By Jonathan Power

The world’s largest voting booth has vindicated democracy once again; No one can deny the achievement. But unless Vishwanath Pratap Singh moves quickly to remedy the deep fault lines in India’s system of law and justice, India is going to continue losing its ‘y as a free nation.

A subcontinent with half a billion voters, mainly illiterate, shows every five years or less that it has a mind of its own and the mind resides in the adult population and not in the hands of a ruling clique. Nevertheless, being democratic is only one measure of freedom. Governments must also be law-abiding. The Old Prussian state, despite its lack of democracy, is still held up by historians as a shining light of 19thcentury achievement because justice was always well done and seen to be done. Moreover, it gave the Prussians the self-confidence to assert themselves in the way they did, they were always tough with their enemies, but they were always fair, too.

India is another matter. It is asserting itself, northward to Nepal and Pakistan, southward to Sri Lanka and westward to the Maldives, in recent years, it has set itself up as a regional troubleshooter and peacekeeper, confident in its size and its democratic foundations that it is the possessor of both superior power and superior virtue.

This is not enough. To be credible, India must learn to be fair and just. It has not been just if honesty is part of justice in fulfilling the promises it gave to Sri Lanka about how long its peacekeeping army would stay. It has not been just to tiny Nepal, squeezing it economically because the Nepalese wanted a better deal on trade and because they were flirting with China. And although both sides are equally at fault, it has never been just with Pakistan.

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Above all, India is not just at home. Several thousand critics and opponents of Rajiv Gandhi’s government have been held without charge or trial. There is widespread torture and extrajudicial killings carried out by the police.

The housecleaning has to begin in Punjab, where Gandhi bungled his earlier valiant efforts to bring peace between Sikhs and Hindus. Until quite recently there were thousands of nonviolent prisoners of conscience languishing without trial in jail. Although many have been freed, the police in Punjab are increasingly taking the law into their own hands, murdering suspects.

India has used its Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act with scant regard for evidence or review. The grounds it allows for detention are ludicrously broad and bail is granted only if a detainee can prove himself innocent.

Torture appears to be widespread in Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and in the northeast. Deaths in police custody are common at least 100 cases a year.

In the more remote rural areas, members of the tribal communities and the “untouchable” castes are particularly vulnerable, not just to torture by the police but to beatings and rape.

Staged killings popularly known as “encounter killings ‘of political activists are regularly reported from Andhra Pradesh, Manipur, Madhya Pradesh and, most of all, from Punjab. The police say they are “violent encounters with terrorists.” In reality most of them are the police on the hunt.

The judiciary intervenes too rarely, and the government has stead  fastly refused to admit that anything is a wry. Mr. Gandhi told the BBC this year that “we don’t torture anybody.” Yet at the same time he has refused Amnesty International’s request to visit India to discuss human rights concerns and to attend court proceedings.

Before the election, Amnesty wrote to all the political parties about these abuses of human rights, during the campaign, neither Gandhi nor his opponent addressed these issues.

Elections do concentrate the mind on the timeless values of democracy. Throwing the rascals out or deciding to keep them in is what generations ‘of would-be democrats have fought for all over the world, including in India. But freedom is more than this. Justice has to be done and seen to be done. Without this, as V.S. Naipaul once wrote, India is a “wounded civilization.” (Jonathan Power of London writes for the International Herald Tribune.).

Article extracted from this publication >>  December 22, 1989