HRF Monthly

Ignoring the Disappeared of Kashmir with Impunity

/ / HRF Monthly

HRF/224/12 | 6 November 2012

Dear Madam/Sir,

The blanket refusal by security forces in Jammu and Kashmir to investigate or release the identities of bodies buried in unmarked and mass graves is a gross violation of international law that India has so far been able to commit with impunity. National and international pressure has been found wanting in this regard. Fatigue and helplessness over the persistence of India’s egregious human rights abuses has made such relative silence the norm. Domestic apathy and selective enforcement of international law must be overcome to end such impunity to the violation of human rights.

It appeared in the 10 November 2012 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly.

HRF/224/12 [ PDF ]

 

2012

‘Disappeared’ in Kashmir

/ / 2012

The Dawn | 30th October 2012 | A.G Noorani |

IT is not surprising at all that the chief minister of Indian Kashmir, Omar Abdullah’s written statement on the disappeared persons, in the assembly on Oct 8 should have been received with complete disbelief.

He said, “Till ending July 2012, 2,305 persons have been declared missing.” FIRs were lodged only in 182 cases. In the rest of the cases, “missing reports and complaints have been lodged”.

Sana Altaf of the Srinagar daily Greater Kashmir noted “even after 23 years of armed conflict, no authentic official data exists on the number of disappeared persons in Kashmir valley while successive governments continue to come up with contradictory figures”.

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Reviews of SAHRDC Publications

Review of Challenges to Civil Rights Guarantees in India

/ / Reviews of SAHRDC Publications

The State and Citizenship | Mona Das | The Book Review, October 2012

CHALLENGES TO CIVIL RIGHTS GUARANTEE IN INDIA | By A.G. Noorani

South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre| Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2012, pp. 283

 

Rights delineate relationship between the State and the individual hence; they are some sort of parameters to determine the nature of any State. Individual and group rights, including a gamut of second generation rights called civil and political rights, when guaranteed by a State serve as milestones to mark democratization of society. Advocacy for protection of Civil Rights, in the present era of hegemonic discourses on cross-border terrorism, insurgency, everyday commonplace security threats, is more complex than ever before.

Rights are the smallest price that a Nation State is more than willing to pay in return for security and peace. In this context the book under review is an attempt to empower citizens of India through dissemination of information and educating them on civil rights, as admitted in the preface to the book which quotes Francis Bacon’s aphorism ‘Foreknowledge itself is power’.

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HRF Monthly

Notifying Farming as an Essential Service-An Authoritarian Manoeuvre

/ / HRF Monthly

HRF/223/12 | 18 September 2012

Dear Madam/Sir,
The Government of India is considering a proposal to notify farming as an essential service. This is ostensibly to bring drought relief to farmers suffering from a weak monsoon – a laudable goal indeed. However, if farming is deemed an “essential service”, farmers and farm workers could lose many of their political and civil rights because the government can then invoke the Essential Services Maintenance Act to ban strikes by agricultural workers, leaving them without collective bargaining power.

It appeared in the 22 September 2012 issue of the Economic and Political Weekly.

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