Physicians had better stay busy healing themselves than try and tend the poor and sick in India’s tribal areas. That would seem to be the moral of this tale of two healers.
In January 1999, Australian missionary Graham Staines, who had been serving lepers in a tribal area of the eastern state of Orissa for 34 years, was burnt alive along with his two under-teen sons. The savage crime shook up the entire country. It did not need extra-long investigations to espy the far right’s hand behind the ghastly crime.
Outrage at the crime was so great that former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was constrained to condemn it and say that it made the country “hang its head in the committee of nations”. He, however, did not go so far as to stop the far right campaign in defence of the murderers as crusaders against a missionary campaign of religious conversions. It took four-and-a-half years for the criminals to be brought to justice.
Very little of public outrage, however, is visible today over the arrest of Binayak Sen, a doctor who made it his mission 27 years ago to bring succour to tribal people in dire distress in the central state of Chhattisgarh. The reasons are perhaps not far to seek.
Binayak’s persecutors, of course, have spared him his life thus far but that is not the main reason for the relative indifference of the media and the civil society to his fate. The primary factor here would seem to be political.
The communal agenda behind the Staines killing was never concealed. The crime followed a long anti-conversion campaign of virulent violence in the tribal area of Dangs in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat. By visiting Dangs then and calling for “a debate on conversions”, Vajpayee had given in effect a green signal for the bloody sequel in Orissa.
The murder gave the political forces opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) an important issue for effective propaganda. The Congress sought to capitalise on the issue, though its unit in Gujarat had been shamefully silent in order to save its political skin in the state that Modi had succeeded in polarising communally.
Binayak, too, has been basically a victim of a BJP government in Chhattisgarh, headed by chief minister Raman Singh. Here too, the party has continued to carry its anti-conversion banner aloft. The BJP sought to make ingenious use of the issue some years ago when Chhattisgarh party leader and Environment Minister in the Vajpayee ministry ‘Raja’ Dilip Judeo was caught in a media sting operation, taking a hefty bribe for agreeing to lease out a coal mine to an Australian multinational. Pleading guilty by implication, Judeo said: “You need an army to fight conversions, and that army needs provisions”.
The BJP, however, has made Binayak’s arrest appear a result of its anti-terrorist campaign, instead of a communal crusade. He stands accused of aiding and abetting the Maoist insurgents in the State. He is supposed to have done so by opposing (as a leader of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties-PUCL) the activities of an officially sponsored outfit called Salwa Judum.
Variously translated as the Peace Festival or the Peace Hunt, the Salwa Judum actually stands for a dangerous division and disintegration of tribal society. It is a band of tribesmen, armed, funded and empowered by the State, ostensibly in order to counter and curb the activities of the insurgents. Human rights activists, however, have drawn attention to numerous instances of Salwa Judum oppression ranging from extortions to more extreme offences.
A fact-finding team of a Committee Against Violence on Women, on a tour of the area, recorded 58 gender crimes committed in the recent period: 21 women had been killed (three of them, after mutilation of breasts and genitals) and 37 raped (23 of them gang-raped) or molested. The criminals, according to the team, were members of the Salwa Judum.
The BJP, which sees opposition to anti-minority activities as anti-national, has also succeeded in portraying opposition to the Salwa Judum as support for Maoist or ultra-left extremism. The Congress of prime minister Manmohan Singh, who has repeatedly named the Maoist movement as the chief terrorist menace before India, cannot bring itself to defend Binayak or make an issue of his incarceration on the basis of “incriminating evidence”. (The ‘evidence’ is even more invisible to many in the case of Binayak’s wife Illina Sen, my dear colleague in India’s Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace or the CNDP, against whom. too, the police is reportedly plotting to proceed.) The mainstream Left, which strongly disapproves of the Maoist outlook and methods, also feels uncomfortable perhaps about taking up Binayak’s case and the cause it involves.
The cause, in a word, is democracy. That is why someone like historian Ramachandra Guha (who, like me and most others, wants no violent revolution for India) has gone to the country’s apex court calling upon it to pronounce the Salwa Judum unconstitutional. That, again, is why Arundhati Roy, Guha’s sparring partner in the peace movement, says that the Salwa Judum sets a trend that can lead to militarisation of Indian society.
And that is why, the call for Binayak’s release has to be heard, loud and clear, in India and elsewhere. The issue of human rights, after all, transcends national barriers and boundaries.*
The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled ‘At Gunpoint’