Issue 53 Vol III, December 15, 2007

M E D I A

Liberty and the Monster State-1
Chaitanya Kalbag

Chaitanya Kalbag is an eminent journalist who has always made his mark wherever he went, India Today Reuters where he rose to  be the first Indian to be Asia head and more recently as editor in chief of the Hindustan Times.

As an investigative reporter, he had always his deep commitments for liberal humanistic values and stood by these whatever be the cost. His honesty, dedication and earnestness touch anyone who comes in contact with him. Recently he delivered 3rd Justice V.M. Tarkunde Memorial lecture in Delhi. We take the pleasure of sharing this lecture with our readers. It would be in three parts.

“What came across strongly in my conversations with Justice V.M. Tarkunde was the fragility of individual liberty in a modern state. Those thoughts hold as true today as they did a quarter-century ago. In fact, globalisation has meant, as I shall discuss later on, a corresponding constriction of individual freedom. Cutting-edge technology has sliced through the veneer of civilised conduct and exposed our rights, our space, our freedom of movement, our privacy, to the indifference and depredations of the Monster State.”

I am honoured and touched by the PUCL’s invitation to speak to you today. My life intersected with the PUCL and Mr Tarkunde more than 25 years ago, and my respect and affection for Mr Tarkunde go back to that time.  I published a detailed account of fake encounter deaths in Uttar Pradesh in January 1982. That investigation won me the PUCL Journalism for Human Rights Award. I then filed a public-interest petition in the Supreme Court against V.P. Singh, the then chief minister, and the government of U.P. Mr Tarkunde was my lead counsel, and I remember several illuminating conversations with him. I discovered only recently that later in the same year, 1982, Mr Tarkunde was involved in a facedown with policemen in Madurai. He and fellow silent protesters including Mr Kannabiran were beaten up and tossed into a prison cell. When a judge let Mr Tarkunde off because of his stature, he refused to leave his companions behind. He had to be dragged by his shirt collar on to a bus leaving town.

In our conversations, the intensely modest Mr Tarkunde never held forth about Radical Humanism, or human rights, or his own deep interest in the rights of the marginal Indian. But he was tireless in his quest for justice and in his empathy for the ordinary man – the Aam Admi that is being made so much of by the latest political hodge-podge to rule us. I think it is a sign of the special place Mr Tarkunde holds in the hearts of so many liberty-loving individuals that we have not one, but two Tarkunde Memorial Lectures organised in his memory every year!

What came across strongly in my conversations with Justice V.M. Tarkunde was the fragility of individual liberty in a modern state. Those thoughts hold as true today as they did a quarter-century ago. In fact, globalisation has meant, as I shall discuss later on, a corresponding constriction of individual freedom. Cutting-edge technology has sliced through the veneer of civilised conduct and exposed our rights, our space, our freedom of movement, our privacy, to the indifference and depredations of the Monster State.

In itself, technological advancement is excellent provided it goes hand-in-hand with a strong sense of ethics and respect for individual rights.

Sitting at my desk at home, I can now soar across the world, fly through faraway cities in 3D, delve into thousands of books and papers in libraries and journals, write instantaneously to dozens of people, engage them in virtual correspondence, look at pictures and video of people, things and events in a perennial kaleidoscope.

Not to sound paranoid, but I am always being watched by someone, somewhere.  It does not have to be a Big Brother gazing from a wall. It could be my neighbours, my friends, my family, my undeclared enemies. There are a million ways in which one is vulnerable.

You don’t have to be a “sting journalist” to spy on somebody. Camera photographs and video are now ubiquitous.  We never know who is recording what we are saying. Every e-mail we send is “discoverable” and we should be prepared to see anything we wrote splashed across a blog or a chatroom. Forget about the turn of phrase of a Samuel Pepys – now every one of us is a diarist, spewing stream-of-consciousness on to the World Wide Web, and all it takes is a computer and an Internet connection.

You cannot trust anyone – and nobody trusts you.

It has not taken us very long to move from relative innocence to cunning and coercive criminality. The freedom of the individual has always been as fragile as an eggshell, as ephemeral as a cherry blossom. When we Indians talk about freedom, we are mouthing platitudes based on a wider global sense of human rights.  Traditionally we have been subservient, credulous, compliant, fatalistic and mistrustful of one another.

The reality of freedom

It is fitting that we should be meeting today near Raj Ghat. I have been fascinated by Gandhiji’s prescience and ability to see through his fellow Indians.  In a November 1934 interview, he said: “The State represents violence in a concentrated and organised form. The individual has a soul, but as the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence….. I look upon an increase of the power of the State with the greatest fear, because although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality, which lies at the root of all progress.”

I cannot think of a better way to describe the position of the individual.

It is a perilous position. It’s a position built on false promises and naïve beliefs.

It’s the position of most of us who get pushed around by forces that we have no hope of ever controlling or influencing.

It is the position of the villager whose mud house can be smashed into by a landowner, or the local thanedar.

It’s the position of the Dalit who is likely to be killed just because he dared to dig a well on his own land.

It’s the position of the Naga or the Meitei or the Ahomiya or the Kashmiri who can be picked up and made to “disappear” in a fictitious shootout.

It is the person who lost a dear one in a cinema fire ten years ago, or the parent whose child was raped and beaten to death a decade ago, or the parent whose daughter was shot dead at point-blank range all those years ago.

It’s the position of a middle-class city dweller dragged from his car and beaten up by debt collectors because he defaulted on one instalment.

It is also the position of a law-abiding citizen who can be beaten to within an inch of his life because he remonstrated with a careless and drunken driver.

It’s the position of the widows of the two men shot to death in broad daylight in the centre of the nation’s capital by a posse of policemen because they were mistaken for terrorists. I will describe later how globalization has actually led to the abridgement of individual liberty.

Here I must remind you that the policemen who shot dead Pradeep Goel and Jagjeet Singh said their action was no different from that of policemen in New York or London who shot dead innocent men believing them to be either an armed robber or a terrorist. It is amazing what you can rationalize if you have access to information!

At a less violent level, it is the position of the householder who has watched the price of milk soar by 33 percent over the past year, or the price of dal leap by 50 percent, and listens to economists and ministers gloating about nine percent growth and low inflation while the pay-packet remains the same.

It’s the position of all of us with regard to privacy, particularly data privacy.  India’s data-protection statutes are among the weakest in the world. So are our libel laws. You can be slandered, your most intimate data can be bandied about by a host of insurance companies, your phone can ring incessantly with obtrusive calls from telemarketers, and you have little or no recourse. This is of course an extension of our traditional curiosity in each other’s affairs. And I use the word “curiosity” politely. You don’t need a Right to Information Act to gossip about your friends, neighbours, colleagues, and relatives. A recent McKinsey study said 34 percent of Indian executives felt privacy and data security issues would impact shareholder value even more than environmental issues.

The Connaught Place “shootout” verdict also took over ten years to arrive.  It is interesting how glibly we use the word “shootout” even if the dead men were not armed or fired a single shot.

Former Delhi police commissioner Maxwell Pereira commented after the Connaught Place verdict that “terrorism changed the whole scenario. Each time there was an encounter killing, I would feel proud of the newfound confidence in the firepower of the Delhi Police. I believed there was a need to send a strong message to terrorists and criminals even if it meant eliminating the miscreant. More so because of the inability of the criminal justice system to convict and punish offenders.”

So here we have a senior law-enforcement officer applauding the cutting down of a human being because the justice system is way too slow and inefficient.  If you use the same logic, those ten Delhi policemen ought to be lined up in front of a firing squad because ten years is too late for justice to be really done.

The individual girl

I’d also like to talk a little bit about the rights of the Indian female.  Demographers now estimate that by 2020 men will outnumber women by 23 million in India and 26 million in China.  One figure I remember was that if girls had been born in the same ratio in Asia as the rest of the world there would have been 163 million more girls and women in Asia today.  Just think of that number – 163 million.

What this means is that female infanticide, foeticide, and abortions are depriving huge numbers of girl babies of their most fundamental right – the right to life.  Some demographers predict soaring crime and violence rates in countries with an out-of-whack gender ratio. That is something we all need to think about.

The scourge of untouchability that still haunts India is doubly torturous for women.  In their book “Untouchability in Rural India”, Ghanshyam Shah, Harsh Mander and others catalogue the discrimination and violence visited upon Dalit women.  “In the case of caste-based conflicts, violence often takes the form of targeting Dalit women. ‘Teaching a lesson’ to Dalit men involves violating their ‘property’ – the bodies of their women.”

The last National Family Health Survey data also point to the inequity of being born a woman in India, especially if you are poor.  Look at nearly any category and you will see what I mean.  Twenty-five percent of our poorest women aged 15 to 19 were already mothers or pregnant compared with a national average of 16 percent.   More than 49 percent of poor women had experienced some form of spousal violence, against a national average of 37 percent. [continued]

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