Crisis of Minority Rights in South Asia
Part  VI

BY RITA MANCHANDA

Living Modes of Exclusion

The challenge of pluralism in South Asia is enormous and so too is the gap between the fundamental rights promised in each country’s constitution and everyday forms of discrimination and inequality.

In Nepal, the caste Hindu hill elite make up 16 percent of the population and dominate political economic and sociocultural life, while 85 percent of the population, including women, is marginalised and excluded. Forty percent of Nepal’s population is literate but only 10 percent of Dalits can read and write—they make up 15 percent of the population. Post-multi-party democracy, in successive elections from 1994-99, not a single Dalit has been elected to the National Assembly. Nepal’s janjatis make up 36 percent of the population, but there are only four persons from the janjati community in the judiciary and a little over 1 percent in the civil service and security forces (Lawoti 1999). The traditional communal land tenure system of the Limbu janjati group in eastern and north-eastern Nepal was overridden by the 1960 land reforms, dispossessing the Limbus, but multi-party democracy did not prevent 71 percent of Limbus from being pushed below the poverty line. The Madhesi, who have constituted themselves as an indigenous nationalities of the tropical forest—high caste, Dalit, and Muslim—are discriminated against on the basis of region. Madhesia leaders claim that 3,00,000 people are deprived of citizenship. Nepal’s 1990 constitution recognises the country’s multilingual character but, in 1999, the Supreme Court prohibited the use of any language other than the “official” language Khas in elected local bodies.

In India, a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Muslims, who make up 13 percent of the population, disproportionately account for India’s poor. In urban India, 60 percent of Muslims have never gone to school as against the national average of 20 percent. In rural India, Muslim landlessness is 51 percent as compared to 40 percent for Hindus. In endemic communal violence, it is largely Muslims who are the victims—in the 1970 Bhiwandi riots, 59 of the 79 dead were Muslims. Political violence against minorities peaked with the consolidation of Hindutva forces leading to the communalisation of institutions such as the police, administration, and judiciary. In the Gujarat communal violence of 2002, when some 200 Hindus and 2,000 Muslims were killed, more than 300 persons were arrested of which only three were Hindu. Draconian laws like the TADA and POTA have been used extensively against rebellious members of the minority community. A study carried out in ten states by the NGO People’s Tribunal in July 2004 found that 99.9 percent of those arrested under the POTA were Muslims.

Adivasis make up 8 percent of India’s population. From 1951 to1990, dams, mines, and industries have displaced 21.3 million people, of which 45 percent are tribal and 75 percent of which have not been resettled. In Andhra Pradesh, 50 percent of cultivable land in the scheduled areas is occupied by non-tribals (Reddy 2006).

In Sri Lanka, Tamils fell from their privileged position of dominating 30 percent of public sector jobs with the promulgation of the Sinhala-Only Official Languages Act 1956. By 1970/71, although earlier accounting for 18 percent of the Sri Lankan population, Tamils had slumped to 11 percent, falling further to 5.7 percent in 1978-81. Less than 8 percent of Sri Lankan public servants are Tamil-speaking, while 26 percent of the country’s population, including plantation Tamils and Muslims, are Tamil speaking. The government’s preferential admissions system to higher education, known as the “policy of standardisation” has squeezed out Tamil students from medical and engineering colleges, and seen the number of student drop to 22 percent and 28 percent in medical and engineering schools, respectively. A combination of restrictive citizenship law and electoral law disenfranchised 975,000 hill-country Tamils in 1956. It is estimated that 150,000 are still stateless in Sri Lanka (Sambandam 2003). Government-sponsored land settlement schemes planted 300,000 Sinhalese in areas considered by the Tamils to be part of the “homeland”. Discriminatory policies and war have produced a diaspora of 2 million displaced Tamils. The war has devastated the northeast, causing the country’s impressive social indicators for the region to plummet. A GTZ study notes that, in Trincomalee, assessed birth weight shows malnutrition and high wastage among mothers (Senanayake 2004).

Bangladesh’s Hindu minority has dwindled from 28 percent in 1941 to 9 percent in 2002. On average 538 Hindus went “missing” each day between1964 and 1991. Minority out-migration was accelerated by the legal regime of the Enemy Property Act and its post-“Liberation war” form, the Vested Property Act 1974-2001_ Nearly 30 percent of all Hindu property was alienated by this act, often accompanied by violence, forcible occupation, and the connivance of corrupt officials. In the country’s 300-seat parliament, religious minorities hold seven seats. Political violence between the two main political parties often leads to the motivated targeting of Hindus as during the October 2001 elections, which were marked by 1,500 violent incidents against Hindus, including torture, rape, and forcible occupation of property and lands aimed at decimating a supposed vote bank. Minorities remain poorly represented in government institutions. The government owned Bangladesh Bank employs 10 percent non Muslims in its upper ranks. There are no known government-run Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist schools. In 1947, the indigenous population in the CHT was 97 percent; now one in two persons is a Bengali. The Kaptai Dam has submerged 40 percent of cultivable land area, and galloping encroachment by state-sponsored Bengali settlers has further increased pressure on land—400,000 landless Bengalis were settled in the CHT between 1978 and 1984.

Pakistan’s women, and Christian, Hindu, and Ahmadi communities are victimised by a constitutionally sanctioned legal and juridical regime that promotes a culture of discrimination, intolerance, and extremism. As mentioned earlier, the Federal Shariah Court bars non-Muslims as members and non-Muslim lawyers from appearing before it. The Hudood Ordinance ousts the testimony of non-Muslims against a Muslim accused (and equates women’s testimony to half that of men), while the Hudood (Offence of Zina) Ordinance, which makes adultery punishable, creates serious problems for Christian divorces on the ground of adultery. The Blasphemy Law, which discriminatingly protects the sanctity only of Muslim holy personages and their religious sentiments, has been used by religious extremists to target 2,000 Ahmadis and, more recently, 55 to 60 Christians. Denial of the nationality question, and marginalisation of national minorities in the distribution of power and resources, has produced ferment and violent revolt. Balochistan, which produces 36 percent of Pakistan’s natural gas, receives barely 12 percent of the royalties. The presence of Balochis in the civil-military power structure of Pakistan is negligible: in the civil service, it is 3 percent, and in the army, practically non-existent. The literacy rate in province is the lowest in the country: one-third the national average.

Moreover, as these living modes of discrimination and exclusion of minorities demonstrate, the minority question in South Asia is a trans-border concern. As former Indian foreign secretary, S K Singh, said, “What happens in the states of UP and Bihar has implications in Nepal, of Tamil Nadu in Sri Lanka and similarly developments in Punjab, Rajasthan, UP and Jammu and Kashmir reverberate in Pakistan and Bangladesh”. Indeed, the network of co-ethnicities, languages, and religion makes for a complex dynamics of action-reaction. Soon after the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, Pakistan promulgated the Enemy Property (Custody and Registration) Order, by which industries, trading centres, and landed properties belonging to the Hindu community (or belonging to Indian nationals residing in Pakistan, deemed “enemies”) were listed as abandoned and nationalised. The destruction of the Babri Mosque unleashed mob attacks on Hindus and their properties in Pakistan and Bangladesh. It was perhaps not incidental that, in 1993, the Bangladesh Home Ministry asked commercial banks to block substantial cash withdrawals and to withhold disbursement of business loans to the Hindu community in the districts adjoining the India-Bangladesh border.

Conclusion

In the midst of growing concern about the crisis in minority rights protection in South Asia, there are sites of resistance, agency, and transformation. Madrassahs (religious schools) in West Bengal, to which students of all communities flock, have become significant catalysts for fostering communal harmony. Independent fact-finding missions, people’s commissions, and people’s tribunals have emerged as important civil society mechanisms for revealing the facts and holding the state accountable for violation of minority rights. Minority groups have been slow to come together, divided by a seeming conflict of interests as they assert competing claims (minorityism) to equitable access.

However, emerging cross-border solidarities and initiatives have drawn attention to the common problems of majoritarianism—which effectively blocks the legitimate participation of minorities in the public sphere—and the communalisation of politics and politicisation of religion. As the Regional Minority Rights Consultation in Kathmandu (1998) revealed, a major factor preventing minority communities from fighting for their rights is their lack of awareness about human rights and democracy (Banerjee 1999).

This moment in history is being hailed as the age of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. However, increasingly rights are being mauled by the so-called “war on terror” that has reinforced xenophobia and racism and seriously undermined the rule of law in the world. States have used the pretext of the “war on terror” to deny and repress the political assertion of minorities. At the international level, this has produced aggressive and ambivalent international doctrines of humanitarian intervention. The moral ambiguity of the US-led international system of intervention has put in question well-intentioned initiatives like the recently adopted UN declaration on the responsibility to protect populations against genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity (2005). Important for minority rights protection are developments such as the General Assembly’s decision to upgrade and create the Human Rights Council in place of the Human Rights Commission, which was a subsidiary of ECOSOC; and the setting up of two new UN posts in 2005: a special advisor to the secretary general on the prevention of genocide, and an independent expert on minority issues, appointed by the UN high commissioner for human rights.
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Concluded

[Source: South Asian Media Net]