Where is India’s civil society?

Civil libert­arians suppos­ed to come in to show up the mirror to the politi­cal class as well as the rest of us.

Arjun Singh was already an active member of the Congress Party in India in 1969 when Shahbaz Bhatti was born in Pakistan, two years before the war between India and Pakistan. Both died this week, the first from old age and the second in the prime of his life, but it is the manner of their death and the reactions they have evoked across the subcontinent that is instructive to those of us left behind.

Those of us old enough to remember can trace back and argue over the twists and turns of our national trajectories since 1947. For several decades now, India and Pakistan have squabbled over the Kashmir vs terrorism argument. In Pakistan, terrorism was often used as a political strategy to keep the enemy (read, India) at bay, just as in India, political parties like the Congress first connived with Sikh separatists to share power, but were forced to crush them later at considerable cost.

The big difference, of course, is that democracy’s strong roots, the collective shock and horror from these political assassinations, as well as the economic reform over the last two decades have served to strengthen India’s energies and channelise them into alternative arenas of discourse. These days in India, several political activists have been murdered not because of their faith or caste or creed or gender — although this is not to say that caste and gender-based violence doesn’t occur — but because ordinary people, invoking the right to information under the act by the same name, have exposed mafias in diesel, wheat and the buildings of roads.

But even as Pakistan is besieged by the terror within, where are all those Indian civil society activists who have so successfully jolted the national consciousness over the blatant violations of rights and liberties in Maoist-dominated swathes, over farmer suicides in Maharashtra, and in border states like Kashmir and the northeast? India’s political class also continues to either show an unnerving naïvete over Pakistan’s troubles or simply ignores the sullen cocktail of religious and radical fundamentalists that threatens to devour that country.

That’s where civil libertarians are usually supposed to come in, to show up the mirror to the political class as well as the rest of us, usually too afraid to speak up. In Pakistan, activists like Asma Jahangir have often pointed the way ahead, although it now seems like the silence over the blasphemy law is growing. That would make the responsibility over India’s civil libertarians even greater. Activists like Arundhati Roy and Harsh Mander, Jean Dreze and Aruna Roy, as well as scores of others must now push the envelope and force the political class in both countries to take positions so as to protect the rights of their peoples.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 7^th, 2011.