As Bhutan gets on the highway of diplomacy with China, is India being side-lined or waylaid, Ravi Nair muses.
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READING tea leaves in the best of circumstances is hazardous. More so when there are so many varieties on offer.
Indian Darjeeling, one of the best teas, is exquisite in all its varieties, it is also the easiest to classify. Oolong, one of the finer Chinese teas, with its many varieties, is much more difficult. Suja, Bhutanese butter tea, is difficult to read due to the infusion of generous dollops of extraneous butter.
The Sino-Bhutan talks
From a careful reading of the tea leaves from all three countries, it is evident that a border agreement between the People’s Republic of China and the Kingdom of Bhutan is ready to be signed. It is not known if the exact details have been shown to India but it would defy comprehension if Thimpu has not shared the contours with New Delhi.
The ICJ decision on interim measures was carefully crafted. It is as political as it is legal. Pointedly, it did not call for an immediate ceasefire ap
By Ravi Nair - 18/02/2024
On February 27, or a few days earlier, Israel will hopefully submit its response report to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) interim order of January 26, 2024. The final decision in the South African plaint, now supported by other countries, is in the distant future. Soon, the registrar of the ICJ will call in South African and Israeli lawyers to outline the time frame for filing papers on the merits of the case. South Africa has hoped that it would take no more than six months for both sides to file papers. This would just be the first step in a very long process.
The ICJ decision on interim measures was carefully crafted. It is as political as it is legal. Pointedly, it did not call for an immediate ceasefire. All countries that are party to the genocide convention, including India, have to ensure that these interim measures are implemented. The United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), the European Union (EU), Germany and many other European States are doing are doing everything but that. The continuance of armament shipments and economic bailouts to a beleaguered Israeli economy is evidently not furthering their legal obligations to prevent genocide.
As the Maldives deadline for withdrawal of Indian armed forces comes close, Ravi Nair traces the historical and contemporary dynamics of the geopolitics in the ‘Indian’ Ocean that have led to this crucial juncture.
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MOST Indians, including those who should know better, think the Indian Ocean belongs to India.
In this era, when official history is only issued in denominations of 500 and 1,000 years, they would do well to remember that prior to 1515, it was called the Eastern Ocean.
But when those in power and in proximity to it believe that, in 2024, the Indian Ocean is Indian in the geopolitical sense, it is delusional.
The Maldives is a sovereign nation
The contretemps with the Maldives is a recent example.
The air of injured innocence on the part of many in India at the request of the Maldives for the withdrawal of Indian armed forces personnel borders on the ludicrous. The Akhand Bharat (Greater India) groupies conveniently forget the Maldives is a sovereign nation.
The air of injured innocence on the part of many in India at the request of the Maldives for the withdrawal of Indian armed forces personnel borders on the ludicrous.
The Indian media is replete with all the benefits that accrue to the Maldives thanks to the Indian connection. The Maldivian media, on the other hand, has chosen to downplay the assistance rendered by India in 1988.
Ghar mein ghus kar marenge is a great movie dialogue. It is an even better election slogan. But can the demands of democracy and the delicate balance of international relations afford India such bravado, asks Ravi Nair.
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NEW Delhi Chatterati loves to play Chinese Whispers. The most popular one presently is, “If the US can do targeted killings outside their country, why can’t we do it?”
Targeted killings internally, within India by official agencies, or by using proxies, are an age-old practice. Too well documented to need reiteration here. Euphemistically called ‘encounter deaths’, they are endemic.
Targeted killings of non-Indian nationals
There is credible information in the public domain about the killing of a pro-Chinese Marxist tribal leader in Bangladesh in 1983 by a pro-Indian tribal leader now living in India.
Operation Leech
On February 11, 1998, an Indian tri-services detachment gunned down in cold blood six of the leadership of the nascent Arakan-based Rakhine armed group fighting the Myanmar junta. They were gunned down on Landfall Island of the Andaman group of islands.
The Rakhine now have the Arakan Army (AA), one of the more formidable armed groups fighting the Myanmar junta.
New Delhi needs to have a nuanced view of the crisis in the Northeast. A refugee policy is need of the hour
It is heartening to hear the Mizoram chief minister designate Lalduhoma saying that the Chin refugee influx in the state is a humanitarian issue and there will be no change in Aizawl’s policy towards them. The influx of over 6,000 Chin refugees from the Chin state of Myanmar into Mizoram from the second week of November 2023 requires reflection. Public perception in India has it that the Mizoram-Chin state border of Myanmar is the Indo-Myanmar border. The Indo-Myanmar border actually extends across the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Manipur on the Indian side, the Sagaing region and the Chin state of Myanmar, and the Chittagong hill tracts of Bangladesh across the international boundary.
As the ragtag Myanmar army starts crumbling, many more from the Myanmar army will cross the Indian border from the Chin state and the Sagaing division. Does the government of India have a policy for the intrusion of armed soldiers of a neighbouring State into India which is cognisant of international humanitarian law?
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THE recent return by India of Burmese soldiers who had crossed the international border into Mizoram to seek shelter during fighting in the Chin State in Myanmar is troubling.
Initially, 44 personnel from the Myanmar army and police had fled across the international border into Mizoram amidst fierce fighting between Chin National Army fighters and the military junta soldiers in Myanmar’s Chin state since the evening of November 13, 2023.
The fighting was adjacent to the Zokhawthar border crossing in Mizoram. The Myanmar soldiers took shelter at the local Mizoram police station. The local police handed them over to the Assam Rifles.
The Assam Rifles, which controls the international border on the Indian side in this sector, is under the administrative control of the Union home ministry. However, all its officers are drawn from the Indian army.
How is it possible that after having its membership in the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions deferred and being at the bottom of every human rights index, the National Human Rights Commission of India managed to find a collaborator in Australia-based Asia Pacific Forum to host the Biennial Conference of National Human Rights Institutions?
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THE National Human Rights Commission of India (NHRCI) is set to host the Biennial Conference of National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) of Asia Pacific on September 20–21, 2023.
The conference is being organised in collaboration with the Australia-based Asia Pacific Forum (APF).
The President of India is scheduled to address the conference.
“On 21st September, 2023, the Biennial Conference will mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UNDHR). It will also celebrate 30 years of National Human Rights Institutions and the Paris Principles, with a sub-theme on the environment and climate change,” a press release of the NHRCI states.
In a badly drafted repetitive press release, the NHRCI makes such basic mistakes as calling the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the “UNDHR”!
In this theatre of the absurd, the APF is being represented by NHRCI on the management committee of the GANHRI even after its deferred status!
This only reflects the NHRCI’s staffing by government apparatchiks in violation of the Principles Relating to the Status of National Human Rights Institutions, also known as the Paris Principles.
The Agnipathscheme introduced by the Union government for army recruitment on contractual basis is a catastrophe that would inevitably lead to militarisation of India. The fear looms large that after the end of contractual service these youths with arms training would be susceptible to exploitation by paramilitaries.
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AT a glance, a brief article in the July 23, 2023 issue of the Tribune merits no more than a quick look from the average reader.
The article discusses the establishment of a training centre by the Adani business group, intended for training individuals to join the Indian armed forces. Notably, the conglomerate is offering this training for free.
This endeavour by Adani prompts contemplation on how close India is from the creation of its own ‘desi’ private military companies (PMC).
Just as Russia has the Wagner group and the United States has Blackwater (which is now known as Academi), India might have its own private militaries soon.
What is Agnipath?
It has been over a year since the Union cabinet approved what some are touting as the “biggest defence manpower reform” in India’s independent history— the Agnipath recruitment scheme.
On June 14, 2022, the Union defence ministry announced the details of Agnipath— a major departure from the current military recruitment scheme.
The involvement of the Tibetan government-in-exile in India in matters outside their purview on a political level is worrisome. The political leadership of the Tibetan refugees is making provocative statements which impact India’s internal affairs and jeopardise the fragile relations between India and China.
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THE worry beads used by Tibetan Buddhists and Indian Hindus are believed to focus the mind. However, as we approach the end game of the Great Game on the Tibetan Plateau, focus seems to be the one thing missing in the Indian ruling party’s trans-Himalayan policy.
The return to an autonomous— forget an independent— Tibet is akin to a pilgrimage to the mythical Shambala.
Since the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s era, populism and its twin, authoritarianism, have found their feet in what has become the present Hindu fundamentalist dispensation.
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INDIA was a successor state to the British Raj. For a post-colonial State, it had a design fault. From day one, it did little to democratise the repressive apparatus of the colonial State it inherited.
Preventive detention was retained and strengthened. Due process of law was given the heave-ho. The intelligence agencies who had served the colonial masters so well continued to do so under their Congress masters with no parliamentary accountability.
Institutional impunity for human rights violations and the calls for mandatory compensation were met with classic stonewalling.
On the economic front, the new Nehru government scuppered land reform, the one major issue that would have brought a degree of equity to rural India, where most of India lived then as now.
In spite of professed claims, no real effort was made to create a welfare State on the western social democratic model. Universal healthcare and education were not priorities. Employment generation was in the realm of ether.
Since then, populism and its twin, authoritarianism, have found their feet in what has become the present Hindu fundamentalist dispensation.
Can the opposition in India forge a roadmap looking at the new architecture of Hindutva? Nine lessons from the course correction in Hindutva and the ‘of course’ corrections needed among the opposition.
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“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Nothing, beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
(Ozymandias— Percy Bysshe Shelley)
THE major theme behindOzymandias is that no matter how arrogant or tyrannical a ruler may be, all power is temporary. Even the most powerful will eventually be brought low, their name nearly forgotten and monuments to their power becoming buried in the sand.
India’s continuing transfer of materials used in surveillance, artillery, and, probably, missiles— all manufactured by State-owned entities— arguably runs afoul of its obligations under customary international law and international humanitarian law.
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THE self-styled “mother of democracies” has supplied US $51 million worth of arms to the jackboots in Naypyidaw since the coup in 2021. Of this, US $49 million of the trade is directly with the Myanmar military through Myanmar-based military suppliers or sanctioned arms dealers, along with US $2.2 million through 22 unique suppliers. This is according to a new report from the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar. This works out to 422 crore in Indian rupees.
The Asia–Pacific regional national human rights institutions network is represented by India’s National Human Rights Commission on the management committee of the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions. This, despite the membership of the commission to the alliance having recently been deferred for a year.
The SCA considered applications for re-accreditation from the national human rights institutions (NHRIs) of India and eight other countries.
Shh! Silence does not beget transparency
The silence of the NHRC, the Union government, most Indian non-government organisations (NGOs), the overwhelming genuflecting Indian news media, the Asia–Pacific Forum (the Asia–Pacific regional NHRI network), and the GANHRI has been curious, to say the least.
Pursuant to Article 14.1 of the GANHRI Statute, the SCA took a decision regarding the re-accreditation of the NHRIs of India, and two other countries.
The NHRC surprisingly enjoyed ‘A’ status at GANHRI. This, in spite of the same recommendations in 2017. The process of re-accreditation is done every five years.
It has been more than 43 years since the 44th constitutional amendment regulating preventive detention was passed by both Houses of the Parliament and signed by the President, but it is yet to be given effect.
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THE Supreme Court’s recent comments on the need to check the abuse of the State’s power of preventive detention are welcome. However, its periodic wringing of its hands is vexing. The remedy lies with it, but it has so far not grabbed the bull of executive caprice by its horns.
The use and abuse of long-term preventive detention in India continues to blight the human rights record of a country that claims to be an open constitutional democracy. Explicitly authorised by the Constitution and exempted from other constitutional protections such as the right to counsel, the right to be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours of being taken into custody, and the presumption of innocence, various pieces of legislation continue to be enacted and abused by the Union and state governments to preventively detain individuals for years on end without even charging them with a crime.
The Hindutva juggernaut has stumbled quite a few times, and it can and will be stopped by the will of the Indian peoples exercised through the ballot. 2024 is D-Day. This is not a pious hope but an assertion of faith in the common Indian.
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INDIAN National Congress parliamentarian and United Progressive Alliance Chairperson Sonia Gandhi, in a thoughtful piece in The Hindu published on April 11, 2023 has sketched out some of the issues that confront the nation as the Hindutva juggernaut moves on, seemingly invincible.
All messianic political movements think they can go on forever. Myth and myth building, rather than an appreciation of history, is their forte. Hindutva is no different. They have stumbled quite a few times, and they can and will be stopped by the will of the Indian peoples exercised through the ballot. 2024 is D-Day. This is not a pious hope but an assertion of faith in the common Indian. A rider, of course, if we get out of our comfort zones and hit the dusty lanes of rural India.
Since the Armed Forces Special Powers Act came into force in Jammu and Kashmir in 1990, the Indian government has not granted permission to prosecute any security force personnel in civilian courts.
ONE would have liked to join the hoi polloi in welcoming the decision of the General Court Martial to recommend imprisonment for life to Captain Bhoopendra Singh, alias Major Bashir Khan for staging the encounter killings of three men in Shopian, Kashmir in 2020. The sentence will be final if and when it is confirmed by the Northern Army Commander. However, the brooding presence of the past cautions one’s reaction.
The concept of voluntary repatriation is the most preferred one by host nations, but it is also made sure that the consent for repatriation is not taken involuntarily. For Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, however, the most durable solution would be local integration.
THE United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in India is coy at its best and devious at its worst.
In a piece in The Hindu on February 16, Oscar Mundia, the Head of Mission, UNHCR in India hides more than he reveals as to its actual position relating to the long-term resettlement of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in India. Apart from wrong usage (or perhaps a Freudian slip) of the English language in describing young Sri Lanka Tamil refugees born and brought up in India as “cohorts”, he seems to infer that the refugees themselves seem to be undecided and, contrary to international refugee law, that the refugees could be sent back to Sri Lanka against their expressed wishes. He also makes a faux pas by referring to the Hill Country repatriates, who are not part of the UNHCR’s remit.
The political implication of not implementing a proper federalist policy is the Tamils in Sri Lanka losing their voice and rights, thereby being subjected to further marginalisation. Every self-respecting Tamil in India and across the world should ask for nothing less than a federal Sri Lanka.
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ADDRESSING the Sri Lankan nation on its 75th Independence Day, its President Ranil Wickremesinghe on February 4 said he was determined to see maximum devolution of power to the provinces, but would not stand for the division of the country. He said that a cabinet sub-committee had been appointed to look into the unique issues faced by the people living in the north and the east of the country.
As early as 1993, the Supreme Court had castigated the Uttar Pradesh police. When the CBI authorities approached the local police as well as officers in the Home Department of the State Government, they did not receive the desired cooperation and case papers were not handed over to them.
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What was Allahabad High Court’s recent verdict on the Pilibhit encounter case of 1991?
ON December 15, 2022, the Allahabad High Court reduced the sentence of 47 policemen for killing ten Sikh men to seven years of rigorous imprisonment. The innocent Sikhs were killed in three incidents of extrajudicial executions (EJEs) in a single night in Uttar Pradesh’s Pilibhit district in 1991.
NHRC’s radio silence on the absence of express definition of torture in Indian law and jurisprudence is deafening.
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THE Working Group on the United Nations (‘UN’) Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (‘UPR’) held its review of India on November 10. The delegation of India was headed by the Solicitor General of India, Tushar Mehta. At its 16th meeting, held on November 16, the Working Group adopted the draft report on India.
India’s paranoia over the review of its human rights record by outside agencies reflects its insecurity, not strength.
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THE Solicitor General of India, Tushar Mehta while presenting India’s fourth periodic report at the United Nations (‘UN’) Human Rights Council session in Geneva on November 10, stated that human rights defenders should conform to the law of land.
That is a no brainer. Unless, one had the moral courage of a Mahatma Gandhi, whose name Mehta is undoubtedly aware of, but is perhaps less conversant with Gandhiji’s teachings on the primacy of the moral law. “Gandhi’s sedition trial of 1922 was one that brought into sharp focus the conflict between obedience to the law of the land and obedience of one’s moral conscience in opposing an unjust law”, lawyer and activist Prashant Bhushan aptly said in a lecture on Gandhi Jayanti in 2020.
The Indian State has conceived itself as a ‘security State’, and as the police apparatus is heavily overburdened, the fabricated arrests of members of minority communities are sacrifices made to create the appearance of relative safety and a protective State.
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THE Counter Terrorism Committee (‘CTC’) of the United Nations (‘UN’) Security Council met in New Delhi in the last week of last month. It adopted the Delhi Declaration which is State-centric, and had little concrete suggestions to protect and enhance citizens’ rights. The UN, as one wag underlined, was “nations united” against “people’s rights”.
Union Minister H.S. Puri’s sudden announcement about the housing of Rohingya refugee families in the National Capital Territory of Delhi is either inspired genius or the cat’s paw for the Hindutva dispensation to explore the process of enforced ghettoization, starting with the Rohingyas.
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Disclaimer: This is an allegory. It is an entry for Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Many truths, deep analysis, some plausible guess work and healthy imagination arising from knowledge of the principal actors reveal a heady cocktail, the classic whodunit. It is advised that it be read with a healthy attitude of Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
What had Puri tweeted?
EARLY yesterday morning, the Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs, Hardeep Singh Puri, tweeted, “India has always welcomed those who have sought refuge in the country. In a landmark decision all #Rohingya #Refugees will be shifted to EWS flats in Bakkarwala area of Delhi. They will be provided basic amenities, UNHCR IDs & round-the-clock @DelhiPolice protection”.
That day we spent only finding out who all had been arrested and who had escaped the police dragnet. The next day, I had wanted to walk down to the Delhi State Socialist Party office and our trade union office. I was cautioned not to go anywhere near it. It was feared that Gobind, the office caretaker, was a police informer.
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ON the morning of June 25, 1975, Than Singh Josh, the leader of the socialist trade unions in Delhi, and I had just reached Bangalore, as Bengaluru was then known. From the train station, we took an auto rickshaw to Subedar Chatram Road. We were going to the office of the Karnataka state Socialist Party. It was actually the office of K.G. Mahewarappa, a lawyer, who was a long time socialist. We were going to sleep there for the week.
Perhaps the legal community would care to demonstrate how they make the fine distinction between an Emergency regime that subverts the Constitution and suspends fundamental rights, and other regimes that do likewise in a society that is bereft of due process of law and is yet considered an electoral democracy, however tawdry.
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WRITING in 2013, Justice Rajinder Sachar, former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court asked the question as to whether the Emergency would have collapsed if the Supreme Court had decided the ADM Jabalpur case of 1976 differently. The court had failed to show spine and follow well-established law that in cases of habeas corpus, every imprisonment is prima facie unlawful and that it is for a person directing imprisonment to justify the act.
The AFSPA will figure as a major item in the discussion at the United Human Rights Council in September this year when it discusses India’s periodic report, and then again at the United Nations Human Rights Committee in November this year.
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THERE are four audiences that the Prime Minister’s statement on the possible lifting of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 [AFSPA] in northeast India is aimed at. The first audience is the people of the North East. However, the people of Nagaland and Manipur have longer memories than the Prime Minister’s Office and the security establishment allow for. They are still awaiting the sanction for prosecution of Assam Rifles personnel pursuant to the Supreme Court’s EEVFAM judgment of 2016. Forget the detritus of Operation Golden Bird and Operation Bajrang in Assam.
In the absence of a legislation to deal with refugees, India continues to treat Rohingya refugees in an arbitrary manner, discriminating against them in relation to refugees from other nations, and inhumanely detains and deports them, in violation of customary international law and its own international treaty obligations.
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HASINA Begum, a Rohingya refugee staying in India, was deported to Myanmar on March 22 from the Indian border town of Moreh in Manipur’s Tengnoupal district. She had been in detention at the Kathua sub-jail in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir since March 6 last year. She had UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] registration no. 305-13C01783 as a refugee in India. Her husband and three minor children are still living in the most abject conditions in a slum in Jammu. The minor children have been inconsolable since the detention and deportation of their mother.
The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act [AFSPA] was passed by the Indian Parliament on September 11, 1958. The Parliament was told it would last no longer than a year. In 2022, we are still waiting for that year to end.
The Act contains immunity clauses for the armed forces even if they are involved in violations of the right to life or torture.
In theory, the Union Government could give permission upon application for prosecution of armed forces personnel accused of offences. According to a question raised in the Rajya Sabha (upper house of Parliament) in 2015, a total of 38 requests for the sanction of prosecution under AFSPA and the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990 were made between June 1991 and March 2015. Of the 38, permission was denied in 30 cases while the remaining eight requests were pending as of March 2015.
Northern Ireland’s Royal Ulster Constabulary experience offers a lesson to Indian lawmakers: the militarised policing of a local population by a centrally-controlled force that has been awarded extraordinary powers without accountability measures will likely result in human rights violation, explains RAVI NAIR.
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MOST modern democracies adhere to the policy of separation between the military and the police. Many nations have made limited exceptions for certain paramilitary forces.
Nevertheless, as Northern Ireland’s experience illustrates, the mixing of forces with inherently different mandates (armed combat versus law enforcement) and targets (enemy versus local citizen) is likely to do more harm than good.
Amidst the recent decision to increase the jurisdiction of the Border Security Force in West Bengal, Punjab and Assam, RAVI NAIR examines the encroachment of Constitutional federalism by a union government gradually inching the country towards an authoritarian state.
Union government’s decision to extend the jurisdiction of the Border Security Force (BSF) to over 50 km in three states – namely, West Bengal, Punjab and Assam, from the barbed wire fence with Bangladesh and Pakistan, along with the grant of policing powers, is one more building block in the creation of a unitary authoritarian state.
RAVI NAIR of theSOUTH ASIA HUMAN RIGHTS DOCUMENTATION CENTREprovides an analysis of the right to self defense relating to person and property under the prevalent criminal jurisprudence, and how the Supreme Court has looked at it over the course of time.
It is the duty of the State to protect its citizens and their property from danger. However, there are circumstances wherein the State machinery is not available or is passive.
Think piece 3 on Afghanistan - Can be freely used with due credit to SAHRDC
The Indian Express of 30 August 2021 mentions that 260 Indians are still stranded in Kabul. Representatives of Indian NGOs from the health, education and medical sectors have informed SAHRDC that over a 100 of them are NGO workers. Most of them have little money to buy even the bare necessities. Banks in Kabul opened a few days ago. Each account holder is allowed to withdraw small amounts. Most of the Indian NGO staff is resigned to losing their savings from their employment in Afghanistan.
SAHRDC Think Piece 2 on Afghanistan (May be freely reproduced with due credit to SAHRDC)
The mythological yarns of Hinduism are many splendoured. They make for many hours of wonderful reading. They also attest to the fertility of the Hindu imagination more than any sound historical record. The revanchist Hindutva supporter who dreams of an ‘Akhand Bharat’, or ‘Greater India’, would like us to believe that the Gandhara kingdom mentioned in the great Indian epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana comprises most of what was part of Pakistan’s North West Frontier province, now called Khyber Pakhtunwa, along with modern day Eastern Afghanistan.
SAHRDC Think Piece 1 on Afghanistan: May be freely reproduced with due credit to SAHRDC
20 August 2021
The cussedness of a Hindutva-based policy taking precedence over humanitarian or even geopolitical considerations, implicit in the statement of the Ministry of External Affairs on 16 August 2021, takes one’s breath away.
“We have been issuing periodic advisories for the safety and security of Indian nationals in that country, including calling for their immediate return to India… We had circulated emergency contact numbers and had also been extending assistance to community members,” the MEA spokesperson said.
On 15 June 2021, a two judge bench of the Delhi High Court composed of Justices Siddharth Mridul and Anup Jairam Bhambani issued orders granting bail to three student activists charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). The students – Ms Natasha Narwal, Ms Devangana Kalita, both members of Pinjra Tod[2], a Delhi women’s rights organization and Mr Asif Iqbal Tanha[3], had been charged under UAPA for “instigat[ing] the local population in certain Muslim dominated areas of Delhi, particularly women, and incit[ing] in them feelings of persecution, which subsequently led to violence and rioting”.[4]
The South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR) is a Colombo based regional organisation. Its Bureau consists of many knowledgeable individuals from the region. However, it is doubtful if they exercised oversight on a public statement put out in the name of the organisation dated 9 July 2021. The public statement titled, " SAHR Is Deeply Concerned For The Myanmar Nationals Fleeing To India And Their Impact On The Host Community” (see full text at https://www.southasianrights.org/sahr-is-deeply-concerned-for-the-myanmar-nationals-fleeing-to-india-and-their-impact-on-the-host-community/ ). It is dated 9 July 2021 and was brought to SAHRDC’S notice on the afternoon of 21 July 2021.
ndia’s academic institutions are all facing authoritarianism. One more example of it was seen when the MEA farmed out the writing of the first draft of their reports to UN rights bodies to academic institutions like the NLUD. The draft report for the Universal Periodic Report by NLUD academics was decent. By the time the MEA worked on it and the final product was submitted, it had made unbelievable claims to India’s human rights record. The same exercise is being repeated for the fourth periodic report to the HRC. The NLUD draft report should be put into the public domain and its academic integrity preserved, writes RAVI NAIR.
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and the National Law University Delhi (NLUD) have held three consultations on India’s fourth periodic report to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee in May and June 2021. It is due for submission in August 2021.
Protecting and upholding human rights just got more difficult in India. Vacant positions in the NHRC are going to pliant retired judicial officers, policemen on deputation, and sleuths who probe and track complainants and not the human rights issues they raise, writes human rights activist RAVI NAIR.
There is a certain insouciance and disesteem on the part of the Bharatiya Janata Party government in matters of upholding norms or respecting institutions. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) appointments committee has picked former Supreme Court judge Arun Kumar Mishra as chairperson. It has also made an insidious choice in Rajiv Jain, former head of the Intelligence Bureau. The third appointment is of a former Chief Justice of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court, Justice Mahesh Mittal Kumar.
Throwing light on the inhumane and illegal method of ‘pushing back’ Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh adopted by the Border Security Force in India, RAVI NAIR writes about how this violates India’s international law obligations, and why these refugees deserve due process as guaranteed by the Indian Constitution.
India shares a direct border with Myanmar as well as Bangladesh. Although the exodus of the Rohingya community coming directly from Myanmar has largely subsided, some Rohingya staying in overcrowded camps in Bangladesh have turned to cross into India. India shares a 4,096 km border with Bangladesh, and the Indian state of West Bengal, with a nearly 2,217 km-long border with Bangladesh, has been the preferred route for crossing over into India.
Analysing the Supreme Court’s recent order denying Rohingya refugees in Jammu interim protection from deportation, RAVI NAIR breaks down the legal infirmities in the apex court’s reasoning to show that the court seems to have made up in advance about its decision and its reasoning follows ex-post facto.
In February 2021, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court asked the local government to explain within a month the measures taken by it to identify and deport illegal immigrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh staying in Jammu.