The price of humans

Unless people are told why human beings, especially women, have right to exist, respected, social evils will continue.

In 1933, when Sir Edward Wakefield was forced on Kalat as its prime minister, he was appalled that a practice which had been abolished in the British Indian empire in 1843, was still prevalent in the state — namely, slavery. Sir Edward recalls in his memoir, Past Imperative that it took a lot of convincing on his part to get this practice banned in Kalat. While I am taking Kalat as an example here, it took several decades after the British had formally abolished slavery for the several hundred other princely states to take action against it. There are several reasons for this slow progress and though it is not easy to understand why people would support such a crime in this day and age, let me theorise one important point.

One of the most important reasons for the lack of alacrity in banning slavery in India was that the people in the subcontinent had still not developed the concept of the ‘dignity of the human being’. Let us not forget that it was only in the 1800s that several practices, which we now consider to be inhuman and immoral, were banned in India, mostly by the British. Together with slavery, India also faced the menace of female infanticide and satti — a practice where a widow self-immolated herself after her husband’s death. It took long and concerted efforts by determined officers and people to root out these evils, and here I am, always reminded of the words of Sir Charles Napier on satti, when some people asked him to not interfere in Indian customs. Sir Charles replied: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

However, even with all the efforts that have been taken to root out this practice, we can still find isolated incidents of satti in India today, with at least 40 incidents having been reported since 1947. This has happened because the process of educating the people about the dignity of human beings has still not fully taken root. Unless people are educated why other human beings, especially women, have a right to exist and are to be respected, these social evils will continue to exist in one form or another. For example, despite the fact that female infanticide is banned in India, we can still see its modern manifestation in the form of pre-natal sex selection. Instead of killing the female child after she has been born, parents now abort the female foetus before she is even born. This issue had become so widespread by the 1990s that the Indian government enacted the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act in 1994 that criminalised the disclosure of the sex of the foetus. However, every year almost a million women still go ‘missing’ in India because of their sex.

While female foeticide has not become a problem in Pakistan yet, our attitude towards women and human beings in general, does not preclude that this will never become a problem. Hardly a week goes by without reports of women being raped, tortured or sold. Newspapers are full of horror stories about human trafficking, which has become a major problem in Pakistan and affects all — men, women and children. The government of Pakistan has enacted the Prevention and Control of Human Trafficking Ordinance of 2002, but it has had little effect since the country lacks the education and understanding required to prevent such heinous crimes.

Recently, a student of mine shocked the class by commenting on the Chauri Chaura incident of 1922 which led Gandhi to call off the Non-Cooperation Movement saying: “Only 22 policemen were burnt alive. That’s not such a big deal!”

We need to seriously rethink our approach towards educating people about human dignity, since if this is really our attitude towards the value and dignity of human life then no law can change us and we will continue to treat people as mere commodities.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 29^th, 2012.