Courtesy: New York Times, January 22, 1995
NEW DELHI: Ron Brown, President Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce, arrived here last week to promote new business deals and drove straight to the black marble platform beside the Yamuna River where Mohandas K. Gandhi was cremated a familiar ritual for Westerners trying to signal how much India and the Western democracies share.
There is, indeed, much on paper to celebrate (forgetting, for a moment, that the two countries have frequently been on opposite sides of great issues, not least during the cold war), and there is even more incentive now that economic reforms have opened India to Western investment. India does have parliamentary government and a Constitution replete with democratic guarantees. It has never been. ruled by the military. It has a proudly independent judiciary.. Its press is as varied and contentious as many in the world.
But those who have made a closer study of India’s record often feel that the country has gained more credit for its democracy than it has deserved. Among Indian constitutional experts, editorial writers and human rights activists, it is easy to find those who say that the freedoms won in the independence struggle a half-century ago have been fundamentally corrupted. The harshest of these critics say India belongs as much in the camp of nations whose governments abuse their people as it does in the club of authentically democratic nations.
“Democracy in India has become like one of those old western movie sets all facade, and nothing behind it,” says Ravi Nair, executive director of the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Center, which is based in New Delhi. He adds: “The erosion has been slow and insidious… And because it’s sneaked up on us, most middleclass Indians have not stood up and protested but meekly accepted the wasting away of rights that were fought for at such great cost just a few decades ago.”
Nair and others tick off the ways in which India has become more authoritarian. One, basic to many others, involves the perversion of elections. With 350 million illiterates in a total population of 890 million, and a rural social system that is basically feudal, politicians have assured themselves of election by vote-buying, ballot-stuffing and driving unwanted voters from the polls at gunpoint. The current election commissioner, T.N. Seshan, has tried to uproot abuses, but few believe that he alone can redeem the system.
According to many critics, the Constitution adopted in 1950 to enshrine democracy has been widely subverted. A provision letting Parliament exempt new laws from court review has been invoked more than 40 times, often to shield repressive actions the judiciary seemed certain to knock down. New Delhi’s power to depose governments in India’s states and to impose “president’s rule.” meaning government by fiat, has been used repeatedly to get rid of elected but politically inconvenient leaders.
One measure of how readily many Indians accept all this can be taken from the adulation of Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister assassinated 10 years ago, whose instinct for a more controlling state led her to declare an emergency in 1975 that allowed her to rule by decree, lock up opposition leaders, muzzle the press and block recourse to the courts. Mrs. Gandhi was defeated when she called an election in 1977, but many middleclass Indians still endorse her actions. “Even the traffic was disciplined during the emergency.” a wealthy hotel owner said at a recent dinner in the capital. “We Indians do better under a bit of dictatorship.”
But it is not political machinations in New Delhi, or even the widespread corruption that has tainted all Indian governments, that has filled the files on India at human rights groups offices. For nights groups, this central issue is the heavy-handed behavior of India’s sprawling apparatus of state power Shadowy intelligence organizations in New Delhi, an ill disciplined police force, one of Asia’s largest armies and an army of paramilitary groups. Under security laws that forgive most abuses in advance, India has amassed a lurid record of massacres, disappearances and torture.
Earlier this month, a battalion of the Central Reserve Police Force, angered by the shooting of one of Its men by a rebel group in the city of Imphal, stormed into the grounds of a hospital, seized an off-duty medical student and seven auto-rickshaw drivers and shot them dead. Many abuses, like those in Imphal, occurred in the widespread areas of the country where New Delhi faces insurgencies. But similar excesses are common where the rationale of defending the country’s sovereignty is absent.
A special target of human rights groups is a 1985 statute, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act, justified by the Government an essential to curb an uprising by Sikh nationalists in the Punjab, which has been used to hold nearly 70.000 people in preventive detention. Many have been held for years for activities-tribal protests, demonstrations against economic reforms, communal – OLS – the lack any tinny of terrorism,
The prison system remains a scandal. About 160.000 of the 207.000 prisoners behind bars in 1994 were awaiting trial, many of them for periods between five and 10 years. In New Delhi’s Tihart jail, reputedly one of the country’s better-run institutions, more than 200 prisoners are held on charges of traveling on trains without tickets.
When activists like Nair are asked why a country with such pride in its democracy has let things get so bad, the answers go despite Indian history and culture. Party, they say, it is because the tradition of the rule of law. brought to India by the British colonizers, never spread to the grass-roots level. But they also cite a disdain for others welfare that has its roots in India’s caste system. Mr. Nair believes that political expediency, as much as any tradition, explains why India has joined the likes of China and Iran in arguing for the right of nations to close their doors 10 international human rights groups. “The argument that human rights are basically a Judce Christian concept that has no basis in Asian culture is poppycock.” Nair says. “The inherent dignity of the human being is respected in every culture, so to present it as an alien concept is a shameless attempt to avoid accountability
Those who would like India to face more pressure have been disappointed by the Clinton Administration’s decision to abandon attempts to use trade as a human rights lover with China. Brown, the commerce secretary was sent to Now Delhi with an understanding that rights abuses would be raised only in private sessions with Indian Ieaders.
“We’re disappointed.” Nair said. “because international scrutiny is the only thing that keeps the situation in India from getting a lot worse.”
Article extracted from this publication >> February 3, 1995
