“India is a geographical term,” said Winston Churchill in the days of the British Raj. “It is no more a united nation than the Equator.” Today, after 45 years of independence, its majority Hindu community feels that the first step towards the redemption of India is the destruction of the existing Constitution and the creation of a Hindu state where social, economic, and political status are largely defined along religious lines. The experiment of secular, unified India seems to be failing.
V.P. Singh, the prime minister forced from office in 1990 after a clash at the same Ayodhya mosque as was recently destroyed by Hindu mobs on December 6, 1992, equated the prevailing situation in India to that of Germany in the 1930’s. He said, “First they created an enemy, then they kept working on them, and working on them.” The Hindu mobs faced by Sikhs in 1984 after the death of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi have now come to be faced by the country’s Muslims as well. Blood flowed in Kashmir and Punjab and in Ayodhya as the Hindu majority lashed out against members of India’s oppressed religious minorities.
Leading Indian newspapers described the violent aftermath of the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque as the death of civilization in India. According to the government’s figures, more than 1,300 people were killed in the ensuing Hindu-Muslim riots, the overwhelming numbers of casualties were Muslim, and hundreds of women were gang raped. In a particularly gruesome case, the 23yearold sister of a police officer was beheaded after being gang raped. The young woman had only recently received her law degree and was preparing for the civil service examination. Her body was thrown into a bonfire made of household goods pillaged from her own home; her head was found in a hospital.
Today, India has almost every ill in the world—hunger, poverty, disease, castism, and communalism. The problems facing India and its whirling degeneration into a theocratic Hindu state make its disintegration inevitable. Strong local government, the bedrock of American democracy, has never been cultivated in most of India. The former attorney general of India, Soli Sorabjee, said that he has never known a time when the integrity of India was so much under strain.
Lakhshmi Chand Jain, winner of the Ramon Magasay award (Asia’s highest prize for public service), said that 44 years of overly centralized government has stifled, if not almost snuffed out, the very last breath of freedom, In his view, the government has handicapped millions of people without sending them to the gallows. He Stated that the only skill the government considers it necessary for them to have is the ability to stamp the ballot paper. In Jain’s opinion, the root of this human crisis germinated in the administration of Jawarharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister.
After nearly 45 years of independence, 54% of the adult population of India is still illiterate. Regardless of this fact, India spends more on the military than on education.
The population of India is 850 million, second only to China, and is projected to double itself in 38 years. India is a region facing Malthusian disaster. Its population is rising unchecked and its capacity to grow food is determined by the availability of water—the source of which is the unreliable monsoons, Confrontations between states over control of river water are inevitable.
The socialist legacy, volatile politics, and mismanagement have ruined the Indian economy. One third of India’s 850 million people still live in the bleak poverty of a $10permonth income. Only about 100 million Indians earn what is considered a “middle class wage” of $100.00 or more a month, Inflation is in double digits and foreign debt is over $100 billion, about a third of the size of the Indian economy.
India is an ecological disaster Eighty-two per cent of the tropical rain forest situated in Western Ghats and eastern Himalayas has been destroyed. The dismal health care system is about to be overwhelmed by the onset of A.I.D.s. The infection is spreading in India at an alarming pace.
Add to this India’s chillingly bleak human rights record. Asia Watch, the respected human rights organization which is a component of Human Rights Watch, has stated that its security forces have adopted increasingly brutal methods. Arbitrary arrests, torture, prolonged detention without trial, disappearances and the summary killings of civilians and suspected militants in “false encounters” are prominent among them, As against India’s own citizens, government troops violate even the laws of war, which prohibit attacks on civilians.
Considering the problems facing “united” India and concluding that it can survive and prosper is a warp on the ethos of nationhood. Time and time again, the Delhi government has been proved ineffective and unable— or unwilling—to defend the rights of its entire people.
Keeping India’s dismal record firmly in view, the world should challenge the doctrine that the concept of sovereignty permits 4 nations flagrantly to abuse the human rights of its citizens. Governments should not allow their professed concern for human Fights to stop at national borders.
‘The protection of human rights— together with stopping wars and promoting social and economic Progress—are the three pillars on which the United Nations is built. It is about time that the world in general and the United Nations in particular show the collective will to exercise that degree of power sufficient to guarantee individual and collective rights in India. Unbridled coercion and abuse of minorities by the Delhi government has brought the experiment of a united India toils anticlimax. It is time for a readjustment in India. India’s oppressed minorities—its Sikhs and Kashmiris— should be allowed to choose their future. Guaranteeing India’s minorities their individual and collective rights is a sacred trust the government must embrace. Doing so will foster freedom, liberty, and economic stability. Not doing so can lead only to further chaos and loss of life.
by Sukhminder Singh Sandhu Inmate No. 08442050 and Ranjit Singh Gill
Inmate No. 08443050 METROPOLITAN CORRECTIONAL CENTER 150 PARK ROW SOUTH NEW YORK, NEW YORK 100071704
Ranjit Singh Gill and Sukhminder Singh Sandhu have been held for almost six years in federal prison in the United States despite being uncharged with any offense against U.S. criminal law. The government of India seeks their extradition although a federal judge earlier prohibited their return to that country. Mr. Singh and Mr. Gill are represented by William M, Kunstler, Mary Boresz Pike, and Ronald L. Kuby.
Article extracted from this publication >> February 19, 1993
