Human rights as a cover
Editorial-October 18, 2013,
India’s participation at next month’s CHOGM in Colombo is still in the balance and speculation is rife that Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh may skip it.
The Sri Lankan government, no doubt, deserves most of the flak it receives and should get its act together on the human rights front instead of venting its spleen on its critics. If not for pressure Britain has brought to bear on it in the run-up to the Colombo CHOGM the killers of a British citizen would have been handled with kid gloves. But, the fact remains that it is not human rights concerns that have prompted Canada to boycott CHOGM and India to dillydally on its participation.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s decision to skip the Colombo summit has everything to do with domestic political compulsions. His government is dependent on block votes that pro-LTTE groups claim to be able to deliver to a party willing to toe their line. Canadian politicians are vying with one another for those votes. The same goes for the Indian Prime Minister who is doing a Hamlet, due to pressure from Tamil Nadu, in view of the next general election. There is reason to believe that he has already made a decision and is prevaricating, unable to announce it.
If Canada is a true respecter of human rights and its boycott of the Colombo CHOGM is aimed at registering its protest against human rights violations in Sri Lanka, it cannot take part in conferences in the UK or any other EU country and the US. For, all of them are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Similarly, if India is really concerned about human rights then before being critical of other countries and taking moral high ground at the UNHRC it should clean up its act at home. According to the Global Slavery Index published on Thursday, there are 30 million modern-day slaves and of them 14 million are in India—2.1 million in Pakistan and 2.9 million in China. The Walk Free Foundation has used information derived from government and non-government sources to rank 162 countries on modern slavery characterised by human trafficking, forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage and sale and exploitation of children. Its report reveals that India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Russia, Thailand, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Bangladesh – account for 76 per cent of the total estimate of 30 million in modern slavery. Could India justify its campaign for human rights overseas while doing precious little to protect them at home? Doesn’t it think charity begins at home?
India is pressuring the Rajapaksa government to devolve power even at the risk of antagonising some of its UPFA partners and a section of its support base while Prime Minister Singh is, in a bid to win an election, going out of his way to placate Tamil Nadu politicians to the extent of subjugating India’s international obligations to their whims and fancies.
The greatest disservice that a country can do to human rights is to use them to camouflage its political projects. Therefore, while hauling the Sri Lankan government over the coals for its human rights violations and cavalier attitude, the Canadian and Indian leaders had better come out with the real reason why they cannot attend the Colombo CHOGM—fear of losing elections at home. They must separate human rights from domestic political compulsions. It will be interesting to see how they will justify being part of the Commonwealth with Sri Lanka in the Chair for the next two years.
