Human rights hurdles

WITH EYES WIDE OPEN
D. N. Bezboruah The invitation had come more than two months ago and been renewed a few times in between to make sure I didn’t forget. I had no reasons to decline it, and decided I was going to make the most of it. So on June 28, I was at Nagaon to preside over a seminar on human rights organized by Anandaram Dhekial Phukan College. The speakers were two very senior police officers and a college teacher of Guwahati who had been a human rights victim several years ago. I have no intentions of inflicting on my readers what happened at the aforesaid seminar except to say that it turned out to be a very edifying and argumentative colloquium for most of us. What is more important is that it really set me thinking about the human rights scenario in the Northeast and India.In India, we seem to have mastered the art of reducing even the most profound thoughts and human experiences to mere rituals. Think of the laws of the land and the articles of our Constitution. We have managed to divest all our laws of their spirit until we have left nothing but the mere letter or just the empty shell of the law in question. We have done the same thing with every constitutional provision. Think of how our lawmakers took the well-intended constitutional provision of reservations for disadvantaged sections of society for ten years, amended it, perpetuated it and made it a perennial producer of electoral benefits. The non-performing politician only needs to inform another section of the population that it could be their turn next to be made ‘backward’ so as to earn all the benefits of reservations if they voted for him and his party. It is this genius for turning everything into a ritual that has made a mockery of human rights in India. The situation in the Northeast is far worse. There are two black laws operating in some of the States of the Northeast that totally preclude even the remote possibility of human rights being sustainable in this region. Here, I can walk out of my house and be shot down in cold blood like a dog by members of the armed forces, and have an AK-47 or AK-56, several rounds of ammunition and some ‘incriminating documents’ put on my dead body. The armed forces can then claim that the septuagenarian blighter was an enemy of the state, a traitor and was up to his neck in anti-national activities. As long as the Johnnie who shoots me is an NCO of the rank of lance naik or anyone above that, he need not lose any sleep over his defence. In a so-called democracy, he has two black laws to give him full legal protection: the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and the Disturbed Areas Act. If it can happen to me, think of what could happen to a poor farmer or a bearded youth riding a motorcycle – the prototype of the north-eastern terrorist in the mind of the armed forces personnel. But let me not confine myself to just hypothetical situations? Let us take a very recent and a very real one. At about 7.30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 1, CPI leader Manoj Deka of Morigaon had returned from his evening shopping and parked his bicycle at a crossroad, when a group of policemen from the police station near by surrounded him on the pretext of frisking him. These policemen were really the bodyguard brigade of the officer-in-charge of the police station, Kamal Bora. One of the drunk policemen, Rafiqul Islam, beat up Deka so brutally that he fell down unconscious. He was admitted to the GNRC in Guwahati at 10.30 p.m. the same night. Here he waged a futile battle for his life for 58 hours till Friday morning. This is a true case of someone being done to death by a drunk custodian of the law without any immediate provocation. How ludicrous it can be to talk about human rights in a land where the most basic human right – the right to live – can be taken away by the very custodians of the law? Or take the case of several individuals and businessmen of the Dispur area (opposite the secretariat) who had the culverts to their homes and establishments demolished with bulldozers and other mechanized equipment in the small hours of the morning recently on the plea that they were illegal constructions. Many of these constructions were 20 to 30 years old. If they were indeed illegal constructions, what had the authorities been doing all these years? And even if they were illegal constructions, it is essential to issue notices to the householders or owners of the business establishments before such constructions are demolished. Was this done? Not at all. The wreckers came at 3 a.m. in some cases and demolished the culverts, thus taking away the basic human right of people to enter and leave the places where they lived or worked. In those cases where someone was awake to ask them for the demolition orders, they were merely told that there were orders from above (all verbal) for the demolitions. Naturally, the higher-ups were never identified. And none of the citizens there had the guts to say, “Stop this lawlessness or I’ll shoot.” Such is the state of human rights in the Northeast, making it quite farcical for anyone to even discuss the issue. And yet, it is not that the Assam Human Rights Commission has not been able to intervene swiftly and effectively in human rights violations. I have personal knowledge of the Commission having done so in several cases, but then death is the kind of fait accompli about which no one can do anything. I have several good reasons for being cynical about the prospects of human rights initiatives in the Northeast even apart from the fact that the armed forces are armed with two black laws to be used against the civilian population of the region. Two other outstanding reasons must not be lost sight of. One is that the police force that is expected to protect our human rights is no different from the colonial police force that the British had in India. In almost 61 years of independence we have not been able to change it from the ruler’s police to the people’s police. As such, it is doubtful if this force will ever be friends of the people. And a police force that resorted to blinding in Bhagalpur many years ago and a force that thinks nothing of custodial death and custodial rape, hardly qualifies to be the upholders of human rights. In fact, not having to uphold human rights comes more naturally to our policemen. Equally, it is for the judiciary to adjudicate on human rights violations and thus uphold human rights. But the judiciary can justifiably claim that it is overburdened with crores of pending cases, and is in no position to take on this additional burden. It would expect the Human Rights Commission to deal with such matters even though the Commission has no punitive powers. The other compelling reason why human rights are unlikely to be respected and upheld in the Northeast or even in India is that we have a surfeit of human rights organizations that are blatantly partisan, often alert to the slightest violation of human rights by the state, but totally blind to the violation of human rights by factional groups of terrorists. For instance, Manav Adhikar Sangram Samity (MASS) has always been very vocal every time the armed forces killed armed ULFA cadres, but has generally been silent whenever the ULFA cadres killed innocent women and children or hundreds of Hindi-speaking people merely for the accident of their birth. In this, the MASS and similar human rights organizations have been no different from Amnesty International that also suffered from the same malaise – of coming down very heavily on state violence but completely ignoring the killings by factional terrorist groups in Punjab and Kashmir. In a country where state terrorism exists together with factional terrorism, it is very important to ensure total fairness and impartiality in such matters. And everyone having anything to do with human rights or fundamental rights needs to have the right kind of education to attain the right mental attitude to view the business of human rights dispassionately and justly.This brings me to the most important reason why there is scant respect for human rights or even for fundamental rights in our country. As I said at the beginning, we Indians have a wonderful knack for reducing everything to rituals and thus taking away the very essence from what we should cherish and preserve. We have thus reduced the Fundamental Rights given to us by the Constitution to just “my rights”. We generally behave as if we alone are entitled to the fundamental rights and not anyone else. If the exercise of my fundamental rights violates the fundamental rights of others, so be it. It is me first in this country. We always tend to forget that one’s right to swing one’s arm must end where someone else’s nose begins. It is small wonder then that with such an attitude to fundamental rights, our attitude to human rights should be what it is – even in the matter of respecting someone else’s right to live. One way out of this is to stop talking about fundamental rights and human rights in our schools and to have extensive lessons on “Respecting the rights of others”. Once the focus changes to the rights of others from our own rights, we shall perhaps end up creating a world that is much better to live in because no one will assume the right to take someone else’s life as part of their fundamental rights. And since future policemen and judges also go to school, it is possible that we shall have the right attitudes to human rights among those who really matter in upholding them. source: sentinel assam