Injustice can be fought with people’s strength: Binayak Sen

Jaipur, Jan 24 (IANS) Injustice can be fought on the basis of people’s strength, doctor and rights activist Binayak Sen said here Thursday.

“Justice is when everybody gets equal respect. Today, we have a situation where a large section of the population does not have equal rights,” Sen, a community healthcare expert from Chhattisgarh, told reporters at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Sen, 62, was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment by a Chhattisgarh court in 2010 for allegedly supporting and sympathising with the Maoists. He was later granted bail by the Supreme Court.

He said the reason India had extremely poor and extremely rich people was because of the violence inherent in the structure of the society.

“This difference (rich and poor) is maintained on the basis of violence,” said Sen, general secretary of the Chhattisgarh unit of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties.

Earlier, speaking at a session on ‘Colliding Worlds: The Quest for Justice’, Sen said a lot of people in the country were in a permanent state of famine.

“The structure of the economy is such that the resources of the people are being taken away…they are being pushed to the edges and women and children have been the prime targets,” he said.

“We need to understand the structural violence endemic in the system,” he said.

Another speaker, Harsh Mander, a rights activist and a former civil servant, said every second child in the country was malnourished and hungry.

“We need to understand hunger with empathy. Two most worrying things in India today are the enormous amount of inequality and the enormous amount of indifference. It does not worry us that some distance from us a child is sleeping on the road while we are warm in our homes,” he said.

He said the protest over the Delhi gang-rape was a “significant moment” for him. “We grieved for a girl whose name or face we did not know. But there is a limit to the empathy.”

“We also need to look at perpetrators of the crime. The juvenile, who was said to be the most brutal assaulter, came from the streets of Delhi. He had an alcoholic father, a broken home and no one to tell him what is right and wrong,” he said.

“The state does reach out to him, and he turns out to be a monster at 17 years. Can we recognise our own moral complicity in this?” asked Mander.

Mander said the rich were not talking to their children about “the other world” of the poor. “We live in a city and if we pass a slum, it does not register.”

Author Rohini Nilekani, the third speaker, said the society had to become strong to counter the combined forces of the market and the state. “We also need a discourse on where the market can and cannot go.”

IANS 2013-01-24 23:10:02