Right To life: India Must Acknowledge That Even Killers Have It
By N. Jayaram
11 June, 2012
Countercurrents.org
Between the sentencing of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor by the Special Court for Sierra Leone to 50 years in jail on 30 May and the handing of a life term to Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak by a Cairo court on 2 June, came the internationally unimportant news that upper caste militia leader Brahmeshwar Singh was killed by unidentified gunmen in Bihar.
But what happened in India is vitally important for those who wish to see that the country often touted as the world’s largest democracy stems lawlessness in large swathes of its territory.
Consider these facts: Liberia has a population of about 3.8 million and Sierra Leone, where Taylor committed atrocities, has 5.5 million, while Egypt counts nearly 90 million. Together they fall short of Bihar’s 104 million.
Taylor was convicted by the court jointly set up by Sierra Leone’s government and the United Nations of “acts of terrorism, murder, rape, sexual slavery, outrages upon personal dignity, cruel treatment, other inhumane acts, conscripting or enlisting of child soldiers, enslavement and pillage”. It is safe to say that Taylor has the blood of thousands on his hands. Mubarak was found guilty by a Cairo administrative court of enabling the massacre of those who rose up against his rule in 2011.
Brahmeshwar Singh’s landlord militia is accused of having killed about 200 lower caste and Dalit people from the mid-1990s onwards. In some of the worst atrocities, women and infants were specifically targeted. Singh was arrested in 2002 but released on bail in 2011. He and co-accused were acquitted of the charges of carrying out massacres. Whether he was killed by lower caste rivals, Maoists or someone else is now the stuff of speculation..
Two elements in this episode are disheartening. The acquittal of a man widely believed to have raised a militia targeting the lower castes was shocking. This is not an isolated case. In a country where scores of members of the national parliament and state legislatures have been implicated in murders and other crimes, the failure of the legal process is glaring.
But the other element is the acceptance among some Indian intellectuals that killings such as that of Brahmeshwar Singh are therefore inevitable. Some have gone so far as to welcome it, in the mistaken interpretation that this ensures justice for the oppressed lower castes. While ruing the failure of the rule of law, they thus tacitly support practices which further undermine an already shaky law and order situation, of which the oppressed classes they champion will continue to be major victims.
It is not that the criminal justice system in India has completely collapsed. Corrections are possible and have been effected. After New Delhi model Jessica Lall was shot dead in front of dozens of people at a late night party in 1999, the main accused Manu Sharma, son of an affluent politician, manipulated the evidence and witnesses to get acquitted in 2006. This led to such intense pressure from the victim’s family and the urban middle class that eventually the Delhi High Court reviewed the case and slapped a life term on Sharma. In 2009, he managed to get out on parole for weeks but media spotlight led to his return to jail.
While the case does no credit to the criminal justice system, it does show that sometimes the well-connected and the powerful can indeed be brought to justice given sufficient civil society interest. A similar campaign targeting the acquittal of Brahmeshwar Singh ought to have been mounted but Bihar has for decades been dismissed as an underachieving basket case and has suffered neglect. The squeaky wheel, as the cliché goes, has to get the oil. In this case, promotion of the rule of law has to be undertaken even in the toughest terrains for it to really take root
In other parts of India too some high profile politicians who have presided over massacres and pogroms have gotten off scot free. Narendra Modi of Gujarat, population 60 million, is even touted as a future prime minister, although more than 2,000 Muslim men, women and children were killed by Hindu mobs there in 2002, with the police having been told to look the other way. Some Congress Party leaders, who oversaw the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 in New Delhi, have never been brought to book.
If those who feel satisfied over Brahmeshwar Singh’s killing had channelled more energy towards ensuring he was convicted and stayed in jail, it would have better served society’s purpose: apparently his militia had dwindled while he was away, whereas his killing unleashed a frenzy of rioting. A consistent attitude towards all extrajudicial killings, by state and non-state actors, by upper caste or lower caste militia and Maoists or Naxalites, is needed for the menace to end and the rule of law to prosper.
Keeping alive killers, or the perpetrator of other heinous crimes, is a concept and a practice India has to get acquainted with the way many other countries have. Turkey, for instance, has abolished the death penalty and has spared the life of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, who waged an armed conflict against government forces. Ocalan is said to favour peaceful negotiations now.
India has not signed the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The courts in the country of 1.2 billion people are overburdened. Moreover they function at a glacial pace. If special courts can be set up to deal with massive human rights violations in countries such as the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, then surely India, with states the size of many countries put together ought also to consider setting up some overarching tribunals to deal with such cases.
N. Jayaram is a journalist now based in Bangalore after more than 23 years in East Asia (mainly Hong Kong and Beijing) and 11 years in New Delhi. He was with the Press Trust of India news agency for 15 years and Agence France-Presse for 11 years and is currently engaged in editing and translating for NGOs and academic institutions. He writes a blog: http://walkerjay.wordpress.com/
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