People's Democracy

Jawed Naqvi

YOU can be booked in India for possessing two bottles of liquor in your house although keeping just one is fine. This idiotic yet little known law derives sustenance from an old British colonial rulebook once used to keep the natives on a short leash. Although the law isn’t seen being very widely used today, it is there, just in case some irritating quarry needs to be fixed. With several other innocuous-looking but sufficiently coercive statutes available to the world’s largest democracy to harass anyone at will, you do not really require the sham of an Official Secrets Act to punish an Iftikhar Geelani or discipline other errant journalists. Nor do you need a mountain-load of colonial bumpf to stop Anand Patwardhan from screening his badly needed films against nuclear militarism, communal fascism. There are other ways for the modern Indian rulers to tackle dissent. For example, Alex Perry, the Time magazine reporter, could be given the treatment for revealing to the ignorant public some facts about the prime minister’s weakness for high-cholesterol food habits. Since the British did not leave behind a foil against lampooning someone’s proclivity to fall asleep in public, the government found it useful to apply the equally crude system of "police-reporting" at the loathsome foreigners’ registration office, once invented to harass hapless visitors from Pakistan, to bring Perry to heel. Look around yourselves and see how the young and already fading democracies of South Asia are reinventing the colonial laws of British vintage to hound and incarcerate dissent.

Attacks on media are not an Indian monopoly. In a letter to Pakistan’s interior minister Lt-General Moin-ud-din Haider, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières - RSF) was last month calling for the prompt release of British journalist Amardeep Bassey of the Sunday Mercury, saying: "Once again, a reporter of Indian origin has been arrested by the Pakistani security services on a ridiculous pretext. The accusations of spying are grotesque, and indicate discrimination against journalists of Indian origin."

Later, the very next month, the RSF was forced to protest to the Balochistan provincial governor, Amir-ul-Mulk Mengal, about the arrest of journalist Rashid Butt, a Pakistani this time. "By arresting a journalist for reporting on their failure to act, the security forces have not chosen the best means of demonstrating their competence", said Robert Ménard, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders. The journalist was subsequently released on bail but the charges against him were apparently never dropped.

Turn to Bangladesh, another erstwhile British colony. With 145 journalists assaulted or targeted with death threats, one reporter murdered, 16 news rooms or press clubs brutally attacked and four journalists detained by the authorities in scarcely over eight months, it is by far the country with the highest incidents of violence against members of the press. "Not a single day goes by without the press reporting an assault or death threat against a journalist," stressed Nayeem-ul-Islam Khan, advisory editor of the daily Ajker Kagoj.

Says RSF: "This endemic violence against news media professionals is endangering press freedom. Paradoxically, however, this South Asian country has never enjoyed a greater plurality of information sources. The print and electronic media --- especially television --- have actually been enjoying very rapid growth over the last five years."

In Nepal, the editor of a newspaper was recently arrested and murdered in cold blood, apparently for being sympathetic towards Maoist insurgents. Arrests and disappearances are expected to increase and not decrease as the landlocked kingdom braces to fight a strange new variant of terrorism, one that is not evenly remotely linked to 9/11. So why are the Americans and the Indians joining hands to crush people who do not qualify as Islamists, their pet hate? If anything, these insurgents are Hindus, unhappy, perhaps disgruntled and definitely very angry Hindus, who possibly include some Buddhists among them too.

Sri Lanka is one of the world’s most educated and thriving democracies. But it has a sad record of treating its media. People are jailed, killed, beaten up. Many disappear without trace. It’s a strange schizophrenic kind of democracy, very charming and very dangerous.

RSF has been pursuing several cases in Sri Lanka, and was recently assured by interior minister and attorney general that they are committed to completing investigation on the murder of the BBC stringer in Jaffna. Two people, who may have been involved in the murder, were recently detained by investigators.

As though the state is not enough of a tormentor, journalists in South Asia have to contend increasingly with non-state players out to harm them, not infrequently at the behest of the state. Daniel Pearl’s murder in Pakistan is a case in point.

Not very long ago, in fact as recently as 1984, the great date on the Orwellian calendar, the world would have frowned upon these brutal ways of wayward South Asian democracies, rapping them on the knuckles for bad habits they had picked up from this or that communist country, which indeed they had all befriended.

And yet, remember how we used to condemn the Soviet system and its allies in East Europe for violating human rights? Personal freedoms could not be bartered for a totalitarian system and so on, even if that system rose to become a superpower. That was the argument many of used to parrot in their ideological war against the "evil empire."

And leading the anti-Soviet chorus was the United States, its Statue of Liberty becoming the symbol of struggle against communism for whoever cared to join it.

Lech Walesa, Boris Yeltsin, great names, or were they? They all shouted from the rooftops for a change in the tyrannical system of communism. They succeeded. But somewhere, very quietly, someone inserted the word "free-market democracies," where everyone was originally supposed to be struggling for freedom and democracy, regardless of their proximity to the New York Stock Exchange or Hanseng indexes. Moreover, one of the main stated objectives of the American-led anti-Soviet campaign was to usher democracy in Central Asia and also perhaps in Russia. Going by their record so far and with the tacit and overt American encouragement they are getting, neither Turkmenistan nor Uzbekistan, nor Tajikistan, nor Kazhakhstan are going to be making a beeline for multi-party elections in the foreseeable future.

Why go that far? Just take a look at what is happening with the world’s most powerful democracy, the erstwhile workhorse of all manner of freedoms. Now it all seems to have been a conman’s trick to deceive us. The promise of sugarcandy mountain, that led the animals to revolt against the owner of Manor Farm in George Orwell’s masterpiece, has become even a more distant dream today. According to an Associated Press report, even within the United States the FBI is visiting libraries, (yes, libraries!) nationwide and checking the reading records of people it suspects of having ties to terrorists or plotting an attack.

The FBI effort, authorised by the anti-terrorism law enacted after the September 11 attacks, is the first broad government check of library records since the 1970s when prosecutors reined in the practice for fear of abuses, the report said.

The University of Illinois conducted a survey of 1,020 public libraries in January and February and found that 85 libraries had been asked by federal or local law enforcement officers for information about patrons related to September 11. The libraries that reported FBI contacts were nearly all in large urban areas.

If that is the signal from the patron-saint of global freedoms and human rights, why blame the doddering democracies and shameless dictatorships of South Asia if they are now bracing to do one better?

As far as President Bush is concerned he has bluntly defended the use of military tribunals to try non-US citizens accused of terrorism. Mark the word non-US citizens. In his speech on the issue last year, Bush said: "We must not let foreign enemies use the forms of liberty to destroy liberty itself."

As Big Brother develops more muscle and grows even bolder, it is inevitable that personal freedoms will diminish. Here is columnist William Safire’s expression of concern about the ubiquitous monitoring of Washington DC:

"Surveillance is in the saddle. Responding to the latest Justice Department terror alert, Washington police opened the Joint Operation Command Centre of the Synchronised Operations Command Complex (SOCC). In it, 50 officials monitor a wall of 40 video screens showing images of travellers, drivers, residents and pedestrians. These used to be the Great Unwatched, free people conducting their private lives; now they are under close surveillance by hundreds of hidden cameras….

"The monitoring system is already linked to 200 cameras in public schools. The watchers plan to expand soon into an equal number in the subways and parks.

"A private firm profits by photographing cars running red lights; those images will also join the surveillance network…. Terrorists and criminals --- as well as unhappy spouses, runaway teens, hermits and other law-abiding people who want to drop out of society for a while --- will have no way to get a fresh start. Is this the kind of world Americans want? The promise is greater safety; the trade-off is government control of individual lives. Personal security may or may not be enhanced by this all-seeing eye and ear, but personal freedom will surely be sharply curtailed. To be watched at all times, especially when doing nothing seriously wrong, is to be afflicted with a creepy feeling. That is what is felt by a convict in an always-lighted cell. It is the pervasive, inescapable feeling of being unfree."

So the Orwellian nightmare is now very rapidly speeding in the further rightward direction almost everywhere across the world, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka. In fact, here’s a next agenda for a SAARC summit. The question is: Are we going to be around to cover it?