Violent police action

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33426, 7 January 1974, Page 10

Violent police action

Three times in less than a year police in Maharashtra have opened lire on demonstrators who were demanding enough food for their families to survive. On the first occasion seven died: on the second, one died: last week six were shot. In the same country, within 12 months, police have shot to kill at least a dozen times. More than 30 people were killed by police a little less than a year ago in racial and religious disturbances about promotion in the civil service: 36 died in May. many of them police who had rebelled against the Army during a dispute about the supervision of university examinations. The dispute led to the burning dowh of most of a university. Strikes, riots, and deaths caused by the clamour for food by a starving population have led to most of the incidents public suicides, usually of parents who have first killed starving children, have become such a national disgrace that who attempt to report them have been arrested. If the events of the year are taken together, this is a horrible comment on governmental competence and international indifference

There has been no international outcry against killings that have resulted from confrontations that grew out of differences of ethnic origins and religion. The evidence of starvation and discrimination is bad enough the results of demonstrations and police action are appalling and the silence about them in international forums suggests that international professions of morality are dangerously selective. The effectiveness of the most earnest protests can only be undermined by this selectivity, even when it is sadly observed that India is a country that sets much More by a policy of “ non-violence ’’. Condemnation ot violent official measures in such a country is not difficult when they are viewed safely, and reflectively, far from the passion, free from persona) threat, and remote from physical tumult But observers abroad snould tn > onsistent m applying this argument, too.