Issue 55 Vol III, January 15, 2008

M E D I A

Liberty and the Monster State- 3
Chaitanya Kalbag

Globalisation has brought tremendous benefits to billions of people. It has freed trade, made information easily accessible, and encouraged the freedom of thought.

But globalisation has also meant the strengthening of authoritarian and repressive regimes at the cost of the individual’s rights and the individual’s privacy.

It may sound like an exaggeration but it seems that everything you speak or read or write can now be “Googled”. And authorities want more and more information from you.  This is also a clear loss of individual liberty.  How many times over the past year have you had to fill out forms – either paper forms or electronic forms – with a host of personal details, including your parents’ names, your religion, your income bracket, your credit card number, your address or your telephone number?

Yesterday I read that because of a clerical mistake, the private details of 25 million people in Britain have been lost – the computer disks may have fallen into the wrong hands.  This data included the names, ages and gender of hundreds of thousands of children.

So globalisation has its risks, and many people, while welcoming the access to information, are also uneasy, although they cannot articulate their fear about the abridgement of individual rights in a globalised world.  A globalised world also means weaker nation-states, and weaker nation-states mean weaker enforcement of citizens’ rights.

Globalisation affects the economy, politics, social structures, our perceptions of time and space and above all whether there is an immutable constitutional order. Globalisation would only widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

The effects of globalisation are only just beginning to be understood by a dazzled public. It is like offering a hundred television channels to a family brought up on Doordarshan fare. Individual liberty is not just freedom of expression – it is freedom of movement, of religion, and of economic opportunity.

Do we really recognise, and appreciate, the forces that are at work in our elections for example?  It is commendable that India has successfully held 14 national elections, and that we are a beacon of democracy in a neighbourhood of crisis.  Look around you at Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. But have our elections really given us the governments we deserve?  Our first-past-the-post system of winning an election can bring in a government elected by a minority of the electorate. There is no doubt that six of our 14 elections have resulted in a change in governing party or coalition. But if you look at the extent to which elections can take place under duress, or be downright rigged as in the case of Jammu and Kashmir, then you have to question whether ours is truly a representative democracy.

I understand – and I am not an expert – that an individual citizen has every right to petition Parliament directly if he or she is in dire trouble. How often has this happened in the 55 years since our first general election? If we did not have an independent judiciary, how many more people would have suffered injustice?

This is not to say that the cloud is all dark. There is a silver lining and that is the Right to Information Act.  In the two years that the RTI Act has been in force, there have been 11,000 requests, and the RTI Commission has resolved 7,500 of them. More and more poor and marginalised people in different parts of India are becoming aware of  RTI and of its inherent power – for instance, to obtain data on what the minimum wage ought to be, whether money allocated for a rural project was indeed spent, and so on.  RTI will force major changes as time passes – chiefly, it will practically render the Official Secrets Act redundant and useless, and force every government department, ministry and subsidiary to digitise its records so that they are accessible by the average citizen.

I said the cloud is not all dark, but dark it certainly is. Despite years of grandiose promises and noble intentions, our politicians cannot find it in themselves to enact the Lok Pal bill which would give us a national ombudsman. The Lok Ayukta mechanism is working in some states, but the road to improving our dismal ranking on the global corruption index of Transparency International is long, rocky, and arduous.

To go back to globalisation, let it not be said that business does not have a conscience. The McKinsey study I referred to earlier asked senior executives from around the world how large corporations can harm the public good. At the top of the list, 65 percent identified “polluting and damaging the environment”, 39 percent put their finger on “putting profits ahead of people’s well-being” and 33 percent admitted to “exerting improper influence on governments”.

Recently, when I watched the movie Superman again and heard Christopher Reeve utter this classic line, it did not sound at all ridiculous, since America has really decided to be the “inspector-general” of the world.

Globalisation inevitably refers us to the status of the individual in other countries.  Is that any better?  Is the global citizen or the global villager any more empowered, more secure, more prosperous and happier than before the iPod was invented or before you could eat Kentucky Fried Chicken in Karol Bagh, or sip Starbucks coffee in Beijing’s Forbidden City?

The United States, where so many of the world’s great ideas take birth, has of course invented the term globalisation. Sadly, it has also in the post-September 11 world invented unique ways to seek and incarcerate, or even kill or destroy the individual human being, wherever he or she may be living or hiding. The U.S. is currently the world’s only superpower and it ought to bear the greatest responsibility to protect human rights. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

The first time I read the phrase “extraordinary rendition” I thought it described a great performance by an opera singer. You can count on the Americans to find imaginative uses for the English language. “War on Terror” is a tautology. War itself is terrifying, and terror?

The U.S. also resorts to proxy detention, which means detaining suspected terrorists in foreign prisons at the behest of the United States.

In June this year six human rights organisations jointly announced the names of 39 individuals who had been held in secret prisons by the U.S, and whose current whereabouts are not known. Their report says the 39 were captured in countries like Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan and then renditioned.

Ironically, the United States is a signatory to the most high-sounding international agreements on behaving in a humane manner. For example, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which defines enforced disappearance as the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by the State or its agents.

The U.S. is also a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. But that does not stop U.S. authorities from holding a large number of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, and in the secret CIA prisons that George W. Bush only pretended to shut down earlier this year. And it does not stop the Americans from using interrogation techniques that are torture by another name.  For instance the inflicting of intolerable pain or injury without causing actual death, or waterboarding.

The U.S. is not alone in re-inventing the definition of torture. Torture is common in India too. As for the narrowing of individual rights, you could range across the globe and come up with dozens of examples. Singapore, where you are now actively encouraged to spy on your neighbour in case he or she is or is harbouring a terrorist suspect. China, where every new showcase of prosperity ranging from Beijing’s preparations for next year’s Olympics to the Three Gorges dam is built on human displacement, ecological damage, and repression. And Russia, where former world chess champion Garry Kasparov is fighting a lone, and increasingly dangerous, political battle against Putin and his oil-fuelled dictatorship. Or Myanmar, where the world has decided to let the junta have its cruel way.

Our jewelled earth

I am sure many of you saw a photograph in the newspapers the other day of Planet Earth. Shot by a Japanese satellite in delayed sequence, Earth looks like a beautiful blue-and-white jewel, shining bright against the inky blackness of space.

Every idea is born in the mind of one human being, one individual, and that individual is but one infinitesimal and fragile speck on that jewelled Earth. Without the genius and the creativity of the individual we will not evolve. We will not set our compasses for a brighter future. We will not live individually happy and satisfying and achieving lives.

So is there hope?

Capitalism and democracy together are a very potent and rich combination.  But it has to be true democracy, and it has to be capitalism of equal opportunity.

Perhaps the most pellucid illustration of what I am saying comes from Howard Roark’s trial speech in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”:

“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received – hatred. The great creators – the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors – stood alone against the men of their time.”

So, dear friends, let us make sure the response they get is not hatred. Let us make sure they do not stand alone. [Ends]

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