[sacw] [ACT] sacw dispatch (1 Feb 00) [India Special]

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch.
1 February 2000
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#1. India: Film under attack by the Hindu fundamentalists
#2. India: Hindu Fundamentalist VHP for special courts to try terrorists
#3. State terror that executed Punjab [India]
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#1.

Hindustan Times
1 Feb 2000
Opinion

A protest that holds no water
by Poonam Saxena

Controversy seems to pursue filmmaker Deepa Mehta like a particularly
persistent ghost. The protests in Varanasi against her new film, Water,
turned violent on Sunday when BJP, VHP, Shiv Sena and RSS activists,
under the banner of the newly-formed Kashi Sanskriti Raksha Sangharsh
Samiti, attacked the shooting locations and ransacked the sets erected
at Tulsighat.

In view of the disturbed law and order situation, the state government
decided to stall the shooting of the film and refer it back to the
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Ironical indeed, because Mehta
had already obtained a clearance from that very ministry before
embarking on the shooting.

Despite taking this effort to safeguard her project, the Canada-based
film-maker should perhaps have anticipated the protests. After all, both
her previous films, Fire and Earth, ran into trouble in the
subcontinent. Fire, about a lesbian relationship between two unloved
Lajpat Nagar housewives, was attacked by Shiv Sena activists in Delhi
and Mumbai for showing a 'perverted' view of Indian women, and the film
was taken off the cinema halls where it was playing. Earth escaped
relatively unscathed, but Mehta did not get permission to shoot it in
Lahore where it was set. She had to recreate the city in Old Delhi.

Regardless of the artistic merit of both the films, the point made by
Mehta and her supporters then, which is valid even today, was quite
simply: Everyone has a right to protest, but there are legitimate ways
of doing this. No one has any business to protest violently, damage
property or threaten the safety of the people in question.

With Water, the third in her trilogy of the elements, the trouble has
started even before the shooting could commence in right earnest. The
subject of the film? Varanasi widows in the 1930s - is apparently
incendiary enough to send the self-proclaimed custodians of Indian
culture, tradition and morality into paroxysms of self-righteous rage.
In Water, Mehta is being accused of projecting Kashi in a negative
light, and depicting it as a centre for "prostitution among child
widows." None of the protestors have actually seen the script, but
rumours are flying thick and fast. In earlier interviews, Mehta had
hinted at the theme, and the script certainly does explore the angle of
a Hindu widow of that period being forced to repress her sexuality. This
is not a terribly new or outrageous idea - it is a reality of our
culture and has been written about by journalists, historians,
sociologists and writers ad nauseum. Hindi movies too have tackled the
theme in their own way over the years.

Then why this uproar? One of the reasons is that Mehta is regarded as an
'outsider' who lives abroad and, to quote Shyamdeo Roychowdhary, local
BJP MLA, who is in the forefront of the anti-Mehta protests, "She enjoys
portraying anti-Indian culture themes to get awards." This is a charge
often levelled against Mehta in a veiled, more sophisticated manner by
people in the film industry as well. And frankly, anyone is free to
think so, but that still doesn't excuse the protests, particularly the
manner in which they were carried out.

Incidentally, this is not the first time that a film has been shot in
Varanasi - there was H.S. Rawail's Dilip Kumar-starrer Sangharsh, Raj
Kapoor's Ram Teri Ganga Maili, Vijay Singh's Jaya Ganga. (And at the
moment too, the shooting for Goldie Bahl's Abhishek Bachchan-starrer Bas
Itna Sa Khwab Hai is progressing smoothly in Varanasi). Mehta has been
quoted in the newspapers as wondering why these films were allowed to be
shot in Varanasi without controversy. The answer lies once again in the
popular perception of Mehta as making films for a Western audience,
which should, by inference, not be allowed to see "Indian culture" in a
poor light (read the 'exploitation' of widows by Hindu society).

This is no argument. It is a bit like shooting the messenger who brings
the bad news. No one in their right mind could possibly justify the role
Hindu society allocated to its widows for decades. Trying to brush these
issues under the carpet or pretend they never existed, is to do an
injustice to the very society to which these upholders of Indian culture
belong. The great social reformers of the 19th century battled against
these very social ills. It is true that these are sensitive issues which
go to the heart of any community, but to give Mehta due credit, she did
get her script cleared by the government before starting her film. What
more is any filmmaker supposed to do? Have the entire film doctored by a
collection of conservative individuals owing allegiance to a particular
ideology? Sorry, that's not possible.

_________

#2.

[Below is an article from the latest issue of the Hindu rightwing
organisation the RSS]

Organiser
Vol. LI, No. 27 NEW DELHI, January 30, 2000

VHP for special courts to try terrorists
=46rom Our Correspondent

The general council of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) which met in
Rameshwarm from January 7 to 9, has appealed to the Central Government
to set up special courts for summary trials of the terrorism-related
offences as no terrorist arrested and tried by various courts in India,
had been convicted and punished so far. These included terrorist
sponsored blasts in Coimbatore, Delhi and elsewhere.

In a resolution adopted at the three-day meeting, the VHP described all
the insurgent and terrorist activities as war on the state and urged the
government to crush these forces with pro-active measures. The
Government should also come out with a white paper on ISI activities as
promised earlier the VHP demanded. The resolution also urged the world
to declare Pakistan and Afghanistan as ''terrorist state''.

''The world is fully aware that Pakistan and Afghanistan are patronising
terrorism. But, surprisingly no country has taken appropriate step to
declare both the countries as ''terrorist state''. They must be declared
so without any delay'', the resolution demanded.

The threat to country's internal security and safety of the people comes
both from external terrorists and from their accomplices within the
country as also the links between external terrorists and extremists in
India such as those in the North-East and Naxalities. The ISI of
Pakistan had spread its tentacles all over India and was also using
theological institutions like madarsas in the country's border areas as
a hide-out for subversive activities. The VHP urged the Centre to
dismantle all such theological institutions and also close India's
borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh.

In another resolution the VHP demanded a ban on all illegal conversions
and a check on the flow of foreign money into the country for this
purpose. It termed the recent call of Pope John Paul II during his visit
to India, as an open cultural war against the non-proselytising
civilisations. The Pope had called upon the Christians to reap a harvest
of faith in Asia in the next millennium, and it had a hidden motive of
the Roman Catholic Church which was concealed behind the equivocations
of the field of missionaries, the resolution added.

The VHP also called for the removal of Delhi High Court judge Cyriac
Joseph for calling upon Christians at a convention in Kerala to opt for
martyrdom to propagate Christianity. The call was not only provocative
but also against the oath of office taken by the judge to uphold the
Constitution which was secular in nature, it said.

Briefing mediapersons after morning session of the meeting on January 8,
Working President of VHP Shri Ashok Singhal said that Hindu Acharyas and
Saints would build the Ram temple at Ayodhya once the chiselling of
stones is over. There was no legal bar on the construction of the temple
he said adding that the property, acquired by the Centre, actually
belonged to the temple deity, Ramlala. ''There was no case pending
against Ramlala'', he added.

Shri Singhal pointed out that the VHP would build up a large force of
Satsangees to counter conversion and educate the masses. Two thousand
schools had already been set up and the VHP would soon set up another
2000 schools. It would also adopt orphans in Orissa between the age
group of one and 14, he said warning the Orissa Government against
allowing orphans to be taken away to other states for eventual
conversion.
_________

#3.

Asian Age
31 January 2000
Op-Ed.

State terror that executed Punjab
By Patwant Singh

As the Constitution faces the prospect of further changes, it would be
of interest to recall the damage previous amendments did to the lives of
hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting Indians. Especially in Punjab,
Kashmir and Northeast India where indiscriminate violence against people
was given constitutional sanction by Parliament. Despite their efforts
to obscure facts with fiction, and make heroes out of criminals in
uniform, successive governments in New Delhi could not hide the most
debased excesses by the state against its citizens.
Punjab bore the brunt of the Union government's capricious amendments of
several statutes and acts relating to criminal justice in the Eighties
which were then incorporated in the Ninth Schedule. It was done to make
them immune from challenge on the grounds of violating Articles 14 and
19 which guarantee the fundamental rights of citizens. This sleight of
hand gave police officers absolute powers to conduct a vicious war of
attrition against innocent men, women and children. The police methods
were no less vicious than other bloodlettings in recent history. Milan
Kundera, in his Book of Laughter and
=46orgetting, shows how memory becomes a casualty in the cover-ups which
follow vengeful acts. "The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered
the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia; the assassination
of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh; the war in the Sinai
desert made people forget Allende; the Cambodian massacre made people
forget Sinai; and so on and so forth, until ultimately everyone lets
everything be forgotten."
Who, indeed, now remembers that from the end of the Eighties till 1995,
Punjab saw its police forces exterminate, torture, secretly cremate,
rape, imprison without trial tens of thousands of people in the name of
end "militancy." Statesmanlike methods to solve political problems were
abandoned in favour of amending the law to facilitate arbitrary police
methods and extra-judicial killings; the amendments of the Eighties
leading directly to subsequent police brutalities in Punjab. In all 30
Punjab-related acts and amendments were enacted between 1983 and 1989
providing the police with pretexts to arrest, detain without trial,
torture and kill persons. The 59th Constitutional Amendment (later
repealed) of March 30, 1988, authorised the suspension of the fundament
al right to life and liberty! The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities
(Prevention) Act (Tada) is still used to detain people all over India.
Another excessive piece of legislation, the Armed Forces (Punjab and
Chandigarh) Special Powers Act, 1983, gave officers the right in
disturbed areas (which Punjab and Kashmir were duly declared) to destroy
shelters from which armed attacks are likely to be made and arrest
without warrant a person on suspicion that he is about to commit an
offense!
Many more such devices helped to obstruct justice, not facilitate it. To
understand through specific cases how these affected the fundamental
rights of Punjab's people - especially Sikhs - the source to turn to is
the just released Enforced Disappearances, Arbitrary Executions and
Secret Cremations: Victim Testimony and India's Human Rights
Obligations. This Interim Report, issued by the Committee for
Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab and written by Ram Narayan
Kumar and two associates, reveals the degree to which the government,
public and a fawning media make these crimes possible. And laud offici
ally sanctioned criminality.
It discloses that after the Congress Party's victory in Punjab in
=46ebruary 1992, the Beant Singh government decided to silence human
rights groups before dealing with militancy. In consequence Ram Singh
Biling, a newspaper reporter and secretary of the Punjab Human Rights
Organisation "was picked up and unceremoniously executed." Then Justice
Ajit Singh Bains, chairman of PHRO and retired judge of the High Court
was illegally arrested, handcuffed and humiliated in April 1992. The
70-year old heart patient, admired for his integrity and independence,
was held without trial for weeks, and only released after the Bar
Association of India at the urging of Fali Nariman, the Bar Association
of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, and the Geneva-based International
Commission of Jurists protested his arrest. Jagwinder Singh human rights
lawyer was picked up on September 25, 1992. "Although the chief minister
and the chief secretary promised to intervene, Jagwinder Singh never
returned."
Jaswant Singh Khalra, active in human rights, had in January 1995
disclosed that the Punjab police were secretly cremating thousands of
dead bodies after declaring them unidentified. The police reacted
menacingly, especially Ajit Singh Sandhu, Taran Taran's senior
superintendent of police, who warned Khalra that unless he "ceased his
involvement in the matter, he would also become an unidentified body."
Khalra refused. As general secretary of the Akali Dal's human rights
wing he had influential friends; more importantly he had backbone. On
September 6, 1995 armed police commandos took him away from his house in
Amritsar and despite the Supreme Court's intervention, assurances by
Punjab's advocate general, pleas by human rights organisations in India,
and outrage by their counterparts abroad, Khalra was never seen again,
nor his body recovered.
What led to his killing was his press release of January 16, 1995. "The
cases of 'disappeared' persons have been a source of constant concern
for all human rights groups working in Punjab...some families, who
cannot bear the uncertainty any more, just want to know if their son,
brother, husband or daughter is dead or alive so that they can perform
the last religious rites... In Amritsar district, the maximum unclaimed
bodies (were) brought to the cremation grounds near the Durgiana Mandir.
=46rom 1st June 1984 to the end of 1994 about 2,000 bodies have been
cremated as unclaimed..."
The Supreme Court took notice of the Khalra abduction from a telegram
sent by Gurcharan Singh Tohra and directed the CBI to investigate the
Khalra abduction and also the cremation of "unidentified bodies." The
CBI confirmed as fact that more than 2,000 bodies were cremated as
unidentified in Taran Taran alone, and further identified about 500
bodies which the Punjab police had cremated as unidentified.
The particulars of unidentified bodies cremated all over Punjab are
meticulously tabulated in the Interim Report - a direct spin-off of
Khalra's path-breaking work - even giving details of the amounts of
firewood and cloth used for shrouds. To read these accounts is to
experience the entire gamut of emotions: outrage, sorrow, admiration for
human rights activists and dismay that these crimes were provided
constitutional legitimacy by our parliamentarians.
Evidence of custodial deaths was destroyed by other means too. "Punjab's
irrigation canals had (also) become the dumping ground for bodies of
killed militants and their sympathisers." In March 1992, according to a
newspaper report, "the government of Rajasthan had formally complained
to Punjab's chief secretary that these canals were carrying large
numbers of dead bodies into the State...that many dead bodies, with
hands and feet tied together, were being fished out when water in-flow
in canals was stopped for repair works." The report is replete with case
histories of police abductions interrogations, deaths in custody, trauma
deaths, punitive punishment of whole families, and terrorising of entire
villages.
"In one case, the police officer-in-charge of a post at village Bham in
Batala subdivision of Gurdaspur district kidnapped two teenage girls
Salvinder Kaur and Sarabjit Kaur in front of eyewitnesses in his
official jeep. The officer-in-charge of the police station in
HarGobindpur denied their custody. Four days later their naked distended
bodies were recovered from a nearby canal. Officers of HarGobindpur
police-station tried to pressurise the parents to sign a declaration
that the bodies were unidentified and unclaimed, and were threatened
that they would be eliminated...if they disobeyed."
In the Nineties, police could force a government medical officer to
complete a post-mortem "in less than five minutes," though this was
difficult if a person wasn't dead. "On 30 October 1993, a dead body,
supposedly that of Sarabjit Singh, was brought to Patti hospital by the
officers of Valtoha police station in Amritsar district for post-mortem.
The doctor who was to carry out the autopsy discovered that the man who
had a bullet injury on his head was still breathing. Thereupon, Valtoha
police officers insisted on taking him away. After some time they
brought him back, now dead for good, and forced a different doctor to
fill-in an autopsy report."
The Supreme Court took notice of this case from a newspaper report and
directed the CBI to investigate the case, which prima facie found the
allegations against the police officers correct. A murder case was
registered against the accused police officers and tried by the session
judge, Amritsar. One sub-inspector of police was found guilty and
sentenced to life imprisonment.
How did top police officials view their rampaging force during those
years? Julio Ribeiro, former Bombay police commissioner who took over as
Punjab's director general of police in March 1986, claims in his book
Bullet for Bullet that despite requests to Punjab human rights activists
"to name one 'innocent person' whom the police had killed, my challenge
had never got a response." In the next paragraph he says "some innocent
youths had died because they took fright and ran. The para-military,
mistaking them for terrorists, had fired at them," adding
philosophically that: "They were the unfortunate vic-
tims of a low-cost war, which is how terrorism has been aptly
described". He didn't think much of Justice Bains. "He was a bitter man,
and this feature of his personality surfaced very markedly..." He
himself sounded bitter at the "warped reasoning...of activists like
Bains," and felt the "PHRO particularly Bains, constituted a serious
obstacle to more determined police action..."
Though no wordsmith, Ribeiro manages to reveal his second-hand colonial
mindset through his views on Punjab. "I came from another part of the
country, with a different culture and different attitudes...this was
tribal territory, with tribal customs and propensities." As for
condoning extra-judicial killings his officers seemed to favour: "Who
was I to pass judgment on them (his officers)? I realised that I had not
contradicted them when they were making their submissions. My silence
could be construed as assent though I was too much of a coward to agree
with them openly." His chapters on Punjab are full of such nuggets.
K.P.S. Gill, who succeeded Ribeiro on November 19, 1991, soon made his
disdain for humanitarian principles, clear. During his four years in
office till December 31, 1995, the state which once revelled in the joie
de vivre of its people, became a fetid place - dark and brooding like
the man who seemed bent on casting it in his own image. He wanted the
job badly according to Ribeiro. "Gill was angling to replace me...he had
convinced the governor and the leaders in Delhi that I did not
understand the Sikhs and that I was not capable of the harder line of
action that was required to put down the terrorists." What Gill did
bring to Punjab was not a hard line, but state terror, whose
executioners were answerable only to him. He deflected the government's
and the media's gaze from them whenever necessary. The latter was easy.
He had his acolytes in the media: some were in thrall of the raw power
he exercised, others by their proximity to him, still others were elated
by the occasional ride in his plane.
The report shows through carefully researched case histories how police
repression and violations of human rights reached their zenith under
him. His aversion to human rights activists - who had highlighted his
trigger-happy ways - is understandable. It continued till after his
retirement. During a press conference on May 24, 1997 Gill was vitriolic
towards those who permitted "human rights activists to thrive on India's
soil - those busybodies 'who will work with any cause that serves their
personal ends...' " For added effect he asked "Parliament to vote for
legal amendments needed to protect other courageous officers from the
kind of humiliation that apparently drove Sandhu to suicide." The same
Sandhu who couldn't abide Khalra!
Hopefully the committee which government is setting up to suggest new
amendments to the Constitution will listen to saner voices. And also
note how some previous amendments created a culture of violence and
venality. Fortunately, the speech of Ram Jethmalani, Union minister of
law and justice delivered on January 13, 2000 in New Delhi, was
reassuring. "Once the legislature takes on the power to ignore the
fundamental rights chapter by putting it in the Ninth Schedule, you have
made fundamental rights a rope of sand. And you have reduced the
Republic to nothing. The Republic stands on the sanctity, the dignity,
and the right of the individual to hold his own against the powers that
be. Take away his fundamental rights and you have denigrated him to the
position of a serf, or a slave, and he is no longer a citizen of free
India."
Patwant Singh is the author of The Sikhs

__________________________________________
SOUTH ASIA CITIZENS WEB DISPATCH is an informal, independent &
non-profit citizens wire service run by South Asia Citizens Web
(http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex) since1996.