PUCL Bulletin,
February 2003
UP
PUCL:
PUCL State Conference
At its daylong state conference held here on Sunday, the UP People's Union
for Civil Liberties (PUCL) passed a resolution, expressing serious concern
on the fast erosion taking place in the democratic, political, and economic
right of the people since the country came under the umbrella of globalisation
and liberalisation, informed PUCL's newly elected general secretary, KK
Roy.
As
a result, said the PUCL, India has fallen into the debt-trap of the World
bank and the International Monetary Fund with disastrous consequences
for the country's economic and political sovereignty.
The PUCL's state conference was inaugurated by former High Court Judge,
Justice R.B. Mehrotra, and chaired by PUCL's president, Ravi Kiran Jain.
Nearly 100 delegates from the PUCL's district units from all over UP attended
the conference and participated in its deliberations, besides presenting
reports about the initiative taken by them in the respective areas for
protection of civil liberties and human rights. The PUCL's annual report
was presented by the outgoing general secretary, O.D. Singh, while the
conference was conducted by Mr. K.K. Roy.
The State, the PUCL said in its resolution, was in retreat everywhere.
It is abandoning its Constitutional, social, political, educational, and
cultural obligations towards the people, and the power is been transferred
the political class of the country to the multinationals. There seems
to be a consensus among all the political parties to surrender India's
sovereignty, both economic and political, to the World Bank by the dividing
among themselves the vote-banks on the caste and communal lines. The job
of deciding how the country should be governed and also the job of evaluating
our achievements, which are meant to be done by people's elected representatives,
are now being done by the World Bank, said the PUCL. In return of the
loans which it has advanced to India, it wants to determine how India
should govern itself. The World Bank is setting the agenda for India in
all spheres of governance, be it health, be it education, be it the art
of governance, be it the judicial administration, be it the print media,
be it the power generation, and distribution, or be it the local self-governance
in urban and rural areas.
Thus, in the emerging scenario, India's basic problem, poverty, affecting
the majority of the people, remains unadressed, thereby affecting seriously
their human rights and thereby depriving them of their Constitutional
and democratic right to live a dignified life. As it in, the incidents
of human right violations as a result of autocratic police repression,
fake encounters, and custodial deaths have been on the increase, and particularly
in UP, the number of human right violations has been the largest of all
the states, because of the reason that the police and the bureaucracy
is tending to become autocratic, the PUCL said.
The PUCL expressed its concern over the fact that instead of tackling
the problems of basic education, poverty, diseases, malnutrition and unemployment,
superior technology is being allowed to be thrust upon India from abroad
to merely create technocrats to serve the interests of the multinationals
in India.
The PUCL resolved to create mass awareness among the people by launching
the nationwide struggle for an effective decentralization of democratic
governance and against the deprivation of the people of an opportunity
to emerge by assertion and fulfillment of their human rights under the
Indian Constitution. Towards this, the PUCL will hunch a movement in order
to ensure people's participation in a new struggle for economic independence
and for liberation from the World Bank's domination, threatening the very
sovereignty. The PUCL called upon the human right activists in the under-developed
and developing countries to join the struggle of the PUCL in this direction
for the benefit of the billions of poor and deprived people whose future
is in the dark in the emerging scenario. -- K.K. Roy, General Secretary,
UP PUCL, December 16, 2002