Kashmir Watch, March 27
Human rights situation in Kashmir is as bleak as it has been during the last two decades. The gross violation of basic human rights are continuing unabated, says Ghulam Nabi Khayal, who presented this paper at the National Seminar on Kashmir organised by Jamia Millia University, Delhi last week.
The track record of human rights situation in Jammu & Kashmir, particularly during the last two decades, does not merit any praise or appreciation. It is quite heart rending that the human rights charter adopted by the United Nations has been thrown to winds in this strife torn border state by all those who hold a gun in their hands.
The worst and most horrific period of gross violation of the human rights across Kashmir Valley has been during early nineties when only a few incidents of indiscriminate gunfire opened by the forces on unarmed civilians resulted in the killing of about three hundred people including old men, women and children. The excessive use of force was wantonly witnessed when the funeral procession of Mirwaiz Molvi Farooq, who had been gunned down on 21 May 1990 allegedly by the militants, was fired upon by the forces killing about 40 persons on spot. The forces did not spare even the coffin of the late Mirwaiz and several bullets were found having been pumped into his dead body.
This gory incident was so shocking that the former prime minister, Chander Shekhar said in the Parliament, “we must hang our heads in shame.” The required action followed quickly by shifting of Jagmohan, the most controversial Governor of the State, during whose tenure Kashmir was seen bathing only in blood.
According to a conservative survey conducted by a few local groups, there are as many as ten thousand widows spending their days of life in penury, misery and prolonged agony. Their husbands, whether militants or otherwise, are no more and this is not their fault that they have been left at the mercy of Allah.
Several so called organisations, NGOs, numbering about five thousand, claim to be the saviors of this miserable lot of the fair sex but they have failed to help out even a small number of them though these fake organisations have been receiving huge funds of money for this very purpose both from Delhi and Islamabad. This criminal negligence towards a suffering community has obviously given rise to social evils in the Valley where the hapless widows are naturally forced to be exploited in different immoral ways to earn their two square meals.
The irony of the fate is that the widows of slain militants are categorically denied permission to perform Hajj pilgrimage which they could do after managing the required money. Also, a valid passport is not issued to them under instructions from the Central government. Their fault, depriving them of a very pious religious performance, is yet to be defined. Why should they be punished for a sin they never committed?
The present scenario across Kashmir is a little brighter for, the militants are not seen indulging in anti social and objectionable activities, also due to the fact that a majority of them has been physically eliminated by the forces during the last two decades of unprecedented armed uprising.
At the same time, and unfortunately, a number of surrendered militants, locally nicknamed as Ikhwanis or renegades, are still at large to harass people by way of arson, kidnappings for ransom, molestation of women and even brutal killing of common people. These heinous crimes mostly take place in far off villages in the Valley and are hushed up as not reported due to the social taboos of the Kashmiri Muslim society. These renegades function directly under the Rashtriya Rifles of the army and the official patronage is available to them so acrimoniously that they are neither hauled up nor are they brought to justice for crimes they are committing unabated.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December1948, says among other things in its Article Number three that “every one has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” These basic guarantees offered to the human being by Almighty God and by the UNO are to a large extent, not available to a common man in Kashmir despite the horrifying fact that About 100,000 people in the State have already been done to untimely death in this turmoil.
As far as the conditions prevailing in various prisons, where Kashmiri suspects or hardcore militants re lodged, are concerned, they can be described as inhuman and nothing else. Even today, scores of detenues are languishing in jails all over the country, from Jammu up to Koimbatore, without being tried in a court of law for the crime they have allegedly committed. Some of these prisoners are there behind the bars for more than 15 years now and no legal procedure has been adopted to facilitate for them a fair trial in an impartial court of law.
My own newspaper Voice of Kashmir has been receiving letters full of pathos and miseries faced by these detained youths in different jails in the country wherein they narrate woefully hair raising tales of torture and inhuman treatment meted out to them by their interrogators. The UN human rights declaration clearly states, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Probably, this charter does not apply to the forces operating in Jammu & Kashmir state.
It is rather imperative to point out here that while talking about the activities of the militants and the security forces, one cannot apply a similar yardstick to them. Militants took up gun but were never answerable to any one.
On the contrary, the armed forces and the paramilitary troops are supposed to be bound by unflinching discipline, moral, ethical and legal obligations. Their reported violations of basic rights are not therefore acceptable under any circumstances.
There are also complaints pouring in regularly that Kashmiri youths who are out in the Indian states to earn their livelihood are subjected to victimisation by the police. They are physically manhandled all over. Even hotels in different cities are instructed to avoid providing accommodation to the Kashmiri visitors.It was on 13th of this month that three Kashmiris were taken into custody in Maharashtra for no obvious reasons.
Several state regimes have publicly admitted that on occasions, forces in Kashmir overstep their brief and that the guilty shall be punished. One has yet to ascertain beyond doubt whether any erring soldier was ever awarded deserving punishment.
The present situation across the State is comparatively conducive to rub off black scars of this menace from the face of Kashmir.
Firstly, all detunes jailed for their involvement in militancy or on suspicion, must be tried properly in a legal court to affirm or nullify their alleged crime. Only then, can their fate be decided in a democratic way.
As a member of one working group constituted by the Honourable Prime Minister in 2007, I had strongly advocated that those frustrated Kashmiri boys who had crossed over to Pakistan administrated Kashmir to receive training in use of arms, are now quite eager to return home, join their separated families and spend rest of their lives peacefully.
Their comeback should be facilitated both by the Central and the State governments. Constant police surveillance can be there to check their routine activities. Gradually, they will themselves turn to a normal life.
There should be a strict ban imposed on the forces for their resorting to reckless use of force while dealing with the peaceful protesters. The declaration of zero tolerance assured by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh before the Kashmiri people should be adhered to in letter and spirit.
As was repeatedly demanded by the previous government headed by Mufti Mohammad Sayed, the Indian paramilitary forces, now largely the Central Reserve Police Force, be withdrawn from the cities and towns to be replaced by the State police. This will undoubtedly reduce instances of human rights violations being committed all over the State. This popular demand has not met with any positive response. Needless to mention here that the imposition of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in force in the State since 1990 does not empower or authorise the State authorities to initiate any inquiry against the forces including the army, the BSF, the CRPF and other paramilitary troops.
The author can be reached at: gulkhayal@yahoo.co.uk
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Peace and Justice Post 
The Spectacular Return of Gandhi’s Spectacles
March 7, 2009By Badri Raina | ZNet, March 7, 2009
Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page
I
Gandhi’s spectacles did go under the hammer in New York for money.
And money bought them back for India.
The Mahatma (great soul) wished the Capitalist class to perform as the “Trustees” of the nation’s interest.
As the premier Gandhian, Vinobha Bhave, was to write of Gandhi’s equation with Scientific Socialism: “Socialism wishes to advance by setting class against class, Gandhism by cutting across classes.”
Well, the whisky magnate, air-line and stud farm-owning industrialist, Vijay Mallya, may or may not be a trustee of the nation’s interest, but he surely has paid more than a million dollars to retrieve Gandhi’s spectacles etc.
India of our days may have only an archival interest in those spectacles, but Mallya surely will benefit. Frontline entrepreneur that he is, his vision is sharp.
He may even set up a huge enterprise cloning those spectacles for the global market. And global celebrities may pay for them more than handsomely as well. And then walk the ramp. Them spectacles could become the best business going.
The powers-that-be, after all the melt-downs, still devoted to neo-liberal economics, may claim during the forthcoming general elections that they did not let the Mahatma’s spectacles fall into foreign hands as mere commodity, even if it barely sees eye to eye with the eye that saw through those spectacles.
Asked once how any individual may assess and evaluate the rightness or wrongness of a course of action, the Mahatma responded with his famous talisman:
Ask yourself, he counseled, whether the thought you think or the action you contemplate has any benefit for the most wretched of faces you may ever have seen, and if the answer is “yes” know that you are in the right path.
As the number of Indian billionaires burgeons, and the gulf of inequity between the top and the bottom widens forever, it beggars the imagination to claim that the Indian state has been a devoted votary of that talisman.
But, on another front, what is a nation without heritage?
II
The word “memorabilia” is of course a dead give-away.
It connotes at once that he/she whose effects we gather and embellish is a memory, rather than something that impels our present thoughts and actions as a living force.
Yet, the more fallible we are, the more good memories and tough ideals we need.
Plagiarising the poet, Browning, a man’s memory must exceed his greed, or what is our striving for.
There are times when a twitch of memory may reclaim us from the excesses we are about to commit. It sort of lends a Kantian distance to our embroiled subjectivity.
And memory expanded manifold is after all what we call history-which is something quite distinct from a chronology of past events.
And it may even now be rather impossible to conceive of India’s modern history without reference to Gandhi, however we may work that hermeneutic. Indeed, the more he nags us, even if as an unpleasant toothache, the better our gastronomical functions might become.
III
To illustrate.
I was once asked by a perfectly well-intentioned bigot why I retained my commitment to socialist ideals, since socialism was now all a memory.
Naturally, this was several years before now, when Capitalism is fast on the way to becoming one as well,–a memory, I mean– and when Das Kapital is suddenly the highest selling work in Europe and Karl Marx on the cover of Time Magazine.
I sighed back in shamefaced agreement, but posed a question back to him as well.
You seem to me a very religious man, I said, and a good one at that. Of course, he shot back with glee, and some satisfaction at my percipience.
So, do you often go to the temple?
Ever since I was a child.
That would make it some fifty odd years. Yes.
Which means you must have seen god more than once?
Alas, that good fortune I haven’t had.
And yet, I said, you keep visiting the temple? I do, he answered with pride.
In other words, you continue your devotion to something you have never seen, but advise me to abandon that which I and the world have, and which continues to exist in one shape, colour, or form, here, there, and elsewhere?
That indeed was the end of that.
IV
Which is to say, Gandhi did exist and walk the earth, even when, as Einstein had prognosticated, many find it hard to believe that such a one did so.
And not only did he walk the earth, he led a movement for freedom from colonial oppression in a way that seems today to have come to invalidate other ways of seeking freedom from oppression.
So that the more violence the world sees and perpetrates, without finding the ends that the violence is directed to achieve, the more Gandhi stands validated.
The more that the glaciers melt and the oceans rise, and the forests disappear, and draught and flood answer the sophistries of the profit-maximizers, the more all of that underscores the simple truth that Gandhi enunciated: “the earth has enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.”
The more that organized bigotry backed by big money takes mankind away from god, the more Gandhi’s pluralist pieties seem vindicated, warts and all.
I recall once asking a colleague at Madison, Wisconsin-a seventh-day Baptist he was– what he thought might be Gandhi’s fate on Judgment day, remembering that he was one man who carried the Sermon on the Mount everywhere he went, and sought to live Christ’s simplicities.
He took not a second to answer that he (Gandhi, that is) would be damned, not having been baptized.
Jesus, are you there, and listening?
Further, the more that technologies calculated to free us from necessity actually bind us into unfreedom, the more we may recall what Gandhi said of freedom:
ask not what you are free from, but free for.
V
So, what of the warts I spoke of-his insistence that politics without religious inspiration must be evil, that the varna ashram (caste system) has a point to it, barring the reprehensible practice of untouchability, that the cow be seen as a panacea for all kinds of economic and moral maladies, that the rich have a place just as the poor, assuming economic democracy to be neither achievable nor perhaps desirable, that the village system be preserved in perpetuity, and so forth?
Here is my simple suggestion: take a cue from the old man and mount a Gandhian movement against all those warts. And most others as well.
Indeed, what many Civil Society Movements in India and elsewhere in the world seek to do in resisting authoritarian pogroms against democracy and human rights, against the degradation of the earth, against social evils of one kind or another, against corruption in political systems, bureaucracies, and big business, against armaments, polluting agents, war, after all, owe not inconsiderably to the legacy that the Mahatma left the world.
It remains for us then only to extend the reach of that legacy to resist the irrational and uncritical impulse of idolatry, of the impulse to justify his work everywhere without warrant, and to use his methods to rid his legacy of those warts.
Something of course that must require us first to imbibe as much as we can the daring selflessness and freedom from distorting personal ambitions, the conviction to refuse sectarian purposes and self-righteous loathing of the “other”, or the belittling impulse always to claim credit that so informed his life and work.
Now that his spectacles are back with us, how about we recall what he said to the Nawab of Junagarh when he made a gift of those glasses to the fleeing Nawab: “these are the glasses through which I saw my way to the freedom of India.”
That seems far more miraculous than anything in Harry Potter.
The paradox is that while India strains to recover those spectacles, it is governments and leaders elsewhere who talk passionately of his vision.
Gandhi said to Louis Fischer that he regarded himself a Communist, and that Communists after Marx had greatly distorted the spiritual force of the latter’s work and vision.
Hey, as the meltdown deepens everywhere, how about we begin to see our way to marrying the two-Gandhi and Marx-and see where that takes us.
What is there to lose, more than we have lost?
________________________________________________________________
badri.raina@gmail.com
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Tags:caste system, Das Kapital, India, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, spectacles, untouchability
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