And so, after a rash of terrorist attacks — two in London and a third in Manchester — in quick succession, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has declared that human rights laws would be changed “to restrict the freedom and movement of terrorist suspects when we have enough evidence to know they are a threat but not evidence to prosecute them in full in court, and if our human rights laws stop us from doing it, we’ll change the laws so we can do it”. She lamented, further, that there was “far too much tolerance of extremism in our country”. May has also called for “closer regulation of the Internet to tackle extremism”. Significantly, British security services have, since the London Metro bombings of July 2005, been granted more powers far in excess of any other European state, and the electronic surveillance regime in London is perhaps the most intensive in the world.

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It is significant that the provocation for these sweeping changes is a sequence of relatively minor terrorist attacks, particularly when compared with other parts of the world, including India, which have long been harangued by the West on their inability to meet impossible human rights standards in situations that have often been close to open civil and proxy warfare. Crucially, the excessive ‘tolerance of terrorism’ that May now bemoans is a consequence, not so much of human rights concerns, but an instrument of State policy that has long been deployed against other nations, some of whose worst terrorist ideologues and criminals have been given safe haven in the UK, from where they have continued, with complete impunity, their support to terrorism, terrorist finance and propaganda against their home countries. It is only now, when the ‘blowback’ of this despicable policy has started to afflict the host country, that the great harm of such ‘tolerance’ is abruptly noticed.

The UK is not alone in being two-faced. The most dramatic case of the abandonment of constitutional and human rights values is, of course, the US — though the provocation, in this case, was far greater, in the catastrophic 9/11 attacks that killed 2,996 in a single day. Nevertheless, the tremendous harm subsequently wrought by US policy has been exponentially in excess of the initial provocation. In the first instance was the rejection of virtually all civilised norms in the name of counter-terrorism, the official adoption of “enhanced interrogations” — torture — as state policy; the even worse abuses that were practised under the policy of “extraordinary rendition” where individuals were illegally abducted and handed over to allied regimes with long histories of brutality, to be tortured and made to “disappear”; and the creation of a range of “black sites” where some of the most vicious practices were encouraged among CIA and military personnel. But these are dwarfed by the far greater suffering that was gratuitously inflicted through a succession of wanton wars that the US cynically initiated under false pretences — the WMD that Iraq was said to possess to start with, but the further destabilisation of the entire Middle East through a series of US- and West-backed misadventures. The United Nations has observed that an unjustified war is the greatest human rights violation, as it comprehends and provokes the millions of constituent crimes that follow from the initiation of war and from the consequent fragmentation of state power. In this measure, the West has been the most significant source of human rights abuses for decades, having wilfully meddled in the affairs of other nations, collapsed stable, if brutal, states, and pursued vicious and cynical “great games” — practices that remain centrepieces of Western policy even today.

Theresa May, in some measure rightly, blames “the single, evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division, and promotes sectarianism” for the preponderance of contemporary terrorism. It is useful to remind ourselves that this “evil ideology” and the terrorism it has generated is very largely a consequence of the “Islamist contagion carried by the returning Afghan veterans” from the anti-Soviet campaigns initiated by the US and its allies, and that American Presidents at one stage hosted and applauded the “brave mujahiddeen” that they now so vociferously condemn.

It is crucial for the Indian leadership to understand and clearly project these realities. The global human rights regime is not an objective standard of consensual values; it is a weapon used by certain States to target and weaken others. Gross violations by Western powers and by the most brutal regimes allied to these are consistently suppressed or ignored; minor infractions by those who are thought to be ‘non-aligned’ or too independent in their stance are magnified beyond all proportion in campaigns of global intimidation. These strategies need to be clearly recognised and effectively countered.

The author is Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management