PEACE and human rights are both important entities by themselves. However, one is likely to face a dilemma if one seeks to know which of these is more basic than the other and, therefore, more desirable. It is common for Constitutions to try and attempt a gradation of human rights, giving preference to civil and political rights over socio-economic rights. But this gradation cannot be stretched to suggest that the concept of human rights is secondary to peace. As a scholar of international law aptly put it, if human rights are part of a meaningful and desirable peace, then peace without human rights is less valuable or not peace at all. Thus, peace is not an essential precondition for the guarantee of human rights.
The very idea of human rights means that every human being is by nature endowed with a certain set of inherent rights, which are not granted by the state and cannot be removed by it. But there has been no consensus on what these inherent rights are, with the result that scholars tend to look at the development of human rights as a dynamic and endless process. Even as existing rights get enriched, new rights are added to the list.
Human Rights and Peace: Ideas, Laws, Institutions and Movements, edited by Ujjwal Kumar Singh, is the fourth book in a series on South Asian Peace Studies. The first three volumes, brought out in the previous years, focussed on related themes. The first volume, Peace Studies, edited by Ranabir Samaddar, carried essays analysing actual conflict situations in India in its relationship with its neighbours. The second volume, Peace Processes and Peace Accords, edited by Samir Kumar Das, included essays dealing with attempts to find peace in northeastern India, Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. India-Pakistan relations and the Indo-Nepal water conflict were other subjects dealt with in this book. The third volume, Women in Peace Studies, edited by Paula Banerjee, studied various womens movements and struggles against discrimination.
In the fourth volume, the authors look at the various dimensions of encountering undemocratic laws, and the dynamics of rights-based movements and institutions. Asking the question whether peace and human rights are mere aspirations, the authors try to explain why the South Asian region is host to a large number of prolonged armed conflicts. While the complex history of these conflicts be it in Sri Lanka or in Nepal or in Kashmir has received sufficient academic treatment, the measures that the state employs to control, contain and regulate the conflicts remain largely unexplored. The chapters under the section on encountering undemocratic laws traverse this unexplored domain of conflict resolution in different contexts.
The chapter War in the heart of India is excerpted from a report by the Independent Citizens Initiative, and provides an overview of Salwa Judum, the so-called peace initiative in Chhattisgarh, and the violence caused by it in the already militarised region. A few members of this initiative have challenged the states support to Salwa Judum in the Supreme Court through a writ petition. The Supreme Court Bench, which is considering a report submitted by a team deputed by the National Human Rights Commission, has voiced concern about the arming of non-state actors by the state to combat naxalism in the region.
As the book reveals, the states strategy to use one section of citizens against another is manifest in other regions as well, in the form of village defence committees, including Jharkhand, Assam (Surrendered United Liberation Front of Assam, or SULFA militants), the Kashmir Valley (Ikwanis) and Andhra Pradesh (Tigers/Cobras, or surrendered Maoist groups working under police patronage). All these organisations, says Bikram Jeet Batra, in his introduction to this section, form part of a clear strategy by the state to ensure impunity by use of such unaccountable and non-uniformed forces. The implication and long-term impact of arming one community against another, ostensibly for restoring peace, is more violence one kind of violence spawning another.
Paula Banerjees chapter, Gendered face of extraordinary powers in North-East India, highlights the complex interplay of gender, community and nationality while examining Manipurs history of struggle for self-determination and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) as a key component of the Indian states response to peoples struggles. She points out that increasing violence in Manipur society has led to facile generalisations about Manipuri women being in cahoots with the underground movement. The members of the armed forces in Manipur justify repression of women on these grounds, she says.
Paula Banerjees account of the history of Manipuri women is illuminating. She traces the first anti-British movement with women in leadership roles to 1904. This was a non-violent agitation directed against British oppression. Manipuri women, with a history of organising themselves, found it easy to come together for agitations against the draconian laws in the State, and thus was born the Meira Paibis (torch-bearers) movement. Meira Paibis has become an institution in its own right today, and it spearheaded the protest against the AFSPA in Manipur. Paula Banerjee has tried to portray how extraordinary Acts lead to extraordinary violence and why violence against a community leads to violence against the women of that community. Both the underground and the state mark each other as terrorists, and the women are caught between the two, she says.
Her explanation for this phenomenon is indeed disturbing. Women are considered as markers of a community; their reproductive role makes them the symbol for the continuation of a community and so if a community is marked as terrorist, then women of that community are also considered terrorist, she says.
Pamela Philiposes brief essay on the deportation of alleged illegal Bangladeshi migrants from India and the report of the Peoples Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) on the lynching of Dalits at Dulina, Haryana, in 2002 highlights the social exclusion of the victims of recurring violence. In her essay, Nowhere policy for a nowhere people, she underlines the absurdity of the Indian governments policy of pushing out virtually every Bengali-speaking Muslim from Indian cities as also that of the Bangladesh governments denial of any such migration into Indian territory. The public discourse on Bangladeshis has been characterised by abysmal ignorance, crass prejudice and the most cynical politics aimed at engineering mass anxiety over an apparent flood of humanity threatening our existence, she says.
In the violence at Dulina, five Dalit men were killed by a mob that believed that they were Muslims who had slaughtered a cow. The PUDR report shows that the victims right to practise their occupation as leather traders and skinners of cattle was directly under attack. Though the police are among the guilty, they continue to investigate the case. In the aftermath of the lynching of the Dalits, they failed to collect evidence, delayed the arrests of the culprits, and along with the bureaucracy, merely made token gestures to counter the backlash by dominant castes. The report warns that the systematic utilisation of the cow-protection agenda to mount anti-Dalit and anti-Muslim attacks and the total complicity of state agencies with dominant groups, traditional caste panchayats and political parties in this have ominous implications for the future.
The chapters on insurgency and human rights in Punjab and internally displaced people in Sri Lanka under the third section on Rights, Movements and Institutions are especially useful for the insights they offer.
Sally Engle Merry, the author of Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law Into Local Justice, the second book under review, is a professor at the Department of Anthropology and at the Institute for Law and Society, New York University. The author is eminently qualified to write this book as she has been a close observer of the United Nations diplomatic negotiations that led to the formulation of important policy documents on womens rights as well as the process of monitoring compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). She has also been a witness to the work of grass-roots feminist organisations in several countries, including India, Fiji and Hong Kong (China), and the American state of Hawaii.
Sally Engle Merry examines the deep roots that gender violence has in cultural and religious belief systems and shows how the perpetrators of violence use them as a means to resist change. The book documents how international human rights language is transformed by feminist groups into the local idiom and successfully used to challenge social hierarchies and entrenched injustice.
The chief merit of her book is that it identifies the conundrums facing the practice of human rights through empirical studies. Some of these are relevant to India. Thus, she finds that because human rights law sets universal standards through a legal framework, it is inhibited from tailoring these standards to the particular political and social situations of the countries that have ratified conventions. She points to the dilemma of persuading India to reform its family laws and explains that Indias overall commitment to secularism and universalism defines the system of separate personal laws as inhibiting womens rights and freedoms, even though this insistence on a secular reform risks increasing communal tensions.
The authors conclusion, tinged with optimism, will be considered relevant in many countries including India. As women achieve more autonomy over their bodies and lives, they may unleash new demands for change. Human rights, she writes, is a powerful language in contemporary political discourse, one that evokes notions of law and legality and confers membership in the international community of civilised nations; like the language of law itself, it serves those in power but is always in danger of escaping its bounds and working in a genuinely emancipatory way.
COMMents
COMMents
SHARE