Cover Story: THE EVIL WITHIN 15 Jun 08 (http://thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=30&theme=&usrsess=1&id=208304)
The Binayak Sen story is more than just about
the violation of individual rights, says
Shoma A Chatterji
THE Binayak Sen story is much more than one of a gross violation of human rights. It goes far beyond the international appeals to release him from the unlawful detention he has been subjected to for more than one year. Beginning 16 June, a 10-day fast has been organised at Raipur in Chhattisgarh to express solidarity with him and Ajay TG (a film-maker) — both members of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, and others detained under the draconian Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005, and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (1967) amended in 2004 to include key sections of the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act, 2002. Pota was itself repealed in 2004 following widespread criticism of abuse and human rights violations. The CSPSA allows for arbitrary detention of persons suspected of belonging to an unlawful organisation or participating in its activities or giving protection to any member of such an organisation, and human rights organisations have demanded its repeal.
Dr Sen is the fifth person to have been arrested under the CSPSA in the state. The fast is to ensure human rights of marginalised people are not trampled upon and human rights defenders continue to work fearlessly. It will end on 25 June, the day Emergency Rule in India was declared in 1975, followed by a National Convention on Repressive Laws and Human Rights on 25 and 26 June at Raipur. In his letter to National Human Rights Commission senior advocate KG Kannabiran, the PUCL, India, president argues that the CSPSA and Unlawful Activities Prevention Act operate by criminalising the very performance of civil liberties activities, and culpability is decided upon not by direct proof, but through guilt by association.
Dr Binayak Sen is a renowned paediatrician, public health specialist and PUCl vice-president, and an activist committed and dedicated totally to community health and human rights. He was arrested on false charges of sedition on 13 May last year, joining dozens of other human rights activists in Indian jails charged under repressive "black laws". Dr Sen earned the government's wrath for opposing Salwa Judum, a private militia movement armed by the government to combat "Maoist insurgency". Salwa Judum has led to a spiralling increase in violence, leading to the displacement of over 100,000 indigenous people over the last three years. In April this year, he was conferred the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights.
Dr Sen's case offers a microcosm of an alarming trend of holding human rights defenders that oppose state repression, including extra-judicial killings under draconian laws. Among these are Lachit Bordoloi, human rights activist, arrested in February for his links with the United Liberation Front of Asom; Govindan Kutty, editor of People's March, Kerala, arrested in January for alleged links with the CPI; Vernon Gonsalves, activist, Nasik; Prashant Rahi, journalist, Uttarakhand; Praful Jha, journalist, Chhattisgarh; activists Arun Ferreira, Ashok Reddy, Dhanendra Bhurule and Naresh Bansode, Vidarbha. All of them have been charged under the UAPA and kept under prolonged detention without bail. These draconian laws sanction the violation of due process by the state and thus are grossly violative of internationally accepted norms of jurisprudence and democratic governance.
The PUCL states that another two of its members, Rashmi Dwivedi and Gautam Bandopadhyay, have been facing harassment and threats of arrest from the police. They have been actively protecting the rights of Adivasis in the face of escalating violence in Chattisgarh between armed Maoists and Salwa Judum, an armed anti-Maoist campaign widely regarded as being sponsored by the state government. They have been instrumental in bringing to light unlawful killings of Adivasis, sexual assault of their women and disappearances of their youth. The latest instance was the unlawful killing of a group of Adivasis in Santoshpur village in the forests of the Bastar-Dantewada area on 31 March.
The story begins in 2005 when the Bastar-Dantewada forest area of Chhattisgarh began witnessing a steady rise in violence between the Maoists and the Salwa Judum. Civilians were routinely targeted on both sides, resulting in at least 300 deaths. Forty-five thousand Adivasis, displaced from their homes, have been forced to live in special camps where they are at risk of increased violence. A perennial state of war created by the Salwa Judum has led to largescale and apparently voluntary displacement of indigenous communities, thus freeing up for corporate and industrial use land and natural resources that historically belongs to local communities.
Somnath Mukherji, an activist with the Association for India's Development, states, "These protests are not only about the violation of the human rights of Dr Sen — they are also about the ongoing assault on the human rights of the people of Chhattisgarh whose lives and lands are being mortgaged to a vision of development that is antithetical to them."
PUCL's April 2006 document, Where the State Makes War on its People, is, to date, the most comprehensive and illuminating account of the Salwa Judum movement in Chhattisgarh. On the basis of its findings, the document picks out three strong facts that need deeper probing. One, that the Salwa Judum is not a spontaneous people's movement but a state-organised anti-insurgency campaign. Two, that it is misleading to describe and oversimplify the situation as one where ordinary villagers are caught between the Maoists and the military. Three, that the entire operation, contrary to claims of it being a "peace mission", has led to violence on all sides. The Maoists, the document claims, have widespread support and as long as people continue to live in the villages, it would be really difficult to isolate the Maoists. Sadly, the only the murders by Maoists are recognised and "punished", while the Salwa Judum and paramilitary operate with complete impunity.
Dantewada district consists of a large number of fairly small tribal villages and a few large ones.
These villagers have no land rights. They are at the mercy of the forest department. About two-thirds of the district belongs to the forest department. Given the rain-fed agriculture, the collection and sale of non-timber forest produce at weekly haats (markets) or to agents is an important source of local income. This points out the people's dependence on the forest, and their forced interaction with forest department officials and traders.
The people of Dantewada are extremely poor, but their land is extremely rich, both in terms of minerals and forests. When the government talks of "development", what it really has in mind is the development of these resources for private profit and not the development of its people. Reality today, seen against the backdrop of "development" activities leading to the displacement and pauperisation of tribals, is anti-development in definite terms. These efforts at exploiting natural resources have gained momentum since the formation of Chhattisgarh in 2001. The new state government has 1,161 villages within its control.
Around 1980, the People's War Group started an organisation in today's Dantewada district, called the Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan. It took up oppression and exploitation of locals by "outsiders", defined primarily as the forest and revenue departments, the police and the moneylenders. By the late 1990s, it began addressing the internal contradictions in Adivasi society. The first of these lay in the inequality in land ownership. The DAKMS redistributed more fertile land and grain in some areas. The second initiative was the creation of sanghams in villages targeting the gradual replacement of traditional structures of authority at the village level. These sanghams are one of the major targets of the Salwa Judum because they challenge these traditional and exploitative structures and are thus identified with Maoists. The third initiative was fixing the price of the forest produce mainly by raising the price of tendu leaves' collection. Struggles by peasant organisations managed to raise the rates from barely two rupees for 100 bundles in the early 1980s to Rs 80 by the mid-1990s.
Vested interests such as headmen, priests, contractors and graders in trading towns and tehsil headquarters were unhappy with this redistribution of land to landless organisations. They were especially unhappy with the Maoists. In July-August 1990, political leaders like Mahendra Karma took over an operation called the Jan Jagran Abhiyan. Its strategy was to tell villagers to either hand over the most dedicated activists or else face attack. Around May 2005, the same Karma, a Congress legislator, formed the Salwa Judum. The phrase means "purification hunt" intended to "cure tribal society of the Maoist illness". But the Salwa Judum is spread is over a wider area, uses much more intensive state power and is an integral part of the Central and state governments' anti-Naxal policy.
The lives of thousands of people in the region have been torn apart in what the District Superintendent of Police, Dantewada, himself described as an "undeclared war". Between January and April 2006, about 30,000 people were displaced from their homes. Approximately 15,000 people from 420 villages are living in temporary camps as refugees. The Salwa Judum could hardly have done the destruction it did without state support. The district collector told PUCL activists that of the 150-200 Salwa Judum meetings that were held till December 2005, he himself had attended 75 per cent. An audio CD released by the Maoists uses the actual voice of the Superintendent of Police, Bijapur district, where he says that Rs 2 lakh would be given to every villager who joins the Salwa Judum. This points to the links the Salwa Judum has with the administration!
Since the Salwa Judum began operations in June 2005, 31 cases of rape were listed, of which six victims were murdered. Children and old people have been beaten up. People are killed, but no FIR is ever registered for those killed by forces brought in by the Salwa Judum to wreak havoc on villagers. In some villages, locals have surrendered to the Salwa Judum to avoid being targeted. Almost all the killings are unrecorded.
Maoist attacks have been in response, not as arbitrary action launched without rhyme or reason. However, the PUCL says the actual scale of Maoist violence tends to be exaggerated by the administration to imply that the movement is illegal. A point repeated by observers, activists and others, including many Salwa Judum activists, is the strong presence of the Maoist movement that has a mass base among the poor. For some of them, a few real victories have been won. Yet, it is also true that the administration has arrested a number of people suspected of being Maoists or Maoists sympathisers. One of them is Dr Binayak Sen.
Will Dr Sen's freedom from long and totally undemocratic imprisonment also free the tribals and villagers of Dantewada from torture, rape and murder at the hands of Salwa Judum activists? Will the state and Central governmentstake it upon themselves to declare the Salwa Judum illegal and disband it for good?
ARTICLE 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.". Article 6(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which India is a party, states, "Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life." Article 4 of the ICCPR states that this right cannot be waived "even in times of public emergency threatening the life of the nation".
Unlawful and extrajudicial killings clearly contravene the right to life. The Indian government ratified the ICCPR in 1979. By ratifying an international treaty which enshrines the right to life, India is obliged not only to respect that right in principle but also to ensure it is not violated in practice. The ICCPR imposes a clear duty on states to investigate alleged violations of the right to life "promptly, thoroughly and effectively through independent and impartial bodies".
HUNDREDS of activists from a broad coalition of 50 international human rights groups that includes Amnesty International, National Lawyers' Guild and the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy,, Canada, took to the streets on two Global days of Action, 13 and 14 May, to protest against the continued incarceration of human rights crusader Dr Binayak Sen. Simultaneous protests were held outside the Indian consulates in London, New York, Washington DC, San Francisco and Vancouver, while activists in Paris, Stockholm, Boston, Pittsburgh, Houston and many other cities organised vigils, talks and film screenings to raise awareness about the ongoing persecution of human rights activists.
Over 4,000 signatures from individuals around the world have been collected on petitions asking for Dr Sen's release. Internationally acclaimed intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, George Galloway and Mahashweta Devi, joined in urging the Indian government to free Dr Sen and stop the harassment of human rights activists. Further, in an unprecedented move, 22 Nobel Prize-winning scientists and economists have also appealed to the Indian government to release Dr Sen so that he can go and receive the 2008 Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights in Washington.
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