| South Asia: Human Rights under Attack |
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The issue of human rights, never far below the surface in South Asia, has once again been showcased in contrasting contexts: the world’s largest democracy and one of the world’s smallest dictatorships. In India and Myanmar, in other words.  In Myanmar, faces incarceration again, this time perhaps in one of Myanmar’s most notorious prisons. The junta that rules Myanmar is utterly ruthlessness in its repression. But the circumstances that surround its fresh persecution of the pro-democracy leader smacks of a paranoia and arbitrariness that easily enters the surreal realm. Suu Kyi can hardly be held responsible for the breach that allowed the intrusion into her prison home of the American who swam across a lake evading the security dragnet. Clearly, he parked himself in Suu Kyi’s home despite pleas from its occupants to leave. Nothing suggests that Suu Kyi or her companions in incarceration were party to the intrusion or that they were in a position to repel it – the charge of undermining the security of the regime would have been risible had it not been such a profoundly tragic commentary on Myanmar and the international community’s indifferent toleration of one of the most brutal and, indeed, genocidal of regimes. Myanmar’s junta has for long been the target of international criticism. The condemnation of the regime peaked stridently last year in the global press, among civil and human rights groups and, in more muted fashion, in official forums when the regime refused to loosen its grip to allow relief work in the wake of a devastating hurricane. Earlier, too, criticism had mounted in the wake of a crackdown on protests triggered by hyperinflation. Unfortunately, this criticism hasn’t amounted to anything because the international community is perfectly happy to do business with a murderous regime. To be singled out for encouraging the Myanmarese junta’s delinquencies are the US, which only goes to war illegally to spread democracy when self-interest is at stake, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Asian superpowers, China and India, which are engaged in a high-octane race to clinch trade and investment deals with the junta without the merest mention of human rights, repression and ethnic cleansing. No surprise that diplomats throughout the world have remained silent about this latest outrage.    As far as the Asian neighbours are concerned, of course, there is a further problem involving pots and kettles. Even if it were so minded, Beijing could hardly claim any high moral grounds in its dealings with Yangon on the basis of democratic practice or human rights. While New Delhi may be significantly better off in this regard, the case of one much decorated doctor does significantly mar its human rights record.  Dr Binayak Sen is just out on bail from a prison in Chhattisgarh, jailed under a draconian law by the state government and denied bail for two years or so, including by the Supreme Court until it relented not long ago. It is eminently to be hoped that his latest plea for bail posted there will be heard in a sympathetic light. Sen’s incarceration on charges of abetting ultra-Left activists, in fact, for a year before trial proceedings even started, is poor advertisement for democracy. Sen is a doctor who has done more than most, certainly more than the Chhattisgarh government, to reach healthcare to those most in need of it – the poorest of the poor in some of the most impoverished regions of the country. In doing so, moreover, he provided a model of participation, involving people as agents rather than passive objects of charity. He has also been an indefatigable campaigner for human rights and has been on record saying that he does not approve the methods employed by the Maoists in Chhattisgarh just as he does not countenance those of the government, especially its policy of promoting a civil militia, the Salwa Judum, a notorious vehicle for child warriors in the fashion of African states like the Congo, Liberia and Rwanda. If then, he is in jail for sympathizing with the broad objectives of the Maoists, one might safely hazard that tens of thousands of law-abiding citizens should also be in custody.  Even if we were to assume, for the purpose of debate, that Sen has some involvement with the Naxals, it beggars belief that the state government should have thought it necessary to imprison him under a draconian preventive detention law, especially given the fact that that since his trial has begun virtually no evidence has been adduced to demonstrate his culpability. Conceivably, any legal proceedings against him could have traversed the more usual routes, with Sen free to carry out the humanitarian work for which he has justifiably earned an international reputation, which is not, of course, to say that lesser mortals should be deprived of their human rights by a government apparatus that revels in repression while blithely abdicating its enabling role in what should be a welfare-oriented state. The full measure of the state government’s perversity can be gauged from its steadfast refusal last year to heed worldwide appeals, including those by an A-list of Nobel laureates, for his temporary release to travel to the US to receive his award.   For more news and updates- |
