Human Rights Concerns

Last week, Chief Justice of India KG Balakrishnan raised the issue of terror attacks and violence due to caste and gender differences as having posed a huge challenge to the promotion of human rights. Addressing a South Asian human rights conference in New Delhi, he said: ‘‘In South Asian region, the agenda for promotion of human rights faces considerable challenges on account of frequent terrorist attacks, communal violence and perverse exploitation on account of caste and gender differences.’’ Justice Balakrishnan observed that in ‘‘an environment of insecurity and distrust’’, there was a tendency to ‘‘clamour for diluting safeguards such as the right to fair trial’’. However, he expressed satisfaction that ‘‘our respective constitutions contain safeguards that have been evolved over the centuries of the common-law tradition and have been further refined by the ideas of political liberalism’’. Noting that there is persistent criticism about the ‘‘lack of independence and initiative and effective powers’’ for national human rights institutions, Justice Balakrishnan held that personnel of rights bodies should uphold a high standard of integrity in their work and that ‘‘the public’s expectations from the human rights bodies largely depend on the participatory complaint redressal system’’.

Human rights are in fact synonymous with democracy, pertain as they to individual liberty and freedom, which is the greatest democratic sanction. However, this is better said than done in democracies like India where a gamut of systemic aberrations and Draconian laws have played havoc with the very hallmark of democracy. The worst of it all is state terrorism, at times competing with the terrorism unleashed by non-state actors and making a complete mockery of the Constitution. When non-state actors kill innocent men, women and children in cold blood with the promise of further savagery, the people have the idea of the state coming to their aid and saving them; but when the state itself inflicts terror on its own subjects, they have absolutely none to fall back on and all the high ideals of democracy, said to be cherished by the state, become a cruel joke on the hoi polloi. Thanks to both ‘insurgency’, which is nothing but terrorism in its nefarious but camouflaged form of revolution for the emancipation of oppressed masses, and state terrorism as manifest in the elimination of innocent people in the name of counter-insurgency operations and the arbitrary powers enjoyed by the armed forces, the Northeast presents a paradigm for the various human rights bodies to deliberate as to how the scourge of state terrorism, far more dangerous than non-state terrorism, could be effectively tackled and done away with, and how colonial laws like the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, in force in the militancy-infested areas of the region, cannot at all fit into any democratic scheme of things or civilized society. The real question is: Has not state terrorism stoked terrorism even further? As Justice Balakrishnan rightly said, ‘‘there is a special responsibility on human rights bodies to actively confront social evils’’. But can there be an evil greater than state terrorism — or human rights violations by the state itself, merely pretending to be a democracy? THE SENTINEL