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Accountability, transparency, and responsiveness are the three virtues, human rights organizations across the world ask from governments. However, these three values are lacking in the human rights sector in India, as hundreds of human rights organizations in the country exist only on paper. A recent study conducted in India reveals more than 53 percent of human rights organizations allegedly working in India are of this nature. Most of them, primarily in the health sector, are organizations with only one staff member that uses the grants they receive for their own personal benefit. Mismanagement though is not limited to organizations in the health sector. It cuts across the entire field of human rights groups, casting doubt about the effectiveness of human rights work in India and its raison d'être.
Indeed, several human rights organizations are small kingdoms of one or two people, often a husband and wife, who control the entire activity of a larger group. No one within the group knows where support for the organization originates and how it is utilized. Any question regarding the use of funds is considered a challenge to authority. Many organizations spend their resources in generating or countering pointless disputes between organizations and often between individuals. Some organizations spend much of their time and resources for overseas trips and attending endless conferences. This allocation of time and resources raises suspicion regarding the time these organizations and individuals spend on real grassroots work. Moreover, some people use their organization and its network for political gain, including their participation in elections.
In the process of building these small empires, what is frequently forgotten are the people for whom these organizations allegedly work and the individuals who are employed by the organization. Often, proper remuneration is denied to the staff with the excuse commonly made that there is a lack of funding. Directors of human rights organizations, who use an assortment of gadgets, like satellite telephones and the most modern portable computers, are habitually found denying basic communication facilities to their staff in the field. In addition, one of the most regularly used tactics of retaining domination over the organization is the control of information.
Even for organizations that do exceptionally good work in the field, the use of information technology and the exploitation of its present-day possibilities is still a taboo. For example, many organizations that gather large amounts of empirical data often keep it locked up in their offices rather than utilizing it for the common good or, indeed, for any particular beneficial purpose. Many organizations complain that the information they generate is not used by the government and often ignored. The question at this point is how much of this information is used for gaining the attention of the government or for high profile lobbying.
By lobbying, what is often understood is endless meetings with pointless themes. More productive lobbying, however, is the effective use of communication facilities to share the voice of the people with a larger audience, a process that requires meticulous documentation and widespread dissemination.
Effective lobbying is not, for instance, the process of circulating complicated and often erroneous interpretations of what people said. For example, if a particular community is suffering from an acute food shortage, what is required is to find out the people's views about their problem and to bring their opinions to the attention of those who can facilitate change. However, often this process is not adopted and instead, a top-down approach is usually employed in which an external agency is expected to solve grassroots problems.
Generic and overly broad studies can be easily countered by anyone. It is more difficult for a government to counter factual details of a consistent pattern of human rights violations. Today, for hundreds of human rights organizations in India, documentation is gathering newspaper cuttings and forwarding newspaper reports. In fact, what is lacking in India is meticulous documentation and effective dissemination of information. Even those who are engaged in documentation use it only as a tool for further funding--the brutal exploitation of issues to make a living. True human rights work, in fact, does not require a great deal of funding.
Good documentation can identify the real areas on which an organization must work. For example, one of the root causes for continuing human rights violations in India is its failed mechanism for rendering justice. The most important justice delivery mechanism for a human rights group in India must be the country's criminal justice machinery--policing, the prosecution system, and lower judiciary in particular. In actual practice, however, the number of human rights organizations working on this problem in India is very limited.
The Indian government has exploited this absence of activity devoted to the criminal justice delivery mechanism in the country. It attempts to do so through the subterfuge of trying to bring about fundamental changes in India's criminal laws. There are projects sponsored by the government under way to propose changes to the existing legal framework related to criminal law. There are academics engaged by the government with the task of organizing pseudo-consultations on this issue. Several such consultations have already been held, led by these academics and a handful of lawyers, retired police officers and bureaucrats, that have attempted to propose that fundamental tenets of law like the presumption of innocence and the right to remain silent are a burden for effective prosecution and they thus must be removed. Is any human rights organization working on criminal law issues in India aware of this treachery? If so, what have they done?
The premise upon which such drastic changes are recommended are on the presumption that there is an increase in crime in India since there are less successful prosecutions. The proponents for change, arguing on behalf of the government, ignore the fact that the reason for the failure of prosecutions in India is the poor quality of police investigations and prosecutors in the country. How many human rights organizations working on these issues in India though can effectively counter the argument proposed by the government with factual details? Moreover, how many human rights groups in India are knowledgeable about the day-to-day functioning of the lower courts in their neighborhood?
To answer these questions, a human rights group should have contact with the people and knowledge about their daily issues. This involves understanding the situation of the victim and their priorities. It requires walking closely with the victim rather than considering the victim as another subject for study. Human rights work in India, however, lacks precisely this understanding, which is the curse of human rights work in the country.
Today many human rights groups in India do not believe in change. Change is possible only if a group has actual concern for the people or the victim rather than engaging in acts of self-deceit.
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(Bijo Francis is a human rights lawyer currently working with the Asian Legal Resource Center in Hong Kong. He is responsible for the South Asia desk at the center and has practiced law for more than a decade. He holds an advanced master's degree in human rights law.)
