Attack on Sharmila

“I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ:” Gandhi. Now, if you read it in the same tread by ‘Eche’ Sharmila, she is probably likely to say “I like your India. I do not like your Indians. They are so unlike your India.”

The moment I heard that few right-wing thugs attacked on the supporters of ‘Eche’ Sharmila Chanu in Delhi last week, while they were trying to hold a peaceful protest march against the most controversial and draconian –Armed Forces Special Power Act, my mind tried to catch a glimpse of Mahatma Gandhi, who strongly advocated and pioneered of nonviolent, for peace and harmony across the world in the form what he called Satyagraha.  I know, I was wrong that this is not the land of Gandhi, where he dreamed, where he hoped for a country, a land of diverse caste, creed... living together. Also I know that the country named India is using his name and exploited the humanity. But my simple argument is - why is India still observing 2^nd October and International Day of Non-violence by the United Nations. Don’t you think it is mockery to the ‘Father of Nation’, who they say because of his Satyagraha the British left India? Still unbelievable!

Now, coming to the point. Why these so-called right wing goons attacked those people who simply held a silent rally against the Act? Did Sharmila do something wrong or wage war against the country? Or is it a manifestation of dominant attitude with a juvenile mindset lingering in the name of ‘Bharat Mataki Jai, Vande Mataram’, who even do not fully understand what the meaning says? Or, do they really know what is India?

If they really believe in Mahatma Gandhi and love Vande Mataram, they should first try to find who is Sharmila and why she is being on fast for more than a decade, before raising their voice and such a callous and unsolicited character being shown towards her, whom millions are praying and looking upwards every day.   

As the Sangai Express rightly pointed that “the very attack is a damning testimony of the growing belief that to Delhi, the North East region is an outpost, a territory that exists to ensure the security of the rest of the country no matter if in the process the very people inhabiting this region are subjected under an Act which empowers the security forces to shoot anyone to death on mere suspicion without the fear of being hauled up for crossing the line that divides duty and murdering. It now seems that this Act now means that it offers immunity not only to the security forces but also to the zealots to whom Nationalism or love for the country may come garbed in the form of right wing Hindu extremists, who may attack anyone standing against AFSPA with impunity.”

If it is the belief than do we need to relook at the history, how India became a nation and how this very Act that has been imposed in the North East for over half a century has become a symbol of hatred and colonialism? If the past events tell us the reality, many great emperors/nations in this world have banished from this earth right from Great Alexander to British Empire to Hitler to invisible Hosni Mubarrack and Muammer Gaddafi.  Those right wing thugs should learn the history first and should not try to recreate the past events of bloodsheds.

 ‘Eche’ Sharmila is just a normal human being. She is not like even Gandhi, who spoke different languages at different people and different places. She hates bloodsheds; she hates differences between man and man. That’s why she has been fighting against the blooded AFSPA. Eche, we are with you.

  

Who will throw the stone first?

"Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone" – Is a story about a woman, who had been caught in the act of adultery and was brought to Jesus Christ by those people big people, at that time, as a test to see if the Messiah was a liberal in matters of the Law of God. In response to their deceitful query, He didn't condemn the woman, not because he (Jesus) was a liberal, not because he condoned her sin, but because the men who brought the woman to him were hypocrites. He was the only person there that day who was free of sin, the only one who had the right to "cast the first stone." He didn't stone her (or her accusers), but instead forgave her and told her to "sin no more." Then he asked those people to throw the stone first, who never had committed sins or crimes or corruptions in their life. No one could do – why? Because all were sinners, corrupt.

Now, if you ask the same question to the Congress, BJP and others - who will be first among them to come out and says we never did commit crimes, sins and corruptions? All are hypocrites, liars, who always live by sucking blood from the common people. How can you say Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a clean man, when he is heading the most corrupt regime in the ‘Independent India’. It doesn’t matter how much ‘clean’ he is. The country is matured enough to see his ‘charming’ fainted face and claiming all the time - ‘I didn’t aware of it’, when corruption charges being piled up on his desk.

Why can’t the Prime Minister simply say – I am sorry, I did mistakes, forgive us. The country will follow you; the country will listen to you. We all know he is not the lone person, but if he continues to behave like a ‘Godfather’ he will be loser at the end of day.

I know I am not a fan of Anna Hazare, neither to the Congress nor to anyone for that matter. But my simple argument is - why both the Congress and Government are feeling so much allergic with Anna when he simply demanded for a strong Jan Lokpal Bill to eradicate corruption from the soil of the country. He has every right as a citizen of a democratic country to demand from the government what he wants to know. Even Mahatma Gandhi committed crimes in life, but he openly accepted his mistakes and renounced such activities.   

Now, tell me who is going to throw the stone first  to Anna. 

The Clean vs the Unclean

The key issue is, who is right and who is wrong – not who will win or lose. If a popular uprising could unseat Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, once thought to be invincible, why can’t the Indian people overthrow the most corrupt government the country has ever had? You might argue that while Egypt was a dictatorship, ours is a democracy. But remember, it is a democracy in which fully one-third of the MPs have criminal records; it is one in which Rabri Yadav could rule Bihar for years by proxy. True, several high-profile public figures, and politicians like A Raja, Kanimozhi and Suresh Kalmadi have been put behind bars. But the question is - why did it take so long to nail them for their misdeeds?

The so-called people’s “representatives” are cheating the very constituencies that elected them and amassing crores of rupees that rightfully belong to the public. The unease in the political parties over Anna Hazare’s insistence that the Lokpal be given teeth came to the fore during the all-party meet that was called to discuss its contents. When it came to its formal drafting, all parties insisted that it must be done “within the framework of the Constitution”. This, quite clearly, is just an alibi, a façade to conceal their impatience with a transparent polity. Their doublespeak too is on record – because just days before they had assured Hazare that they were with him in demanding a strong Lokpal.

Yet another noteworthy question is - why did the personally clean Dr Manmohan Singh keep ignoring the advice of senior ministers like the late Sunil Dutt and Mani Shakar Iyer who sent him documents that established Kalmadi’s dubious dealings during and before the Commonwealth Games. Why, for instance, is Dayanidhi Maran still walking free? What stops this clean prime minister from accepting moral responsibility for it all and stepping down?

If you want to know the real situation in the country ask the man on the street, the honest tax payer, who almost right since Independence has been looted by so-called popular representatives. You don’t have to be a constitutional expert to know what is wrong with the country. All you need to do is hear the people who have been defrauded day after day with no recourse to any kind of justice.

What is Anna Hazare getting from all this? He doesn’t want publicity. That much should be clear from all his public statements and his body language. It is in complete contrast with that of people like the smooth-talking Kapil Sibal who smugly justified boycotting the Hazare team because, to use his words, these “unelected civil society members are running a parallel government”. The fact, on the contrary, is that those who want the sanitized Lokpal are scared that someday they might get nailed themselves.

The price of a person

It would sound a little bit awkward, but for those who have gone through such a situation, would say, well this is just a life what you can do.

In an astonishing revelation which was recently published in a newspaper based outside India, it asked what is the price of an Afghan. How would you define or measure the value of a person – by beauty, by height, jobs, race, caste, nationality? The answer is as simple as you think, i.e. it could be

anything depending what you decide better. Yes, it could also be true that if Mr Shahrukh Khan is arrested or detained again in a London airport, it would make headlines across India, if not in United Kingdom, than someone like me!

Now, if these are the deciding factors, what about Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gurjarat, who was not given visa to participate in a Gujarat Summit in United States few years ago? Why there is a law, a constitution which says everyone is equal in the eye of the law?

The answer is all are not equal in the eye of law.

However, if you agree with the theory of natural law, no one can deny to the fact that all human life is of infinite value. If you put one human life on one side of a scale, and the rest of the world on the other side, the scale is balanced equally.

Most of us would say that Jai Kishan who is a rickshaw- wallah in Chandni Chawk, Delhi, is worth the same as Shahrukh Khan.

Isn't that what all believe?

Now, look at this. The Ministry of Defence, the Government of United Kingdom, has been paying compensation to Afghans for accidentally killing their children, their brothers and sisters, or their parents, during the present low-level war in Afghanistan. Thanks to a freedom of information request

the newspaper further mentioned how much the MoD has paid families when a member has been killed.

Here are some examples: a daughter hit by shrapnel from air-strike and later died of injuries, $1,000; mother killed during bombing, $5,000; two brothers and two sons killed by hellfire missile strike, $32,000. The variation in the  figures is not explained, but in no case was more than $8,000 (about £5,000), paid for the loss of a single life.

Again, look at the value of a British life. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), UK, assesses drugs and other medical treatments for cost-effectiveness and recommends whether they should be supplied on the National Health Service (NHS). The key factual question is

how much the treatment costs for each quality-adjusted life year, or QALY, gained. A QALY is one year of life of good quality, or its equivalent, which might be a longer period of life of lower quality. The Nice then tells you that while decisions are made on a case by case basis, "generally … if a

treatment costs more than £20,000-30,000 per QALY, then it would not be considered cost effective".

Remember, that sum is per QALY, not per life saved. So if one has to take the bottom line of this range, Nice recommends that the NHS pay up to four times as much to extend the life of a British citizen by just one year, as the MoD is prepared to pay in compensation for killing a child or young person. That young person could – even allowing for Afghanistan's dismal life expectancy – expect to live another 40 reasonably good-quality years. That suggests an answer to the question with which I started in the beginning: it takes about 4 x 40, or 160 Afghan lives, to be worth the same as one British life!

According to international price comparisons that would not be the right answer, because £5,000 will be much figure in Afghanistan than it would be in Britain – perhaps four or five times as much. We can say five times. Even with that adjustment, it is, now, going to take 32 Afghan lives to be worth the same as one British life.

Here, there is nothing unique about the UK in this respect. The paper has further reported that the US generally pays no more than $2,500 in compensation for the loss of an Afghan life. In contrast, after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States Government had set up a ‘Victim Compensation Fund’. The average payment it made to families of victims was $1.8m! Adjusting for purchasing power at a 5:1 ratio suggest that the US regards the life of an American as equivalent to the lives of 144 Afghans.

Look at the suggestion, what would happen if the Nato or Western forces really took seriously the idea of the equal value of all human life? They would then have to compensate Afghans for the civilian deaths and injuries they are causing at the same level as they would compensate their own citizens. That would serve three important purposes. First, it would demonstrate to the Afghans that the Nato forces truly respect them as equals. Second, the troops themselves might start to see Afghans as more like them, and have a new respect for the people they are trying to aid. Third, a dramatic increase in the costs of endangering the lives and limbs of civilians might foster a new restraint, because no military force wants to drain its own resources. The result would then be that fewer civilians would be killed – surely a very good thing, both for the civilians themselves, and for winning over the support of Afghans.

If it is the case, would our government convene a meeting to fix a new price for a person, when he got killed either by plane crash or train accident or killed by Naxalites or security forces, so that we can say proudly all are equal in the eyes of law, even if someone can’t become a Shahrukh Khan or Narendra Modi.

Why Dr Binayak Sen

Well, one may not agree with what China does to its pro-democracy dissident Liu Xiaobo. But if we look at the differences between the Nobel peace laureate and Dr Binayak Sen, who was recently sentenced to life imprisonment on the charge of sedition by a trial court in Chhattisgarh has thrown up some uneasy question about the nature of the Indian state.

 Also one may argue what Dr Sen’s wife had asserted in an interview to a TV channel that the conviction of her husband was the Indian state and not an independent judiciary in action but one is certain there is a farce difference in a seemingly open society and freedom of expression that the country has advocated around the world. 

In an era where ‘personal integrity’ overrules the scam in which people in positions of power are known to have siphoned off public money to the tune of Rs 1,70,000 crores, persons like Dr Sen who have no power or position to defend themselves have to face life-term. The reason given is he was acting as a courier for a Maoist leader lodged in jail, and thus was “conspiring to wage war against the state”, attracting punitive action under Sections 120(B) and 124(A) of the Indian Penal Code, Sections 8(1), (2), (3), and (5) of the draconian Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, and Section 39 (2) of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (as amended in 2004).

But even if it is true that he did carry these documents, the legal question being raised is, does this amount to sedition. Indeed, the sedition debate has been raging ever since Arundhati Roy and others declared publicly on stage during a conference on Kashmir in New Delhi, that Azadi was Kashmir’s right. The consensus has been, unless a statement amounts to direct incitement of violence, anything anybody says or does cannot amount to sedition. So, even in this hypothetical scenario, Dr Sen may have been a friend of the Maoists or maybe did carry Maoist literature with him (both of the charges are denied) but this cannot amount to sedition under Indian law.

We do agree that the sudden upswing of the Maoist violence in recent years has indeed been a major cause of concern for the country. Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had gone on record saying the Maoist menace is the most serious challenge to the internal security of the Indian nation in modern times. This rebellion, unlike those in the peripheral regions of the Northeast and Kashmir, is like a dagger pointed at the heart of India.

The fact is, even as Dr Sen is so harshly convicted for charges that are at best flimsy, there are many who are accused in some of the biggest scams in recent times. The CWG scam and the 2G allocation scam to name just two cases would fall in this category. Yet, people guilty of crimes against the nation of this magnitude are still not made to face the kind of persecution a well respected civil rights worker was made to go through. In all likelihood, in the end all the accused in these scams will go scot free, or at best end up with penalties that cannot remotely compare with Dr Sen’s.

Now, if it is the case, why couldn’t a single FIR lodged against Arundhati Roy and others who openly supported Azadi of Kashmir. Why the Government kept silence while the tribes belonging to the ‘upper class’ struck at the very sovereignty of the nation.

As Rajinder Puri rightly pointed out, more than 22 Nobel laureates (nine Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine, nine in Chemistry, two each in Physics and Economics, and now Indian Nobel Laureate Dr Amartya Sen) pleaded with Indian authorities to release Sen. If the higher courts do not overturn the recent judgment administering a life sentence on Sen, it is entirely possible that in 2011 Binayak Sen might be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to succeed the current recipient, Chinese jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, as he was also supported by Nobel laureates including Dalai Lama. Thereby India would be honoured with one more Nobel Prize. China pressured other countries to boycott the Nobel Prize distribution ceremony. Beijing refused to attend the ceremony. If Sen is awarded the Nobel Prize it is possible that India may proudly attend the ceremony for having won the honour. Most certainly India would never pressure other countries to boycott the ceremony. Unlike China we do not bully other countries. Like China we bully our own people. 

Surprisingly, in October this year, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and 15 others Nobel Laureates wrote a letter to the leaders of the G20 group of nations, asking them to help in seeking the release of the Chinese dissident. But it is unlikely that Prime Minister would write a letter to the G20 nations seeking help to release his own fellow or shall we wait a letter written by Hu Jintao for his fellow comrade – Dr Binayak Sen.

Body of Lies

It sounds like David Ignatius’s 2008 blockbuster Hollywood film – Body of Lies. Yet, it’s not so as complicated as it should be in the film. Now, it is true that the ‘self-appointed front-runner’ for a permanent UNSC seat is playing a hypocritical double-standard when it comes to human rights and its outlook towards the other nations.

RK Sanayaima, chairman, UNLF

Permanent membership

Honestly, his intention was not cleared, yet what I knew is his interest of the relentless debates round the corner – what if India becomes a permanent member in the United Nation Security Council or what if not or otherwise what are the rewards of being into that club. The questions my childhood friend Beelu asked when he just stepped into the room from the airport might be simple assertion out of his mind, but what it underlined is the unyielding conversation so far by many intelligentsias’, public or to the higher up authorities.

Well, the argument is, obviously, too far and big. For that matter, there will be always a supporter and against or merits and vise-versa. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that I am a supporter or opposed to the idea. However, the simple submissions or rather figment of imaginations that came cross in my mind when Beelu placed his question were – is there anybody on earth who is permanent and when India cannot even secure its own people in Delhi, how could it secure the world.

Take for an instance – Delhi Commonwealth Games, 2010. At a time when the entire folks of the country, especially Delhiites, should unite and cheer the athletes, who came from across the world, the stadia are emptied – because of the psyched of the ‘imminent terrorist threats’ during the Games. No account in the history texts of India ever occurred that killed 76 jawans in just one go, that too not by any external force. The country had been fighting wars with Pakistan, China, but never ever happened with such a war-like scenario. Does anybody damn cared about it.

Coming to the point. There are two reasons with which India wants a permanent membership in the UN Security Council. First, the present structure of the United Nation General Assembly or Security Council is irrelevant in the present ages. Also it fails to exercise its ‘primary responsibility’ for maintaining peace and harmony in the increasing conflicts of the world. Second, as an emerging economic power, and also being the largest democratic country and second most populous nation, it’s the time to be recognised or atleast heard at the regional level if not as a whole what it deserves to.  Third, but not to be mentioned is the ‘veto power’, that India has been eyeing for.

The given propositions are as good as bad from any sight of the angle. Yes, let’s assume all is right as of now. But here I would like to borrow one simple line what my junior Gunamani had pointed out that when India becomes fully a economic superpower, say in 2050, will the other nations remain what they are today. That’s merely impossible. The another point here is there are three other countries – Brazil, Germany and Japan, which are superpower on their own right.  Although, India and Brazil are two of the largest contributors of troops to UN-mandated peace-keeping mission, Japan and Germany are the UN's second and third largest funders respectively. If the status of a superpower is determined by money, where lies India’s position is still remained a questionable subject.

 According to the International Food Policy Research Institute’s annual “Global Hunger Index” for 2010, India has more hunger than Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world. India is home to 42 per cent of the underweight children under the age of five. With an empty stomach, you can’t fight with.