Srinagar/March, 20 :: The United States Human Rights reports for 2018 released last week as part of an annual exercise in which the US State Department submits its assessment of such rights as per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements to the U.S. Congress.
The 2018 India report covers a range of issues including press and media freedoms, forced disappearances, custodial deaths and the NGO clampdown — which became an issue between the US and India, after the NDA government cancelled licenses of some 15,000 NGOs under the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act, “The Hindu” and reported.
“The government imposed restrictions on foreign funding of some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including those with views the government stated were not in the ‘national interest’, thereby curtailing the work of these NGO,” the report said.
In terms of custodial deaths, the Report cites official (Indian) figures of 1,674 cases of such death between August 2017 and February 2018, with 1,530 occurring in judicial custody and 144 in police custody.
The report, in a separate section, Role of the Police and Security Apparatus , says, “Police continue to be underpaid, overworked, and subject to political pressure, in some cases contributing to corruption.”
Regarding data from the Home Ministry in response to an RTI request on the 2016 NGO Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative report regarding human rights violations committed under the AFSPA (the report said just under half of the cases reported were from Jammu and Kashmir in the 2012-2016 period), the State Department report says, “The data supplied by the Ministry of Home Affairs under the Right to Information Act did not indicate, however, whether complaints were deemed to have merit.”
The report also cites figures from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on violation of human rights by security forces in Kashmir. It says 130-145 civilian deaths by security forces in Jammu & Kashmir occurred between June 2016 and April 2018.
The report however also adds that, “Non-governmental forces, including organized insurgents and “terrorists”, committed numerous killings and bombings in the State of Jammu and Kashmir, the northeastern States, and Maoist-affected areas.”
“Maoists in Jharkhand and Bihar continued to attack security forces and key infrastructure facilities such as roads, railways, and communication towers,” it said.
Taking note of undertrials, the report, based on National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) data, says just over 2,93,000 individuals were awaiting trial at the end of 2016. It also cites a 2017 Amnesty International report saying that Muslims, Dalits and Adivasis comprised a disproportionate number (53%) of pre-trial detainees.
