THE SOCIAL BLOG

Dear Friends,

It is with regret that I inform you that the review petition which was filed by Masooda Parveen against the judgment dated 2.5.2007 passed by the Supreme Court came up before Justices Dalaveer Bhandari and H.S. Bedi today (11/10/07), and has been dismissed.

I may remind you that Masooda Parveen had filed a writ petition under Article 32 and 21 for compensation for the death of her husband, an advocate, in the custody of 17 Jat Regiment in Pulwama, Kashmir, as far back as February 1998. While initially the petition was for compensation and for compassionate employment to the wife, later its scope had been expanded to get the court to lay down some safeguards from the army that enjoys “special powers” in J&K under the J&K Armed Forces Special Powers Act. It was hoped by us that the Supreme Court would use this opportunity to apply the safeguards in the Naga People’s Movement for Human Rights case to J&K.

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India completed 60 years of its independence day before yesterday. Ironically, I did not feel even a bit patriotic and proud of it. The State of ours today is in shambles; impunity and violence are rampant. Machinery existent to protect and regulate the use of sovereign power seem to be fading away. Kashmir and Nagaland still burn. Hindus and Muslims still fight. The poor are still poor and we still have a distaste for the caste system. I dont feel proud of this Country. 

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Once in a while, I read the NewYorker online edition to be aware of US sattires and activities. This time however, I saw this article by Pankaj Mishra on the New yorker talking about the legacy of the Indian Partition.

The article starts with an anecdote which is an interesting read;

Sixty years ago, on the evening of August 14, 1947, a few hours before Britain’s Indian Empire was formally divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, sat down in the viceregal mansion in New Delhi to watch the latest Bob Hope movie, “My Favorite Brunette.” Large parts of the subcontinent were descending into chaos, as the implications of partitioning the Indian Empire along religious lines became clear to the millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs caught on the wrong side of the border. In the next few months, some twelve million people would be uprooted and as many as a million murdered. But on that night in mid-August the bloodbath—and the fuller consequences of hasty imperial retreat—still lay in the future, and the Mountbattens probably felt they had earned their evening’s entertainment.

Pankaj then proceeds to talk about how we Indians made our tryst with destiny and sought to set India free. But that, he argues, was not for the secular India but for protecting the interests of a 400 million hindus and not caring about the Muslims who stayed back in India. The article also talks about Nehru and Jinnah’s policies and actions during the brief period of finalising the partition. The idea of the article seems to be to give a brief of the partition history of India by citing incidents relevant in this regard.

Below are certain excerpts from the article;

But sectarian riots in Punjab and Bengal dimmed hopes for a quick and dignified British withdrawal, and boded ill for India’s assumption of power. Not surprisingly, there were some notable absences at the Independence Day celebrations in New Delhi on August 15th. Gandhi, denouncing freedom from imperial rule as a “wooden loaf,” had remained in Calcutta, trying, with the force of his moral authority, to stop Hindus and Muslims from killing each other. His great rival Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who had fought bitterly for a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, was in Karachi, trying to hold together the precarious nation-state of Pakistan.

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Trains carrying nothing but corpses through a desolate countryside became the totemic image of the savagery of partition. British soldiers confined to their barracks, ordered by Mountbatten to save only British lives, may prove to be the most enduring image of imperial retreat. With this act of moral dereliction, the British Empire finally disowned its noble sense of mission. As Paul Scott put it in “The Raj Quartet,” the epic of imperial exhaustion and disillusion, India in 1947 was where the empire’s high idea of itself collapsed and “the British came to the end of themselves as they were.”

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan. The millions of Muslims who chose to stay in India never ceased to be hostages to Hindu extremists. As recently as 2002, Hindu nationalists massacred more than two thousand Muslims in the state of Gujarat. The dispute over Kashmir, the biggest unfinished business of partition, committed countries with mostly poor and illiterate populations to a nuclear arms race and nourished extremists in both countries: Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, Hindu nationalists in India. It also damaged India’s fragile democracy—Indian soldiers and policemen in Kashmir routinely execute and torture Pakistan-backed Muslim insurgents—and helped cement the military’s extra-constitutional influence over Pakistan’s inherently weaker state. Tens of thousands have died in Kashmir in the past decade and a half, and since 1947 sectarian conflicts in India and Pakistan have killed thousands more.

 

Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled. At least one group—Bengali Muslims—succeeded in establishing their own nation-state (Bangladesh), though only after suffering another round of ethnic cleansing, this time by fellow-Muslims. Other minorities demanding political autonomy—Nagas, Sikhs, Kashmiris, Baluchis—were quelled, often with greater brutality than the British had ever used against their subjects.

 

Meeting Mountbatten a few months after partition, Churchill assailed him for helping Britain’s “enemies,” “Hindustan,” against “Britain’s friends,” the Muslims. Little did Churchill know that his expedient boosting of political Islam would eventually unleash a global jihad engulfing even distant New York and London. The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena; and the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades. 

 

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 We still suffer from the stains left by the partition of India. Communal clashes and Kashmir and the direct causes of it.

I was talking to Rachita and Aanchal tonight at the lane (They happen to be very good friends of mine). Its just that somewhere down the line the discussion got down to humanitarian issues and my notion got affirmed.

“We live in this space surrounded by walls on all sides that in our petty existence we forget to come to terms with reality. We forget that there are 300000 people die in darfur, violations take place everyday in Kashmir and that government policy seems to be a scam.”

Pretty true then that someone in the Times of India wrote the other day (22nd July) that ‘NALSAR Ideals fall to Mammon’. The institution talks of itself producing socially active lawyers when all we do is laze around within these four walls. There are times when we need to come to terms with reality. The glitzies of the corporate world then seem to attract us more  while we forget to do our bit to save this world that for now seems to be running haywire.
I recommend my readers to read this letter by Dr. Elfarra. It made me understand that human relationships are totally linked to injustice in life. How politics can become an integral part of one’s survival.

My mother is in her last moments and I cannot cross the borders

My mother is in the hospital at the moment. She is severely ill. She was admitted to hospital 3 days ago. I cannot reach her.

I finished my 45 day speaking tour in the USA. All across the USA and in every lecture I told the audience about our suffering, living in this big prison called Gaza. I told them about the borders closure and about the patients who passed away while waiting to cross the borders.

The borders have been closed for more than 5 weeks, 28 patients died while waiting to cross the Rafah crossing, the only crossing between Gaza and Egypt. All other exits are completely sealed by the Israeli army. The border was opened 70 times in one year.

Now it is my personal story, like the daily stories of 1.4 million people in GAZA under siege and occupation, poverty, lack of resources, killing, shooting, violence etc….

I cannot cross the borders, I cannot cross the Rafah crossing. I badly need to be next to my mother. I badly need to be there with her to help her, to do whatever I can for her. To say good bye mum.

I was always there for my patients and many people, to help and try to alleviate their suffering. In her last hours I cannot be there, my hands are tied. I am helpless, I can do nothing, I just have to wait and wait and wait. My throat is dry, my eyes are full of tears.

This is unjust, inhuman. It is the occupation. How can it come to be just and fair, when it is mainly based on injustice, aggression and cruelty?

Can somebody help me to go home? I badly need to be at home next to my mother in her last moments.

Good bye mum, I hope you rest in peace, a peace we do not enjoy in Gaza.

with love and solidarity

Mona ElFarra

Sunday 15 July 2007

Yesterday was World Torture Day. While there is no need to explain the prevalence of torture in our country, I’d like to use this opportunity to show the attitude of the Courts towards this grave violation. This I’d do by critiquing the case of Masooda Parveen v. Union of India, the judgment which was announced in May this year.

The deceased and husband of the petitioner, Ghulam Mohi-uddin Regoo was one day taken by 17 Jat Regiment soldiers an  brutally tortured. The reason that the wife and most witnesses gave was because he had refuse to pay an extortion fee to the soldiers. The petitioner alleged that her husband was tortured to death by the army and later his body was returned in pieces to her. The explanation given by the Army was that he was leading them to a hideout which was blown up the moment he reached there with the soldiers. Surprisingly no soldier was injured by the blast and the only fatality was Ghulam’s death. Ghulam’s wife, Masooda filed a petition before the Court demanding compensation and a job on “compassionate grounds.”

The Army said that Ghulam was a militant so no ordinary law would apply to them in this regard. They went on further to say that since Ghulam was a militant, Masooda would have to suffer for her husband’s wrongdoing. The Army’s rationale was readily accepted by the Supreme Court which stated that since there is ‘no evidence to say that he was not a militant, so he is presumed one’. It indirectly stated that if the Army identifies a person as a militant he is one until proved otherwise. There was no evidence produced by the Army to support this notion and nothing on record about Ghulam’s mode of death. From what I understand, in a petition for habeas corpus, it is upon the state to show that death was incidental and it is all the more onerous on the state to show so. It further stated,

“We are not unmindful of the fact that prompt action by the army in such matters is the key to success and any delay can result in leakage of information which would frustrate the very purpose of the army action.”

So the Court has violated the ruling in Naga People’s Movement v. Union of India, and given an upper hand to the Army to indulge in such nefarious activities. These are troubled times for the judiciary. An organ that is supposed to be a guardian of human rights and injustices disappoints us by relying on irrational convictions. The support of the Army by the judiciary is unprecedented as is evident in this case. The judicial sanction of torture in the name of national security is a pandora’s box in its true sense. Absolute power corrupts, its usage without any checks is the cornerstone of evil. This time Ghulam was picked up and killed, tomorrow its going to be someone else. The matter could have also been simply resolved by given compensation on compassionate grounds and not accepting guilt as asked for by Masooda. But the Army argued otherwise and now a bad precedent has been set. So we should now be prepared for more people to be branded as terrorists by the Army.

This case did not get the publicity that a situation like Jessica Lal got. It is a reflection of what we Indians think of such instances. ‘We don’t care is someone is blown up into pieces. We would like a rapist to get a death sentence. Kashmiris are likely to be terrorists so they deserve it.”

Such notions are bad publicity. Human rights concerns are non existent in a majority of Indians. For them, torture is good if a person is caught. But what if the person might not be a terrorist? I used to admire Dershowitz a lot. Lately he stated something to the effect that torture is good if it produced desired results (don’t know for sure). I am losing faith in the system. There is injustice everywhere. Right from my college to international issues. To what extent can one stand all this is the question? Do I just sit and watch or is there something I can do?

USA: Letter from Amnesty International to President Bush on His Upcoming Visit to India

The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

Amnesty International welcomes your visit to India during the first week of March. Your visit represents a rare opportunity for you to directly communicate your concerns about human rights in India. While you discuss economic cooperation and civilian nuclear partnership with the Indian Prime Minister, it is vital that you also raise human rights concerns affecting large numbers of Indian citizens. Amnesty International strongly urges you to include Indian human rights concerns in your joint communiqué with the Indian Prime minister Manmohan Singh.

Even though India is the world’s largest democracy, there remain serious and disturbing human rights practices, including “disappearances”, rape, extrajudicial executions, deaths in police and military custody, torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, arbitrary arrests, dowry deaths, and numerous other human rights abuses.

The Government of India not only fails to prevent these abuses, but also shelters members of security forces from facing justice. People living in several of the northeastern states of India, Kashmir, religious minorities, those belonging to the lowest social order called “dalits”, and indigenous communities called “adivasis” face the brunt of these abuses. Other socially and economically marginalized groups including women face discrimination at the hands of the police and criminal justice system. While some laws were passed to address some of the human rights abuses; serious concerns remain about the implementation of such laws.

There are numerous human rights violations taking place in India. Following are some of the abuses and concerns:

Massacre of Sikhs: Over three thousand Sikhs were massacred when the governing Congress Party incited mob violence targeting Sikh civilians in reaction to the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. Scores of women were gang raped and some were burnt alive. After two decades, a judicial commission concluded that members of the governing Congress party were involved. Several belonging to the same party were cleared of charges, which led to criticism from several civil society and Sikh organizations and opposition political parties. Twenty years have passed since the massacre, but only a few have been brought to justice for this mass killing.

Massacre of Muslims: In 2002, over 2,000 Muslims were massacred in Gujarat as a reaction to a train fire that killed 59 Hindus. This train fire was blamed on Muslims. Hindu mobs allegedly incited by state Bharatiya Janata Party members went on a killing spree targeting Muslims. Several hundred Muslim women and girls were gang raped and some were burnt alive. Pregnant women and children were also targeted. After three years, very few individuals have been brought to justice.

Bhopal tragedy: Several thousand people have died and many more continue to die from a 1984 gas leak at Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal in 1984. Twenty years have passed since the leak occurred, but the plant site has not been cleaned up and toxic wastes continue to pollute the environment and ground water. Tens of thousands continue to live with debilitating illnesses. Despite numerous efforts, survivors continue to be denied adequate compensation, medical help, rehabilitation, and justice.

Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958: The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 has remained in effect in “disturbed areas,” including Kashmir and large parts of the northeastern states of India for over forty years. This act is a major contributor to massive human rights abuses in these areas of India. This law protects Indian Security forces from prosecution by requiring permission to prosecute from India’s Central Government–permission which is rarely given. As a result, security forces often take the law into their own hands and commit massive human rights abuses against the civilians. This law has facilitated grave human rights abuses, including “disappearances,” rapes, extrajudicial executions, and deaths resulting from torture. This law also gives the security forces power to shoot to kill anyone even without any threat to the lives of security forces.

Northeastern States: One of the areas “hidden” from international attention is the region of northeast India. A reign of terror is prevailing in this area, which is largely facilitated by the above mentioned Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958. Security forces kill, rape, “disappear” and commit other gross human rights abuses with virtual impunity. Amnesty International has never been permitted to visit the northeastern states of India.

Kashmir: The Indian side of Kashmir is another area where Indian Security forces commit massive human rights abuses with impunity. This is once again facilitated by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 and other similar laws. Indian Security forces “disappear,” rape, extra-judicially execute, torture people to death, and commit other severe human rights abuses. Authorities arbitrarily detain people and use preventive detention to stifle political dissent. The civilian population of Kashmir has paid a high price for the conflict. Thousands have disappeared and the total casualties since 1989 are believed to be around 38,000.

One example of impunity in Kashmir is that of a human rights lawyer and activist Jalil Andrabi. Nine years after the “disappearance” and killing of Jalil Andrabi, an army major identified as responsible by a special investigation team had still not been brought to justice. Army representatives asserted that they have not been able to locate him. Amnesty International has never been permitted to visit Kashmir.

Abuses against “Dalits”: India’s caste system involves a social hierarchy and individuals are considered to be born into a particular caste and remain in the caste throughout their lives. Outside these caste categories are the “untouchables,” now commonly known as “dalits”, whose occupations – sweepers, tanners, sanitation workers, etc – were viewed as “polluting” the community. Nearly 200 million people in India belong to this category and this system has been called India’s “hidden apartheid.” Abuses against “dalits” are numerous and take many different forms including: parading of naked dalit women through the streets, socioeconomic discrimination, killings, arson-burning of dalit communities, gang rape, bonded labor, denial of land rights, and many more. The police and the criminal justice system also discriminate against dalits. Though important strides have been made, much remains to be done.

Abuses against Adivasis: The indigenous communities called adivasis face immense pressure from dam and mining development projects and settlements. Adivasis face socioeconomic discrimination as well as discrimination by the police and the criminal justice system. For example, recently police used excessive force during a protest against the construction of a steel plant on traditional adivasi land in the state of Orissa. At least twelve adivasis, including three women and a twelve year old boy, were reportedly killed in the police firing.

Abortion of female fetuses: Traditional preference for boys has led to thousands of female fetuses being aborted despite the prohibition of pre-natal sex discrimination for the purpose of the abortion of female fetuses. In May, the Health Minister stated that there had not been a single conviction for breaking the ban since it was introduced eight years earlier.

Mr. President, Amnesty International urges you to secure a meaningful commitment from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to improve India’s human rights situation. It is essential that human rights be treated as an important issue like trade and civilian nuclear partnership.

We urge you to include human rights as part of your overall discussion with the Prime Minister and that you demand the following:

1) Abolition of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 and other similar laws.
2) Immediate release of those held under such laws.
3) That those involved in the massacres of Sikhs and Muslims be brought to justice.
4) Immediate resolution to the Jalil Andrabi case.
5) Adequate compensation, medical help, rehabilitation, and justice to those who were affected by the Bhopal tragedy, including full cooperation to bring Dow Chemical in compliance with their responsibility.
6) An immediate investigation into the abuses happening in northeastern India.
7) That Amnesty International and other human rights organizations be allowed access to Kashmir and to all northeastern states.

Mr. President, we urge you not to miss this opportunity to speak for those whose rights have been violated in India. They need your help.

Sincerely,

William Schulz
Executive Director