Islamabad now has a separate ministry of human rights. It will have a minister for human rights, a secretary, a couple of joint secretaries and an army of deputy secretaries and section officers. Stenos and peons will be recruited, housing and transport for official will be bought, and the minister will have his Pajeros and sedans as per the cannon of bureaucratic proliferation we swear to in Islamabad.
A government which is frequently advised to cut the fat and slim down must care a lot for human to create a new ‘division’ in these times of financial duress. The ministry will absorb all the human rights ‘cells’ that have accumulated in other divisions, including the prime minister’s own secretariat. It will centralise the various scattered activities aimed at enforcing the articles of the Constitution relating to human rights.
It is possible that the new ministry became feasible after funding from abroad materialised. The ministry can simply become a front to account for this money; or it can work sincerely and efficiently to provide succour to citizens being maltreated by state and society. Going by the reports compiled by the various NGOs active in Pakistan, their is enough work for the new ministry to do. But will it be able to do it?
The first doubt that shadows this new creation relates to jurisdiction. The ministry is federal but its subjects is provincial. We know that it will have to coordinate with ‘cells’ in provincial governments to get its message across. Will its signals be understood and its fiats carried out? Let us take an example. Last week, a feudal landlord who runs brick kilns in village Singhra, district Sheikhupura near Lahore, drove out the Christian inhabitants of the village and razed their houses to the ground.
Let us assume that a Christian knows that there is a ministry in Islamabad he can turn to. He gets in touch with the ministry on the phone. Will the ministry require him to reduce his plaint to writing and approach a sleepy difficult-to-locate human rights cell in Lahore; or will someone in Islamabad get into a helicopter and land the same day in Singhra to see what is happening there?
Human rights violations are often committed by the majority community against minority communities, or by the powerful against the underprivileged; and they are committed on the basis of popular prejudice. When the Christian community of village Khan Jagga were dispossessed and rendered refugee in Punjab, the police, the magistracy, and the local political elite collaborated in this crime. One can’t imagine that the new ministry of human rights will treat this kind of offence any different from the provincial administration.
Let us predict what the ministry will do. On receipt of complaint, the concerned section officer in Islamabad will ring up the ‘cell’ in Lahore, the ‘cell’ will get in touch with the Punjab administration, and someone in the home department will get the police department to go to Singhra. The SHO in Singhra and the magistracy in Sheikhupura will give a version totally at variance with the plaint made by the Christians; most probably, the Christian community will be held responsible for the disorder, the local clergy swearing that someone had been guilty of blasphemy. After that the local MPA will pressure the chief minister into side-tracking the inquiry started by the federal human rights ministry.
It is politically difficult to defend human rights in Pakistan. The religious community and most conservative opposition circles in the country have condemned Pakistan’s participation in the UN conference on discrimination against women in Beijing. We have seen how successive governments have ignored the persecution of the Christians under the blasphemy law; raped women have had to keep quiet because the process of obtaining justice against men is more humiliating than rape itself.
Increasingly, the intellectuals in Pakistan, including state functionaries, some of whom will find jobs in the ministry of human rights, believe that human rights is a Western intrusion into our culture. But all over the world, the struggle for human rights goes against the grain of culture. Human rights activists are dubbed foreign agents; at times, they are perceived to be acting in violation of the Constitution. Governments have to pledge themselves to righting the wrongs done to the victims of prejudice at the risk of becoming unpopular.
The PPP government seems inclined to respect human rights, but will it make any headway in improving their observance in Pakistan? Not if it duplicates the inertia of federal ‘divisions’ in the new bureaucratic hierarchy it is about to create in Islamabad. People persecuted by prejudice require immediate relief. They cannot obtain justice through the present network of state bureaucracy. The incidence of crime against them is not even admitted by the state.
Therefore, let the new ministry be lean. Spend less on the establishment. Give the ministry real teeth by making it swift in mobility. In coordination with the NGOs, let it go out and ‘establish’ independently and expeditiously that a violation of human rights has actually taken place. For this function, you don’t require armies of section officers and clerks, but a few motivated and well-equipped individuals willing to rough it out in remote areas where these violations usually take place.