From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Sun May 16 2004 - 15:27:48 MDT
I don't really know much about Indian politics. I was reading about the Indian elections where the Congress party won, and this comment on the "Prevention of Terrorism Act" (POTA) rang a bell.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=44&ItemID=55229825
Darkness Passed...
by Arundhati Roy
May 14, 2004
<snip>
In recent years, the number of people killed by the police and security forces runs into tens of thousands. Andhra Pradesh (neo-liberalism's poster state) chalks up an average of about 200 deaths of "extremists" in "encounters" every year. In Kashmir an estimated 80,000 people have been killed since 1989. Thousands have simply "disappeared".
According to the Association of Parents of Disappeared People in Kashmir, more than 2,500 people were killed in 2003. In the last 18 months there have been 54 deaths in custody. The Indian state's proclivity to harass and terrorise has been institutionalised by the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (Pota). In Tamil Nadu, the act has been used to stifle criticism of the state government. In Jharkhand, 3,200 people, mostly poor adivasis (indigenous people) accused of being Maoists, have been named in Pota cases. In eastern Uttar Pradesh, the act is used to clamp down on those who protest about the dispossession of their land. In Gujarat and Mumbai, it is used almost exclusively against Muslims. In Gujarat, after the 2002 pogrom in which an estimated 2,000 Muslims were killed, 287 people were accused under Pota: 286 were Muslim and one a Sikh. Pota allows confessions extracted in police custody to be admitted as evidence. Under the Pota regime, torture tends to replace investigation in our police stations:
that's everything from people being forced to drink urine, to being stripped, humiliated, given electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts and having iron rods put up their anuses, to being beaten to death.
Under Pota you cannot get bail unless you can prove that you are innocent -- of a crime that you have not been formally charged with. It would be naive to imagine that Pota is being "misused". It is being used for precisely the reasons it was enacted. This year in the UN, 181 countries voted for increased protection of human rights. Even the US voted in favour. India abstained.
Meanwhile, economists cheering from the pages of corporate newspapers inform us that the GDP growth rate is phenomenal, unprecedented. Shops are overflowing with consumer goods. Government storehouses are overflowing with grain. Outside this circle of light, the past five years have seen the most violent increase in rural-urban income inequalities since independence. Farmers steeped in debt are committing suicide in hundreds; 40% of the rural population in India has the same foodgrain absorption level as sub-Saharan Africa, and 47% of Indian children under three suffer from malnutrition.
But in urban India, shops, restaurants, railway stations, airports, gymnasiums, hospitals have TV monitors in which India's Shining, Feeling Good. You only have to close your ears to the sickening crunch of the policeman's boot on someone's ribs, you only have to raise your eyes from the squalor, the slums, the ragged broken people on the streets and seek a friendly TV monitor, and you will be in that other beautiful world. The singing, dancing world of Bollywood's permanent pelvic thrusts, of permanently privileged, happy Indians waving the tricolour and Feeling Good. Laws like Pota are like buttons on a TV. You can use it to switch off the poor, the troublesome, the unwanted.
When Pota was passed, the Congress staged a noisy opposition in Parliament. However, repealing Pota never figured in its election campaign. Even before it has formed a government, there have been overt reassurances that "reforms" will continue. Exactly what kind of reforms, we'll have to wait and see. Fortunately the Congress will be hobbled by the fact that it needs the support of left parties to form a government. Hopefully, things will change. A little. It's been a pretty hellish six years.
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