The well-attended meeting was organised by Janhastakshep and the Press Club of India to mark International Human Rights Day.
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI — Human rights activists have expressed grave concern over the criminalisation of any dissent or opposition to the official policies of the governments in states and the Centre. Those disagreeing with the government are being termed anti-national and face incarceration without trial for a long period under the draconian anti-terror laws, they said.
“Jail has become the rule while bail has become nearly impossible resulting in scores of students, political and human rights activists, journalists, Dalits, persons of minority communities-especially the Muslims, writers and even the leaders of political opposition are languishing in prison,” activists told a well-attended meeting here on Wednesday. The meeting to mark International Human Rights Day was jointly hosted by Janhastakshep and the Press Club of India.
The meeting was organised in the background of wars continuing to ravage around the world, while governments at home have been gloating over their efforts to shred apart the social, economic, political, cultural and moral fabric of the country.
Addressing the gathering, Prof. Atul Sood of Jawaharlal Nehru University presented an interesting context of human rights in India today by pointing out that the only global index in which India has improved its position is the ‘ease of doing business’ while in every other index concerning poverty, food security, gender parity or press freedom it has been sliding down the scale. This, he said, has been the result of the neoliberal economic policies that have been pursued by all governments since 1990. “It has had an impact on the character of civil society in the country. Even the phenomenon of ‘judicial activism’ has been very selective and populist in nature which allowed the gradual erosion of peoples’ rights such as the labour laws, the rights of the displaced people and other marginalised sections. The human rights movement in the country needs to position itself in light of these harsh realities,” he said.
Ms. Tara Hanzo, a former member of Manipur’s Scheduled Tribes Commission, painted a graphic picture of the state of affairs in Manipur over the past eight months which has led to the burniong of over 7,000 homes and more than 300 churches in the state, leaving nearly 70,000 people displaced. “Rather than protecting the interests of the people affected by violence, overwhelming numbers of whom are from the Kuki-Zo community, different sort of labels – refugees, narco-traders, terrorists, and infiltrators from Myanmar are being slapped on Kuki-Zo community to isolate and further penalise them. One glaring example is that while the Armed Forces Special Powers Act has been withdrawn from Imphal valley in the state it continues to be applicable in the hill areas inhabited by the tribal people,” she said.
Press Club of India President, Umakant Lakhera, highlighted the manner in which media has been undermined by the present government. “Journalism has indeed become a high-risk profession,” he said. The situation, he said, required joint concerted action by all democratic segments of society.
The editor of ‘The Caravan’ magazine Hartosh Bal, referring to the Indian Constitution being the source of our rights as Indians stated that in bestowing these rights upon the people of India the Constitution does not make them conditional to accepting a geographical or emotional construct of Indian nationalism. “However, what has been happening for a long time now is that such leaders and political parties have been using such a geographical and emotional construct of Indian nationalism as a ruse for violating the human rights of the people across the country,” he said.
Using the analogy of ‘Samudra Manthan’ (churning of the seas) Hartosh pointed to the unabashed large-scale use of soft Hindutva/Hindu majoritarian project by the Congress first in 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the subsequent elections as the ‘samudra’ (sea) of communalism and that the present regime’s politics is but a concentrated derivative of the same politics that has evolved from the ‘manthan’ (churning) of that ‘samudra’.
Veteran Human Rights activist and People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) leader, N.D. Pancholi, recalled the vital role played by the human rights movement in the country during the Emergency and subsequently during the period of militancy in Punjab, Kashmir and the North-East. He emphasised the need to recapture the same spirit in the circumstances as they prevail today in the country.
