Indian culture has been the product of a synthesis of diverse cultures and religions that came into contact with the enormous Indian sub continent over a very long stretch of time. As Jawaharlal Nehru notes, there is "an unbroken continuity between the most modern and the most ancient phases of Hindu thought extending over- three thousand years."1 The rights of man have been the concern of all civilizations from time immemorial. "The concept of the rights of man and other fundamental rights was not unknown to the people of earlier periods." The Babylonian Laws and the Assyrian laws in the Middle East, the "Dharma" of the Vedic period in India and the jurisprudence of Lao-Tzu and Confucius in China, have championed human rights through out the history of human civilization.