The Hindu : Distanced from the people

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Thursday, Jun 27, 2002

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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.

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