“Afghanistan’s territory should not be used to threaten and attack any country or to shelter, finance or train terrorists”, said Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) thus passed an India-sponsored resolution on Afghanistan amid the withdrawal of US troops, ending the two-decades long war.
India showed the highest degree of concern and reluctance since President Joe Biden fixed the specific date (August 31) of withdrawing foreign troops from Afghanistan. India and the international community showed great concern about the victory of the Taliban freedom fighters and the departure of the foreign troops. That clearly hurts India’s position. The Indian Bengali daily, Anandabazar Patrica even published an editorial that America betrayed the people of Afghanistan.
India wanted the American forces to remain in Afghanistan for an unlimited period of time so that it could disintegrate Pakistan, creating more and more agents from amongst the Afghans.
Analysts who are aware of India’s horrendous record question the validity and logic of raising such resolutions in the UNSC. They suggest that India should look at its own face in the mirror.
India itself violated almost all the issues that the resolution asked the Taliban government to do. Let me reproduce some aspects of the resolution on Afghan affairs and examine whether it has a position to place it before the UNSC.
India denies international obligations
India deliberately raised this resolution, as its Foreign Secretary acknowledged, saying, “This is of direct importance to India,” This was passed to keep pressure on the Taliban. While briefing the media after chairing the UNSC meeting on Afghanistan, Shringla said, “The resolution also notes the statement by the Taliban on the 27th. of August and the Security Council does expect them to adhere to their commitments.”
But India still does not implement its commitment made on Kashmir over 73 years ago. Doesn’t Shringla know who raised the Kashmir dispute before the UN in 1948? Can he recollect or enumerate how many times the UNSC unanimously passed resolutions on Kashmir, asking to hold a free and fair plebiscite in Kashmir and how many times Nehru committed to honor those resolutions?
Did Shringla forget Nehru’s Solemn pledge, “India is committed to holding a plebiscite in Kashmir. If the result of the plebiscite goes against India, still we will accept it.” Though Nehru survived for another 15 years after the first resolution adopted at the UN in 1948, he never honored his commitments.
Now India claims Kashmir is India’s integral issue and no one has any right to interfere in it.
India deployed one million military and armed forces of various names, to indiscriminately kill innocent Kashmiris who are desperate to end Indian occupation of their land. Shringla knows very well that Indian policymakers seldom honor their own commitments with their neighboring countries.
Human rights in India
The India-sponsored, “resolution also recognizes the importance of upholding human rights, especially Afghan women, children and minorities…“
It was comical that India instructed the Taliban to honor human rights. Does India honor human rights? It has no face to cry for human rights, as it is accused of gross human rights violations.
If a group of researchers since 1947 would have engaged to document the incidents of human rights violations in India, they would have utterly failed to unearth the exact picture, as many tragic happenings disappeared since Indian governments and historians consciously kept them buried. Even many tragedies, which now happen daily in Indian-Occupied Kashmir, Punjab, Naxal and Maoist dominated areas and the Northeastern states of India remained unrecorded.
India is the only country where its armed forces have been fighting against its own citizens since 1947 (particularly in Nagaland and Kashmir). Dozens of draconian black laws exist in India which unaccountably allow the law enforcing agencies to enter any private, even public premises, search and demolish any house, arrest, even kill any so-called suspect without a warrant or warning.
Secret, even open and indiscriminate firing (that leads to death) on innocent people, custodial deaths, killings in crossfire, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and many other types of unlawful liquidations are very common and normal practices in the so-called largest democracy named India. Many of these human rights violations are intentionally kept unrecorded. Western powers, the vanguard of human rights, are well-aware of India’s black records of human rights violations, but are not vocal against India as they need it for their global interests.
If a group of researchers are engaged to document incidents of human rights violations in India since 1947, they will surely fail to unearth all of them as many tragic happenings went to eternity as Indian governments or historians consciously avoided them. Even though many tragedies happened in India-Occupied Kashmir, Punjab, Naxal and Maoist dominated areas, Northeastern States of India, etc., they remained unrecorded.
India is the only country where its armed forces are fighting against its own citizens. Law enforcing agencies can enter any private, even public premises, search and demolish any house, arrest, even kill any so-called suspect without warrant or warning. They conduct secret and open indiscriminate firings (that lead to deaths) on innocent people, custodial deaths, killings in crossfire, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, rapes and gang-rapes and many other types of unlawful happenings which are the common and daily happenings in the so-called largest democracy, named India. Many of those human rights violations are kept unrecorded.
Rights of women in India
The resolution askes the Taliban to uphold the rights of the women and the minority communities. But what is the position of these two groups of people in India? Crimes against Indian women are extremely horrific.
Domestic violence, child marriages, forced marriages, and above all, rape is the most common crime against women in India, according to the Times of India.
An Indian magazine, Outlook, reported in March of 2021 in a curious style: “Bulandshahr, Hathras, Badaun, Unnao, Gorakhpur, Rajasthan, Delhi – The never-ending list of gang-rape cases across nation (India) enraged people.”
This cruel culture started on December 16, 2012, with Nirbhaya, a medical student, who she was brutally gang-raped in a moving bus in Delhi.
Six days later on December 22 of the same year, Joti Singh (23), also a student, boarded a lonely wrong bus to reach her location but failed. Six men raped her brutally and left her to die on the road: naked, wounded, exposed and devastated. No one in the “civilized” India even turned to look at the ill-fated raped girl, as if, a raped girl has no right to live and could have a happy married life. She died in the hospital on December 28 after battling for six days.
Since 2012 such inhuman gang-rapes, particularly penetrating rods through woman’s organs very frequently occurred across India. The latest one occurred just on September 9, 2021, when a 34-year-old woman was raped inside a public transport. She died after battling for her life in the hospital for 33 hours.
Such tragedies occur daily but nothing changes, even after so many promises made by the Indian leaders and their parties. Outlook magazine provides more horrifying stories saying, “The Odisha rape victim was just 3 years old, Banda victim was 8 years old, Hathras victim was just 19, Bulandshahr girl who was raped and then set on fire was also 12 years old. The list can go on and on…”.
“What is more shocking is the fact that, in most of the cases, it has turned out that these minor girls are sexually abused and molested by someone they already know or someone, who is known to their families.” This really uncovers the degradation of moral and social values of the Indians as a whole.
Indicating to the frequency of random rape in India Outlook quotes child rights group, CRY as saying: “A sexual offence is committed against a child in India every 15 minutes and there has been an increase of more than 500 per cent over the past 10 years in crimes against minors.”
The same magazine quoted India’s NCRB crimes against women report of 2019: “Uttar Pradesh (UP) reported the highest number of crimes against women (59,853), accounting for 14.7 per cent of such cases across the country. UP also had the highest number of crimes against girl children under the POCSO Act (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.) and ranked second in terms of rapes committed.”
According to the POCSO Act report, “India has a population of 472 million children (census 2011) below the age of eighteen. Protection of children by the state is guaranteed to Indian citizens by an expansive reading of Article 21 of the Constitution of India and also mandated given India’s status as a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
This law utterly failed to protect children, girls and women. Some rapes were unthinkably inhuman and cruel.
On the basis of sexual assault and harassment against women, India is the most dangerous country in the world. Women are subjected to being harassed not only outside, but also inside their own house. (Anandabazar Patrica, August 31, 2021).
“Nobody knows the exact number of rape victims in India. Concerned campaigners believe thousands of more cases of sexual assaults are ignored by police amid cultural barriers that frequently blame the victim. In most cases, victims generally keep the issue secret, unless it is disclosed by the rapists or incidentally surfaced.“
In light of all this, Shringla and his masters — the policymakers of the same country — being worried and crying for the security of Afghan women and girls is a cruel mockery!
No other treats treats woman so dishonorably. Giving birth to a girl is treated as a symbol of enduring ill-luck. The birth of girls is still discouraged. Thousands of fetuses of baby girls are aborted, even killed just after their birth.
Another anti-woman culture is in vogue in some parts of India where girls are sent to Hindu mandir as ‘Devadasi’ outwardly to learn Hinduism, to pray to the deities, sing and dance to please them. But these girls who can never marry or live with their families, and in many cases, are abused by the Hindu purohits.
Human rights violations centering on cows
In India, members of the minority community are tortured in notorious ways because of cows. Beef is a popular edible item all over the world and India is the number one exporter of beef. Its 150 beef exporters sell beef to 50 Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Many Indian Hindus also consume beef. But, India does not allow Muslims to eat beef. Muslims are frequently harassed, tortured, even killed falsely, being accused of eating, possessing, freezing, or selling beef. During the Modi regime, over 200 Muslims were unlawfully tortured to death for unfounded accusations.
Even Dalits, who are Hindus, are tortured and killed for skinning out dead cows. Such systematic torture and murder are very common in India since Modi came to power. Earlier in 2002 when the BJP came to power, its cadres dragged out four Dalit men from the police station, whose eyes were gouged out, faces burnt and bodies mutilated and trampled upon in Dulina area of Haryana. Local units (Arya Samaj and Bajrang Dal) of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) claimed that a cow’s life was more valuable than that of humans. Modi effectively politicized cows as weapons to get power. Cow politics has featured prominently in the last four of BJP’s electoral manifestos since 1998. Two widely distributed text message slogans were: “Vote for Modi, give life to the cow” and “If the cow is saved, the country will be saved.”
If the status of a cow is placed above human beings, how can one believe human rights are preserved or secured in India? How can Shringla advocate and claim that India stands for human rights? Why do Indians target the people of Afghanistan without allowing them to breathe after liberating their country at the cost of blood and miseries?
Last of all, India or any other country or government has no right to poke its nose in the internal affairs of Afghanistan. External pressure or interference will be counterproductive. It is the popular government of Afghanistan that will determine their policies. Whatever changes the puppet governments, on behalf of the occupation powers, made in Afghanistan, the popular government reserves the absolute sovereign right to review, accept or entirely abolish those whether they are related to Afghanistan’s internal or external policies. Why should the Afghan people carry the burden of the occupation powers? Imposing anything on the Afghan government is tantamount to denying their sovereignty and independence. How can India hope that a new independent Afghanistan will bear the burdens of occupation eras?
*The writer is a Bangladeshi-American journalist and researcher.
September 16, 2021
The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of Aequitas Review.
