When we raise demands as citizens, we need to be aware of the spin-offs of our demands. We need to be careful that our demands are reconciliable with human rights and that our strategies do not unwittingly reinforce a trampling of human rights. For that will come to haunt us another day.
Recently there were objections to the screening of the documentary film “India’s daughter” which is part of the BBC’s ongoing Storyville series. The objections were raised by rights activists, in this case, feminists, on the ground that the film reinforces certain gender stereotypes, generates hatred, and violates the rights of the accused to a fair trial and to protection from self incrimination because of what the accused is saying in the film. These objections were put in the same basket as the objections of conservative ruling party forces who were seeking a ban on the film on the ground of damage to India’s name.
The rights activists claimed that through their open letter, they were engaging with the mainstream media about the screening of the film, while the conservative forces were demanding a ban on the film. But it was a slippery slope from engaging-with-the mainstream media to the ban on the film. And the State selectively cherry-picked the demand for a ban. Who benefitted? As a matter of fact, the State now seems further strengthened in using ‘banning’ as a weapon to silence any documentary films that raise uncomfortable questions or which contain views that are contrary to the dominant conservative thinking. Unless we stay alert.
Here is an example of some measure of alertness that is necessary to ensure that in the name of addressing legitimate concerns, the State does not push its hidden agendas of taking away the carpet of human rights from under people’s feet. As 2015 was setting in, there were calls for “ghar wapsi” (return to one’s supposedly original religion) and again, these calls were by the front groups of the ruling dispensation. As the days went by, it became clear that what was anticipated is that when the call of ghar wapsi is made, there would be a counter-call from the minorities for a ban on these conversions. The State imagined that it would then jump in and offer an anti-conversion bill, as the pill for the problem. But the State’s hopes were dashed. Because citizens’ groups and minority organisations were alert enough to understand that the ulterior motives of such ghar wapsi announcements were to generate a large scale demand against conversion. The anti-conversion legislation that the Centre has been talking about is about asserting Hindutva in the garb of checking ‘forced’ conversions and how force is defined has been a major bone of contention. The citizens’ groups were alert enough to see through that if they demanded an anti-conversion bill, it would in fact be used to hound the minorities involved in voluntary conversions, because of the way ‘forced’ conversions would be defined. Therefore, in the way that citizens’ groups posed their opposition to ghar wapsi, the State did not have the opportunity and the pretext to foist the anti-conversion bill in the name of dealing with the concerns against ghar wapsi.
Increasingly, rights activists are in a conundrum as to whether or not to engage with their Governments or mainstream media and if they do engage, how to do so in a manner that their agendas are not hijacked and twisted by the State – all in the name of meeting their agendas and in the name of justice. There is also the lurking question of what precisely is the role that non-Governmental organizations and rights groups must play in critically engaging with Governments whose professed ideologies or ways of functioning are intrinsically in opposition with the very idea of democracy that is at the foundation of the rights groups’ being.
It might be useful to revisit the past performance of the State in this connection to draw from history in lessons for the future. In the period preceding the Lok Sabha elections in 2014, there was a loud demand for surveillance, particularly after the ‘Nirbhaya’ case. But the State captured that demand in a way that it could fit into its groove of protecting people who actually have no faith in the State’s protection – as happened in Snoopgate at Gujarat. A woman was being stalked, as a way of spying for her estranged husband, in the name of State surveillance for her protection!
In 2004, and again in 2014, the cry against trafficking at Baina, the cry against illegalities such as coastal zone regulation violations, and the call for enforcement of disaster management laws, were used by the State to appropriate prime land for land sharks. This prime land was being eyed for port privatisation and four lane coastal highways that would displace people and bulldoze its way from the industrial estate of Verna to the port and back – for trade to feed corporate greed even as Goa gets at best crumbs from this ‘development’. Where are the moves to prevent trafficking of women and children, that was consequently more difficult to track because it has since been spread out and yet taken more organised and sophisticated forms? The popular prejudice against ‘outsiders’ has been cleverly used by the State to remove people from their dwellings in clear violation of basic human rights, as was recently pointed out by a spokesperson for People’s Union for Civil Liberties, when releasing their fact-finding report. The State’s fishing community has in fact constantly had to resist their residences along the coast being threatened in the name of coastal zone regulations, while the State looks the other way when it comes to mega-projects for gated communities and starred tourism resorts brazenly violating coastal regulation laws.
This cherry-picking by the State has also been visible with the gender justice agendas. Else, how is it that a case against a politically unfriendly journalist editor, results in him getting hounded by the State to the extent of requiring him to do a potency test when the accusation is of insertion of a finger in the vagina? Whereas another case at about the same time in Goa of a complaint by a female employee at IFFI does not bother the Goa Government and the woman is advised to go back to her employer in another state and complain there and deal with the matter? Are not the ‘means’ or due process of law to get justice as important as the ‘ends’ we seek, in detection and conviction for perpetrators of sexual crimes?
Clearly, the hour has come to be increasingly cautious about what the demands we raise are, and how we position our demands. Lest the State appropriates the demands to craft agendas that go against the basic grain of human rights – all in the name of justice.
(Albertina Almeida is a lawyer, human rights activist and an independent researcher.)
