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Note
The Human Rights
Situation in
Orrissa Biswapriya
Kanungo writes : The
photograph flashed in the daily newspapers of 21.10.2000, wherein a police
officer in the Bheden police station is seen to be urinating in the face of a
person under custody in the police lock-up is horrifying.Quite more shocking
is the ridiculous clarification given by no less a responsible officer than
the D.G.of police, Orissa, who, while admitting the incident, tried to brush
it aside as a matter of cracking a joke by the concerned police officer with
the person under custody. This speaks of the trivial attitude of the whole
police administration towards questions of rights of the common people and
even if it is a matter of joke, it does not lessen the barbarity of the
incident either. It is certainly a cruel joke and once again confirms the
savage and sadistic mindset of the man in authority, besides showing again
the disdainful attitude the police normally displays towards the dignity,
particularly of the common man on the street. If
anything this incident in no way can be said to be anything extraordinary in
view of the umpteen number of such incidents of violation of human rights
from various quarters taking place in the state as are being reported every
other day, not to speak of the incidents which could not have made it to the
Press. To take some examples on 13 October, a hired wage labourer had been
brutally beaten, splashed with warm water and given electric shock on the
charge of theft by one influential family in Cuttack, having political
connection and said to be a relative of one cabinet minister of the Navin
Patnayak govt. In another incident, a class-iv employee of Stewart School, a
reputed public school at Bhubaneswar had been forced by the School secretary
to kneel down and move on his knees in the public for allegedly defying the
authorities. On 17th of October, in a village under Kodala police station of
Ganjam district, 8 women and 6 men were tortured under confinement with hot
iron marks by the village committee on charges of practising witchcraft.
These happenings within a span of only one |
month, to some extent, can be taken as an index of the precarious human rights situation in the state. Whereas, in one case the traditional culprit, police is the violator; in the second case the violator is an influential family with political connection; in the third case, it is a private establishment managed by influential people with connection at top political and bureaucratic level and in the fourth case, the violator is a village committee dominated by the rural rich. Immediately prior to the above incidents, in September,2000, an eight-year-old girl of Nayapalli slum area was brutally beaten by the Nayapalli police inside the lock-up in the dead of night, a home-guard was beaten and injured by a police officer of the Badgada Police station, a school teacher in the capital city itself, two journalists were beaten up by the goondas of a private company Utkal Alumina at Kasipur in Raygada district, to mention only a few. Such
alarming situation calls for concern from every conscientious quarter to take
deterrent measures and to device preventive mechanisms to check the
recurrence of such incidents. The
Orissa Government should constitute a State Human Rights Commission as
provided under section 21 of protection of Human Rights Act which is supposed
to be an independent autonomous body to investigate into matters of human
rights violation also. The Government should constitute human rights courts
in each district under Section 30 of the Protection of Human Rights Act. No
doubt people are fully aware of the limitations, shortcomings, apathy and
weaknesses such institutions are destined to suffer under the present
socio-economic-political system. Still, it is high time such mechanisms
constituted which, to some extent, may exert some deterrence against the
violation of human rights in the state. This site is developed by CYBERCRAFT Official web designer for Frontier. |