Parallel Lines of Dissent
We Are All Binayak Sen—And We Are All Bradley Manning
By Priti Gulati Cox
25 August, 2011
Countercurrents.org
We have a situation in which the government is acting as a guarantor to the process of expropriation of access of common property resources across the country and handing over those resources to private interests. This is leading to inequity .
– Dr Binayak Sen
Indian authorities are fighting against what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh maintains is “the biggest internal security challenge facing our country.”
This “challenge” has the Indian state on one side and Adivasis-turned-revolutionaries fighting for their land and water on the other. In the middle is a stew of capitalism, starvation, usurpation, “development”, displacement, police brutality, rapes, smoldering villages, indiscriminate killings , draconian internal security laws, counterinsurgency operations, censored reporting, thieves' notes called memoranda of understanding backed up by corporate patronage , and the eventual destruction of the land and its inhabitants.
There is irony in the fact that Chhattisgarh is one of the richest states in India in terms of precious mineral resources and also home to a large share of India 's Adivasis , who are among the country's poorest citizens. For more than three decades, they have benefited from the work of Dr. Binayak Sen, the pediatrician and civil liberties activist who has gained notoriety by dedicating his life to providing medical service to the people of the state, and by serving as the national vice president of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), which has sent out fact-finding teams to affected areas and revealed gross human rights violations.
Dr. Sen blew the whistle on the state governments' arming of the vigilante movement known as Salwa Judum. As a result, he was arrested in May 2007 for having links with Maoist rebels. He is currently free on bail but his trial in Chhattisgarh continues.
“If I am free today it is also because of the national and International campaign to free me,” he said recently in an interview. Since his release he has continued speaking out against state policies on many occasions. When asked about physical and mental abuse of prisoners, Sen draws attention back to the unjust laws that landed them behind bars in the first place.
Which raises a question: What is to become of those throngs of innocent people languishing in India 's prisons, or of displaced indigenous communities? They have no access to Supreme Courts, no websites campaigning for their support and release, no semblance of redress. Theirs is a collective suffering – a kind of collateral damage. Sen goes so far as to characterize the situation as genocide . In his view, because “the Indian propertied classes do not have another country in which they can go and exploit, they are turning their gaze inward.” For Dr Binayak Sen and all other voices of dissent, the fight for collateral justice has only just begun.
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Sometimes I wish it were all black and white like the media and politicians present it – him, he's the bad guy, oh and he, he's the good guy – it's all shades of blurry grey.
– online conversation attributed to Bradley Manning
Alleged to have given Wikileaks the now-infamous video revealing “ collateral murder ” in Iraq along with a trove of documents detailing war crimes by American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan , Private First Class Bradley Manning was arrested in Iraq in May 2010 and held for months in solitary confinement on the US Marine base in Quantico , Virginia . He was held in “ maximum custody ,” kept naked for long periods, and placed under suicide watch despite psychiatrists' conclusions that he was not a threat to himself. At the end of April this year, he was transferred to the federal prison in Fort Leavenworth , Kansas . Manning may be under less harsh conditions in Fort Leavenworth , but he still faces the prospect of life in prison because he put his conscience and his loyalty to America ahead of the Pentagon's interests.
A couple of miles from the Secunderabad, India , neighborhood in which I grew up there is an army base whose official motto is spelled out on an arch over the entrance: Be Fikr Badhe Chalo (“Bash on Regardless”). That could also serve well as a motto for America 's so-called War on Terror. That “war” has proved a colossal failure, its only accomplishment having been the feeding of its own ideology, while at the same time it has fed the ideologies of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other adversaries. As Wikileaks has revealed, 80 percent of the dead in Iraq are civilians . Meanwhile in Afghanistan , coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians, and the Taliban are having a field day. In both countries, the occupation bashes on regardless—regardless of the results, regardless of who is the US president, and regardless of who is in nominal control of the occupied country.
In order to continue fighting its unwinnable wars, the US military created a bubble of “classified” or “secret” cover ups, and “ fragmentary orders (FRAGO)”. Wikileaks burst this bubble and exposed the horrors of war and occupation for everyone to see. At the same time that the Abu Ghraib scandal and the execution of Saddam Hussain were making headlines everywhere, the use of torture and violence was multiplying in the prisons, bridges, homes, streets, farms, check points, and mosques of Iraq .
Bradley Manning means different things to different people in America . For some he's a traitor, for others he's a hero. But he is without question America 's son. The question is which voices will speak louder here in America ? Is it going to be the forces that breathe fear and lies into its body politic, or will it be the forces of dissent? Either way, Manning will serve as an example.
Binayak Sen's release was a small victory for democracy in India . But what remains to be seen is if the United States , which claims to be the world's second-largest democracy, can manage even that bit of justice in the case of Bradley Manning.
We continue to wait for Manning's pre-trial hearing date to be announced.
Priti Gulati Cox ( www.vanishingindia.com ) is an artist. She lives in Salina , Kansas . Write her at [email protected] . Read an extended version of the article here .
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