India: A Many-faced Country

Mohammad Zainal Abedin: Afghanistan’s territory should not be used to threaten and attack any country or to shelter, finance or train terrorists, said Indian foreign secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla. Shringla said so, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed an India sponsored resolution on Afghanistan amid the withdrawal of US troops ending the two-decade long war.

India showed the highest degree of concern and reluctance since President Joe Biden fixed the specific date (August 31) of withdrawing foreign troops from Afghanistan.  India dismayed, the international community laments and weeps centering the victory of the Tabliban freedom fighters and the departure of the foreign troops that hurt India. Indian Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrica even editorially opined that America betrayed the people of Afghanistan.

India desired that the American forces should remain in Afghanistan for an unlimited period so that India could catch fish in the muddy water, and it could squeeze, even disintegrate Pakistan creating more and more agents from amongst the Afghans.

Analysts who are aware of India’s ugly records, question the validity and logic of raising such resolutions in UNSC.  They suggest India to see its own face in the mirror.

India itself violated almost all the issues that the resolution asked the Taliban government to do. Let me reproduce some aspects of the resolution on Afghan affairs and examine whether it has such a face and position to table it before the UNSC.

India denies international obligations

India deliberately raised this resolution, as India’s foreign secretary acknowledged saying, “This is of direct importance to India,” Shringla said. This was tabled and passed to keep pressure on the Talibans. While briefing the media after chairing the UNSC meeting on Afghanistan he said, “The resolution also notes the statement by the Taliban on the 27^th August and the Security Council does expect them to adhere to their commitments.”

But India still does not implement its commitment made on Kashmir over 73 years. Doesn’t Shringla know who raised the Kashmir dispute before the UN in 1948? Can Shringla recollect or enumerate how many times UNSC unanimously passed resolutions on Kashmir asking to hold free and fair plebiscite in Kashmir and how many times Nehru committed to honor those resolutions.

Did Shringla forget Nehru’s Solemn pledges, “India is committed to hold plebiscite in Kashmir. If the result of the plebiscite goes against India, still we will accept it.” Though Nehru survived for another 15 years after the first resolution adopted at the UN in 1948, he never honored his commitments.

Now India claims Kashmir is India’s integral issue and none has any right to middle it.

India deployed one million military and armed forces of various names, who indiscriminately kill the innocent Kashmiris who are    desperate to end Indian occupation in Kashmir. Shringla knows that the Indian policymakers seldom honor their own commitments with their neighboring countries.

Human rights in India

The India-sponsored, “resolution also recognizes the importance of upholding human rights, especially Afghan women, children and minorities ….”

It was really cruel fun that India instructed the Tablibans to honor human rights. But a question surfaces, does India do the same? India has no face to cry for human rights, as India itself is accused of gross human rights violation.

If a group of researchers since 1947 would have engaged to document the incidents of human rights violations in India, they would have utterly failed to unearth the exact picture, as many tragic happenings went to eternity as Indian governments or historians consciously kept them buried. Even many tragedies, which now happen daily in India-Occupied Kashmir, Punjab, Naxal and Maoist dominated areas, Northeastern States of India remained unrecorded. India is the only country where its armed forces have been fighting against its own citizens since 1947 (particularly in Nagaland and Kashmir). Dozens of draconian black laws are there in India which unaccountably allow the law enforcing agencies to enter any private, even public premises, search and demolish any house, arrest, even kill any so-called suspect without warrant or warning. Secret, even open indiscriminate firing (that leads to death) on the innocent people, custodial death, killing in crossfire, extrajudicial killing, imposed missing, and many other types of unlawful liquidations are very common and normal practices in the so-called largest democracy, named India. Many of those human rights violations are intentionally kept unrecorded. Western powers, the vanguard of human rights, are well-aware of India’s black records of human rights violations, but are not vocal against India as they need to use it for their global interest.

If a group of researchers are engaged to document incidents of human rights violations in India since 1947, they will surely fail to unearth as many tragic happenings went to eternity as Indian governments or historians consciously avoided those. Even though many tragedies happened in India-Occupied Kashmir, Punjab, Naxal and Maoist dominated areas, Northeastern States of India remained unrecorded. India is the only country where its armed forces are fighting against its own citizens. Law enforcing agencies can enter any private, even public premises, search and demolish any house, arrest, even kill any so-called suspect without warrant or warning. They conduct secret and open indiscriminate firing (that leads to death) on the innocent people, custodial death, killing in crossfire, extrajudicial killing, imposed missing,  rape and gang-rape for days together and many other types of unlawful happenings are the common and daily-happenings in the so-called largest democracy, named India. Many of those human rights violations are kept unrecorded.

Rights of women in India

The resolution askes the Taliban to uphold the rights of the women and the minority communities. But what is the position of these two groups of people in India.  The crime against the Indian women is extremely horrific.

Besides, domestic violence, child marriage, forced marriage, etc., above all, “Rape is the most common crime against women in India”, opined ‘Times of India’.

An India magazine, OUTLOOK, (March 2021) reported in a curious style: “Bulandshahr, Hathras, Badaun, Unnao, Gorakhpur, Rajasthan, Delhi – The never-ending list of gang-rape cases across nation (India) enraged people.”

This cruel culture started on December 16, 2012, with Nirbhaya, a medical student, when she was brutally gang-raped in a moving bus in Delhi while the rapists traumatized her private part by inserting iron rods.

Six days later December 22 of the same year Joti Singh (23), also a student, boarded a lonely wrong bus to reach her location but failed. Six men raped her one after another who also inserted an iron rod to tear her vagina, small intestine and large intestine came out.  Rapists left her to die on the road: naked, wounded, exposed, devastated. No one of self-styled humanist civilized India even turned to look at the ill-fated raped girl, as if, a raped girl has no right to live and could have a happy married life. She died in the hospital on December 28 after battling for six days.

Since 2012 such inhuman gang-rape, particularly penetrating rod through woman organ very frequently occurred across India. The latest one occurred just on September 9, 2021, when a 34-year-old woman was raped inside a solitary tempo. The rapist / rapists penetrated an iron rod through her genital part and pushed it repeatedly that caused her death, battling in the hospital for 33 hours.

Such tragedies expand daily, and nothing changed, even after so many promises were made by the Indian rulers and their partymen. ‘OUTLOOK’ provides more horrifying stories saying, “The Odisha rape victim was just 3-year-old, Banda victim was 8-year-old, Hathras victim was just 19, Bulandshahr girl who was raped and then set on fire was also 12-year-old. The list can go on and on…”.

“What is more shocking is the fact that, in most of the cases, it has turned out that these minor girls are sexually abused and molested by someone they already know or someone, who is known to their families,” (which really uncovers the degradation of moral and social values of the Indians as a whole).

Indicating to the frequency of random rape in India ‘OUTLOOK’, quotes child rights group, ‘NGO CRY’ as saying: “the sexual offence is committed against a child in India every 15 minutes and there has been an increase of more than 500 per cent over the past 10 years in crime against minors.”

The same magazine quoted India’s NCRB crime against women report (2019) that says: “—- Uttar Pradesh (UP) reported the highest number of crimes against women (59,853), accounting for 14.7 per cent of such cases across the country. UP also had the highest number of crimes against girl children under the ‘POCSO Act’ (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.) and ranked second in terms of rapes committed.”

According to the ‘POCSO Act’ report “India has a population of 472 million children (census 2011) below the age of eighteen. Protection of children by the state is guaranteed to Indian citizens by an expansive reading of Article 21 of the Constitution of India and also mandated given India’s status as a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.”(POCSO or Protection Of Children from Sexual Offences Act: Necessity and Features (byjus.com)

But such a harsh law utterly failed to protect the children not to speak of the girls and women. Some rapes were unthinkably inhuman and cruel. Iron road was inserted inside the vagina of a victim that caused her death.  Anandabazar Patrika of Kolkat informed the most gruesome rape that a rapist to insert his penis cut the vagina of four-year with a blade that caused her death.

One the basis of sexual assault and harassment against the women, India is the worst dangerous country in the world. They are subjected to being harassed not only outside, but also inside their own house. (Anandabazar Partica, August 31, 2o21).

Nobody knows the exact number of rape victims in India. Concerned campaigners believe thousands of more cases of sexual assaults are ignored by police amid cultural barriers that frequently blame the victim. In most cases, victims generally keep the issue secret, unless it is disclosed by the rapists or incidentally surfaced.

India is such a country where gang-rapists insert their penis enlarge the vaginal path of minor girls and cut it with a blade; where the endangered minor girl’s mom humbly appealed to  the gang-rapists, “Dads, my daughter is minor-aged. Please (you) come one by one; where women are brutally killed after rape, where rapists celebrate the century of rape. Surprisingly Shringla and his masters — the policymakers of the same country — being worried become senseless, crying for the security of the Afghan women and girls. What a cruel mockery it is!

No country, other than India, so dishonorably treats the woman. Giving birth to a girl is treated as a symbol of enduring ill-luck. Birth of girls is still discouraged. Thousands of fetuses of baby girls are aborted, even killed just after their birth.

Another anti-woman culture is in vogue in some parts of India where girls are sent to Hindu mandir as ‘Devadasi’ outwardly to learn Hinduism, to pray to the deities, sing and dance to please them. But these girls who can never marry or live with their families, but in many cases, are abused by the Hindu purohits.

Human rights violations centering cow

In India members of the minority community are tortured in notorious ways centering cows. Cow beef is a popular edible item all over the world. India is the number one exporter of beef. Its 150 beef exporters sell beef to 50 Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Many Indian Hindus also consume beef. But such a country does not allow the Muslims to eat beef. Muslims are frequently harassed, tortured, even killed falsely accusing them of eating, or possessing, or freezing, or selling beef. During the Modi regime over 200 Muslims were unlawfully tortured to death for unfounded accusations.

Even the Dalits who are Hindu are tortured and killed for skinning out the dead cows. Such systematic torture and murder are very common in India since Modi came to power. Earlier in 2002 when BJP came to power, its cadres dragged out four Dalit men from the police station, whose eyes were gouged out, faces burnt and bodies mutilated and trampled upon in Dulina area of Haryana. Local units (Arya Samaj and Bajrang Dal) of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) claimed that a cow’s life was more valuable than that of humans. Modi effectively politicized cow as a weapon to get power. Cow politics has featured prominently in the last four of BJP’s electoral manifestos since 1998. Two widely distributed text message slogans were: ‘Vote for Modi, give life to the cow’, ‘if cow is saved, the country will be saved.’

If the status of a cow is placed above human beings how can one believe human rights are preserved or secured in India. How Shringla can advocate and claim that India stands for human rights? Why the Indians target Afghanistan without allowing them to have a breath after liberating their country at the cost of blood and miseries.

Last of all I should say, India or any other country, or government has no right to poke nose in the internal affairs of Afghanistan.  External pressure or interference will be counterproductive. It is the popular government of Afghanistan that will determine their policy. Whatever changes the puppet governments, on behalf of the occupation powers, made in Afghanistan, the popular government reserves the absolute sovereign right to review, accept or entirely abolish those whether they are related to Afghanistan’s internal or external policies. Why should the Afghan people carry the burden of the occupation powers?  Imposing anything on the Afghan government is tantamount to denying their sovereignty and independence. How India or its masters could hope that a new independent Afghanistan will bear the burdens of occupation eras? *

Mohammad Zainal Abedin is a Bangladesh-origin American journalist & researcher.

September 15, 2021