| July 17, 2002 | Wednesday | Jamadi-ul-Awwal 6, 1423 |
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Containing thalassaemia
Incitement to violence
KASHMIR’S ‘chief minister’ Farooq Abdullah has revealed that New Delhi is willing to hold talks with his administration on the question of granting autonomy to the held state. If this is indeed part of a new Indian initiative to restore a semblance of normality to the troubled state, it is clearly doomed to failure. This is because the process bypasses two key players in the Kashmir imbroglio: Pakistan, which considers Kashmir a disputed territory, and the legitimate representatives of the people of Kashmir, who believe that theirs is a full-scale freedom struggle and not just a movement for autonomy. There has, however, been no confirmation so far about any such move from New Delhi, which has traditionally been strongly opposed to granting autonomy to the state. As recently as July 2000, the state assembly had passed a resolution demanding autonomy and urging the government in New Delhi to devolve power to the state and retain its control over only defence, finance and communications. However, the BJP government at the centre had rejected such a plan outright. By raising the bogey of autonomy at this point in time the Indians could be seeking to dangle a carrot before the Kashmir electorate in the build-up to the forthcoming state elections scheduled for October.
Meanwhile, the mujahideen groups fighting against Indian occupation have strongly rejected the autonomy option, claiming it is merely an election ploy. While the mujahideen groups have called for a boycott and stated that they would disrupt the polls, the mainstream anti-India umbrella group, the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, has also announced that it will not participate. There are bitter and deep-rooted historical reasons for this reluctance to take part in elections in Kashmir. For one, New Delhi has always exploited any participation in elections by claiming that the exercise renders calls for a plebiscite under the UN resolutions redundant and that it bestows legitimacy on New Delhi’s line that Kashmir is an integral part of India. The truth is that all such electoral exercises in the past have been blatantly rigged to produce a certain kind of results.
The elections of 1989, heavily rigged in favour of Abdullah’s pro-Indian National Conference, sparked off the latest wave of the struggle for self-determination which continues to rage to this day. Once again, the same discredited Abdullah reigns over Kashmir and is seeking a mandate from a battered and bruised populace that views him as part of the problem and not the solution. By holding talks on autonomy with a man so closely identified with the woes of the Kashmiri people, New Delhi is simply repeating the mistakes of the past. What is required to defuse this long and festering conflict — that has claimed some 80,000 lives and caused untold misery — is for a meaningful dialogue to take place with the participation of all the key parties to the conflict. Given the bitter history of the Kashmir problem, with its roots in the partition of the subcontinent, the best way forward is to hold tripartite talks over the future of the disputed territory between India, Pakistan and the representatives of the people of Kashmir. Any talk of granting autonomy to Kashmir at this stage, and that too with a state government whose legitimacy is highly suspect, will merely be an attempt to bypass the proper route to ending the crisis.
AS a recently published report by the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre reveals, some eight million Pakistanis are suffering from thalassaemia, largely an inherited disease of the blood that is ultimately fatal in most cases. According to the report, the number of those suffering from the affliction is constantly on the rise partly because of the general ignorance about the causes, symptoms and consequences of thalassaemia. Annually, an estimated 6,000 thalassaemic children are born in the country, of whom 60 to 70 per cent succumb to hepatitis B or C and die before reaching the age of 10. Thalassaemia-afflicted patients across all age groups run a much higher risk of contacting infectious diseases as they have to receive regular blood transfusions, in addition to being exposed to the regular risk factors that may cause infections. In the small number of cases where a cure may be possible through bone marrow transplantation, the treatment is prohibitively costly and thus out of the reach of even the middle class strata of society.
Obviously, the public health system cannot fully subsidize such an expensive treatment. The JPMC report suggests that since thalassaemia is largely an inherited disease, the expectant mother and father of the child should undergo pre-natal tests to determine if one of them is a carrier of thalassaemia minor, the dormant form of the disease which may never become active in the carrier parent but is more likely to afflict the unborn baby in the womb. The tests in question are not complicated or expensive and can be carried out before or even in the early stages of pregnancy. Thus, given the rising incidence of the disease in Pakistan, the government would do well to make parental testing for the fatal disease part of the pre-natal tests which the health ministry regularly advocates through the mass media. Also, these tests should be available to the general public at subsidized rates at the government hospitals, so that a large section of people can benefit from this preventive measure.
RELIGIOUS leaders are supposed to epitomize love, peace, harmony and restraint. These are cardinal values universally accepted by all religions and civilizations. Islam especially expects of the ulema to inculcate these values in their followers and beckon them towards the highest form of moral behaviour as individuals and groups. Our impulsion to focus on this subject came from a picture published in this newspaper yesterday. It shows a group of ulema demonstrating against a murder. As citizens, they had every right to hold a rally and voice their anger at the delay in investigation and prosecution. However, one of the banners carried by a demonstrator read khoon ka badla khoon (blood for blood).
It is not clear what precisely the writing on this placard was supposed to convey. Investigating a murder, arresting the suspect and his trial are the responsibility of the state. No individual or group has the right to take the law into his own hand. Any group crying for blood indirectly urges its followers to turn away from the rule of law and opt for instant justice — of which we have seen quite a few instances in this country recently. In all these cases, innocent people, or people against whom cases were still proceeding in court, were lynched or severely beaten by aroused mobs. In one case, it was a village panchayat that decreed gang-rape as a form of punishment. In two other cases, some hate-filled imams were responsible for inciting murderous attacks against two presumed blasphemers. That such open incitements to mob violence and murder should come from some ulema is most unfortunate and shows how religion is being abused and exploited by some of these elements for their narrow and bigoted purposes. The ulema must counsel patience and restraint and let the law take its own course instead of precipitating matters to a point of mob frenzy and madness on one pretext or another.