India, Pak join hands to ward off attack from NGO hawks

Together, India and Pakistan plotted and succeeded in shooting the messenger, an independent UN expert Professor Clair Palley from the United Kingdom, instead of examining her message which, through a severe indictment of both countries, was based largely on facts culled from Indian press reports, civil liberty organisations and individual testimonies.

What, the expert asked in her high-pitched voice, was the difference between the massacre of innocent people at Jallianwala Bagh by General Dyer and the killing of innocent people in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab as has been widely reported in the Indian and international press?

Indians suffered so much under the British why must they continue to suffer under Indians, Palley said. Why, she asked an attentive audience, is India allowed to “provide an excuse for everything it does?”

How, she wondered, can a country that gave the world Mahatma Gandhi and B R Ambedkar stand up in international fora and state that human rights violations are inevitable in large, poor and underdeveloped countries? Child labour, encounter deaths, custodial deaths, torture, Kashmir, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar, Assam all figured in the resolution and Palley’s presentation of it. “Even if one tenth of what is reported is true, there would be a case for gross violations in India,” the expert told the sub-commission.

Displaying rare sub-continental camaraderie unheard of in human rights matters, both New Delhi and Islamabad (she was equally biting about Pakistan) dismissed Palley and her resolutions calling for an examination of both countries’ human rights record as the work of a raving and nostalgic colonialist.

In her resolution where she criticised the coloniser United Kingdom for denying Indians basic human rights and India and Pakistan for continuing that “wicked” colonial practice, both countries saw a sinister plot to destabilise the sub-continent which they told the UN body was on the verge of an economic and human rights take off.

The Indian position in public was that Pakistan and Palley are equally irrelevant. In private, India and Pakistan rallied and succeeded in preventing any action on the resolution. A “no action” motion was proposed by Halima Embarek Warzazi, the expert from Morocco and backed by an overwhelming majority of the subcommission’s experts from the north and south all of whom appealed to Palley to withdraw her resolutions. India said Warzazi’s initiative was her own and that Pakistan hid behind India.

An unrelenting Palley preferred to go down shooting. She had made her point though the UN cannot have double standards and no country however big and powerful is above scrutiny.

Indian diplomats saw it differently. Palley is a loose cannon, completely isolated, India said. She did not invent the facts, said other diplomats who backed India in public and criticised it in private. Palley’s humbling, India said, was an important 50th anniversary gift, a clear political message in favour of India and an equally clear message to all trouble-makers including the Sikhs, Kashmiris and the Nagas that India has support within the UN system.

India then pointed to its positive steps. Strict guidelines to police, security, military and para-military personnel about the need to respect human rights. It waved the recommendations of the National Human Rights Commission’s reports, critical of the government, as proof of progress. There were problems, but there was dialogue. New Delhi said it had a free judiciary and a lively press that kept the government on its toes. There was worse, it was said in private. Like Cuba and Algeria, Turkey and North Korea.

This is probably the first time that a UN resolution against India, not sponsored by Pakistan, has been tabled at any UN human rights forum. There’s nothing new in it, said Indian diplomats and played down the substantive parts that contained the allegations.

Indeed, there’s nothing new and that is the tragedy, Palley told the world body. “India provides the largest example of impunity,” she said, asking what the world was to make of the world’s largest democracy with some very fine institutions when it says there’s nothing new in reports of deaths and torture.

As UN debates go, the Subcommission on Human Rights is the mother of all talk-shops. Even more irrelevant than the UN’s Human Rights Commission (UNHRC), the Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination of Minorities is where governments, non-governmental organisations (NGO), fringe liberation groups, including lately terrorists on the make, whine about the fate of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the world. But politically, this is a high-profile pressure point. The annual four-week trauma is resolutions from the subcommission’s 26 experts and 26 alternates, who, although nominated by their governments, are expected to be independent in their thought and work. Traditionally governments decide the limits of independence of experts nominated from their countries. In that sense, Palley is her own person.

“Recognising the enormous responsibility of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for having left in the Indian subcontinent tradition of imperialism…harsh military suppression…reactionary penal laws and double standards of enunciating human rights and the rule of law,” the British expert told the UN that 50 years after Independence, India continued to violate human rights in full view of the world.

Harsh words, but just how off the mark do most Indians think that is?