Trail of violence: rights activists at risk
Opinion - Leader Page Articles
The Hindu
Mukul Sharma
Rights activists face a series of obstacles to their work. Rights violations also have wider repercussions. They create a climate of fear.
The Karnataka convener of the National Alliance for People’s Movement, A.D. Babu, was killed recently. He was on his way, along with two colleagues, to a NAPM meeting on an anti-liquor campaign at Ramnagaram, when a group stopped his vehicle at Mayanagram, a few km from the venue, and attacked him with knives and swords. He died on the spot. It is believed that a Karnataka liquor mafia is behind the gruesome murder.
In May, Lalit Kumar Mehta of Palamau district, Jharkhand, who fearlessly raised the issue of corruption in implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme , was murdered. So was Narayan Hareka — a naib sarpanch belonging to the Kandha tribal community — of Kambivalsa village in Koraput district, Orissa, who fought against liquor brewing, private money-lending, land alienation and corruption.
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Sreelatha Menon: A homecoming in Bastar
Business Standard, July 20, 2008
EAR TO THE GROUND
Sreelatha Menon
The collector of Dantewada has agreed to give 10 quintals of paddy seed to restart farming in Nendra. Nendra is a village in Konta block in Dantewada district in Chhattisgarh which has been lying deserted for the last three years after multiple attacks by the government-backed anti-Naxal militia, the Salwa Judum, and the police. The collector’s gesture was in reciprocation of a rehabilitation effort by an NGO called Vanvasi Chetna Ashram to facilitate homecoming for the villagers who were living either in jungles fearing reprisals from the Salwa Judum and the police, or in neighbouring villages of Andhra Pradesh. Some of them are in camps set up by the state government.
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Letting the law take its course : Gautam Sen
Goutam Sen writes in his blog Gyanoprapha
Would you say that the law is respected in a country where
- the police routinely abuse the powers that they have been given, in flagrant violation of the law?
- the Supreme Court’s rulings regarding the treatment of undertrials are routinely ignored by the police and the executive?
- torture is so common, despite extensive bans against it, that people meet in public to condemn it, and the organizers of the meeting are implicated in false cases by the police
after public protests against torture attended by former judges, civil servants and former and serving police officials? - human rights investigators are routinely threatened and harassed ?
- the police ignore an order given by a judge at a trial allowing the accused to meet a member of his family, and physically try to prevent the meeting?
- the police threaten the family member of the accused while she attempts to meet with the accused during a court recess pursuant to the judge’s order, within the court premises?
Each of these shows the utter contempt in which the law is held by those charged with upholding it. In such a country, it is arguable that the chief breaker of laws in the country is the police itself. The independence of the judiciary from the executive appears to have assumed a new meaning here - if the judiciary commands that the executive do or refrain from doing something, the executive frequently either ignores the injunction, or does precisely the opposite.
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“Madam, we know you’re leaving. Think wisely before coming back”
The Indian media and civil society generaly do take note, if only in passing, of such attacks on human rights actvists. So while many have suffered the fate of Binayak Sen in Chattisgarh, Sen’s story has got some attention partly because he was responsible for bringing out the stories of those many people, because the doctor was a PUCL activist.
But when it comes to Kashmir, the Delhi media usually has silence to offer: it is a conspiracy of silence that seeks to mainatin the great consensus of not seeing Kashmir from any perspective but the one that makes the Valley an Integral Part of India. The Integral Part rhetoric is so deeply ingrained in most journalists and editors that they are loathe to even take note that most residents of this Integral Part see themselves as being chained to a body they don’t belong to.
The greatest casualty of the media’s decision to align itself with the establishment on the ‘question’/’dispute’/’issue’ of Kashmir is the truth about human rights. A free, liberal press should by now have exposed each and every unaccounted, secret, unnamed grave in Kashmir, which the security establishment claims are of foreign militants killed in encounters, but locals say they are of innocent individuals who just ‘disappeared’, and, in custodial death, won some soldier a bravery medal, some cash reward or a promotion. Or just the kick of killing someone from a place whose people don’t see themselves as part of India.
Having failed to look beyond the vale in Kashmir, the least that the Indian media could do is take note of those who are finding such graves, documenting them despite being trailed and intimidated by the security establishment which does not want the buried secrets out. In the big black mark on democracy and freedom, a small dot is the Delhi press’ failure to take note of the recent incident at the house of human rights advocate Parvez Imroz.
Imroz is a member of the Jammu & Kashmir Coalition for Civil Society which is involved in the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice, which is conducting what its name suggests in the Indian part of kashmir. Their work has just begun, and the report they brought out on 900 unaccounted graves they have documented from just two districts - Baramulla and Kupwara - was not taken note of by most of the Delhi media. 29 skeleteons in Noida’s Nithari village had the Delhi media on edge for two months, but 900 unknown graves in Kashmir didn’t merit a mention. Some lives are more important than others; it depends on whether you died for sex or organ trade or for national integration.
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Justice travestied
by Sandeep Pandey
(The Statesman, July 8, 2008)
I first met Dr Binayak Sen, his wife Ilina and their two daughters, Aparajita and Pranhita, at the conclusion of the ‘Pokhran to Sarnath Global Peace March’ on 6 August 1999 at the Central Tibetan Institute of Higher Learning in Sarnath, near Varanasi. Sarnath is where Buddha delivered a sermon to his first five disciples after attaining enlightenment at Bodh Gaya. The peace march was symbolically between a place of destruction ~ Pokhran ~ and a place of peace ~ Sarnath. It began exactly a year after the day India tested nuclear weapons in 1998 and concluded on Hiroshima Day. The objective of the march was to push for total global nuclear disarmament.
While the march was in progress for 88 days and over 1,500 km, the Sens were busy organising activities in Raipur, now in Chhattisgarh, and their work area in its support. We also later got a chance to work together for the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, a national platform.
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From freebinayaksen.org- Updates from Google News
- Govt disapproves of 'non-state' law enforcers like Salwa Judum - Times of India
- With fear and hope - Hindu
- Orissa Police in Service of Hindutva (and POSCO) - Desicritics.org
- POTA 3.0: India's New Terror Law - CounterCurrents.org
- Mumbai attack: Who is asking the real questions? - Express Buzz
- Poetry: Matte Finish - Desicritics.org
- Reports From Indian Media
- With fear and hope - Hindu: Sunday Magazine
- Mumbai attack: Who is asking the real questions? - New Indian Express
- Equality before the law? - Oheraldo
- Govt disapproves of 'non-state' law enforcers like Salwa Judum - TOI: India
- Chidambaram says Govt disapproves of Salwa Judum - Express India-- Front Page
- Chidambaram says Govt disapproves of Salwa Judum - The Indian Express -- Front Page
- Centre disapproves of 'non-state' law enforcers like Salwa Judum - Rediff: News
- Government disapproves of 'non-state' law enforcers - NDTV National
- Govt disapproves of 'non-state' law enforcers - Hindustan Times: News
- Govt disapproves of 'non-state' law enforcers - Hindustan Times: India
- Govt disapproves of 'non-state' law enforcers like Salwa Judum - TOI: India
- Govt disapproves of 'non-state' law enforcers like Salwa Judum - Doordarshan
- Rhetoric rejected - Frontline
- Outcome shot in the arm for salwa judum - Asian Age: India
- PUCL Vice-President's bail plea rejected - New Kerala: West Bengal
- Chhattisgarh HC: PUCL vice president's bail plea rejected - IndLaw News
- Different kinds of silence - Telegraph: Opinion
- Whither democracy? - Oheraldo
- Q&A: 'Rights activism uses space within the Constitution' - TOI: Editorial
- The Shootin' Sheriffs - Outlook