Why are NGOs, sting operations silent on Naxal menace?

29 Oct 2007, 0253 hrs IST,Dhananjay Mahapatra,TNN Times of India

EW DELHI: India signed the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948 and ratified it in 1958. Under this, a signatory state is bound to effectively act upon and legislate upon the intents of the mandate of the convention.

According to the convention, genocide means any of the following acts, committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, that would include killing members of the group.

It slso includes causing serious bodily injury or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In the 2002 killings in Gujarat, a frenzied mob, with state patronage, systematically targeted Muslims that the world rightly branded as one of the worst genocides in India.

Union home minister Shivraj Patil’s well-informed deputy, Sri Prakash Jaiswal, told the Lok Sabha in 2005 that 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed, 223 more were missing and 2,500 were injured.

The state government’s effort to botch the inquiry to help the perpetrators get acquitted by the court was derailed by a vigilant group of NGOs, supported by the media, and the timely intervention of the Supreme Court, which did not mince words in blaming the then Gujarat administration.

A series of sting operations unveiled and continue to unveil the ugly faces behind the carnage. Exactly 23 years ago, a frenzied mob led by political leaders butchered Sikhs in Delhi after two bodyguards from the community assassinated Indira Gandhi to take revenge for Operation Bluestar, the Army action to flush out terrorists holed up in the Golden Temple at Amritsar.

The official toll - 2,733 Sikhs were killed. Unofficial figures put it at around 4,000. Till date, not a single conviction of consequence has taken place, given the shoddy investigation done by the police at the behest of those in power, and commission after commission have failed to identify the perpetrators.

In the wake of Nanavati Commission report on anti-Sikh riots being tabled in Parliament in 2005, which led to the resignation of Union minister Jagdish Tytler, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said his government would seek to prosecute those guilty of inciting the deadly riots in 1984.

For all these years, the NGOs, the media and the sting operators did not think it a fit subject to probe and unmask the masterminds of this genocide.

Killings by Naxalites, waging a war for the have-nots against the exploiters, have crossed the four-figure mark in the last five years. Jaiswal in 2005 told the Lok Sabha that 76 districts in nine states were badly affected by Maoist violence.

In 2006, he was contradicted by Patil, who claimed to have personally collected the data, which showed that only 50 districts were affected. In 2007, addressing a chief ministers’ conference in Delhi, the PM said Naxalite movement had spread to over 160 districts.

There is hardly any activism on the part of NGOs, media or sting operators to expose the masterminds behind the Naxals who have defied the state machinery and strike at will. The tears shed by victims - be it of Gujarat riots, anti-Sikh riots or Naxal violence - are identical.

Article 2 of the Genocide Convention applies equally upon all three forms of attack. Why is it then that only one of them gets highlighted and not the others?

It is time the Centre took appropriate steps to prevent such carnages through legislative and socio-economic measures. That alone would justify its decision to ratify the convention 50 years ago.

( dhananjay.mahapatra@timesgroup.com )