Men,
Matters & Memories
Hurriyat's grand illusion
By M L Kotru
It takes
some gall for a bunch of self-seeking
politicos to say that they will not meet
the Prime Minister of India when he
visits Kashmir. It betokens arrogrance
among a set of people who but for a
pocket of influence in one 'gali' or may
be four 'galis' do not count for much.
Yet these very men will stand up in a
queue at the Pakistani High Commission
for an audience with the hand-picked
Prime Minister of the Pakistani Military
dictator, Gen Pervez Musharraf next week.
And, like a bunch of cry babies they are
urging Dr Manmohan Singh, the Prime
Minister, whom they won't see in
Srinagar, to grant them permission to go
to Pakistan in search perhaps of
spiritual and political inspiration. Dr
Singh who began his two-day visit to the
State on Wednesday, as I am writing, has
for his part made it known that
representatives of any political party,
pro-Pak separatists included, are welcome
to meet him during his stay in Srinagar
or Jammu . There obviously will be no red
carpets spread out to receive the
separatists. They don't deserve it
either. Only a week earlier, while I was
on private visit to the valley, they had
refused to meet the Home Minister, Mr
Shiv Raj Patil. Personally though I do
feel that such a meeting would have
served no purpose at all, given the
lacklustre persona of Patil.
But to say
no to a meeting with Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh speaks of extreme
insolence, the kind that is peculiar to
the men of the Hurriyat Conference,
pygmies who somehow have grand illusions
about their political clout. And what is
the reason that young Maulvi Umer Farooq
offers for his Hurriyat faction's refusal
to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh?
They have met the Indian Prime Minister,
Atal Bihari Vajpayee twice, it is time
now for them to meet the Pakistani
leadership as also the leaders of
Pakistan occupied Kashmir.
Before I
forget, he also mentions that they must
meet the Mujahideen leaders in Pakistan
as well. One presumes the last-named
group includes die hard fundamentalists
such as the leaders of the
Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaishe Mohammad (all
banned but alive and kicking with the
connivance of Gen. Musharraf) and, of
course, our very own Salahuddin, the
Kashmir School Teacher who took to arms
because he was ''made'' to lose an
election to the Jammu and Kashmir
Assembly from one of the valley
constituency.
The
meeting with Pakistani Mujahideen groups
tells a tale. We are asked to believe
that cross-border terrorism and terrorist
training camps in Pakistan have ceased.
If that is really the case why does young
Umer Farooq want to meet the Mujahideen.
As for his craving to meet the Pakistani
leadership I don't believe that there is
any lack of coordination between the
separatists and the establishment in
Islamabad. Why, Umer himself told us that
he had a long chat with Gen Musharraf
only the other day in Amsterdam or
wherever. Besides, they are only a week
away from their meeting with the
Pakistani Prime Minister in New Delhi. I
don't have to mention the fact that all
the Hurriyat (Geelani and Maulvi) leaders
were closetted with the Pakistani High
Commissioner for long hours only two
weeks ago at and after the Iftar party
hosted by the latter.
It is time
someone told Hurriyat that it does not
matter to Dr Manmohan Singh nor does it
impinge on India's position whether the
Hurriyat meets the Prime Minister or not.
Marginalised as they are politically-
their hartal calls, their signature tune,
are being ignored for the most part. At
the risk of annoying Syed Ali Shah
Geelani who would seem to be imagining
himself in the role of a Qaide-Azam Sanee
(Jinnah the second) let it be said that
the general mass of Kashmiri Muslims is
tired of the kind of uncertainty the
Hurriyat factions are trying to impose on
the people.
To
Geelani's credit it must be said that he
has been a steadfast Pakistani and
therefore his lack of confidence in an
Indian Prime Minister becomes
understandable. But young Umer should
have known better than observing that
after two meeting with Atal Bihari
Vajpayee it is for his group talk to
Pervez Musharraf. Did'nt it occur to him
that in a democracy, unlike in a military
dictatorship, Prime Ministers can and do
change. Once a change occurs there is
likelihood that the new incumbent may
have other ideas, different from
Vajpayee's, to address problems.
It goes
without saying that there is a general
national consensus on the board contours
of a solution to the Indo-Pak tangle can
be. The Hurriyat would also do well to
remember that there has been a flurry of
diplomatic activity bilaterally between
India and Pakistan, that Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh and Gen Musharraf had a
very useful meeting in New York. The
Hurriyat and its camp followers would in
the event not be doing any good to their
cause with their child-like behaviour.
Very much like a petulant child Umer
Farooq has maintained the refrain
''permit us to go to Pakistan first only
then shall we talk to you again'', very
much the spoilt brat insisting 'Mommy,
buy me that lollipop if you don't want me
to cry by the have ceased. If that is
really the case why does young Umer
Farooq want to meet the Mujahideen. As
for his craving to meet the Pakistani
leadership I don't believe that there is
any lack of coordination between the
separatists and the establishment in
Islamabad. Why, Umer himself told us that
he had a long chat with Gen Musharraf
only the other day in Amsterdam or
wherever. Besides, they are only a week
away from their meeting with the
Pakistani Prime Minister in New Delhi. I
don't have to mention the fact that all
the Hurriyat (Geelani and Maulvi) leaders
were closetted with the Pakistani High
Commissioner for long hours only two
weeks ago at and after the Iftar party
hosted by the latter.
It is time
someone told Hurriyat that it does not
matter to Dr Manmohan Singh nor does it
impinge on India's position whether the
Hurriyat meets the Prime Minister or not.
Marginalised as they are politically-
their hartal calls, their signature tune,
are being ignored for the most part. At
the risk of annoying Syed Ali Shah
Geelani who would seem to be imagining
himself in the role of a Qaide-Azam Sanee
(Jinnah the second) let it be said that
the general mass of Kashmiri Muslims is
tired of the kind of uncertainty the
Hurriyat factions are trying to impose on
the people.
To
Geelani's credit it must be said that he
has been a steadfast Pakistani and
therefore his lack of confidence in an
Indian Prime Minister becomes
understandable. But young Umer should
have known better than observing that
after two meetings with Atal Bihari
Vajpayee it is for his group talk to
Pervez Musharraf. Did'nt it occur to him
that in a democracy, unlike in a military
dictatorship, Prime Ministers can and do
change. Once a change occurs there is
likelihood that the new incumbent may
have other ideas, different from
Vajpayee's to address problems.
It goes
without saying that there is a general
national consensus on the broad contours
of a solution to the Indo-Pak tangle can
be. The Hurriyat would also do well to
remember that there has been a flurry of
diplomatic activity bilaterally between
India and Pakistan, that Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh and Gen Musharraf had a
very useful meeting in New York. The
Hurriyat and its camp followers would in
the event not be doing any good to their
cause with their child-like behaviour.
Very much like a petulant child Umer
Farooq has maintianed the refrain
''permit us to go to Pakistan first only
the shall we talk to yu again', very much
the spoilt brat insisting ''Mommy, buy me
that lillipop if you don't want me to cry
by the roadside.
By their
absurd posturing they are also not
helping people like the State Chief
Minister, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, who
unlike any Chief Minister before him, has
made a dialogue between the Centre and
the separatists very much his leit motif.
A point in
passing. The leftists supporters of the
UPA Government one hopes will some day
learn the virtue of observing silence.
Times out of number have they been
stalling, obstructing and generally
making a nuisance of themselves in the
conduct of State policy. ''Don't do this
or else''. It was not surprising
therefore to find Comrade Bardhan of CPI
(Yechhuri was somehow not in view)
telling the Prime Minister about the do's
and don't for his Kashmir visit. Backseat
driving does not help anybody's case. And
so far as the CPI is concerned it has no
presence in Kashmir. The CPM has a lone
MLA. Both have nevertheless managed to
create problems for some infrastructural
projects in Kashmir by inducting workers
to resort to strikes. If this is the kind
of message the leftists had for Manmohan
Singh before he left for Jammu and
Kashmir they might as well have kept it
to themselves.
|
 |
Yours
Randomly
Rape is a heinous
crime……
By Dr R L Bhat
Rape is a
heinous crime. It is violation of a
person that cannot be undone whatever the
compensation. It is a crime against the
society as a whole. The society abhors
the crime and the sinner who commits it.
People are outraged, the honor is
irredeemably compromised. Rape rightly
exercises the deepest concerns of the
biological entity called human. A full
fifteen years ago a lady teacher had gone
to the Baramullah district, adjoining
Handwara, to collect her salary after the
end of winter vacations. Terrorism or
'Tahreek' was in flourish then in
Kashmir. The woman was asked to come the
next day when, instead of being handed
over the pay-packet, she was abducted.
For many days she was violated and
finally her body was sawed through.
People were divided on the point whether
she was sawed alive or dead, though that
was a mere academic point after the
ceaseless violation. That heinous crime
became the leitmotif of the operations
that have devastated the valley,
banishing all 'rays of light' there may
have been. Old fashioned may call it the
curse of these victims. None can condone
it.
Yet most
of the people, who should have been
infuriated and outraged at the violence,
went silent at that desecration. That was
the prime of the Tahreek, when jehadis
had a wide welcome of many colors and
were busy extracting 'sacrifices' that
now the 'Tehreekis' say cannot be brushed
away in resolving the Kashmir tangle. In
collecting these 'sacrifices', a singer
turned Tahreeki, was an active
participant. He too saw many violations
being committed. Probably, he aided some.
Probably, he didn't. Then the violation
came nearer home. And like any honorable
man he protested. When he was killed last
year, he did not have many mourners apart
from family and close associates. Around
that time, another person in the hills of
Doda protested and refused to be a silent
spectator to the rapine of the land. His
father and sister were abducted. While
the aged father was tortured, his sister
was gang-raped for more than a fortnight.
When security forces finally succeeded in
tracking the culprits, they escaped but
not before they had chopped off the nose
and ears of the girl. This barbarian
custom has become almost a routine
happening in the hills of Jammu, where
the chop-happy terrorists hold sway. They
are raping and ravaging the honor whoever
they wish and fancy.
They are
also adding to the number of 'sacrifices'
that Hurriyatis and non-Hurriyatis of
Kashmir Tahreek keep throwing at the
media, government and people. That does
not mean that rape is a something to be
condoned. It is a heinous crime that must
be reckoned as such. The sad thing is
that, it is only selective rapes that
exercise people, outrage the calm of bar
councils and make university students go
berserk. Abu Garib shamed not only the
Americans but the whole world that
civilized people could commit such
atrocious acts. Yet there have been
abu-garibs a dime a dozen in Iraq and all
around. None protested it; none found
anything heinous in all the atrocities
that happened at the same Iraqi prison,
two or three years ago. Few,
incidentally, protested the wide
desecrations that the Taliban piled on
Afghanistan. Of course, few know about
those happenings. Because, few choose to
know about them, and fewer are ready to
get agitated over those outrages. Thus
few know about the Pandit woman who was
raped and sawed through in Kashmir in
early nineties. The media helped bring
the straits of the Gujjar woman of Doda
to fore, though none went berserk about
it. Handwara is making headlines because
a whole people has forgotten everything
else and taken up their cause. That is
good.
For, rape
is a heinous crime. It deserves full
condemnation. When it is committed by a
disciplined force, it becomes all the
more abhorrent. One does not know if
punishment is any compensation for the
outrage. However, there is a comfort,
though cold, in it. Unlike other
violators, they get punished. A colder
statistic of early this year tells that
of a total of 1385 cases of alleged
outrage that were reported and
investigated, 66 were found to have some
substance. That is 4.7% or say 5 percent.
Now, how many rapes does one see in a
typical society, in a 'routine' matter?
Of the 66 cases 32 have been committed to
courts. Not that this makes rape a
condonable thing. Rape is a heinous crime
and that is that. Especially when, one
sees hundreds of rapes going
unregistered, unprotected, unheard even
condoned. One does not know if the
Baramullah rape of nineties, or this
year's Doda rape, was actually condoned
but they could not deserve even a
moderate protest. Does it mean that the
society is getting used to this most
appalling of crimes? No. That thousands
of women, for example, are killed in the
neighboring Pakistan to 'save family
honor' does not mean that the society
there is out to kill women. It is
following a tribal ethos, the distinction
of 'us' and 'them', 'self' and 'others'.
This distinction is worse than condoning
the crime. It marks people as violable
and inviolable: 'us' is sacrosanct, and
'them' is game. The society by giving
selective response in rape and rapine
shows no dulling of hurt. It is just that
'other's' hurts do not pain. They are
'meet'; they are 'deserved' even 'due'!
The same
atrocity in one case is seen as
redemption, in another it becomes a
violation that throws the whole society
into mortal throes. That is the recipe of
inequality. In that scenario all are not
equal. Some are more equal and others are
a lot less equal. Anthropologists know it
as the typical tribal behavior. When it
transcends the tribal formulations and
takes hues that retain the character but
change the contour of application, the
vision gets shrunken. The idea of humans
as one retreats leaving the stereotype of
'us' and 'them', 'we' and 'others'. There
condonable and condemnable are situations
not crimes per se. There a whole people
get exercised over violation of one of
the 'self' but thinks naught of the
atrocities piled on 'others'. It is
wrong, because in the end, all the
atrocities come roosting home. It is
worst because the atrocities are not seen
as atrocities but only as tools to meet
this end, to make that point. It is
appalling because the human is lost and
instead we have an animal dictating its
needs as definitions of civilization.
|
|
Reflections
on the rights of children
By Renu Nanda
As I look around I
feel a cer-tain amount of disappoint-ment on
account of the fact that even when times have
changed perceptibly, most of the children today
have yet to find their rightful place in our
society. I am not being cynical but matter of
fact remains that majority of our children still
are out side realm of modernisation and
advancements taking place around us. Their rights
to survival, development, protection, and
participation are curtailed, denied and not even
recognised in most of the countries including
ours, as constitutional safeguards to this effect
remain only on papers. Recognizing the gravity of
the problem, United Nations initiated
comprehensive plans to safeguard and protect the
fundamental rigths of the children. In this
regard the Beijing platform of Action and the UN
Convention of the Rights of the Child recognized
that every child requires quality and timely
health care, adequate nutrition, education
including vocational training and opportunities
for recreation and leisure within a secure and
loving family environment to develop the fullest
potential. The Convention on the Rights of the
Child adopted by the UN General Assembly on 20
November 1989 came into force after the World
Summit on Children, 29-30 September 1990 for its
universal adoption by the member countries.
Articles explicitly state, ''for the purposes of
the Convention, a child means every human being
below the age of eighteen years unless, under the
law applicable to the child, majority is attained
earlier.'' (Article 1).
States party to
this Convention are therefore mandated to take
all appropriate measures to ensure that the child
is protected against all forms of discrimination
or punishment on the basis of the status,
activities, expressed opinions, or beliefs of the
child's parents, legal guardians, or family
members (Article 2). Further that the States need
to recognize that every child has the inherent
right to life (Article 6). States are also
obliged to provide assurance to the child who is
capable of forming his or her own views, the
right to express those views freely in all
matters affecting the child, the views of the
child being given due weight in accordance with
the age and maturity of the child. (Article 12).
The resolution
further directs the States to make their best
efforts to ensure recognition of the principle
that both parents have common responsibilities
for the upbringing and development of the child.
Parents or, as the case may be, legal guardians,
have the primary responsibility for the
upbringing and development of the child. The best
interests of the child will be their basic
concern (Article 18). States Parties have to
recognize that a mentally or physically disabled
child should enjoy a full and decent life, in
conditions which ensure dignity, promote
self-reliance and facilitate the child's
participation in the community. (Article 23).
Listing out the
fundamental duties, UNO resolution insists upon
the member states to take all appropriate
measures, including legislative, administrative,
social and educational measures, to protect
children from the illicit, use of narcotic drugs
and psychotropic substances as defined in the
relevant international treaties, and to prevent
the use of children in the illicit production and
trafficking of such substances (Article 33).
Member States Parties need to protect the child
against all other forms of exploitation
prejudicial to any aspects of the child's
welfare. (Article 36).
Recognizing the
need for evolving a universal code of conduct
National charter for children has been recently
been notified as a Resolution in the official
Gazette of India on 9th February 2004, which
emphasizes on free and compulsory education for
6-14 years of age group children. So much so that
parents be involved for ensuring education for
harmonious development of the children. The
charter further insists on providing adequate
health care, nutrition minimum basic necessities
of life, assurance of security and childhood care
with a special focus on girl child whose plight
is even worst.
If we turn the
pages of history, rights of a child have been
recognized in various national and international
declarations like, Geneva Declaration of the
Rights of the Child (1924); Rights of the Child
adopted by the General Assembly on 20 November
1959; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
in the International Convenient on Civil and
Political Rights (in particular in Articles 23
and 24); International Convenient on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights (in particular in
Article 10) and Statutes and relevant instruments
of specialized agencies and international
organizations concerned with the welfare of
children.
Statistics in
India show that among deprived and disadvantaged
children denied right to education, girls out
number boys. This can be attributed to gender
inequality and bias within family and society.
Child labour, early marriage, adolescent
pregnancies, and strict compliance to customary
social and religious norms has often resulted in
the violation and abuse of the children rights.
It can also be attributed to lack of support
facilities within the family and community, such
as a creche to look after the younger sibling
because of whom the older girl child is kept at
home to look after the younger child so that the
mother can earn a bare livelihood. Even when
enrolled in school, girls are expected to
undertake heavy domestic chores at a very early
age and are expected to manage both educational
and domestic responsibilities often resulting in
poor academic performance or early dropout.
Besides this, lack of access to schools, refusal
of parents to send their girls to co-educational
schools and the quality of schools further hamper
the education of girls. The denial of the right
to schooling at primary and secondary level puts
vocational pursuits during girlhood and
employment opportunities later, out of reach for
thousands of women more so in rural sector of our
country. Among deprived children, plight of girl
children is the worst and among them child
labour, street children or handicapped become
venerable to physical and emotional exploitation
and are often in danger of being sexually abused.
I would therefore urge that all of us to do their
best to prevent such children more so the girl
children from getting into situations which
results in social injustices. We all know that
the solution to these problems is in relevant
education, which has been rightly regarded as
means of realizing desirable quality of human
life. Education facilitates the development of
personality and rationality of individuals,
empowers them to optimize economic, political and
cultural pursuits and thereby improve their
socio-economic status.
Having understood
the plight of the girl child the need of the hour
is to fathom and analyze the problems, synthesize
the optimistic possibilities and finally
conceptualize a vibrating vitalizer so that
attitudes of all of us are transformed into a
positive attitude with a fresh outlook of the
whole scenario. She needs to be loved, pampered
cared, given the respect adored and worshipped.
The objective of this article is basically to
awaken and acquaint the readers with the
complexities being faced by girl child and as a
consequence, to evolve a focused approach for the
emancipation of the strata which constitutes
practically half of the population of our
country.
(The author
is faculty member PC Deptt of Education Jammu
University)
|
|
| |
|
|
