Torture in 'democracies'
Let us talk about torture and how three countries, widely considered to be remarkable democracies – India, US and Israel – hush it up. Israel, unlike the other two, is not a democracy by any genuine legal or moral standard. It denies a fifth of its population (Israeli Arabs not living in the occupied territories) equal citizenship rights. It is in fact a non-secular, explicitly communal “Jewish state” which Constitutionally-legally discriminates on the grounds of religion. But such is the effectiveness of Israeli propaganda that any number of people in the West and elsewhere are prepared to swallow the myth of it as some kind of ‘democratic bastion’ in West Asia.
In fact, in 1999, Israel’s Supreme Court legalized torture. It did so by outlawing the use of certain techniques of interrogation while justifying “moderate physical pressure” in the name of security and counterterrorism. This is in complete violation of the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which Israel has signed and ratified. But in this “vibrant democracy” the Fourth Estate is remarkably silent, indeed in a way complicit, about Israeli treatment of Palestinians in custody. Violence by Palestinians is invariably labelled terroristic and the perpetrators terrorists while the violence of the Israeli armed forces and police is always “retaliation” in the cause of “counterterrorism”.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it! Is it any surprise that both the US and Indian governments can use similar excuses to hide their own iniquities? The US like Israel has also signed and ratified the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT) but carries out its own illegal brutalities on prisoners and incarcerated suspects in Guantanamo. The US is also violating the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners but justifies this through the magic wand of re-description, claiming they are “enemy combatants” not entitled to prisoner’s rights. But India, unlike Israel and the US has signed CAT (in 1997) but has to this date despite numerous appeals, domestic and international, not ratified it, and is therefore, not bound by it.
We have to be clear about what is meant by torture. It is not to be defined by the severity of the pain inflicted. Otherwise one could try and claim that “moderate physical pressure” (whatever this might mean in practice) is not torture. As the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Prof. Manfred Nowak, makes clear, it is defined by the context of powerlessness of the individual. If someone is deprived of freedom and unable to fight back, then if the pain is inflicted for a special purpose, it is torture. What are the purposes for which torture is carried out? There is first what is called deterrent torture – to terrify and deter one’s opponents. An element of deterrence is attached to most acts of torture but it becomes a dominant purpose when, for example, a dictatorial government in Latin America (Guatemala) leaves mutilated bodies in the open for the public to see, or when a guerrilla group does the same in respect of a presumed informer.
The second kind is “backward-looking interrogative torture” aimed at getting a confession about some past event. The third kind is “forward-looking interrogative torture” aimed at getting information concerning future plots. After 9/11 this kind of torture, in particular, has been increasingly justified as necessary in the “war against terror”. Of course in India, police interrogators of ‘suspects’ (formally charged or otherwise detained) for a whole host of crimes, not necessarily political, take routine recourse to morally unacceptable forms of brutality. So torture is not used merely for ‘counterterrorism’ but is embedded in the longstanding structures of class, caste, communal and gender oppression that exist in Indian society and which, to put it mildly, do not leave law enforcement or government agencies untouched.
Moreover, national and state level human rights commissions have no power to do anything about such custodial torture. Though India is a member of the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights and thereby obliged to let UN human rights rapporteurs carry out investigative work, it has refused to allow this. In the current Indian system, complaints about alleged tortures are adjudicated on the basis of reports given by administratively appointed investigating officials and state prosecutors! It does not take a genius to see how farcical this situation is. The Indian government has also consistently prohibited independent human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch-Asia, International Red Cross, from investigating allegations of torture. Nor is there any effective nationwide campaign for elimination of torture in Indian civil society with the media relatively unconcerned as compared to other HR issues.
Even in the US, where public concern is greater, it takes a backseat to other HR issues. In Israel the issue has little resonance because the public is morally already so deeply de-sensitized. It has to be in order to live with and even justify the sustenance of the longest running illegal military occupation of the last 150 years, one that is sustained by extraordinary levels of institutionalized and routinized forms of violence towards Palestinians. Thus most Israelis have no will to ‘embarrass’ their government on this issue. But apart from these national specificities there is also a common thread that helps explain this common indifference.
Torture is a lot like terrorism. Non-state actors/groups do engage in torture as also in terrorism. But the scale of both in terms of victims affected, is immensely, indeed incomparably, greater when carried out by states. The main reason for this is not the much greater means for inflicting violence that states possess but because acts of terrorism (and torture) can be rationalized in the name of much more grandiose ends! These can range from ‘promoting the national interest’ to ‘defending national security’ to ‘preserving national unity and integrity’ to ‘fighting global communism’ to ‘fighting capitalist imperialism’, even to ‘promoting democracy globally’. After 9/11 the favourite banner for justifying state terrorism and torture is ‘counterterrorism’ or the “war against terrorism”. Not only are states able to get away with inflicting an incomparably higher scale of civilian casualties, they are also more easily able to get away with claiming that however regrettable the “collateral damage”, this is not terrorism. The standard definitional deceit involved here is the claim that only those acts intending to hurt innocent civilians count as terrorism. But governments carry out acts they know are going to kill civilians! The philosophical gap, however, between intentionally and knowingly killing civilians is not enough (if it at all exists) to allow states to get away with such linguistic whitewashing.
There are some human rights that must be seen as absolute and the right not to be tortured is one among them. Isn’t it time that we in India demand the highest standards of transparency and accountability on this score from our government? Shouldn’t reputable and independent HR bodies be free to carry out their investigation of the behaviour of police and armed forces? Shouldn’t there be severe and exemplary punishment for all those (from the highest to the lowest) who are complicit in acts of torture? Is it not time for the government to immediately ratify CAT? Impunity for wrongdoers has always been the most valuable accomplice of torture.
Achin Vanaik is a fellow of the Transnational Institute and Professor of International Relations and Global Politics (South Campus) at the Political Science Department of Delhi University. He is the editor of Selling US wars, Interlink, 2007.
Achin Vanaik is a fellow of the Transnational Institute and Professor of International Relations and Global Politics (South Campus) at the Political Science Department of Delhi University. He is the editor of Selling US wars, Interlink, 2007.
