Political confrontation and killing

In its latest numerical report on human rights violation, the Ain-O-Salish Kendra has held the total number of political killings at 117 and the wounded at more than 5,000 in the first six months of the current year. If the numbers are any indication, it can be said that the country is hardly at peace with itself. No, not one person was done to death everyday on an average but the figure nearly comes to this point. The figure of the wounded is particularly high. What is so worrying at this point is the fact that the casualty figure is apparently from a relatively peaceful period, politically speaking. Barring the month of January when the election was held and in its immediate aftermath, the rest of the time saw no direct political confrontation. Can it be that the killings are a sequence of unfulfilled revenge when politics was at its nastiest confrontational? Whatever it is, apparently this country is sliding into a kind of aggressive tribalism on account of politics shorn of democratic values and norms.

All this, however, comes to the point of lawlessness. In the absence of rule of law, political thugs and anti-social gangs are enjoying a field day. The culture of political killing then finds its link to lack of justice done to the perpetrators -be they in uniform or in civil clothes. Kerry Kennedy, President of US-based Robert F Kennedy Centre for Justice and Human Rights, in her insightful observation cited the reason for development of the culture of impunity when too much power is concentrated in the hands of law enforcement agencies. Indeed, extra-judicial killings and forced disappearances of people are the natural consequences of such power concentration and its abuse. In the final analysis, though, all such disquieting developments refer to nothing less than the lack of good governance. The issue of governance takes its sustenance from democratic practices, values and love for the country. Instead, greed and corruption are sweeping the country like a raging storm and politics has fallen victim to all the negative developments.

When politics acts as a driving force behind annihilation of the opponents, it leaves the system of arrangements that hold society together to fall asunder. With the breakdown of a system that has developed throughout centuries, a vacuum is created. Unless there is a change in the political culture now ruling the roost, this nation will only find itself on a downhill journey. The least the political leaderships on both sides of the divide can do is to go for a thorough soul-searching and come to an agreed point on the need for restoring healthy politics -one that has nothing to do with brawn but everything to do with brain. They must know first of all how to put the country and its people, not their parties and cadres, at the centre of politics. Only then will all the revered institutions of the state start working as true institutions and as its follow-up good governance might be established.