Let’s not talk about Kashmir, so how about Israel then?
By Jawed Naqvi
AMNESTY International had declared Morarji Desai a prisoner of conscience because he was thrown into prison by Indira Gandhi. One day Morarji Desai himself became prime minister. So lawyer activist A.G. Noorani very enthusiastically went to see him with Amnesty volunteers, to request Morarji Desai to let the group visit all parts of the country freely, including Kashmir.
Noorani was in for a surprise. “What is Amnesty International?” Morarji Desai queried, pouring buckets of cold water on everything the group had done for him. After it was patiently explained to him how Amnesty volunteers worked to defend human rights of prisoners across the world, among their other good deeds, the Indian prime minister shot back: “Only God can give protection or amnesty to anyone, no one else has that right.”
It was obvious that Desai would, by a quirk of his strange logic, find it acceptable for human beings to throw fellow humans into prison — he did too, sending former tormentor Indira Gandhi to Delhi’s Tihar Jail, albeit for one night — but he invoked God when it came to delivering justice against his mortal man’s common tendency to trammel the basic rights of other fellow humans. Even as A.G. Noorani recalled his shocking experience with Morarji Desai, at the release of Amnesty’s annual world report in Delhi last week, it became suddenly clear why Desai, prime minister in 1979, had refused to join the international community in seeking clemency for Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from the hangman’s noose. For that singular ‘favour’, Gen Ziaul Haq, another great devotee of God, rewarded the Indian prime minister with Pakistan’s highest civilian honour. (And what fuss we made when Indian thespian Dilip Kumar was deservingly accorded the same honour by Pakistan, much later, for his acting talents!)
During the Cold War it was easy to target Amnesty as an intrusive western agency, but now that India has chosen to snuggle up to the West, whose diplomats visit Kashmir as often as they please, it does seem odd that Delhi continues to keep the widely respected group out of its troubled areas. The quandary for a country like India in this regard is not difficult to see. Amnesty comes across so even-handed in its approach to the protection of universal human rights that it becomes morally untenable to ignore its conclusions. Take the example of Mumbai. Amnesty strongly condemned the serial train blasts that killed over 200 commuters in July last year. That criticism suited India fine. But the group was equally forceful in its previous reports in pressing for justice for the victims of communal orgy that was let loose in the city by the Shiv Sena in January 1993. This didn’t seem to suit India at all. The Shiv Sena was indicted by the independent Justice Shri Krishna Commission, but that was that. There was no follow-up to bring the culprits to justice as is the case currently with the underworld-linked criminals in the 1993 bomb blasts who rocked Mumbai and killed hundreds.
Yet most countries that oppose groups like Amnesty, overtly or covertly, are quick to use its reports to target their opponents as is often the case with India and Pakistan. The Indian foreign office, which would not have the UN rapporteur on torture in the country, as lamented by Amnesty’s latest report, has often enough found itself quoting the group’s strong criticism of Pakistan’s human rights abuses to throw a well-aimed barb at Islamabad. Likewise with Pakistan. It doesn’t squander any opportunity to cite Amnesty or Human Rights Watch on the goings on in Kashmir, even though the groups are not allowed to visit there. In this year’s Amnesty report too killings and disappearances in Kashmir are listed as a cause for serious concern, grist to Pakistan’s propaganda mill. India would of course readily point to Irene Khan’s forward to the report where the Amnesty chief has named Pakistan among the states that are moving in the direction that would attract the classical description of failed states. Afghanistan, Iraq, occupied Palestine and Lebanon are among the others in this category.
The irony for country’s like India is that their political and moral anchor in the post-Soviet era, the United States of America, has been severely criticised for its “war on terror” that has done everything but fight terror — mostly of its own making. Israel’s daily excesses against the occupied Palestinian people too have been brought into sharp focus. It is said that you can be easily judged by the company you keep. The strategic alliances with Israel and the United States reflect a mindset within the Indian establishment that is not too different to the thought process that strives to keep Amnesty out of Kashmir. The policy would be far less duplicitous if India didn’t ever quote Amnesty reports to make its point. But let us for a moment heed the sensitivities of the Indian establishment in Kashmir, or of Pakistan in Balochistan. Let us hear of Irene Khan’s experiences in Palestine, and see if that won’t make the establishments in India and Pakistan take notice of the close resemblances there are between the world’s troubled regions.
On Dec 10, 2006, while the world celebrated International Human Rights Day, Ms Khan was in Jayyus on the West Bank. “The small village is now divided by the Wall — or more accurately a high iron fence. Built in defiance of international law, and ostensibly to make Israel more secure, the Wall’s main effect has been to cut off the local Palestinian population from their citrus groves and olive orchards. A once prosperous farming community is now impoverished.”
She spoke to an angry Palestinian farmer, who cried: “Every day I have to suffer the humiliation of checkpoints, petty obstructions and new restrictions that stop me from getting to my orchard on the other side. If I cannot cultivate my olives, how will I survive?”
As she listened to him, Ms Khan says she could see in the distance the neat red roofs and white walls of a large and prosperous Israeli settlement. She wondered if those who lived there believed that a Wall threatening the future of their neighbours could truly enhance their security.
Earlier that week, she had visited Sderot, a small town in the south of Israel, which had been subjected to rocket attacks from Palestinian groups in Gaza.
“We are frightened,” one young woman resident told Irene Khan. “But we know that there are women like us on the other side who are also suffering, who are also afraid, and who are in a worse situation than us. We feel empathy for them, we want to live in peace with them, but instead our leaders promote our differences and create more distrust. So we live in fear and insecurity.”
This brave Israeli woman understood what many world leaders fail to comprehend: “that fear destroys our shared understanding and our shared humanity. When we see others as a threat, and are ready to negotiate their human rights for our security, we are playing a zero-sum game.”
The Amnesty chief found the Israeli woman’s message sobering at a time when our world seems as polarised as it was at the height of the Cold War, and in many ways far more dangerous. “Human rights — those global values, universal principles and common standards that are meant to unite us — are being bartered away in the name of security today as they were then. Like the Cold War times, the agenda is being driven by fear — instigated, encouraged and sustained by unprincipled leaders,” says Ms Khan. The force of logic is clear and the message resounding, unless of course, you happen to share the self-defeating mythology of Morarji Desai.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com