Whose Truth -Rohingyas

 Amnesty has made a startling revelation about Rohingyas in Myanmar, will it change tack in India?

The trouble with human rights watchdogs is that they have, by virtue of countering the establishment narrative, assigned themselves a certain kind of legitimacy and credibility without realising that some of their own investigations are compromised by subjective assessment than objective analysis. And when it comes to the Amnesty International, which has been riled by China, Russia and Vietnam for biased reportage and dot surveys and which has at various points been criticised for receiving funding from Islamists, observers take its findings with a pinch of salt. Now its on-ground crew in Myanmar has forced it to change its line of Muslim victimisation in the hands of the military by confirming a mass genocide of Hindus. Although the Myanmar Government has for a long time been claiming cleansing of Hindus and Buddhists by extremist Rohingya Muslim groups, many had gone with the tide and dismissed it as propaganda to hide its own excesses against them. Now Amnesty team interviews at refugee camps have revealed that up to 100 Hindus were brutalised, terrorised and killed in cold blood by Rohingya extremists. While this has raised hackles of Rohingya activists worldwide, leading them to wonder if the Myanmarese military had indeed been able to swing Amnesty to their side of the story, the eyewitness accounts in the Amnesty report prove the gruesome nature of vengeance, forced conversion of women, rape and arson. This disbelief at Hindu or Buddhist oppression is symptomatic of a deep-rooted malaise in a mindset that perceives Islamic extremism as a result of other kinds of majoritarianism and never the accelerator or provocateur of deepening faultlines. The global rights group has at least now acknowledged that when it comes to minority pressures, Hindus face as much heat, be it in Myanmar, or the immediate South Asian neighbourhood where they are anyway reduced to minuscule proportions, courtesy the unreported exodus that happens to the home country year after year.

As for our own educated discourse, any talk of Hindu victimhood is quickly assigned to being driven by political agenda rather than being a matter of genuine human interest. The Amnesty’s own record in India, particularly in its assessment of Jammu & Kashmir, has always been scripted by hawkish anti-India protagonists. And while there are reams on excesses by the Armed Forces, without referencing the context of each reported event, there is no proportionate study or coverage of Kashmiri Pandit displacement or their systematic cleansing from the Valley. Not too long ago, an Amnesty conference in Bengaluru had even allowed anti-India slogans to be raised at the venue and marginalised Kashmiri Pandits from placing their own point of view. Any rights group has to sift the grain from the chaff but Amnesty for long has harvested the crop as is so long it has helped reap dividends of foisting a saleable issue and a Western acceptability of clichés rather than truths. While the Pandit plight finds little or no mention in Amnesty records, which claims it does not have enough credible ground inputs, its India chapter has never investigated other human rights abuses against minorities like Dalits or tribals. Home-grown activists, who thrive on these reports and even become office-bearers of these organisations themselves, have not raised a collective voice against the massacre of Rohingya Hindus or talked about their refugee status. But they are quick to assail any initiative to curb the influx of Rohingya Muslims, despite them posing a logistical human resource challenge and in some cases a security threat. Will Amnesty India now, therefore, change tack given its headquarter revelations? As a robust democracy, we have it within ourselves to accept vilification and acknowledge cogent counterpoints. We don’t need lobbyists to get the other side of the story, our media is free to do that. It is just that while condemning human rights abuses, there should be a fair assessment of the perpetrators regardless of which side they belong to.

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Courtesy: Pioneer: Saturday, 26 May 2018