Might is Right

Summons to Sonia Gandhi by a New York court proves that judiciary in the US is also over-steeping its jurisdiction with US emerging as “Globoscop”. In issuing summons against Sonia Gandhi, Chairperson of India’s ruling UPA and president of the Congress party, during her recent short visit to the US in connection with her medical treatment, the district court in New York has shown a rare arrogance of power and a singular lack of sense of the limitations of the law that it was brandishing. The Alien Torts Statute (ATS) is an 18th century law was aimed at recovering Americans’ dues from British businessmen after the colony’s independence in 1776. In the post-Cold War era, with America’s emergence as “globocop”, this law, in combination with Torture Victims Protection Act (TVPA), is being touted as a statute that allows foreign citizens to seek remedies in US courts for crime allegedly committed outside the US. Sikhs for Justice, an advocacy group in the US, obviously had its political motive to file a petition against Mrs Gandhi, a person who was not at all in public life in November 1984, when the atrocities against Sikhs took place in India. The group is remnant from the Pakistan-inspired Sikh separatist movement that had led to the tragic Operation Blue Star, the subsequent assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi in the hands of her Sikh bodyguards, and the retaliatory mob frenzy in which 3000 plus Sikhs were killed . Sonia Gandhi reluctantly joined politics a generation later, in 1998. Of the three main targets of Sikhs for Justice, Urban Development Minister Kamal Nath and Congress leaders Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler, the last two were denied party tickets by her in 2009. Nath, on the other hand, was absolved by the Nanavati Commission, instituted in 2000, of the charge of instigating a mob to attack a gurdwara on November 1, 1984. Therefore, with no case pending against him in any Indian court, it is but natural that Nath, regarded as an efficient executive, is continuing in the Union Cabinet during the entire UPA rule. It is true that the police and CBI had botched up the investigation of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots which led to the questionable acquittal of Tytler and Kumar in a lower court. However, the proverbial long arm of the law is showing the firmness of its grip in higher courts. But Sikhs for Justice seems to have objectives other than mere justice. In recent times, it has exhibited an unusual zeal to drag to the US courts not only Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Kamal Nath but even the Akali Dal Chief Minister of Punjab, Parkash Singh Badal, Sukhbir Badal and others. Congress and Akali Dal are political adversaries except in one respect—that both are signatories to the 1985 Punjab Accord that put an end to the separatist movement. But Sikh extremists did not accept peace. Soon after signing of the accord, they assassinated its Akali signatory H. S. Longowal. Even now, the embers of separatism have kept glowing in the Sikh diaspora, Sikhs for Justice being one example, and the fire is diligently stoked by Pakistan, particularly the cloak-and-dagger wing of its army. However, apart from joining the brigade of American ambulance chasing lawyers by pinning summonses on visiting Indian dignitaries, a section of the Sikh diaspora seems to hold distorted views on how much their community is integrated with modern India. If there has been a delay in bringing perpetrators of the 1984 riots to book, it is attributable more to the country’s notoriously tardy criminal justice system than string-pulling at the highest level. However, Alien Torts Statute (ATS) is a laughably one-sided device that no international law, which is based on all participants’ acceptance, can go along with. If the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, for that matter, puts something similar to ATS on its statute book, and its court summons a visiting US dignitary on a complaint that the US Army had committed genocide in that country, will Washington stomach such an insult with a beaming face? In 1987, three years after Bhopal gas tragedy, Warren Anderson, CEO of the Union Carbide chemicals factory from where gas leaks took a toll of 3,000 lives, refused to comply with the summons issued by an Indian court to appear before it. If India had its ATS, could it enable the activists still fighting for more than the token damages paid by the US to bring before court some official of Dow Chemicals, the present owner of UC? Can an aggrieved person in Baghdad get an Iraqi court to summon ex-President George W. Bush for bathing his land in human blood on the cooked up ground of possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)? Being without a rival, the US is thinking that might is right. No wonder President Obama has called Russia’s President Vladimir Putin a “jackass” at the G20 summit in St. Petersburg. The world is now realizing that Cold War had a positive side after all. (Harish Gupta is National Editor of Lokmat Group of newspapers based in Delhi)