Question on Human Rights Day: Do we protect Human Dignity?

--By Sagar Satpathy, Editor-in-Chief

While we celebrate the Human Rights Day on December 10 each year, do we really care for the human dignity and rights? If we do a soul searching, the answer will come straight from the heart. Only commemorating the anniversary of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) at the United Nations General Assembly as Human Rights Day, won't serve the purpose. We must understand what is human dignity and how to protect it.

We cannot absolve ourselves of the responsibilities saying we have not violated the rights of any human being. If we do not protest against similar incidents in our surrounding, that is also tantamount to human rights violation. How can we tolerate such inhuman things in a civilized society? Forget about Pakistan, Malaysia or China. Does our own country ensures self-dignity for all? I really doubt.

If we think that we are living in a civilized society, how could we let Nandigram happen. Wasn't it a shame to kill people indiscriminately and not let anyone to enter the area for long? Who took the law into their hands? They are our own people. Enemy within is more dangerous than the enemy across the border. If we remain mute spectators to such heinous crime, we have no rights to call ourselves responsible citizens.

When a 10-year-old boy tied to a horse by its owner and dragged for nearly two km just because he drove the horse away from his landlord's field, people kept watching. And, believe me, it happened. In another gruesome incident, the Bihar police had helped a mob in beating a suspected thief and one of the policemen tied the victim to his motorbike and dragged him until he fainted. Is it the society we are looking for?

Recently, the whole country was shocked to see a young Adivasi (tribal) girl stripped and beaten in public by some local residents in Guwahati, Assam. The incident occurred before thousands of people, yet nobody came to her rescue. The issue put everyone in the country into shame. Are we still living in dark age???

Human rights refers to economic, social and cultural rights of people from all sections of the society. All human are entitled to live with dignity irrespective of their gender, race, color, religion, language or wealth. The only logic works behind this - they all are human. Protection of human rights is the protection of human dignity.

We can't shrugg off saying there are many countries that witness serious human rights violation. We are least bothered of what others are doing. We must lead by example. We must show everyone that we are the best in the world when it comes to the protection of human dignity. If we take pride in the fact that we belong to the largest democracy in the world, then we must join hands to ensure the protection of human dignity under any circumstances. This is what expected from us, as we call ourselves human.