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Journalism of Courage
Naxalites capture and torture, sometimes on camera, those they perceive to be enemies of the people. Mirwaiz Umar Farooq says he will take up human rights violations by security forces in Kashmir with the National Human Rights Commission. Groups at war with the state use torture as a form of protest; the state for its part uses torture against civilians to demonstrate its power.
Living in a country where torture has become banal, we know it is just as likely to emanate from disgruntled and disaffected fellow citizens as it is from the institutions mandated to protect us 8212; the army, the police, the paramilitary. When authoritarianism and violence become common currency across classes, across the divide between state and citizenry, and across ideological camps, then nobody has qualms disrespecting the basic tenets of civilised political discourse, behaviour, and transaction. This is what we witness in Indian political and public life at the moment: the utter breakdown of civility.
Torture is the great leveller: soldiers do it, policemen do it, revolutionaries do it, terrorists do it, insurgents do it, separatists do it, citizens do it. What is it with torture that it8217;s so easy for all those who are armed 8212; legally or illegally, within the establishment or fighting the order of things 8212; to resort to this particular form of degradation, action that degrades both agent and victim, empties them both of their basic dignity as human beings? What is the alarming ubiquity and banality of torture telling us about our society? Whether it8217;s unapologetically on our television screens thanks to People8217;s War, or hidden away in hell-holes like Srinagar8217;s infamous and now shamelessly reclaimed 8220;facility8221; Papa 2, what is the growing incidence of torture symptomatic of?
Ever since Abu Ghraib broke last year, America has been soul-searching: in the press, in the legislature, inside the military, in academia, in every forum of private and public reflection and debate. When is India planning to wake up to what our state does to our people, and our people, given half a chance, have no hesitation in doing to one another?
In early October, the US Senate voted 90-9 to outlaw the torture of detainees held in US custody overseas. Republican Senator John McCain tabled the motion to this effect as an amendment to a 440 billion Pentagon funding bill. George Bush8217;s White House opposed McCain8217;s amendment, which would render practices, including 8220;toture lite8221;, at locations like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay not just scandalous, but impossible to continue. Despite the near-unanimity of the Senate against torture abroad, the entire Bill is threatened with a presidential veto should this amendment not be modified. Earlier this week the US Senate passed the Guantanamo Amendment 84-14, which allows Guantanamo Bay prisoners partial access to federal courts. From the Bush administration, Vice-President Dick Cheney is furiously lobbying the US Congress to grant the CIA exemption from the taboo on torture. The argument? We need torture to combat terror.
The same argument that radical leftists in India use to justify torture when they claim to be fighting state terror; the very same argument that the state uses, in Kashmir and elsewhere, when it purports to be combating the terror spread by militants. Yet study after study has shown that torture is never the means to an end. Torture achieves nothing, except the torturing of the victim. It works neither as interrogation, nor as persuasion, nor even as coercion. It is neither a path to the truth nor a weapon against terror. Not only does torture have no place in the rule of law, it has no place even in the laws of war.
Six decades ago, when Primo Levi survived Auschwitz, he characterised the concentration camp as a space not only of unprecedented physical violence, but also of horrific moral ambiguity. He called it 8220;The Grey Zone8221;. When Seymour M. Hersh wrote about Abu Ghraib for The New Yorker in May 2004, he used the very same phrase. Hersh did not even have to name Levi for the full force of this phrase, instantly evocative of the Holocaust, to hit his readers. When the gates of hell were opened, both these places of pain, the Nazi death camp and the Iraqi war prison, revealed a continuum of cruelty that implicated big and small functionaries alike, all along the chain of command.
In Germany as in the US, the impulse for torture issued from the highest levels of political authority, and percolated down to the last uniformed individual who would actually beat, electrocute, rape, sodomise, photograph or in myriad other ways hurt, humiliate, violate and terrorise the victim, possibly to the point of death.
But when torture becomes widespread and common, this grey zone 8211; this space in which rationality and agency are radically perverted, in which no one can be counted on to do the right thing 8211; is no longer confined within the walls and fences of the detention centre or the jail. Torturers may be fringe Maoists, or may belong to a state agency 8211; the fact is they have no place in our midst, they cannot be accommodated in our political community. For surely a society callous and indifferent to torture assumes, as a whole, this deathly pallor, this greyness, this inability to draw a line at what is inhumane, uncivilised, evil?
From August 2005, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi, offers a post-graduate diploma in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding.
