The Rushdie debacle is an indictment of India’s democracy

This article has been published in The Independent.

It is the complaint of the complacent to argue, “it’s all their fault” and in India the opportunity to argue “it’s them” is ever-present. But with the dust almost settled on the Rushdie fiasco, it’s apparent that this complaint against India’s government is not being made often enough.

The handling of the Rushdie fiasco has led to the accusation that the government showed scorn for democratic values. But a stronger charge can be made. The fiasco exposes the government’s willingness to abdicate its duties to protect freedom of expression and maintain law and order. Much worse than scorn, India’s government has shown disregard for its democratic responsibilities.

The issue was only ostensibly a law and order one. Cutting off Salman’s video-link was necessary to avert the threat of violence, we were told. But a detail in David Remnick’s blog is telling: “The security apparatus [at the festival] was…enormous”, well before Rushdie was due to arrive. Could this “enormous” security deployment not have protected a citizen against threats of “elimination” from, what transpired to be, fictional assassins? And if the concern of the Rajasthani and State administration were that the protests would get out of hand, where was the condemnation and where were the appeals for peace?

Religiosising the debacle is another distraction. Muslim leaders and groups have insisted their protests were always going to be peaceful. The way to solve the intractable conflict between the right to say what you please and the right to be respected is not to entertain more theorising. Debate is necessary but in this instance, redundant. India’s legal system has reached a satisfactory compromise on the issue. The penal code provides a right to free expression unless the speaker intends to incite.  Rushdie’s presence, physical or virtual, was plainly not intended to incite and so religious sensibilities, according to the law, were in no need of protection.

Here, Nick Cohen’s point about power resounds: “few admit that what makes liberal democracies liberal is that “power” will not throw you in prison [for speaking freely]”. Freedom of expression exists therefore only to the extent that the State will protect it. In this instance, the “power” of the radical, militant few was allowed to stifle free discussion because of the absence of political will. This apathy amounts to an abdication of the responsibility, shared by all democratic governments, to safeguard the right of free speech.

The most pernicious implication of the Rushdie debacle is self-censorship. As Nick Cohen points out in his timely book, fear is the greatest threat to open discussion. Extremists, by definition, flout both the moral consensus and the law. The refusal to apprehend the threat of violence and the patent indifference shown towards free expression by India’s government risks establishing a dangerous precedent. The risk is one of fundamentalists filling the power vacuum left by the absence of political will.

Rushdie’s diagnosis is entirely correct. What his silencing marks is the “decline in the liberty of ordinary citizens to engage in discourse”. The failure of free expression in the Rushdie debacle, however, is not absolute. It’s ironic that in silencing Salman at Jaipur, extremists have catapulted his international profile and have pushed The Satanic Verses once again to the fore of international political and literary consciousness. The victim here is India’s free and democratic society.

The most peculiar thing about the Rushdie ‘black farce’ is that Rushdie, since the ban on his book, has entered the country and attended the Festival without opposition. Salman was not being self-effacing when accepting “the vast majority of Indian Muslims…don’t give a damn whether I come or go”. What is different now? The imminent Uttar Pradesh elections. The suspicion is that the ruling Congress party refused to protect Salman’s rights as a citizen out of fear of alienating Muslim voters. The Rushdie debacle rests therefore on the fact of a government reneging on its present responsibilities to focus on future prospects. What the Congress party have demonstrated is political opportunism of the worst kind.

The Rushdie debacle is the kind of national crisis that draws conspiracy theorists and cries of foul government agendas. Even as we dismiss those, the central issue has been abstracted. Protecting the rights of the citizen, maintaining law and order and safeguarding free speech are all basic and fundamental responsibilities of democratic governments. On each account, in the Rushdie debacle, India’s administration failed. The charge is more than one of simply showing scorn for democratic values, the Indian government’s failures amount to political abnegation.

Ram Mashru

The Abu Qatada judgment undermines the fight against torture

This article has been published in The Huffington Post.

The UK for the last 10 years has tried to extradite Abu Qatada, a terror suspect, to Jordan where he faces trial on charges of terrorism. The European Court of Human Rights however ruled last week that such a deportation is illegal because Qatada is likely to face an unjust trial. On these sparse facts, hysterical rights sceptics have re-energised their attack on human rights, as Trojan horse being used to undermine Parliament’s sovereign will. But, it is the human rights community, not panicky politicians, that should be alarmed by the Court’s decision.  The decision is one in which the fight against torture suffers a mighty blow.Chief sceptic is Philip Johnston for whom the judgment was an instance of human rights being manipulated by a terrorist to “fool” Britain. Of all the MPs with an opinion on the matter it’s unsurprising that Johnston quotes Raab, a fellow libertarian and rights-sceptic. It serves as evidence of their thoughtless hostility to human rights that they both miss the implications of the case and miss it so widely.

The Court, for present purposes, decided two issues and in doing so, established a far-reaching rule, from which it carved a narrow exception. The Court ruled that extraditions, to countries suspected of carrying out torture, were lawful provided diplomatic assurances had been procured. By so deciding, the Court ruled in favour of the UK Government. Indeed it praised the detail and depth of the understanding our government had agreed with their Jordanian counterparts. Put another way, a diplomatic assurance is now all that is needed to safeguard a convict from the threat of torture.

This rephrasing is hardly needed to expose the gaping flaw in the Court’s reasoning. Diplomatic assurances, essentially gentleman’s agreements, have now been elevated to the status of substantive rights protections. Far from subverting the will of the Parliament, the Court have struck a death blow to efforts to expose ‘torture treaties’ between states, to the effort to uncover the practice of torture and to the effort to condemn States for turning a blind eye. In what is perhaps its most politically deferential judgment yet, the Court have relegated all concerns about the torture of terror suspects by placing complete and blind faith in the invisible processes of international relations.

Despite the diplomatic assurance, the Court ruled Abu Qatada’s deportation would be illegal under Article 6, which enshrines the right to a fair trial. By taking into account the real risk that evidence obtained by torture would be used to incriminate Abu Qatada, the Court reasoned that to allow the deportation would be to countenance an “immoral, illegal” and “unreliable” trial. Without the risk of corrupt evidence being used against him, Qatada would have been deported and so potential article 6 infringements constitute a narrow defence to the far-reaching diplomatic assurances rule. It is this narrow exception that has been typically mischaracterised by Johnston and is ilk.

There is rightful consternation among human rights groups. The diplomatic assurances rule amounts to an “alarming setback” according to Julia Hall of Amnesty International, and represents taking “one step forward, two steps back”. The “positive development” of the Article 6 exception, she argued, was “eclipsed” by the Court’s decision to substitute diplomatic assurances for binding legal obligations. States, particularly in the anti-terror context, have eroded prohibitions on torture and the European Court’s decision amounts to a “green light” on securing “unreliable” assurances in the place of legal guarantees. Human Rights Watch and Liberty have echoed these criticisms.

Several options remain open in the Qatada case. The quickest solution would be to seek assurances that improper evidence would not be used. Alternatively, there is nothing preventing Qatada going on trial in the UK and Shami Chakrabati has urged that this be done “without delay”. Or, the UK Government could appeal the European Court’s decision. Doing so will add a few more years to Qatada’s already 7 year internment. It should be noted that Qatada has spent this time in the confines of a jail cell, without charge.

The law of human rights is, at its core, the process of balancing competing demands. Abu Qatada’s case is but one example of the effort to weigh the demands of national security against the rights of the individual. With the diplomatic assurances innovation, the Court has eased the process of deporting terror suspects to places where the risk of torture is both real and high. In doing so, they have abdicated their apolitical mediating role and devolved responsibility for protecting potential torture victims to the whispered negotiations of governmental corridors.

Ram Mashru

‘It’s a girl: the three deadliest words in the world’

This article has been republished in The Independent. 

It’s a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer’s most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are ‘missing’. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

Gendercide in South Asia takes many forms: baby girls are killed or abandoned if not aborted as foetuses. Girls that are not killed often suffer malnutrition and medical neglect as sons are favoured when shelter, medicine and food are scarce. Trafficking, dowry deaths, honour killings and deaths resulting from domestic violence are all further evils perpetrated against women. This femicide has led the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces to report in ‘Women in an Insecure World’ that a secret genocide is being carried out against women at a time when deaths resulting from armed conflicts have decreased.

The brutal irony of femicide is that it is an evil perpetrated against girls by women. The most insidious force is often the mother in law, the domestic matriarch, under whose authority the daughter in law lives. Policy efforts to halt infanticide have been directed at mothers, who are often victims themselves. The trailer shows tragic scenes of women having to decide between killing their daughters and their own well-being. In India women who fail to produce sons are beaten, raped or killed so that men can remarry in the hope of procuring a more productive wife.

It is an oft-made argument that parental discrimination between children would end if families across south Asia were rescued from poverty. But two factors particularly suggest that femicide is a cultural phenomenon and that development and economic policy are only a partial solution: Firstly, there is no evidence of concerted female infanticide among poverty-stricken societies in Africa or the Caribbean. Secondly, it is the affluent and urban middle classes, who are aware of prenatal screenings, who have access to clinics and who can afford abortions that commit foeticide. Activists fear 8 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the last decade.

The Chinese cultural bias towards male children is one exacerbated by the birth control policy. India, however, poses a more complex problem where the primary cause is a cultural one.

Activists attribute a culture of valuing children by their economic potential to South Asia’s patriarchal social model in which men are the sole breadwinners. Sons both carry the family name and work from a young age. Daughter, on the other hand, impose the burden of a dowry before leaving the home upon marriage. Strict moral codes, onerous cultural expectations and demanding domestic responsibilities are all forces that further subjugate women.

Dr Saleem ur Rehman, director of health services for the Kashmiri Valley, has conceded that a healthy male to female infant ratio in Kashmir in 2001 led him and his team to become complacent. Since 2001, the ratio has dropped from 94.1 to 85.9 girls per 100 boys. The solution, however, lies beyond merely holding officials to account.

The cultural root of the problem partially explains why an effective solution has eluded authorities. Legal prohibitions have proved ineffective. In India, dowries were outlawed 1961 and in 1994 the Prenatal Determination Act outlawed gender selective abortions. Yet dowries remain a condition of marriage and action against unregistered or non-compliant clinics fail to intercept registered medical professionals performing illegal operations.

A crude supply and demand distinction can be drawn. Activists argue the demand for eliminating female fetuses is independent of the supply of illegal services. Only those that can afford to abort will do so. Others simply kill or abandon female infants after birth. This foeticide/infanticide equation will only skew towards the latter if the problem of illegal clinics and criminal doctors were solved.

In the New Statesmen, Laurie Penny explained that South Korea improved its infant gender ratio through a programme of education. But is increasing the awareness of contraception, abortion laws and women’s rights a panacea? No. Educational efforts insufficiently target the core cultural canker. Similarly, economic policed designed to encourage development are necessary but insufficient. Any improvement in living conditions is unlikely to offset the financial burden of raising a child and a dowry.

A solution therefore must be three-fold. Policy efforts combatting poverty must be supplemented by legal prohibitions. There must be an educational programme informing women of their rights. Finally and most importantly, there must be a social and religions campaign aimed at destroying ossified cultural attitudes.

The distinction between, on the one hand a programme of economics and education and on the other a cultural campaign is not qualitative but quantitative. The latter warrants a greater level of official engagement, allowing governments to actively discourage femicide rather than passively encouraging change.

A ‘secret genocide’ is a malaise in response to which government paternalism must surely be justified. In Kashmir, officials have enlisted the help of social and religious leaders. It is religious and social leaders that must reinforce legal prohibitions on dowries with campaigns attacking the social pressures of producing one. And they must supplement information of women’s rights by persuading mothers to educate their daughters and to allow their daughters to work. These cultural channels are best placed to begin to erode sexist cultural monoliths.

Ram Mashru

The lessons to be learned from India’s unsung protests

The obligatory 2012 predictions have been made and the commentariat are unanimously forecasting doom and gloom. Pessimism, when rife, becomes contagious but these lamentations should be reserved in the case of India, where the greatest political movement since its independence is underway.

India’s anti-corruption protests have gone largely unreported and John Pilger’s recent article is an example. He gravely predicts that India will experience its own Arab spring and yet not once cites the anti-corruption protestsrippling across the country.

With pervasive official corruption, sclerotic parliamentary opposition, an inept Prime Minister and an increasingly menacing financial class, the anti-graft movement faces a near Herculean struggle. But the new year marks new beginnings and now is a chance to reflect on the pertinence of India’s anti-corruption movement.

Anna Hazare, the movement’s elderly figurehead, and the anti-graft movement have returned to the political fore after the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India’s parliament, failed to pass an anti-corruption law. Parliament is now in recess and the bill will not be reconsidered until March.  Hazare, who threatened to resume his fast in response, has fallen ill and amid claims of changing tack the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement has begun to stagnate. Yet the movement is, for several reasons, a strategic success.

Foremost, the IAC movement is a vindication of organised peaceful protest as an effective political tool. The movement has served as a lens through which focus on corruption has intensified and the pressure on parliament increased. Passing a LokPal (public ombudsman) bill has been tried seven times already since 1968. In the long and old fight to combat graft, the anti-corruption movement now dominates India’s political and popular discourse like never before. In a society so divided by capitalism, caste and creed the movement has become a rallying point.

Hazare’s threats to fast unto death have spearheaded the Jan LokPal bill through India’s parliament. Objectionable as it may be to hold a legislature to ransom with the threat of starvation, in the context of India’s inert democracy such galvanising acts of self-sacrifice are unsurprising and necessary. Though the Rajya Sabah has reached an impasse over the bill’s scope, the movement is making material progress: 21 corrupt ministers from BJP (India’s nefarious nationalist party) have been sacked and major corruption scandals have been exposed.

Parallels can be drawn with OLSX: combatting corruption is as much about changing financial and institutional attitudes as the reform of Britain’s financial sector. And corruption poses the same threat to the livelihoods of Indians as austerity measures. And like Occupy, the anti-graft movement has disavowed representative politics, rejecting associations with politicians and refusing to set up a rival political party.  Yet the IAC movement has been a much greater strategic success.

When the anti-graft protests and the occupy movement are juxtaposed, the former establishes two things. Firstly, political protests (within democracies) do better when working with, as opposed to outside of, political processes (I have criticised the failures of OLSX elsewhere). Secondly, the anti-graft movement shows that reform by increment yields more than absolutist demands for wholesale reform.  The relative failures of OLSX, having achieved little beyond engaging our national conscience, attest to these lessons.

There are further points of contrast. Occupy London has sought to lead by example with its non-hierarchical structure. The anti-corruption protests demonstrate that more conventional models remain viable. Movements need figureheads in order to be effective and to an extent, the mere fact of Hazare’s leadership has facilitated the movement’s success. By capturing the national spirit he has mobilised a cross-section of India’s population, transforming their long held frustrations into active protest. In the process, Hazare has packed out stadiums with supporters lending their voice whilst, in morbid worship, watching an elderly activist waste away.

But where movements attract criticism, figureheads attract scorn. The risk with Hazare, who is both leader and martyr, is one of the person overshadowing the protests. Most divisively, the movement have entertained the claim that Hazare is Gandhi’s heir. Gandhi’s legacy is often invoked in times of civil protest but with Hazare, Gandhi’s image has been misappropriated. He is Gandhian in his politics and his physique but not in his achievements. India’s press have denounced him but in rightly denouncing the comparison the press have wrongly denounced his cause. When criticising Hazare’s dogmatism, India’s press have elided the distinction between his motives and means. The anti-corruption movements is the product of a popular consensus and Hazare’s role is purely catalytic.

The movement remains far short of its targets and the IAC have resorted to the baffling step of asking for suggestions as to what to do next. And though the LokPal bill is yet to become law with regional elections on the horizon the movement, it is hoped, will manifest at the ballot box. Political gains notwithstanding, the scale of the movement is unprecedented and a culture shift and the protest’s practices are harbingers of imminent improvement.

An Indian Spring there may well be, but not for the oft-repeated reasons Pilger lists. India’s poor and working class have long been assaulted by a Molotov cocktail of having their land ‘recolonised’ by corporations, of discrimination and of a denial of basic services. If anything will catalyse a political revolution in India it will be the anti-graft movement. The IAC movement is neither the first nor most imaginative attempt at weeding out the deep roots of corruption in India’s society. But there has never been a more opportune moment and success in eradicating institutional corruption will topple the first domino of India’s many structural evils. If the domino falls, it will have done so by the force of popular will working with and within the law. This is the lesson India’s unsung protests offer.

Ram Mashru

Dicuss[n]‘s year in review

Discuss[n] was founded on 12th September 2011. The magazine’s annual report makes clear just how successful Discuss[n]‘s first few months have been. Thank you to everyone who’s visited the site, read the articles and left a comment.

An excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. Discuss[n] was viewed over 2,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 38 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Obama’s Bush-era Bargain

This article originally appeared in Prospect Magazine.

Earlier this month, Obama refused to veto the National Defence Authorisation Act (NADA), which the House of Representatives later passed by a 283-136 majority. The act—which brings into force the indefinite detention of terror suspects before trial, eases the process of rendering American citizens to foreign regimes, and makes the closure of Guantánamo Bay more difficult—marks a new chapter in Obama’s erosion of civil liberties.

Although the White House had threatened to veto the bill, the official line now is that sufficient changes were made to the bill, following the president’s request, to avoid a veto. The reforms gave him the power to grant a waiver in individual cases so that defendants could be tried in civilian courts. But the legislation prohibits spending money in the civilian trials of suspected terrorists, rendering the waiver worthless.

The White House also insisted that, if implementing the NADA jeopardized the rule of law, Congress would be expected to work “quickly and tirelessly” to reverse the damage. But oppressive laws spawn miscarriages of justice, the effects of which persist long after legislation is tweaked.

Commentators have been quick to note the timing of Obama’s volte-face. With less than a year until the presidential election, Obama is being accused of capitulating to Republican factions in an attempt to be seen as tough on terror. But groups across the political spectrum have opposed the act and critics include the justice and defence secretaries and the directors of the CIA and the FBI.

Their refusal to veto the NADA marks a new chapter in a civil liberties record already tarnished by the failure to close Guantánamo Bay, the expansion of Bagram, the detention facility, in Afghanistan, the refusal to investigate or prosecute Bush-era officials complicit in torture, the approval of drone strikes on US citizens and the blocking of numerous public-interest lawsuits challenging presidential abuses.

According to Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, Obama “has proved a disaster” for the “civil liberties cause” in the US. But the implications are much greater. Obama has struck the Bush-era bargain, deciding fundamental rights are a small price to pay for safety. Like Bush, he has failed to learn the post 9/11 lesson that it is counter to national security interests to erode civil liberties. Republicans and Democrats alike have criticised NADA as an affront to American values. And on the international stage, the NADA will damage America’s reputation, delegitimise efforts to combat terrorism and, of course, provide fodder for those who accuse the US of hypocrisy and rights-imperialism.

Ram Mashru