WHY INDIA IS UNFIT TO GET UN VETO POWER BY MOHAMMAD ZAINAL ABEDIN:
ASSALAM-O-ALAIKUM!
The South Asian nations surrounding India had a sigh of relief when United States of America, Russian Federation and China, the three permanent members of UN Security Council (UNSC), technically deterred India’s dream to get UNSC membership, as they declined a proposal to reform UN Security Council what could ultimately pave the way for India to enter such prestigious and powerful body having veto power. India’s neighbors apprehend if India gets veto power it will use it not only to squeeze them, but also to occupy them to implement its dream of so-called ‘Akhand Bharat’ initially merging those countries to India what slipped away from it in 1947. After its recent setback Indian policymakers dismayingly recalled American President Mr. Barak Obama who in 2010 asserted that India deserves a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. But the analysts believe Obama honoring diplomatic courtesy and strategic policy intentionally overlooked or avoided the irritable realities and traumas that India suffers from since its inception.
The ground reality says India practically lacks in all the counts get UNSC permanent membership. India will have to go a long way before it gets such position. None of the India’s neighboring countries will sincerely welcome Indian admission in UNSC, as India poses, as if, she is their guardian. India must remove such apprehension from psyche of its neighbors by shunning its so-called dream of Akhand Bharat. Such dream prompts Indian policymakers to wage a policy of disturbing, squeezing¸ controlling and even, if possible, occupying them. With that end in view India creates stooges and agents, even secessionists, in her neighboring countries to create political and religious unrest to keep them economically shattered and backward, socially chaotic and restive, psychologically weak and insecure, and above all, nationally shaky and divided. None of its neighbors are harmonious with India, whose support is very crucial for it in getting the support of all the veto-powered nations of UN. Though India is not fit to get veto power, still for a long time India desperately bids to get it simply highlighting one ground that out every six of the global people one is an Indian. But the knowledgeable sources believe if those regions that were immorally and illegally merged to Indian territory (through occupation or conspiratorial integration), are segregated from India, not only its geographical size, but also its demographic volume will shrink to a great extent. On the other hand simply huge population cannot be a factor in attaining the Security Council membership.
Indians to brand as so-called super power and hence to enter UNSC also distantly point to their extravagant military muscle as another factor, but such military might is, in fact, a burden for India, as it eats up vitals of India earns negative image wherever its personnel were deployed inside (disturbed areas) or outside India (in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka). India is the lone country in the world whose army is engaged in a never-ending war against its own people since its inception in 1947. India nurses such mega-army keeping its millions of marginal people in distressed who live in urban slums or in thatched huts in remote areas who are constantly chased by starvation, malnutrition, disease, illiteracy, and social or caste hatred and persecution. The most serious factor that makes India unfit to get UNSC permanent membership is that India lags far behind in all sectors from the current veto-powered members. India is even poorer than those aspirants (Japan, Germany, Brazil, or Africa) for the same position in UNSC. India is widely infamous for its poor economy, illiteracy, communal riots and caste hatred, religious and social violence, poor human rights records, and above all, its expansionist policy of ‘Akhand Bharat’ abolishing the existence of its neighboring countries.
Uncovering India’s poor and lowly position, a BBC report says, “Seventy-five percent of India's population lives in rural poverty, which results in a stagnated economy ----. A typical farmer feeds and clothes a family of four on $2 per day. ---poverty drives many farmers to suicide. Typical villages lack basic services, communications and infrastructure, resulting in a stagnated rural economy -----.”
Mumbai, the so-called dazzling city, is home to 22 million people, and over 70% of them live in slums. In recent times though some of the slum people were removed, but the position remains unchanged. People living in the slums have limited access to electricity, clean water, food, and educational opportunities. The slums are also home to over seven million children under the age of 14 who are growing up in abject poverty. Young as five and six years old are forced to work for survival. Slum children work as rag pickers, sewerage cleaners and other menial jobs all around Mumbai, earning a few cents a month for their families. Majority people of India are so poor that they are deprived of so many modern facilities. Dean Spears, an economist and visiting researcher at the Delhi School of Economics, writes, in India “Open defecation is everybody's problem. It is the quintessential 'public bad' with negative spillover effects even on households that do not practice it.”
A new World Health Organization (WHO) report says more than half a billion people in India still “continue to defecate in gutters, behind bushes or in open water bodies, with no dignity or privacy”. They are among the 48% of Indians who do not have access to proper sanitation.
India is estimated to have one third of the world’s poor. India’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) need to undergo significant changes to address the current malnutrition crisis in India, according to a World Bank report. The prevalence of underweight children in India is among the highest in the world, and is nearly double that of Sub-Saharan Africa, the report says. Globally, an estimated one in four children under age 5 suffer from stunting, a form of malnutrition in which children are shorter than normal growth for their age. In India, almost 62 million children (48 percent) across all income groups are stunted. Stunting, or chronic malnutrition, is accompanied by a host of problems—weak immune systems, risk of sickness and disease, arrested cognitive and physical development, and a greater risk of dying before age 5. India has 287 million illiterate adults, the largest population globally and 37% of the world total, says a report by U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, also known as UNESCO. In India there prevail huge disparities between the rich and the poor in all sectors from education to healthcare.
According to government statistics on an average 44,000 women still die every year at the time of delivery. Health Minister J P Nadda on March 17, 2015 informed the Rajya Sabha in a written reply that as per Sample Registration System (SRS) 2013, the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) in the country is 40 per 1000 live births which translates into death of an estimated 10.68 lakh children up to the age of one year annually (http://www.outlookindia.com/news/article/Maternal-Mortality-Ratio-on-Decline-Since-2007-Govt/886273) The problem of gender-based violence is getting worse in India. National Crime Record Bureau statistics show crimes against women increased by 7.1 percent nationwide since 2010. There has been a rise in the number of incidents of rape recorded too. 24,206 incidents of rape were recorded in 2011, a rise of 9 percent from the previous year. More than half of the victims are between 18 and 30 years of age.
Figures indicate that 10.6 percent of total victims of rape were girls under 14 years of age, while 19 percent were teens between the ages of 14 and 18. Under the IPC (Indian Penal Code) crimes against women include rape, kidnapping and abduction, homicide for dowry, torture, molestation, sexual harassment, and the importation of girls. A total of 2,28,650 incidents of crimes against women were reported in India during 2011.
India claims itself as the largest democracy where in reality there is no democratic practice. Its democracy is confined to holding election. There is no democracy in those regions whose people strongly believe that they don’t belong to India, where people are socially discriminated and persecuted, economically deprived and exploited. India also behaves with them like an occupation power. An Indian human rights activist Henri Tiphagne acknowledged “We have all these great human rights institutions, but still nobody in India gets justice when the state murders one of their family members,” Same position, in the truest sense of the term, prevails all over India, particularly in Kashmir, Northeastern region or Maoist-infested areas that cover about 11 provinces.
The laws that Indian parliament passed so far are utterly contrary to democratic values and norms. Some of the infamous draconian black laws are: Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), Unlawful Activities (prevention) Amendment Ordinance, Indian Telegraph Act, Criminal Procedure Code, Newspapers Incitements to Offence Act Official Secrets Act, National Security Act, Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA), Disruptive Areas Act, Public Safety Act, etc.Most of these laws are imposed to crush the people of those so-called ‘disturbed areas’ where encaged and deprived people being annoyed became desperate for liberation. Availing these laws the armed forces can arrest, even shoot to death anyone, on suspicion or take him into custody without a warrant.
They can enter and search any premise in order to arrest so-called ‘wanted’ person, or to recover arms, ammunition or explosive substances. They can stop and search any vehicle or vessel that is suspected to be carrying wanted persons or weapons. Availing such excuses, in many cases, Indian soldiers simply enter the house with the intention of raping the women. Incidents of rape committed by the Indian army are so random and intolerable that the women community in were Manipur enraged, chagrined and agitated. Their anger went to its zenith when on July 11, 2004 a 32-year Manipuir women, Thanglam Manorama, was lifted from her house by the Assam Rifles personnel, raped and repeatedly shot at her vagina to death. This cruel behavior of the Indian army made the Manipur so disturbed and perturbed that on July 15, 2004 they stripped themselves and demonstrated in front of the Assam Rifles Headquarters holding a banner that says, “Indian Army rape us” and “Indian Army takes our flesh.”
Army officers have legal immunity for their actions. There can be no prosecution, suit or any other legal proceeding against anyone acting under most of these laws. As a result, custodial death, death in planted encounters, death without trial, arrest or detention on suspicion, demolition of residential houses or prayer houses or shops, rape and molestation and so on occur daily in India what is branded as the largest democracy in the world. Democracy in India is seen only during elections, but it is absent from Indian social life, as India is controlled and dictated by Indian Army and intelligence agencies, whose personnel are above law. Under such situation Human rights in India is alarmingly in the lowest position among the existing permanent members of the UNSC and the aspirants that seek the same status what India hankers.
India is a prophet of unrest and war in South Asian region. It is an aggressive country having expansionist zeal. It deceptively occupied Sikkim; forcibly swallowed Goa, Daman and, Diu; and illegally captured Princely State of Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir, Manipur, Tripura etc. Besides it manipulated the British colonial power to handover without people’s consents such lands and regions like Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, which never were parts of India before their treacherous annexation to the British India in 1826.
Now India to maintain its controversial occupation on Kashmir and of Northeastern seven sisters comprising Manipur, Tripura and Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, wages a never-ending war since its inception in 1947 where its troops, under the cover of democratic fashion, lunches despotic and ruthless rule. Indian military and intelligence agencies control those areas where human rights are nakedly violated.
India deployed about 400,000 army personnel in seven sisters who commit atrocities on the local people availing black laws that I mentioned afore, and massively violate human rights. No pen is enough to detail and ventilate the accurate and exact agonies, sorrows and sufferings, deprivations and exploitations of the ill-fated people of seven sisters that led them to the path of armed resistance to liberate their region.
To comprehend the gravity of atrocities in seven sisters I prefer to refer to an iron lady Irom Chanu Sharmila, a Manipuri civil rights and political activist and poet who is on hunger strike since November 4, 2000 demanding annulment of the infamous AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act), a weapon responsible for so many gruesome killings in northeast and elsewhere in India.
On November 2, 2000, the Manipuri insurgents attacked an Assam Rifles convoy near Malom town of Manipur. In retaliation, the troops shot at civilians at a nearby bus-stop that left 10 civilians dead, including a 62-year old woman and an 18-year old Sinam Chandramani, who had been awarded the bravery award by the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Besides, as many as 42 people were dragged out from their houses and severely beaten up by the Assam Rifle personnel.
The brutal combing operation enraged and hurt the heart of Irom Sharmila so much that prompted her to go on fast-to-death (hunger strike) demanding the repeal of the AFSPA. About 15 years passed by, but Sharmila bending to India neither ended her hunger strike till date nor her hunger strike could move so-called the largest democracy India to withdraw its black law.The most serious allegation that one may bring to the forefront is that India is such a country that dishonors the UNSC, better to say United Nations. How a country that denies UN Security Council resolution adopted on April 21, 1948 that India must hold referendum in Kashmir under UN supervision to decide whether the people of Kashmir want to merge to India or Pakistan. India raised the Kashmir issue before the UN and politely welcomed the decision of holding plebiscite under UN and committed to accept results, if it would go against its occupation. Late Nehru who repeatedly declared to hold plebiscite didn’t honor it in his life time who died on May 27, 1964. How such a country that dishonors the UN Security Council resolution could desire to get permanent seat in it?
To keep Kashmir under its occupation India maintains more than 700,000 troops there who are committing all kinds of atrocities against the Kashmiri people. Reliable Kashmiri sources confirmed that Kashmiris are virtually denied of all types of human rights. Indian armed forces so far murdered more than 203,030 Kashmiris, detained 216,222 people, 110,355 kashmris were made disappeared, 116,010 homes have been demolished, leaving 123,110 widows and 207,664 orphans. In Kashmir, there are thousands of unmarked graves, let alone the known ones, in secret cemeteries created by the army and the police to hide their crimes. Indian army, even police, are allowed to enjoy full freedom and permanent immunity in committing atrocities that include, among others, rape, murder, arson, kidnap, demolition (dwelling houses, businesses, religious sites and what not. The killers remain uncharged and unpunished.
South Asian analysts expressing their dismay opine how such a poor country that suffers from acute problems and backwardness in all sectors along with lowest human rights records should desire the most responsible and prestigious position of the world body. They apprehend that India’s membership in UNSC will simply turn South Asia to a permanent battle ground whenever India opts to implement its aggressive dream of Akhand Bharat. All these realities and records, including communal and caste violence, crime against the women and religious minorities, above all, psyche of the South Asian people, are to be profoundly taken into consideration before awarding UNSC membership to such a poor and irresponsible, but occupation-hanker aggressive, at the same time repressive country, named India.*
The contributor: A journalist & researcher, Mohammad Zainal Abedin is based in New York can be reached at Email: noa@agni.com.
