rights are not merely a set of protective devices against harassments or a set of entitlements guaranteeing access to forms of competence. They make spaces for forms of life, forms of thought, forms of difference. Rights protect difference against threat. Security protects monolithic order against the right to be different. But rights are only a guarantee of a framework of plural thoughts. Rights to survive against the pressures of security or terror needs to be animated by dissent.

Dissent is a label that includes a variety of celebrations of difference. Dissent includes the radical rebel, the eccentric, the deviant, the pluralist and the seeker of alternatives. Terror and security need all of them as an antidote to the very instability or false stability they create. Eccentricity is a question of style, a way of doing things differently. It focuses more on the odd or the quixotic. It is individual. Amplified to the level of collectivity, we confront ethnicity. Meanwhile, the rebel challenges authority, especially its authoritarianism or corruption. Whistle-blowing is one well known form of rebellion. Radicalism demands system transformation. NGOs can be rebellious while Naxalities can threaten a radical alteration of the social structure. Dissent involves a critique of society at every level of texture. It differs in thought and in action because a way of thinking is frequently accompanied with a change in lifestyle. It can move from suspicion and scepticism to an advocacy of more differences within the frame or an alternate frame. Unless security, rights, sustainability play themselves out within the tenor of life, they will remain un-nuanced. Security then will set the stage for that worst of tyrannies, the monoculture of the mind.

... contd.