The state must act

The latest Maoist atrocity, where they blew up a bus with civilians in it, shows the pathetic state of our human rights brigade.

Nobody should be knocking the idea of human rights, but when this becomes your profession, you lose all sense of right and wrong. You blindly oppose the state, and equally blindly support the so-called targets of state power. We have seen this repeatedly happen both in India and abroad.

A few months ago, Amnesty International got rid of a human rights campaigner, Gita Sahgal, because she questioned the organisation’s decision to share platforms with Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who is associated with a far-right Islamic organisation called Cageprisoners. It is one thing to fight for the human rights of Guantanamo detainees, quite another to whitewash the victims’ own association with wrong ideas, including Talibanesque preferences.

In India, we have seen no dearth of phony human rights campaigners, who can only see state repression, but not the other side of the coin. Even as the Maoists perpetrate mind-boggling violence, the human rights cacophony is that there’s a difference between state-sponsored violence and what’s perpetrated on behalf of “poor tribals”. By equating the two, they effectively become apologists for the Maoists’ brutality.

Human rights is a beguiling argument. It clogs the brains of liberals, who are then unable to differentiate between right and wrong. Till the LTTE was eliminated, the human rights groups (including several church groups in the West) could not see the organisation for what it was: a corps of pathological killers.

Good, honest people cannot protest against terrorist violence, because if they do they can be eliminated themselves. Sometimes, the human rights people have to be told to shut up for their own good.

But let’s examine all the assumptions of the human rights groups and check out how far they are true anyway.

Proposition one: State violence has no justification, whatever theprovocation from the Maoists. Individuals, after all, cannot fight the might of the state. This is not quite true. The fact is the individual’s powers vis-à-vis the state have grown enormously: 9/11 and 26/11 were two demonstrations of this reality. A few thousand al-Qaeda diehards have held the might of the world’s greatest superpower at bay for nearly a decade.

The lessons of the last decade show that a few determined individuals can hold the state to ransom and murder hundreds or thousands of ordinary citizens at will. The state can do little. As more and more lethal weapons become available from the global arms bazaar, private violence is now more than a match for state power. It’s pointless to suggest that state violence is worse that Maoist violence. It is often the only alternative left. State violence at least has legitimacy. Maoist violence does not.

Proposition two: The Maoists are fighting for poor tribals, whose rights have been trampled on by a corrupt bureaucracy. Let’s not argue with the fact that we do have heavy corruption in the bureaucracy. It is hand-in-glove with businessmen and traders who loot forest produce and usurp tribal land for mining. But let’s invert the argument, and ask: What are the Maoists doing about this? You will find that they extort money from the same traders and mining companies, who are happy to pay off the Maoists instead of the bureaucracy. In short, the Maoists are replacing one kind of disempowerment of tribals with their own authoritarian version of it. If you question them, you get a bullet through your head.

Proposition three: The state should get development going instead of fighting the Maoists. There is some merit to this argument, but only some. In most areas dominated by the Maoists, the state cannot, in fact, do anything since the former will disrupt anything that will delegitimise them. If the state starts behaving well with the tribals, the Maoists will intervene, since it undercuts their authority. It is, of course, possible to restart the development process in areas that are already controlled by the state. The best option is to post good, honest officials in these areas, protect them well against Maoist incursions, showcase the change that government can bring, and win back the confidence of the tribals.

But this is a long process. Even while the state starts rebuilding its credibility, it needs to simultaneously start taking control of the Maoist areas, since the first duty of the state is to make sure its writ runs. So there is no either/or logic here. The state cannot abandon security and opt for development; it has to go for both. If it pursues only one of the two goals, it will end up with neither.

We have reached a point where nothing is gained by listening to the professional human rightswallahs. They have got stuck to a position from which they can only be rescued by the defeat of the Maoists. It’s best to ignore them
for now.