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We congratulate India’s Congress party and its allies for their comprehensive win in India’s marathon national elections, making newly sworn-in prime minister Manmohan Singh only the second man in the country’s history to serve two successive terms at the helm. We also laud Singh and the Congress party leadership for the impressive cabinet they have announced, underscoring their commitment to the stability and economic growth that India has enjoyed over the past five years, resoundingly validated by the electorate. Side by side, the rejection of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies in these elections is also a rejection of the communal and divisive politics that its version of Hindutva represents. We can only hope that this language of communal reconciliation and unity will find expression in Delhi’s foreign policy, contributing to sustained stability and economic growth across South Asia. It is relevant to point out that the array of outstanding disputes that Delhi has with its neighbours are a significant stumbling block in the goal of a shared economic prosperity and political harmony. It is no secret that many, even in India, believe that Delhi needs to reinvent itself in terms of its regional foreign policy before there can be any resolution of mutually aggravating disputes at its borders.
   We can certainly say of Dhaka and Delhi that people on both sides will see much gain in resolving their disputes over water sharing and border demarcations, as well as a more constructive and holistic approach to trade issues. The unilateral manner in which Delhi has recently announced its intention to push through its Tipaimukh Dam project in Assam, as just one example, is exactly the kind of political decision-making that breeds mutual suspicion between the two countries, though the people share much common ground in terms of culture, history, and development. While Dhaka and Delhi have repeatedly thrown their lot in together at global climate change negotiations, the latter seems to disregard the fact that its hydroelectric plant at Tipaimukh will exacerbate the water shortages that millions in Bangladesh, and India, will face.
   Since the Congress party in India and the ruling Awami League have shared good relations historically, we hope the two sides will approach the host of outstanding disputes with a view to a resolution rather than manipulation for political mileage as has too often been the case. Incidentally, among the major treaties that Dhaka has signed in the past decade, one with Delhi on water sharing and the other in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (with assistance from Delhi), was in the era of non-Congress regimes. We hope, therefore, that the new regime in Delhi will use its historic opportunity to work with Dhaka to resolve outstanding disputes and set the tone for future negotiations, as powerful neighbour and not as regional hegemon.

Miscarriage of justice

WHAT could be a more damning indictment of the country’s judicial and penal systems than that a young man spent more than seven years in prison for a crime that the court eventually ruled he did not commit? According to a report published in New Age, Zahirul Islam was arrested at Agargaon in the capital Dhaka on January 19, 2002, along with three other young men, all aged between 19 and 20, on the charge of possessing contraband phensidyl (codeine) syrup. While his three co-detainees secured bail from the High Court in between 2005 and 2006, Zahir had no such luck because he could not afford a lawyer. By the time the court acquitted him of the charges brought against him on May 13 and he was subsequently released on May 16, he had spent seven years and nearly four months in prison. Ironically, the offence he was charged with carries a maximum prison term of seven years.
   Zahir’s case is, however, not unique; over the years, many cases have been reported in the media wherein people have languished in jail for years on end without trial. In all those cases, too, surely, as the metropolitan public prosecutor in Zahir’s case claimed, the jail authorities, trial court and prosecution were equally responsible. The question, however, is: Will anyone be held accountable for such lapses – lapses that have translated into so many lost years for so many people over the years? The answer is not too difficult to guess.
   Indeed, our judiciary is overburdened with hundreds of thousands of pending cases. Indeed, as a former chief justice once said, the mess that the judiciary is in could take at least 20 years to sort out. However, it cannot be used as an excuse to condone a miscarriage of justice of such grave proportions. All our lofty talk about the rule of law will mean nothing if people continue to rot in jails without trial, let alone conviction.
   Zahir’s case should be an eye-opener for the authorities to revisit our judicial and penal systems and identify the loopholes that need to be plugged. If, as the public prosecutor has claimed, the court handling the case should have informed the Dhaka Bar Association’s legal aid committee that provides legal aid to poor without fees, then it should be immediately investigated why such information was never passed on. It is in no way acceptable that some systemic flaws should claim more than seven years from a person’s life. Hence, the authorities need to act and act in earnest so that there is no recurrence of such miscarriages of justice in the future.

EXPERTS tell us that, by most measures, President Barack Obama has done a great job. Of course, the economy is still far from recovery. However, if you look at what he inherited from Bush and Cheney – an avalanche in Dow Jones industrial average trading at 14,269 from its peak in October 2007 to almost half its value when Bush left the White House in January 2009 – you ought to feel a little bit encouraged with how Obama is handling the crisis. But probably the most important thing he has done is reversing Bush’s torture policy declaring that it was wrong. He has decided to release more memos and photos on torture.
   As expected, not everyone welcomes such a decision. Last month, when asked about the Obama administration’s plan to release more photos of terrorist detainee interrogations, Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, said, ‘I think that is a sick, anti-American behaviour.’ He ought to feel ashamed and not just sick because it was his Republican party that had run the government when the torture of detainees took place, in violation of international laws. By releasing those photos what Obama is doing is nothing short of being a true American that craves for transparency and honesty in government.
   As Jacob Weisburg of the Newsweek has so bluntly and aptly put, ‘The use of torture on suspected terrorists after 9/11 has already earned a place in American history’s hall of shame, alongside the Alien and Sedition Acts, Japanese internment during WWII and the excesses of the McCarthy era.’ It was five years ago that most Americans came to learn what was going on inside the Abu Ghraib prison. The New Yorker magazine and the CBS TV showed hooded prisoners standing on a box with wires attached to their hands and genitals; frightened prisoners attacked by mean dogs; soldiers punching restrained prisoners; piles of naked prisoners stacked into a pyramid; prisoners forced to simulate sexual acts, often with grinning GIs on hand to point and offer a jaunty thumbs up.
   For many simpleton and naïve Americans, those pictures were simply unbelievable. They sounded as if they suffer from amnesia – a selective one in that – or cognitive dissonance. They had assumed the best from their government that was led by a Church-going ‘born-again’ Christian. To them, their great nation had been setting standards for higher moral grounds everywhere, for everyone. They simply could not accept the fact that their best-trained soldiers had failed them by committing those horrendous crimes.
   Those who knew better were embarrassed. They had been caught off-guard, almost like a thief caught with a hand in the cookie-jar. They had to be hypocritical. Within days, President George W Bush offered a public apology for ‘the terrible and horrible acts’. Even his unabashed secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, took ‘full responsibility’ for the scandal and promised that the offenders would be brought to justice because the victims ‘are human beings. They were in US custody. Our country had an obligation to treat them right. We didn’t do that.’ (As Americans later found out such words did not mean anything.)
   And then there were guys like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who justified such crimes. Limbaugh said ‘what went on over there is not torture.’ According to him, the abuse was ‘no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation’ and that the American soldiers were ‘having a good time’ as part of their ‘emotional release’. If you think that his was a lone sick, demented voice, you’re mistaken. Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, claimed to be ‘more outraged by the outrage than … by the treatment.’ In CNN’s Larry King Live show Ann Coulter claimed that all normal people who have ever had a sibling, been through a fraternity hazing, or been on a sports team or misbehaved with small children have experienced water-boarding.
   Fortunately, most Americans do not fall into any of the above three categories. They were genuinely repulsed by what they saw and what they read over the next few years, thanks to investigative reporters like Seymour Hersh. They learned that more harsher and demeaning torture methods were employed by American soldiers and interrogators, not just in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay but in all detention camps and centres. Torture methods included water-boarding, raping, urinating on detainees, throwing phosphoric acid, continuously hitting with metal batons on injured limb, sodomising with batons, tying ropes around genitals and dragging the detainees on the floor, and even killing detainees. Truly, there was hardly a torture method – considered illegal by the Geneva Convention and scores of international laws – that was not committed by those guards and interrogators, disgracing America’s image abroad.
   Americans found out that the Bush administration had lied to them, not just with the rationale for the war itself, but also with torture. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Gonzales had actually authorised harsh torture methods. They knew what was going on in those prisons and detention camps. And then there were many top advisers like Wolfowitz, Feith, Cambone and Tenet who knew all along what their guys were doing to those prisoners. Americans also found out that Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, who had authored the torture memo that provided the basis for violating international laws, was rewarded in 2003 by President Bush with a judgeship at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
   It was this public revulsion with Bush’s torture policy that made sure that today guys like Inhofe are a small minority in the Congress. Americans are demanding that those who authorised torture be punished. However, much to the embarrassment of most Americans, none of the top guys has yet been convicted or tried. In what appeared to be a mockery of justice, only the foot soldiers – seventeen in total – were convicted in courts martial in 2004-2005. Of these, most were sentenced to low-term prison terms, and dishonourably discharged from service. Two soldiers, Specialists Charles Graner and Lynndie England, were sentenced in 2005 to ten years and three years in prison, respectively. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who denied knowledge of the torture, was demoted to the rank of Colonel in 2005. She maintained that her superior Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez had authorised the use of military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns and sensory deprivation as interrogation methods in Abu Ghraib. The ACLU claims that General Sanchez had authorised interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army’s own standards.
   As stated earlier, President Obama has taken the first step in dealing with this disturbing episode of torture by reversing Bush’s policy. He must now order congressional hearings and perhaps an independent commission to probe the matter further so that never again this country is misused by government officials soiling its image. Pursuing criminal charges against all those who authorised torture would be a moral victory for America and help her to be taken seriously by the international community who had only seen hypocrisy from the most powerful nation on earth. Is President Obama ready for taking the next step?
   Dr Siddiqui writes from Pennsylvania