[Reader-list] Kuldip Nayar's another article(Iong back it appeared in the Hindu)

[Rakesh Iyer]

Dear all

This is for all those who love the BJP, Modi ji and RSS. Keep enjoying. And
specially for all those who love Kuldip Nayar.

Do read it. Enjoy.

Regards

Rakesh

Source: The Hindu

Date: Thursday, Jun 27, 2002

Link: http://www.hinduonnet.com/2002/06/27/stories/2002062700881000.htm

Article:

Opinion <http://www.hinduonnet.com/2002/06/27/05hdline.htm> - Leader Page
Articles

* Distanced from the people *

By Kuldip Nayar

* Whether it is the police or the administrative set-up, it functions at the
behest of the rulers alone. Some years ago, the consideration was politics.
Now caste and creed also play a role. *

 DURING The day, time somehow passes off at the Shah Alam camp but at night,
it is not so. The sound of someone crying, screaming or simply beating
someone else is commonplace. At night, the souls of the dead appear to visit
their loved ones. The souls hug their orphan children to their chest and try
to search for answers by looking into their eyes. Once the entire camp is
asleep, the children wait to see their mothers and have dinner with their
fathers. "How are you, Siraj," the soul of a mother asks her child. "How are
you mother," the child responds. "Now I have become a soul, so no one can
burn me alive." "Mother, can I also become like you?"

How poignant. How touching and how telling. This is part of a long treatise
in Hindi someone has sent me from the Shah Alam camp, where hundreds of
Muslims took shelter after the carnage in Gujarat. Their suffering is the
worst kind of human rights violation anywhere in the world. I do not know
how long is their night of sorrow. They had a past but have no present, no
future. The Prime Minister's Office, which is supposed to oversee the
rehabilitation, is too soft on the State Government. Little does it realise
that this is a matter of human beings, who have the right to get justice in
any civilised society, not a particular community.

Gujarat's Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, is still very much there. In fact,
he becomes a mascot of the BJP which wants to cash in on the polarisation in
the State. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is as helpless as the
inmates of the Shah Alam camp. I wish the NHRC could do more. At least it
can make more noise. The State Government has rejected its second report.
The question that stares us in the face is: how can we protect human rights
when the protectors themselves are a guilty party?

I am referring to the state machinery, including the police, which has got
not only politicised but communalised. What happened in Gujarat is happening
all over the country in one shape or the other. Whether it is the police or
the administrative set-up, it functions at the behest of the rulers. Some
years ago, the consideration was sheer politics. Now caste and creed also
play a role. This is reprehensible but is happening increasingly. Human
rights are the casualty.

Rulers are also losing their sensitivity. They hardly feel the privations of
affected people. Take, for example, the Mann dam. This project is one of
several large dams being built on the Narmada river and its tributaries.
This dam will submerge homes and lands, the rich black cotton soil of
several hundreds of Adivasi families. The history of the Mann dam, like many
others in India, is a story of unkept promises. The project received the
legally binding environmental clearance from the Central Environment
Ministry in 1984. The condition of the clearance was that the affected
Adivasis must be resettled on non-forest agricultural land. Whatever the
assurance, the Madhya Pradesh Government has violated the conditions of
environmental clearance and the provisions of its own rehabilitation policy.
Cash compensation of sorts has been considered adequate.

Madhya Pradesh's Chief Minister, Digvijay Singh, is considered better than
many others. Apparently, he thinks that doing business with Mr. Modi is more
rewarding than with the Adivasis who will have no land or home after the
Mann dam attains a particular height. The Narmada Project Award, now several
years old, makes it clear that before disturbing people from their places,
alternative sites for their rehabilitation should be ready six months
earlier. This has not been followed either in Gujarat or Madhya Pradesh. The
question is not whether some people are against the dam or not, but whether
the oustees have any claim to rehabilitation before they are uprooted.

The oustees have themselves identified some chunks of agricultural land for
themselves on which they are willing to be resettled. Their demand to the
Government is that these lands should be developed with irrigation
facilities and should be allotted to them immediately. On the one hand, the
State Government has totally failed to provide agricultural lands to the
oustees and on the other it has unleashed a reign of terror to force the
Adivasis to flee without any rehabilitation. Government officials, along
with a large posse of armed police and forest contractors, are roaming the
area and spreading terror by ambushing, intimidating and threatening to
shoot the Adivasis if they resist. They have cut down a large number of
trees in the villages and have razed to the ground several primary schools,
two middle schools, two storehouses and one health centre in the area. The
officials also have severed all electricity connections in the affected
villages.

However, the pinnacle of the Madhya Pradesh Government's inhumanity has been
the extraction, the removal and bulldozing of all hand pumps in the affected
villages in the area last month; at the height of summer as the temperature
in the districts of western Madhya Pradesh soared to 47-48 degree
centigrade. With the Mann river completely dry, removal of all hand pumps
shows scant respect for human life, much less human rights. As many as 5,000
Adivasis have been exposed to the danger of death through thirst. The
district administration is candid about its intentions. When questioned
about the action, they said that it was the only way to oust the people.

The affected people have refused to quit. They are staying in their
villages, confronting the state terror and have asserted that not only would
they not move in the face of state terror but more than that they will be
willing to face even the rising waters and submergence in the monsoon,
unless they are rehabilitated. It is against state-sponsored terror that
some people went on hunger strike in Bhopal.

It is, however, heartening to see the Supreme Court interfering in enforcing
economic and social rights. According to the Food and Agriculture
Organistion (FAO), India alone accounts for over 400 million poor and hungry
people. For a nation long inured to scarcity and starvation, the nature of
this problem is ironic — the problem of plenty. A problem so acute that the
Supreme Court was forced to take notice. Shocked at the increasing number of
starvation deaths amidst overflowing foodgrain godowns of the Government —
public stock exceeding 60 millon tonnes — the Supreme Court passed an
interim order on November 2001 demanding that the large stocks of grain in
the FCI warehouse be released with immediate effect. The Court's damning
indictment and directive gives the desperately poor a reason to hope. It is
a shameful treatise on both the democratic institutions and the media that
the Judiciary has to step in to ensure what has been overlooked for so long
— the fundamental human right to food.

Starvation deaths are not new in India. The notorious
Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput region in Orissa is a case in point. No
commission has ever been set up to examine why in a food surplus nation,
where buffer stocks are three times more than what is needed, thousands
still die of hunger and malnutrition. For the first time, the battle for the
right to food has reached the Supreme Court.

In May last year, the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties filed a PIL with the
Supreme Court, arguing that several federal institutions and Sate
Governments should be held responsible for mass malnutrition among the
people. In one of its interim orders relating to the case, the Supreme Court
affirmed that where people are unable to feed themselves adequately,
Governments had an obligation to provide for them, ensuring, at the very
least, that they were not exposed to malnourishment, starvation and other
related problems.

  * *