Human rights get precedence

The prime minister himself called it a 8216;blot on the national image8217;. On the eve of his visits to Singapore and Cambodia he publicly wondered: 8220;With what face will I go abroad after what has happened here?8221;

Within a week or ten days, however, the PM himself said something else in Goa, 8220;Wherever there are Muslims, they do not wish to live with others. Instead of living peacefully they want to project and propagate their religion by creating fear and terror in the minds of others8221;.

Our largest minority in India is the Muslim minority. Inevitably, the PM8217;s statement attracted adverse comment and he had to issue a clarification. An extremely sane and mild comment, which did not directly refer to the PM8217;s statement, came from Hamid Ansari, immediately after he relinquished office as vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University. He said: 8220;There is a feeling that there is something terribly dangerous about the word Islam, something wrong with the people associated with it. There is no recognition that Islam has contributed in the widest sense to world civilization8221;. Ansari was earlier India8217;s Permanent Representative to the UN and Ambassador to Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia at other stages of his career.

These last six or seven weeks the country as well as the world have watched all our Opposition parties in Parliament, our National Human Rights Commission, the Minorities Commission, our electronic and print media, as also the international media and scores of observers view in a most negative light the conduct of the Gujarat chief minister and specific members of his Cabinet for not performing their statutory duties to maintain law and order and safeguard the life, limb and property of all classes and communities of the people of Gujrat. By now it is being whispered that certain foreign governments and organisations feel that serious human rights related offences may have occurred in Gujrat.

Today we have to remember that the architecture of international law established after the Second World War was broadly based on the principles and concepts contained in the UN Charter. The world is passing through a period of flux, rethinking and reviewing of several of those concepts. After the end of the Cold War we have witnessed the unraveling of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has acquired greater salience and acceptance. The UN Charter principle on non-interference in the internal jurisdiction of sovereign states, has become blurred and eroded, if not severely damaged. Members of the EU have voluntarily and willingly surrendered certain aspects of their state sovereignty to the EU8217;s Human Rights Tribunal. A somewhat intrusive International Criminal Court is in the process of being born.

It behoves India, therefore, as a major humane power to sit up and take note when in the international media one of our chief ministers is called 8216;Narendra Milosevic Modi8217; and terms like genocide start being thrown around. All of us Indians need to worry and agonise.

There is already a perceptible reduction in export-related economic activity from Gujarat; dwindling flow of investments into that state; advisories being issued by foreign governments about visits to India, thus affecting our tourism industry. Anxieties are beginning to be voiced about the potential of trouble affecting Maharashtra, in view of recent stories of the Shiv Sena8217;s statements and extortions and communal highhandedness there. Certain global credit rating agencies seem to be involved in reviewing our country8217;s credit rating.

Can we afford to be seen as a violent society indulging in reckless communal frenzy and talking about a 8216;final settlement8217;? Should we be emulating Pakistan at this late stage by attempting to re-write our history textbooks for school children or discourage researchers and knowledge-seekers from the wider world from coming to India, despite the fact that we live now in the age of the Internet and the computer.

Foreign journalists have dug up the earlier statements of some of our Central ministers who had then stated that Hinduism must be seen as the basic culture of India and that all Indian Muslims must see themselves as 8220;Mohammadiya Hindus8221;. And even the current head of the RSS, K.S. Sudarshan, is being quoted as opining that if Muslims have to stay in India they must submit to the Indianised version of their religion etc.

We cannot blame them if the international community is unable to square all this with the verdict of our own Supreme Court which has consistently held that secularism is an established feature of the basic structure of India8217;s Constitution.

One is reminded of what Frederick the Great had said: 8220;Religion becomes a dangerous instrument when one knows how to make use of it politically8221;. Let us also remember what Vidur Niti had sought to reach us, that when a ruler forgets to apply proper laws and procedures within his state, no neighbour, small or large, will recognise his nation as powerful or well-ordered. Indignation and rancour are concepts foreign to diplomacy. A diplomat need not be a practitioner of penitence, nor a judge in a criminal court, nor indeed a philosopher. He needs always to pursue the national interest. Our diplomats must judge if by asking all foreigners to desist from mentioning the Gujarat carnage to us, they serve the national interest. We have had occasion to criticise Pakistan using religious intolerance to fan hatred of Hindus in Kashmir and elsewhere. We could need to repeat this in the future unless Pakistan suddenly turns democratic and tolerant. We need to be consistent. Let us remember that religion cannot be the most formative influence on diplomatic theory. Diplomatic theory has to depend on common sense. That is why fanatics and missionaries make the worst kind of envoys. The best are rational and compassionate skeptics.

The writer is a former foreign secretary