Needed, a code of child rights

V.R. Krishna Iyer,The Hindu Nov 14,2007

Jawaharlal Nehru was the first and foremost Prime Minister of India. He brought brave new Bharat international stature and pre-eminence in the non-aligned movement. He and the Indian National Congress of which he was president, stood for swaraj, swadeshi, and a socialistic pattern of society. The Planning Commission was set up with the creative-dynamic objective of shaping a revolutionary transformation with an egalitarian vision and strategy. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, with a humanist drive and socialist vision, gave more economic teeth and political pragmatism to the progressive social justice pledge. She abolished the privy purses of the profusion of princes, nationalised leading private banks and other key enterprises and, most important, amended the Constitution to declare the Republic to be socialist, secular and democratic.

Those who dismiss, denigrate or disregard the socialist element, with its egalitarian and agrarian focus, betray Gandhi, Nehru and Indira. Those who treat the key promises in the Preamble to the Constitution — which is a fundamental factor in the basic structure of the polity — with cynical contempt, with feelings of dollar domination, rupee devaluation, and the submissive illusion that our world is beholding a decadence of socialism and an escalation of White House supremacy and occupation by multinational corporations, are guilty of the same kind of betrayal. The Congress has jettisoned its swaraj and soul, and serendipitously found inspiration in U.S. Inc. Having assumed office by taking an oath of allegiance to the socialist, secular, democratic Constitution, anyone who commits colonially conditioned violation of these values cannot honestly continue in offices of state power. How can they observe November 14 in the name of Nehru unless they proclaim with statesmanly integrity that they stand by the Preamble which is paramount and adhere to the socialistic dimension of government inscribed therein?

The Left, which runs a few State governments and supports the Union government and ensures its survival, must not submit to the hidden agenda of neo-capitalist rule, with dependencia syndrome, if any moral principles govern their ideology and politics. Exotic pressures, swadeshi-allergic imports and luxury investments using the trans-Atlantic mantra of globalisation, liberalisation and privatisation represent a dubiously democratic elite mafiacracy. Socialism, under the present establishment, is suffering a Seppuku pathology. “The purpose of development should not be to develop things but to develop man.” (The Cocoyoc Declaration, 1974). If distorted it is a disastrous slogan, with land-grab freebooters robbing the poor into homeless slavery and the rich lawlessly exhibiting class ‘affluenza’. We have two Bharats, one ruling the other with the aid of state power.

Such is the horror: contemporary anti-socialist, para-colonial society coalition administrations which boast of ersatz per capita income are blinking at the slums and the petty peasantry. This is silent terrorism, tacit debunking of humanism. This grave situation is defended de facto by a strange Left stance which formally opposes a pro-U.S. nuclear deal but actually sustains the same Cabinet by ensuring its continuance — which amounts to a riddle wrapped in a mystery. What an inconvenient truth. This is the fate of our socialistic Constitution.

U.S. nuclear big business is lobbying to make India a quasi-colony — which is an inconvenient truth that our sovereign executive hides. Why be a nuclear mendicant before the unipolar mega-power? Nehru, Indira or Morarji would never have succumbed to this imperial deal. We have, beyond doubt, wind power, solar power, hydro-power, earth heat power, wave power — if only we have the will to use globally available technology. But do we have the do-or-die spirit of swaraj?

Now comes another mega-mendacious observance. November 14, we are told by the Central government, is Children’s Day. But in reality those who run the Republic have scant regard for the Indian child, the celebration of Nehru’s birthday notwithstanding. Gabriela Mistral, a Nobel prize winner, wrote: “We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait, the child cannot. To him we cannot answer tomorrow. His name is today.”

Read Maria Montessori: “Humanity shows itself in all its intellectual splendour during this tender age as the sun shows itself at the dawn, and the flower in the first unfolding, of the petals; and we must respect religiously, reverently, these first indications of individuality.”

To rob a generation of tender wonders of the right to rise to their mental, moral height, to unfold their flowering of faculties and to crib their personality, is societal criminality and culpable desertification of fertile human resources.

The Supreme Court, in M.C. Mehta v. State of Tamil Nadu, dwelt upon the obligation of state and society towards the children of India.

Here comes the poignant pertinence of the noble U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. In Mehta, the court recalled the commitment that India made to the world community by acceding to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). The Convention covers the full personality of the child in every dimension. Acceding to the instrument represented a reinforcement of the tryst of the Republic with the children of India which has to be redeemed. The girl child faces everything from foeticide to ‘sati-cide’ to ‘dowry-cide’ to ‘rapicide’.

India has come under international censure, more so because even poorer African countries have done better by children than the Socialist Republic of India where the little child is still made to work on crackers and carpets. Every match box or cracker, every bangle, every brass-ware piece, every hand-made carpet or polished precious stone has on it a streak of innocent blood and the tormented tears of some child forced to slave.

The Central government has not made any comprehensive legislation to implement the U.N. Convention and save the juvenile victim. This tragic indifference induced UNICEF to set up a committee of which this writer was the Chairman, and many distinguished persons including Margaret Alva and Justice A.M. Ahmadi were members, to consider how best to give effect to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We drafted a regular Bill doing justice to the Convention and presented it to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He praised the draft and agreed to bring it before Parliament. His term expired and the Congress came to power. Years have passed since, many a Children’s Day has passed, and now another November 14 has come.

The Union Government has aggravated the number of street children, allowed the escalation of child illiteracy by making lower kindergarten and upper kindergarten so expensive as to keep poor children out, and blinked culpably at the growing sexual abuse of juveniles.

A code for child rights is overdue. The tragedy of India is that there is no more Nehru, no more child rights, no more constitutional duty to enact a “paedo-code” to go by the U.N. Convention of which India is a signatory.