The chairman of the National Human Rights Commission is reported to have suggested including the teaching of the rudiments of human rights in the syllabus for schoolchildren.

Is he not pointing at the wrong end of the stick? Children, especially in a land such as ours that takes pride in its feudal heritage, look up to their elders as role models. If they have to acquire the sensitivity to appreciate the significance of human rights, it is the country’s ruling politicians and lawmakers who must be made aware of their responsibilities in this regard. Sad to say, many of them are not even familiar with the chapters on directive principles of state policy and fundamental rights inscribed in our Constitution; their awareness of the Charter of Human Rights drawn up by the United Nations and endorsed by our government is a cipher. Besides, the new generation of politicians, including those adorning Parliament and state legislatures, are, more often than not, comprehensively innocent of the history of the nation’s freedom movement. Alien rulers denied the most basic civil liberties to Indians. The fight for national independence was therefore entwined with the endeavour to assert, at different levels, the dignity of human existence. Leaders of the nationalist movement, as well as ordinary men and women, went to prison, for instance, to protest against the provisions of the claustrophobic Rowlatt Act. Heads and limbs of thousands were battered when they assembled in public places to register their abhorrence of the British practice of detaining without trial whomsoever they suspected of so-called seditious activities. The expression they used for persons they picked up for incarceration for an indefinite period without producing before a trial judge was ‘security prisoners’. The central concern was not the security of the Indian nation but that of the empire.

With the odiousness of such practices still fresh in their memory, the authors of the Constitution of post-independent India depicted in detail features of the just republic they wanted to give shape to. The outcome was the formation of the directive principles of state policy alongside articles that set out the roster of fundamental rights for Indian citizenry, such as, equality before law, sanctity of life and personal liberty, freedom of speech and association, and protection against social and economic exploitation.

It took barely two years for the country’s rulers to have a change of mind and retrace the footsteps of the erstwhile colonial masters. Legislation on preventive detention was sprung on the people, ostensibly on the ground of curbing ‘Left adventurism’ embarked upon by the Communist Party of India. The communists soon reined their more radical exuberance in, but those firmly entrenched in power could not be swayed from the passion to arm themselves with dubious legal authority to silence political opposition.

That regime of inequity has continued over six decades despite occasional changes in the colour of government. Civil liberty committees, largely sponsored by communist party activists, mobilized widespread public opinion against the return of repressive legislation, but to no avail. The Preventive Detention Act was followed by the long reign of such statutes as the Maintenance of Internal Security Act and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act. The latest in the series is the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, with its particular emphasis on putting behind bars persons doing things or expressing views which, in the view of the authorities, amount to aiding or encouraging the perpetrators of unlawful activities.

This legislation has been in place for the past few years. It is supposed to be targeted against Maoists and their collaborators. The act, however, has not cramped the style of the insurgents entrenched in states across the central and eastern regions of the country. Joint expeditions launched by Central paramilitary forces and state police personnel in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and West Bengal have actually met with a number of setbacks in the recent period. The authorities appear somewhat flummoxed and an internal debate is currently on, even within the Central cabinet, about how to proceed henceforth. The Union home minister has publicly aired his unhappiness at what he thinks is the limited mandate he has been given to crush the Maoist menace. According to one interpretation, he wants large-scale deployment of the army and the air force in the Maoist-infested areas.

Is the minister aware of the implications of what he is proposing? Ground reality cannot be wished away. The combined operations launched by armed contingents of the Centre and the states have not till now nabbed many hard core Maoists. The rough way they have gone about it, followed by indiscriminate arrests and prosecutions under the UAPA, has nonetheless further alienated many honest, innocent citizens in the disturbed areas. Neither civil liberty groups nor investigating journalists can be prevented from trying to unearth detailed information concerning such arrests and prosecutions. The Union home minister’s stern warning, hinting that even chance acquaintances of distant friends of remote sympathizers of individuals suspected of supporting the Maoist cause run the risk of prosecution under the UAPA has, like it or not, tilted the scale of emotional — and intellectual — balance further against the authorities. For the minister’s assertion is in essence akin to putting the formal imprimatur of approval on the concept of guilt by imputation championed by Senator Joe McCarthy in the United States of America in the early 1950s. A parallel can be drawn from our own colonial history too. British rulers introduced a statute — the Goondas Act — in the third decade of the last century with the announced purpose to deport from Calcutta and its vicinity certain criminal elements engaged in nefariously illegal activities in the metropolitan area but who could not be successfully proscribed because of difficulties encountered in assembling concrete evidence. The onus of deciding whom to deport was left to the discretion of the commissioner of the Calcutta Police and the magistrates in charge of the adjoining districts of 24 Parganas and Howrah. In no time, the provisions of the act were utilized to extern from Calcutta scores of dedicated political leaders and workers whose activities were inconveniencing the government.

The home minister will also be well advised to ponder over the consequences of a large-scale involvement of the army and air force to hunt down the Maoists. Army personnel forcing their way into a tribal village will often be unable to distinguish a simple-minded householder from a committed insurgency ideologue; nor will war planes targeting a presumed Maoist-ridden cluster of villages be able to pick and choose where to strafe and where not. Casualties will be high, with widespread deaths and destruction. The increased alienation of the tribal population will be accompanied by a surge of protests by large groups of conscientious citizens in urban areas. Will the home minister threaten them with the weaponry of the UAPA?

As long as the constitutional prerogative of freedom of thought and expression is not abrogated, democratic-minded people will rally against what they consider to be interference with civil liberties, even if such interference takes place in locations where Maoists have a strong presence. Should not time and energy be better spent on introspecting on the reasons for the steady spread of tribal discontent, including on the consequences of mollycoddling the likes of Shibu Soren and Madhu Koda? Even as exploitation of adivasis by land sharks and mining and industry barons proceeds apace, the country’s political establishment keeps picking corrupt-to-the-core Uncle Toms and humouring them all the way. It is pointless to hold it against the adivasis if they have had enough of the ongoing spectacle and choose to try out an alternative path promised by the Maoists. The latter have their own thesis and bagful of strategies which too can be suspected of exploiting the immiserized adivasis. What is already revealed, however, makes a dent on the mind greater than what is as yet merely a conjecture, and in such a situation, even the most gruesome excesses of the Maoists — such as, indiscriminate killings of Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s workers and supporters — only elicit mild disapproval and nothing more from bystanders.

Must not the authorities ponder how various citizen groups, with weighty academic or professional credentials and impeccable bourgeois roots, have persuaded themselves to give a compassionate hearing to what Indian Maoists are saying and doing purportedly on behalf of the adivasis? Perhaps it is the rationality ticking inside the metabolism of the human species which is at work, a rationality which looks with disfavour on the indignities heaped through the ages upon descendants of the country’s original population.

Even it is firmly established that blowing away that passenger train near Jhargram in West Bengal resulting in 150 deaths and the crippling of very many more was a Maoist plot, the bottom line will remain the bottom line. It will still be an open question whether Maoists are the greatest security threat to the nation or whether that investiture is to be reserved for those who create the conditions that enable outlaws to dare perpetrate such a dastardly act.