The following article wrote by Jaskaran Kaur is a reminder to minorities who are suffering from the security regime of Indian Officials. Many Sikhs moved to Canada for better living, where they enjoy equal citizenship. If you are from a minority community, think about migrating to elsewhere.
Kaur is co-founder and executive director of ENSAAF , a nonprofit organization fighting impunity in India.
WHEN INDIAN Prime Minister Manmohan Singh meets with President Bush in Washington this week on his first official visit, and the first of an Indian head of state since 9/11, he will be reaffirming a strategic partnership. Prime Minister Singh will address a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, and terrorism is high on the agenda. An item not likely on the agenda is India's systematic abuse of human rights in the name of counter-terrorism. Despite receiving praise as the world's largest democracy, India's human rights record falls dismally behind countries that have only recently shed their legacy of dictatorships. From 1984-95, Indian security forces tortured, ''disappeared," killed, and illegally cremated more than 10,000 Punjabi Sikhs in counter-insurgency operations. Many perpetrators of these abuses are now championed as counter-terrorism experts. Most prominent among them is former Punjab director general of police and campaign architect K.P.S. Gill, whose policies, according to Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights, ''appeared to justify any and all means, including torture and murder." Hailed as a super cop, Gill now heads an Indian counter-terrorism institute.
Four years ago, I criss-crossed Punjab and documented the impact of impunity for abuses committed by security forces. I sat on jute cots in poor farming houses talking with survivors struggling to rebuild their lives and sipped tea in the guarded mansions of judges. A senior high court judge, who addressed me as a naïve daughter, pointedly told me that fundamental rights did not exist during an insurgency.
One afternoon, I spoke with Jaswinder Singh. He was in his 20s. In 1992, Punjab police officers repeatedly subjected Jaswinder to electric shocks, stretched his legs apart at the waist until his thigh muscles ruptured, and suspended him upside down from the ceiling, while beating him with rods. Subsequently, the police ''disappeared" his brother, father, and grandfather. Jaswinder unsuccessfully pursued his family's disappearance to the Supreme Court. But he had no time for grief; the loss of his family's breadwinners meant he had to support the survivors, despite continued police harassment.
A flickering hope of justice remains for survivors of the counter-insurgency abuses. Since December 1996, the Committee for Information and Initiative in Punjab has struggled before the Indian National Human Rights Commission in a landmark lawsuit addressing police abductions that led to mass cremations, including those of Jaswinder's family. The commission, acting as a body of the Indian Supreme Court, has the authority to remedy violations of fundamental rights in this historic case of mass crimes. Its decisions will serve as precedent for victims of state-sponsored abuses throughout India. The commission has received over 3,500 claims from Amritsar alone, one of 17 districts in Punjab.
During the past eight years, however, the commission has not heard testimony from a single survivor. Guatemala's Historical Clarification Commission registered 42,275 victims in 18 months. El Salvador's Commission on the Truth collected information on 22,000 victims in eight months. The Indian Commission, however, has kept survivors running in circles, limiting its inquiry to one of 17 districts in Punjab.
A few weeks ago, the commission drastically narrowed its mandate, stating its plan to resolve the case by determining only whether police had properly cremated victims -- not whether the police had wrongfully killed them in the first place. With this move, the commission rejected the victims' right to life and endorsed the Indian government's position that life is expendable during times of insurgency.
India's counter-terrorism practices have left a legacy of broken families, rampant police abuse, and a judicial system unwilling to enforce fundamental rights. As India ignores its past, it continues to employ the same Draconian measures in places such as Kashmir. While Prime Minister Singh extols India as a leading democracy, the international community must weigh the devastation and insecurity wrought by a national security policy based on systematic human rights abuses and impunity.
In 1997, Ajaib Singh committed suicide after the Punjab police tortured and disappeared his son and justice failed him. His suicide note read: ''Self-annihilation is the only way out of a tyranny that leaves no chance for justice." If India fails to address its own mass atrocities, this should raise serious questions about its role as a partner in the ''war on terror."
July 17, 2005, Boston Globe (www.boston.com)
Showing posts with label Minorities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Minorities. Show all posts
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Thursday, July 6, 2006
Persecution of Minorities in India , a Letter from a Christian Migrant
Let me introduce myself, I am an Indian living in Canada. I immigrated here 2 years ago to get married to my girlfriend who moved here 8 years ago.
For 25 years, I lived in India, a democratic multi-religious nation. Although there is no state religion, Hindus make up the largest population group numbering over 80.5% of the total population followed by the Muslim 13.4%, Christian 2.3%, Sikh 1.9%, other 1.8%, unspecified 0.1% (Jews, Zorastrians etc). As a child growing up in Mumbai (Bombay), I had friends from different religions and was unaware of any form of religious persecution. We did study about the British policy of 'Divide and Rule' which led to partition and the formation of the countries of India and Pakistan (Islamic nation run on Islamic laws), but we were taught that as a nation we had learnt not to repeat mistakes from the past.
The first persecution that I can recall, during my life time, was the Babri Masjid issue (December 6 1992); where radical Hindus led by certain politicians tore down the Babri Masjid. Babri Masjid was a mosque built on the site where some hindus believe Ram (Hindu Deity) was born. What followed were the most gruesome riots across the whole country. I was 13 at the time and Bombay was in the grip of a religious violence with Hindus killing Muslims and vice versa. At the time there was a city wide self imposed curfew. Self imposed only by fear that if you stepped out of the house you would probably not come home alive. This went on for a while and the repercussions of that event can still be felt in India even today. From that day onwards, minority religious groups became very aware of their position in a Hinduized society and for the first time we felt the weight of being a minority and what it meant to be a religious minority.
The second experience with persecution was much closer to home as it affected the Christian community directly not in Mumbai, but in Gujarat. The history of this is complex but I shall try to summarize it.
India is a largely agrarian economy with three fifths of the population involved in agriculture. India also has a social system based on Hinduism called the Caste system which promotes untouchability. A small percentage though significant ( 14.9%) in Gujarat are tribals who do not fit into the Hindu caste system. Gujarat has some fertile land in the southern part of the state which is owned by rich landlords. To run this land, these landlords need a cheap supply of labour which they could exploit by paying less than minimum wages.
The Dalits (untouchables in the caste system) and tribals make up the perfect cheap work force as they do not have any rights (though they are granted all rights by the constitution). The reason they don't have rights is because politicians are in collusion with the rich land lords. To remain in power the politicians need the rich landlords for monetary support and the landlords use their power to coerce the dalits and tribals to vote for the politicians.
Christian missionaries run schools in tribal areas for the tribal and dalit population and over time, some dalits have begun to speak up against the oppression. Many of the tribal and dalit children no longer work in fields (child labour) but go to school. The missionaries also provided health care and other services for the tribals and dalits.
This is a thorn in the side of the landlords and the politicians, as now the educated tribals and dalits make their voices heard and could no longer be oppressed so easily. Hence the landlords and politicians raise the bogey of forced conversions saying that Christian missionaries forcibly convert tribals and dalits away from Hinduism (the first group are non-Hindus and the second group are treated as outcasts in Hinduism). A fringe group amongst the Hindus who also happen to support, and in turn get support from a major political party proceeded to conduct many attacks on Christians and Christian missionaries in Gujarat including the killings of priests, raping of nuns and destruction of Christian schools and institutions in 1998.
An example from the Human Rights News Website:
Jamuna Bhen, a thirty-year-old agricultural laborer in Dangs district, told Human Rights Watch, "The Hindus removed the ornamentation from our church on December 25 [1998]. They threatened us by saying that they will set the church house on fire. Then they started taking down the roof tiles…. There were one hundred to 200 people who came from other villages. They said, 'We will burn everything.' We begged them not to. We said, 'Don't do this,' and said we will become Hindu."
In January 1999, Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons were trapped in their car and burned alive in the state of Orissa, reportedly by Dara Singh, a local leader of the extremist group Bajrang Dal. On the eve of India's national parliamentary elections in September and October 1999, the situation for minorities in the state deteriorated significantly. In August 1999, Singh struck again, chopping off the arms of a Muslim trader before setting him on fire. One week later, Rev. Arul Doss was shot in the chest with an arrow and beaten to death by a group of unidentified assailants.
Muslims in India similarly face a lot of persecution as can be seen from the Babri Masjid issue and the Best Bakery Case in which 14 people were burnt alive during the 2002 riots. Following an attack on a train in Godhra, Gujarat, on 27 February 2002 in which 59 Hindus were killed, violence of unprecedented brutality targeting the Muslim community spread in the state and continued in the next three months, leaving more than 2000 people dead. The state government, administration and police took insufficient action to protect civilians and widespread reports at the time implicated police officers and members of Hindu nationalist groups, including the ruling BJP, in violence against Muslims.
Besides this, there have been various other acts to make the lives of religious minorities difficult in India. The Indian Constitution grants to all its citizens, the right to practice and follow any religion of choice and the freedom to change ones religion. Yet some states are trying to pass laws which will make religious conversions illegal, these laws are aimed especially at Christians to prevent religious conversions. These laws if passed will also violate the freedoms of Dalits and Tribals and any Indian who may want to convert to a religion of choice. The underlying aim of such legislation is to prevent dalits, tribals and other backward castes from converting to Islam or Christianity and thereby lifting the shackles of a caste based religion.
Besides these glaring forms of persecution, there have been other forms of persecution against Christians. Which are too numerous to go through but can be found at the All India Christian Web site (www.aiccindia.org) under the press releases and resources section.
To avoid this kind of religious persecution, despite constitutional protections, some Indians migrate to other countries like Canada and the USA. These people seek a better life for themselves and their families, both monetary as well as spiritually. However, in India, the persecution against Christians and religious minorities are visible and can be protested.
For 25 years, I lived in India, a democratic multi-religious nation. Although there is no state religion, Hindus make up the largest population group numbering over 80.5% of the total population followed by the Muslim 13.4%, Christian 2.3%, Sikh 1.9%, other 1.8%, unspecified 0.1% (Jews, Zorastrians etc). As a child growing up in Mumbai (Bombay), I had friends from different religions and was unaware of any form of religious persecution. We did study about the British policy of 'Divide and Rule' which led to partition and the formation of the countries of India and Pakistan (Islamic nation run on Islamic laws), but we were taught that as a nation we had learnt not to repeat mistakes from the past.
The first persecution that I can recall, during my life time, was the Babri Masjid issue (December 6 1992); where radical Hindus led by certain politicians tore down the Babri Masjid. Babri Masjid was a mosque built on the site where some hindus believe Ram (Hindu Deity) was born. What followed were the most gruesome riots across the whole country. I was 13 at the time and Bombay was in the grip of a religious violence with Hindus killing Muslims and vice versa. At the time there was a city wide self imposed curfew. Self imposed only by fear that if you stepped out of the house you would probably not come home alive. This went on for a while and the repercussions of that event can still be felt in India even today. From that day onwards, minority religious groups became very aware of their position in a Hinduized society and for the first time we felt the weight of being a minority and what it meant to be a religious minority.
The second experience with persecution was much closer to home as it affected the Christian community directly not in Mumbai, but in Gujarat. The history of this is complex but I shall try to summarize it.
India is a largely agrarian economy with three fifths of the population involved in agriculture. India also has a social system based on Hinduism called the Caste system which promotes untouchability. A small percentage though significant ( 14.9%) in Gujarat are tribals who do not fit into the Hindu caste system. Gujarat has some fertile land in the southern part of the state which is owned by rich landlords. To run this land, these landlords need a cheap supply of labour which they could exploit by paying less than minimum wages.
The Dalits (untouchables in the caste system) and tribals make up the perfect cheap work force as they do not have any rights (though they are granted all rights by the constitution). The reason they don't have rights is because politicians are in collusion with the rich land lords. To remain in power the politicians need the rich landlords for monetary support and the landlords use their power to coerce the dalits and tribals to vote for the politicians.
Christian missionaries run schools in tribal areas for the tribal and dalit population and over time, some dalits have begun to speak up against the oppression. Many of the tribal and dalit children no longer work in fields (child labour) but go to school. The missionaries also provided health care and other services for the tribals and dalits.
This is a thorn in the side of the landlords and the politicians, as now the educated tribals and dalits make their voices heard and could no longer be oppressed so easily. Hence the landlords and politicians raise the bogey of forced conversions saying that Christian missionaries forcibly convert tribals and dalits away from Hinduism (the first group are non-Hindus and the second group are treated as outcasts in Hinduism). A fringe group amongst the Hindus who also happen to support, and in turn get support from a major political party proceeded to conduct many attacks on Christians and Christian missionaries in Gujarat including the killings of priests, raping of nuns and destruction of Christian schools and institutions in 1998.
An example from the Human Rights News Website:
Jamuna Bhen, a thirty-year-old agricultural laborer in Dangs district, told Human Rights Watch, "The Hindus removed the ornamentation from our church on December 25 [1998]. They threatened us by saying that they will set the church house on fire. Then they started taking down the roof tiles…. There were one hundred to 200 people who came from other villages. They said, 'We will burn everything.' We begged them not to. We said, 'Don't do this,' and said we will become Hindu."
In January 1999, Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons were trapped in their car and burned alive in the state of Orissa, reportedly by Dara Singh, a local leader of the extremist group Bajrang Dal. On the eve of India's national parliamentary elections in September and October 1999, the situation for minorities in the state deteriorated significantly. In August 1999, Singh struck again, chopping off the arms of a Muslim trader before setting him on fire. One week later, Rev. Arul Doss was shot in the chest with an arrow and beaten to death by a group of unidentified assailants.
Muslims in India similarly face a lot of persecution as can be seen from the Babri Masjid issue and the Best Bakery Case in which 14 people were burnt alive during the 2002 riots. Following an attack on a train in Godhra, Gujarat, on 27 February 2002 in which 59 Hindus were killed, violence of unprecedented brutality targeting the Muslim community spread in the state and continued in the next three months, leaving more than 2000 people dead. The state government, administration and police took insufficient action to protect civilians and widespread reports at the time implicated police officers and members of Hindu nationalist groups, including the ruling BJP, in violence against Muslims.
Besides this, there have been various other acts to make the lives of religious minorities difficult in India. The Indian Constitution grants to all its citizens, the right to practice and follow any religion of choice and the freedom to change ones religion. Yet some states are trying to pass laws which will make religious conversions illegal, these laws are aimed especially at Christians to prevent religious conversions. These laws if passed will also violate the freedoms of Dalits and Tribals and any Indian who may want to convert to a religion of choice. The underlying aim of such legislation is to prevent dalits, tribals and other backward castes from converting to Islam or Christianity and thereby lifting the shackles of a caste based religion.
Besides these glaring forms of persecution, there have been other forms of persecution against Christians. Which are too numerous to go through but can be found at the All India Christian Web site (www.aiccindia.org) under the press releases and resources section.
To avoid this kind of religious persecution, despite constitutional protections, some Indians migrate to other countries like Canada and the USA. These people seek a better life for themselves and their families, both monetary as well as spiritually. However, in India, the persecution against Christians and religious minorities are visible and can be protested.
Friday, February 24, 2006
India's "supercops" in firing line over mob links
24 Feb 2006 Source: Reuters, By Krittivas Mukherjee
MUMBAI, India, Feb 24 (Reuters) - For eight years, Daya Nayak killed with impunity -- sometimes with his pistol but often with an AK-47 automatic rifle -- as he bumped off people suspected to be gangsters or involved in acts of terrorism in Mumbai.
These days, the policeman just kills time.
Once the poster boy of Mumbai's police force and eulogised by Bollywood filmmakers, Nayak helped to dramatically curb organised crime in India's financial capital, breaking the back of violent gangs and sending mobsters on the run.
But after years of tormenting crime dons, the past has returned to haunt him.
The tall, moustachioed Nayak, 34, has been arrested and ordered held until early March as anti-corruption officers probe allegations he had amassed wealth, including real estate worth millions of rupees, far beyond what his salary could pay for.
Nayak is not alone in his fall from grace. More than half a dozen officers of a crack force, formed over a decade ago, have been accused of corruption and links with the underworld.
Known in the Indian media as "encounter specialists" for shooting down criminals in raids, the men have either been dismissed or suspended until an investigation into their financial assets is completed.
Nayak's critics claim that as well as taking mob money, the so-called "supercops" have been routinely killing gangsters in stage-managed shootouts and in custody. Human rights workers have branded the deaths nothing more than extra-judicial executions.
"I've done nothing wrong. These charges are false," the sub-inspector, who says he killed over 80 criminals in shootouts, said recently after appearing in a Mumbai court.
In the late 1990s, Mumbai, then known as Bombay, faced a tide of mafia killings, abductions and extortion demands.
Poor migrants from villages and small towns were drafted into gangs, taking up the gun for cash, earning relatively small amounts but more than they could hope to make honestly.
The underworld was remote-controlled by bosses based in Dubai, Malaysia and Karachi who had fled India to avoid arrest, leaving behind associates to carry out their orders.
ROUGH JUSTICE
Mumbai's authorities hit back, giving a free hand to officers like Nayak who worked informers and wielded their guns to administer justice.
In a decade of violent confrontations, the officers busted hideouts and shot dead at least 350 suspected gangsters, drawing cheers from businessmen and the Bollywood set, prime mob targets.
Newspapers splashed photographs of the officers across their front pages, while film directors explored Nayak's climb from abject poverty.
Many people supported the "supercops" because snuffing out the bad guys, most felt, was better than putting them through a failing justice system where witnesses could be manipulated and cases drag on for years.
Human rights activists say police routinely killed criminals in cold blood after taking them to a lonely spot and telling them to run. When they did so, or even if they did not, they were shot, usually in the back.
"They kill them (criminals) somewhere and then take their bodies to hospital and put it down as a shootout death," P.A. Sebastian, a human rights activist, told Reuters.
Sometimes, rights activists allege, officers blaze away as they compete with each other for media headlines.
But police say they open fire only in self-defence.
"Does a policeman enjoy killing? Those killed are trying to get us. They aren't saints," said officer Pradeep Sharma, who police records say has shot dead 104 criminals.
Sharma is facing an inquiry in the disappearance of an accused in a 2002 bomb blast in Mumbai. Human rights activists say the man, Khwaja Yunus, was killed in custody while police say he simply escaped.
"Many of these encounters are fake and killings by police extrajudicial," said criminal lawyer Majeed Memon.
Sharma's boss says the controversial tactics have yielded results.
"It's for all to see that stern police activity has curbed crimes," Mumbai police commissioner A.N. Roy said.
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