Author: Sunando Sarkar
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: November 13, 2002
URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1021113/asp/bengal/story_1380167.asp
A seemingly innocuous visit by a
US state department official to the office of the West Bengal Human Rights
Commission has embroiled the panel in an unseemly spat initiated by the
government.
The "verbal instruction" - that
the commission should inform the government before meeting anyone from
the office of a foreign consulate - following the "discussion" the panel's
brass had with the US official did not go down well with those at the helm
of the rights body.
"The person who came to me had some
queries regarding an issue on which we were keeping track," rights panel
chairman Justice Mukul Gopal Mukherjee told The Telegraph. "I didn't see
any harm in helping someone working on issues similar to our concerns,"
he said, responding to the government's missive.
It all started with a US global
affairs officer visiting the commission' s headquarters at Bhawani Bhavan
earlier this month with questions on trafficking in women and children
in the state.
"I met her at my office in the presence
of other commission officials," Mukherjee said. All the questions revolved
around "immoral trafficking", he added.
"What's wrong if I know of the present
status of the problem and tell someone what I know?" Mukherjee asked. "The
person whom we met was not part of any investigating team and did not venture
outside her brief."
United States Information Service
director Rex Moser, too, felt the visit was a "routine one". "The global
affairs officer was new to her assignment and she just wanted to get acquainted
with the situation and introduce herself to contacts who would be of help
in her job," he said.
The visit, however, sent the government's
intelligence antennae cracking. Coming as it did less than two years after
another "fact-finding" mission from the consulate (to Nanoor in Birbhum,
where 11 landless farmers and Trinamul Congress supporters were lynched
allegedly by CPM cadre in the run-up to the 2001 Assembly polls), the government
went on an overdrive.
One of the seniormost officials
in the government called up the commission's office last week, asking it
to henceforth intimate the government - and seek permission - before meeting
anyone from a foreign consular corps. But all state human rights commissions
are independent bodies not answerable to state governments, members argued.
It is not possible to intimate the
government before every meeting with persons referred by a consulate, commission
officials said. Besides, the incident over which the government chose to
make the brouhaha was not an investigation by a foreign government. "It
was a discussion where more than one person representing the commission
was present," one of the members said.
Though state chief secretary S.N.
Roy would not comment on the issue, a senior home department official said
the government responded with alacrity because it was concerned at rights
groups' attempts to make the arrest of a large number of political prisoners
an issue.
"...The government wanted to make
sure that the issue of Naxalites in prison did not go outside the state,"
a commission member said.
