People's Democracy

Jawed Naqvi

IT took the Vatican over 400 years to accept that Galileo was right, that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way round. But Galileo was dead and gone by then. You can't un-ring the bell. He died a harassed, hounded man. It's difficult to recall the exact reason that persuaded the Pope to make the belated confession, but it was conveyed to the world one fine morning, perhaps 10-15 years ago, by Alistair Cooke on the BBC's Letter From America programme. By comparison, it took Madeleine Albright relatively less time, but still nearly half a century, to confess that it was the CIA that toppled a popular government in Iran in 1953, paving the way for the Shah's reinstatement as an autocratic ruler, and thereby sowing the seeds of the 1979 Islamic revolution. But, even in her confession, Albright was not contrite. Her justification for the overthrow of the Persian Gulf's first elected government was curiously American.

"In 1953, the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh," she said in a rare Nowroz address to the Iranian-American Council, a week before visiting New Delhi and Islamabad with President Clinton last year. "The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs."

No apologies. Just a reaffirmation of the truth everyone already knows too well, not unlike the revolution of the earth around the sun. Naturally, a key element of the so-called third world syndrome, of which India and Pakistan are both a chronic and an acute part, is a deep and abiding mistrust of the West, not merely because of the countless instances of brazen perfidy, from Allende's Chile in Latin America to Africa, Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Asia, east, west, north, south, everywhere, but even in its integrity in the basic first step towards creating a civil society across the world, in its battle against the kind of osbcurantism it accuses the Taliban of practising. The last time the West fought a major battle against terrorism, against Nazi Germany, it created Israel as a solution, based on the tenets of religion, the Promised Land. Goodness knows what holy scriptures will guide the post-Osama bin Laden involvement in Afghanistan.

The cynics would notice though that not unlike Israel, Afghanistan too is sitting on the edges of an oil-rich region, which imbues the current standoff there with an air of suspicious coincidence.

One of the core beliefs of civil society is equal justice for all. And yet, even after it was accepted as a most desirable international covenant in 1945 in San Francisco, equal justice remains one of the most elusive ingredients of democracy, not to speak of mediaeval monarchies and dictatorships that still dot the global map. The Secret Evidence Act introduced by the Clinton Administration was the anti-thesis of the world's quest for equal justice, targeting and trapping foreigners as suspects and denying them access to any evidence or proof of the alleged suspicion of terrorism. That such foreigners mostly turned out to be Arab immigrants is a curious coincidence.

After the attacks in New York and Washington, almost the same principles of American justice are being sought to be imposed on the global war against terrorism. The short message is: Believe us, we have proof, those guys are guilty. We have shown some select evidence to your governments. But we cannot, will not, need not, give any further proof to proceed with our objective to annihilate terror. Terror as we define it. Sounds so much like British law as it evolved in India.

Remember that it was the British who practised the slave trade. They practised racism. Their offspring hunted and annihilated the native inhabitants in America, Australia and on countless islands across the world inhabited by the so-named aborigines. Even worse was this Western habit of looking at the pre-September 11 Afghanistan primarily as a source of illicit drugs. But was it not the British who massacred the Chinese during the Opium Wars because of their refusal to hawk opium to their people? Weren't the British of the civil society fame, the world's original drug peddlers? These gurus of civil society, what were they doing and practising in India? Let's look up a few paragraphs from their manuals of justice and see if anything has changed.

The reforms of 1772 introduced by Warren Hastings included one significant foray into substantive law, in the form of Article 35, for punishing dacoits.

An address which Hastings made to the Council on July 10, 1773 suggests that the kazis and muftis of the faujdari adalats (the criminal courts) were not using Article 35 very enthusiastically. The article prescribed capital punishment but "the maulvis in the provincial courts refuse to pass sentence of death on dacoits, unless the robbery committed by them has been attended with murder. They rest their opinion on the express law of the Koran, which is the infallible guide of their decisions."

Some months later Hastings was complaining that the maulvis of the courts did not draw a distinction between the raiyat (peasant) who, impelled by strong necessity, in a single instance, invades the property of his neighbour, and on the other hand the dacoit, robbers on the highway, and especially to such as make it their profession. But on what criteria, after all, did Hastings want the judge to distinguish between the one-time offender and the professional robber? His loaded conclusion could be relevant to the way the arriving anti-terrorist coalition looks to solve the problem they face, or believe they face.

"The dacoits of Bengal", said a government committee reporting to Hastings, "are not like robbers in England, individuals driven to such desperate courses by sudden want: they are robbers by profession, and even by birth; their families subsist by the spoils which they bring home to them; they are all, therefore, alike, criminal wretches, who have placed themselves in a state of declared war with our government, and are therefore wholly excluded from every benefit of its laws." That is the thinking that must have been dominant during Britain's first engagements with Afghanistan. More than 200 years later, little if any of the colonial mindset seems to have changed.