November 3, 2003	Monday	Ramazan 7, 1424

THE Universal Declaration of Human Rights that came in the wake of the liberation of Europe from Nazism was enshrined as the pivot of the UN system. In democracies, mainstream political parties usually uphold the values enshrined in the UN covenants and press for those that they find missing from their respective polities.

Today, however, we find that much of this responsibility has been offloaded from the political system to the growing number of NGOs, a political variation of the business process outsourcing that underpins the new economic strategies of leading corporations in the developed countries. This political outsourcing is as prevalent in India as elsewhere except that it is more palpable here. Thus we find a growing list of award winners and countless other less recognized activists involved in excellent work in a range of critical tasks.

For example, Medha Patkar is considered a leading environment activist of global stature. Writer Arundhati Roy lends her own considerable strength to Ms Patkar in the anti-Narmada Dam campaign, thus taking the movement into a wider social sphere. Ms Arundhati Roy is fighting for the right to information with the help of dedicated villagers in Rajasthan. There are groups working against communalism. There are groups fighting for the rights of women and children. Some are less restrictive in defining their work, so they simply fight for ‘democratic rights’.

Most of these NGOs are aware of what they are up against. Some believe they are fighting an increasingly authoritarian state with a strong leaning towards fascism. Others believe religious fanaticism is the issue while some NGOs are battling the much older scourge of caste as they pick up the cudgels on behalf of Dalits who are at the bottom of the Hindu caste system. Missing from the frame are the political parties who have turned into a class of effete demagogues, having deserted what was once the core of their mandate.

Two incidents from last week prove the point. One is the case of Mallika Sarabhai, well-known danseuse, book publisher and staunch campaigner for the rights of Gujarat’s dispossessed Muslims. She worked with NGOs and lawyers’ groups to give legal protection to the hapless minorities against a quasi-fascist state administration. For her pains, she has been slapped with the ludicrous charge of running an immigration racket. She has been forced to seek anticipatory bail; if she doesn’t get it, Sarabhai says she has no option but to go underground. Even internationally celebrated figures are not proof against the machinations of a state intent on teaching activists a lesson. Arundhati Roy has already been to prison, so Sarabhai ought to be warned.

The other person who has just braved it out, with some help from NGOs, a clutch of well-meaning lawyers and loyal friends is S.A.R. Geelani, the Kashmiri college teacher who was acquitted by the high court last week in the parliament attack case of December 2001. One would have thought the Delhi University Teachers’ Association (DUTA), to which Geelani belonged, would have been the first source of succour for him. But DUTA failed him in his hour of need although it was controlled by members owing allegiance to the Communist Party of India-Marxist when Geelani was being tried in an anti-terror court.

Such is the sway of rightwing nationalists in the body politic that the leftist union considered it politically safer to distance itself from the case. And so it did not act when Geelani was arbitrarily suspended from his job even during the period of his trial, a job that was restored because of intense lobbying by individual teachers.

The rise and fall of the Tehelka investigative news portal is another case of brave activists who were doomed because they were working in a political vacuum. But perhaps the biggest negative fallout of this state of affairs is the pitiable state that NGOs find themselves in. Take SAHMAT, an NGO linked with CPI-M that promotes cultural rights. It was formed after a party member and playwright Safdar Hashmi was killed by hoodlums during a street play way back in 1989. At that time the CPI-M blamed the Congress for the attack. Today SAHMAT considers the Congress Party to be the mainstay of secular and, therefore, democratic politics. In the absence of any political movement, the group has splintered into two or three rival and acrimonious platforms. Their activists are routinely beaten up by rightwing Hindu mobs, the recent one being the attack on playwright Habib Tanvir in Congress-ruled Madhya Pradesh.

Historian Stanley Lane-Pool had described a failed British campaign into Afghanistan thus: “The retreat became a rout, the rout a massacre.” That too was a time when there was no air cover for the British infantry’s foray into a wild, uncharted region.