Pride, prejudice and abuse
By Raja Jaikrishan

THERE is a metaphor for American politics: an immense journey of a wagon train. Nobel laureate Seamus Heany has woven it into his poem Field work:

"The coal smell
of the train that comes between us, a slow goods,
wagon after wagon full of
big-eyed cattle...."

The big-eyed cattle are the US pride, prejudice and abuses. The US pride is its fetish for openness. Nothing remains hidden from people, be it their race prejudices, physical or moral compromises of the high and mighty or human rights abuses at home or abroad.

While the Congress was debating, whether or not to release Kenneth Starr’s report on President Bill Clinton’s affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the beleaguered President received a final report from his seven-member advisory board on what its members learned during their year-long examination of racial attitudes and conditions in the USA.

The board praised President Clinton’s "mend it, don’t end it" position on affirmative action, but said he should continue the dialogue on race through a permanent presidential council. It also called for a "multi media" campaign to teach Americans how they developed their briefs about race and institutionalised them through the notion of "white privilege."

"You have to have an opportunity and a venue to share your story", Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook, a board member said. "The overcoming of the race issue only comes when the healing begins."

Though President Clinton didn’t offer an immediate endorsement of the board’s suggestions, he did say that he was open to the idea of giving Americans a better education on race. "A lot of us have strong opinions on the subject, not all of us have facts to back them up," he said. "We must build an America where discrimination is something you have to look in history books to find. The first thing we have to do is keep conversation going," he added.

President Clinton said race is "a special burden" for each minority group living in the USA. "With native Americans, it has been a special burden because we took land that was once theirs. With African Americans, it has been a special burden because we all have to confront the accumulated weight of history that comes from one people enslaving another," President Clinton said.

In the meantime, a Congressional panel gave a go-ahead to impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.

Coincidentally, Amnesty International report damned the US human rights record.. "...but across the USA, thousands are falling victim to human rights violations", alleged Pierre Sani, Amnesty International Secretary-General. "All too often, human rights in the USA are a tale of two nations: rich and poor, white and black, male and female."

"What we have in the US political establishment today is a clear case of hypocrisy and inconsistency," the report added.

The "Big Apple" (New York) was plagued with killer cops and abusive prison guards — as well as being hell for refugees seeking asylum. Cops have beaten and shot unresisting suspects; they have misused batons, chemical spray and electro shock weapons, the report charged. (Not much different from India.) The overwhelming majority of victims are members of racial and ethnic minorities, the report added.

Amnesty International has been knocking on the doors of the Congress for the past 37 years." We have been telling the US authorities that curelty just doesn’t happen elsewhere. Serious human rights violations are not just a foreign affair. They are happening in the USA today and ... worst of all ... some are on the increase." "And where is the public outcry?" Amnesty asked. "Where are the zealous defenders of morality, when a mentally-ill inmate is shackled to a four-point metal restraint board for 12-weeks? When a pregnant woman is shackled during her seven hours of labour? Where is the public outcry at the shockingly cruel conditions in many of the nation’s jails and prisons?"

Perhaps an old US watcher is too close to reality when he asserts: "American society is also the deafest. Its government is deaf by design and its people are deaf by ignorance. America listens no more, not even to sanest words."

Doesn’t the observation sound true about India? What a wonder that democratic polities go on despite prejudices of race and sex and abuse of human dignity. Democracies are an immense journey of a wagon train "that comes between us, a slow goods."