Reimagining PUCL! – The Challenges

By Dr. V. Suresh
Preface
“We have to be very vigilant from the very beginning; if you concede the first step, every next step will lead to the further erosion of the rule of law and disregard of human dignity”.
… Arthur Chaskalson, Chief Justice, South African Constitutional Court.
“There is growing and widespread recognition that armed conflicts cannot be understood without reference to such root causes as poverty, political repression and uneven distribution of resources”.
… Amartya Sen and Sadako Ogata, Human Security Now (2003), Independent Commission on Human Security.
“The idea of rights is nothing but the concept of virtue applied to the world of politics. By means of the idea of rights men have defined the nature of licence and tyranny …. no man can be great without virtue, nor any nation great without respect to rights”.
Alexis de Tacqueville, 1835
Greetings to all the delegates to the 11th PUCL National Convention!
The 11th PUCL National Convention being held in Jaipur, Rajasthan on 1st and 2nd December, 2012 is happening in a year, which has seen an unprecedented number of human rights violations by the Indian state. The governments, both in the states as also in the Centre, have repeatedly demonstrated that they will not hesitate to crush the human rights of citizens if they dare to challenge the Indian state, be it about the nature of development policies, or allocation of `common resources’ to private interests or corruption or open and brazen support of the rich, propertied, industrial elite sections of society or agitate against police excess or acts of state terrorism. Human rights violations are not just stray or accidental incidents of police brutality or state excess; rather human rights violations have become widespread, systemic and institutionalised. The Indian State, and its agents in the form of the police, the executive, military and para-military forces continue to operate with impunity crushing dissent, silencing opposition and indulging in torture, encounter killings and worse, all across India.
Sedition cases have been filed against thousands of villagers who have been peacefully protesting against the Koodankulam Atomic Power Plant in south Tamil Nadu. The Koodankulam agitation is one of the most inspiring acts of peaceful civil protest launched in recent years, similar to the valiant anti-POSCO struggle in Odisha against a South Korean steel plant. Non-violent protests by children against the power project have been termed `waging war against India’, `seditious and traitorous’ and `promoting enmity amongst different communities’. With impunity the Tamil Nadu police has arrested children and hundreds of elders in the name of preserving `law and order’. The situation is no different in numerous other agitations by citizens against such mega projects in Odisha, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, MP, AP, West Bengal, Karnataka, UP, Haryana and other states. In these states too citizens have been prosecuted for sedition, waging war against India and other similar serious offences.
It is a matter of deep irony that citizens who agitate as an expression of their fundamental right to life and live with dignity and without fear, freedom of speech and expression and as part of their fundamental duties to strive to reduce inequalities and disparities between rich and poor are termed `traitors’ by the State and beaten, shot at, killed, arrested and silenced; in sharp contrast, those in power, who literally sell the valuable natural resources and mineral wealth of the country to foreign capital, MNCs and Indian industries, are feted by the state as `patriots’! The Governments, both Central and State, have always been obliging and willing to bend every rule in the law book to facilitate private appropriation of the nation’s resources and wealth; not content with this, they have also been eager in bestowing generous financial and economic concessions to industry.
The Indian state doesn’t think twice of crushing dissent with a heavy hand implicating citizens and human rights defenders in false cases under draconian laws like the UAPA, sedition laws, Criminal Laws Amendment Act, AFSPA and many other similar legislations. It does not matter which political party is in power; all the governments, both in the states as also the Centre, uniformly violate with impunity constitutional protections to free speech, to freedom of association and protest, to oppose state policy relating to development, social welfare and other issues of public policy. The latest example of arrest of 2 young girls, Shaheen Dhada and Rinu Srinivasan by Palghar police in Maharashtra for posting Facebook remarks against the bandh forced on the people following the death of Shiv Sena supremo Balasahab Thackeray (November, 2012), the imprisonment of a young journalist Aseem Trivedi for posting a cartoon lampooning political corruption (July, 2012), the arrest of a youth in Puducherry (October, 2012) for writing in the social media alleging the corrupt deeds of Karthi Chidambaram, son of Union Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram are a few notable examples of this trend. Mamta Banerjee, Chief Minister of West Bengal got Ambikesh Mahapatra, an academic, arrested for circulating a cartoon lampooning her government’s policies and shouted down a young girl who questioned her in a TV show as being a `Maoist’ and walking out of the public show. Entrenched habit of state intolerance has been elevated to a new high in 2012, all across India.
The extent of police animosity is highlighted in an example from Gujarat. The local police on 22nd-23rd September, 2012 had opened fire on agitating Dalits in Thangadh town in Surendranagar District of Gujarat causing the death of 3 dalit youths. RS Bhargava, the Superintendent of Police, filed an affidavit before a court, admitting that these policemen used modern weapons including AK-47 rifles on account of “hatred and prejudice against the dalits”. Such a rare admissions is symptomatic of the extent of the degree of brutality and violence that the police unleash on common citizens, most often to satisfy their political bosses, patrons and vested interests as also arising from social prejudice, hatred, animosity and bias. Errant police and state officials escape with impunity; citizens pay the ultimate price with their lives.
Traditional caste hostilities between dominant Caste Hindu groups and Dalits are erupting frequently in organised violence against Dalits. A very disturbing phenomenon has surfaced in Tamil Nadu recently with assertive caste Hindu groups rallying together to form an alliance against local Dalit groups on the ground of a `Dalit conspiracy to entice caste hindu girls into marriage alliances with Dalit boys’. All of a sudden, aggressive caste groups like Thevars in southern districts; Vanniars in north TN and Gounders in western districts of TN are trying to band together fanning violent attacks against Dalit habitations. In October-November 2012, Tamil Nadu has witnessed major pogroms against the Dalits resulting in massive violence aimed not just to injure and physically debilitate but also to destroy the basis of living and livelihood in Dharmapuri and Cuddalore districts. The eerie silence and indifference of the TN State police only lends support to the complicity of state agencies with upper caste interests in stifling the social mobility of dalits and marginalised social sections.
Honour killings in intercaste marriages, caste conflagrations, and mass attacks on Dalits are commonplace in Haryana, UP, Rajasthan, AP, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra. It highlight both the precarious situation of Dalits in India as also the subversion of `rule of law’ by the state executive and police who ensure impunity to perpetrators of violence.
The Indian state, which reacts with alacrity to challenges to its dominance, reacts with indifference, and indeed in some instances, in collusion with political vested interests, in cases of mass violence as in the case of Kokrajhar in Assam. For the last 6 months since June-July 2012 Kokrajar and other districts in Assam has witnessed deliberately stoked armed attacks in which both Muslims and Bodo tribals lost their lives and lakhs of people had to flee their homes and villages seeking safety. The allegations of complicit support by the ruling Congress Government to armed groups of one ethnic group in spearheading the attacks on vulnerable Muslim populations is made worse by the ugly slanging match between the Congress led Assam government and the Congress headed Union Home ministry in terms of who is responsible for the terrible carnage that occurred in Assam. This only underscores the reality of irresponsibility by state functionaries in cases of mass massacres and complicit response of government officials in instances where serious human rights threats occur on account of identity issues, communal politics or other diversity related conflict.
The anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat launched by the Hindutva groups in the wake of the Godhra train burning incidents of 2002 is a watershed in the communal history of India. The mass killings of over 2,000 Muslims by armed gangs with overt and complicit support by the BJP run Gujarat government is illustrative of the harmful potential when state agencies, particularly the police forces, conspire with communal forces to launch systematic, planned and orchestrated violence against social groups considered the `enemy’. Apart from the violence inflicted during riots, attacks and pogroms is the communalisation of state agencies.
Spreading communalisation or saffronisation of the police and state agencies is a matter of grave concern across many parts of the country, such as Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, MP, Chhattisgarh and so on. This is particularly so as these agencies have by law, been delegated the power and authority for enforcing the law, including through the use of force by weapons given to them, against citizens. When officials tasked with ensuring `rule of law’ themselves become law breakers three types of systemic violence is generated: Innocent victims of violence don’t get justice – many times victims themselves get falsely implicated and arrested; perpetrators of violence get protection and escape prosecution; and state agencies who subvert and abuse the law not only get away with impunity but are enabled to actually erect `state machines of terror and violence’ against socially marginalised and communally vulnerable minority groups.
Love jihad, moral policing, hate crimes have all become part of the daily media discourse indicating the extensive infiltration of communal feelings amongst those charged with the responsibility of implementing the laws and safeguarding the lives of all, particularly vulnerable minorities and socially marginalised sections.
While these cases of systemic human rights violations occur generally all through the country, there are other types of state violence in specific areas such as in the Maoist affected states of Central India and in the North East and Kashmir. In the name of `Operation Greenhunt’ the central government para-military forces like the CISF and police forces in the states of Odisha, Jharkand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, MP, AP, Maharashtra have created a state of terror virtually enclosing the tribal belt within an armed forces cordon. Even though the Supreme Court has struck down as unconstitutional the establishment of the `Salwa Judum’ or vigilante forces armed by the police and given the mandate to kill anyone using the excuse of crushing Maoists, many states continue to arm and financially support local groups to crush local support to the Maoists. Encoutner killings, widespread pillaging of adivasi villagers, false implication of thousands of innocent adivasi villagers and widespread use of violent, repressive measures have created a vast hinterland of seething anger where the `rule of law’ is more a rhetoric than reality. The cold blooded killing of 18 tribals, including 4 school going children, in Bijapur district in June, 2012 and the lack of investigation into the murder by the police forces is one of the latest illustrations of the reign of impunity enjoyed by armed forces. That the pockets of Maoist violence also are areas of mining interests which have been handed over in a platter to big corporate interests, both national and MNC, only lends credibility that the so-called `war on terror’ is actually an attempt to crush dissent in an area where people are opposed to destructive development projects.
Similarly the widespread use of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and other similar laws by the armed forces and para-military forces leading to disappearances, deaths due to encounter killings, custodial torture, burning down of habitations in the name of capturing hideouts of militants and many more horrors are widely documented in the North East as also in Jammu and Kashmir. The total silence on the part of the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government to the 12 year long fast of Irom Sharmila of Manipur is symbolic of the disdain with which Delhi, and the key political parties, view the issue of human rights violations in these parts of India which has been festering with large scale human rights violations for decades. They also underscore the difficulties before the human rights movement in India.
The nation was shocked in June-July, 2012 to see the panicked exodus of thousands of North East people from Karnataka, Kerala, TN, AP and Maharashtra who fled their places of employment based on unsubstantiated rumours of impending attacks on outsiders and migrants from the North East who were taking away the jobs of locals. The poison of `local vs outsider’ conflict had clearly spilled over from Maharashtra to other states too. The exodus highlights the very thin state of communal harmony and security that citizens feel outside their own states.
The reality of high underdevelopment in some states coincides with the fact that the so-called developed states have managed to grow only due to the migration of cheap labour into their states. In other words, those states which had embraced globalisation-induced growth and opened their doors for industries has led to massive migration of young people from across Indian states in search of jobs. A double irony pervades: states like Gujarat and Tamil Nadu have shown their readiness to attract global capital and industry by assuring that there will be no problems on account of trade unionism or labour unrest through a combination of police repression as also dilution or subversion of labour laws. However finding jobs is not a very liberative experience, for oftentimes the migrant labourers are at the receiving end of very depressed or low wages and poor working conditions. Any attempt, even feeble requests to enhance wages is met with a cruel response. There are no protective labour laws or labour law enforcing officials to help these migrant labourers.
Consequently the lives of such migrant workers is pathetic; apart from ensuring non-application of existing labour laws, especially the law of minimum wages, all safety measures in industries, protecting labourers from hazards, are ignored. Stories abounds from across industrial centres all across India, of industrial accidents in which labourers lose their lives or suffer serious injuries being abandoned by their employers to fend for themselves. Such unfortunate labourers find no assistance from state agencies that show no interest in their plight. The disinterest of political parties, barring those from the left, ensures that these vital issues are rarely taken up for larger political discussion and resolution.
Across India, lakhs of ordinary citizens are threatened by eviction from their places due to development projects, especially major industrial projects like establishment of SEZs, power plants, dams, mining sites and so on. The impact of increased industrialisation is turning cities and towns into urban `hell holes’; people who lived with a sense of dignity and self-reliance in their rural areas are forced to live lives in terrible slums, robbing them of a sense of dignity, meaning and control over their lives.
While the negative impact of globalisation processes on India’s teeming poor, both rural and urban, is now well established, the Government, especially the UPA led Congress government is driving the last nails in the coffin of democracy in India by rushing in an unholy hurry, to pass policies and laws which will change the economic character of India irretrievably. Permitting FDI in retail shopping, increasing FDI limits in insurance, banking, power and other core sectors, dismantling the structures of regulatory authorities, watering down the already weak environment regulatory mechanisms by setting up the `National Investment Bureau’ (now christened as Cabinet Committee on Investments) are all meant to allow the unregulated entry and exit at will of international capital without the threat of being held accountable to Indian laws; or being held responsible for environmental or ecological disasters caused by their projects; or for directly or indirectly violating the essential core constitutional values of `equity, social justice and inclusion’.
The present economic policies of the Indian state in effect are structured in such a way that the rich get richer and the poor poorer. Despite the controversy over what constitutes poverty and the poverty level in India, the reality is that there are as many, if not more, hungry people in independent India in 2012 than was the entire population of India at the time of independence!! All this belies the definition of human development, which the UNDP Global Human development Report, 2011 describes as, “the expansion of people’s freedoms and capabilities to lead lives that they value and have reason to value. It is about expanding choices”.
The reality before Indians cannot be more cruel, degrading and robbing of the sense of dignity, self-respect and self-esteem. The coming years are only going to become worse.
The judiciary, especially the subordinate judiciary, have shown that far from being `sentinels’ of the rule of law and enforcers of constitutional protections, their response is not very different from the way the political executive or the state officials function. Thousands of poor tribals, dalits and people belonging to weaker sections languish in prisons as under trials across Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha, MP, UP, AP, Maharashtra and many other states.
Ordinary citizens who have run afoul of the state, police and vested interests continue to be tortured with impunity. Even in cases when the signs of torture and violence by the police is visible in the person of those arrested and produced for remand do Judicial Magistrates exercise their constitutionally mandated duty by sending such prisoners for medical examination or conduct enquiries and seek accountability from police and state officials. These powers have been provided to them by law precisely to check police abuse. Incidents where Judicial Magistrates or District Judges using such powers is so rare as to be non-existent. The failure of the judiciary to check police abuse of law is a very important factor in the reign of impunity enjoyed by the police and armed forces.
The shocking torture of Soni Suri by senior officials of the Chhattisgarh police is an example of where even the courts, the last resort of citizens seeking protection and accountability from a brutal state, fail citizens and rule of law. The terrible sexual torture by which a stick was violently inserted in the private parts of Soni Suri by a senior police officer like a Superintendent of Police, while in custody and in hospital highlights the precarious condition of `rule of law’ as it applies to ordinary citizens anywhere in the country. It should be noted that Soni Suri’s case had been taken note of by the Supreme Court and yet the brazenly committed torture took place. The message to ordinary Indians is clear, don’t even dare to question state terrorism or abuse.
PUCL members, Binayak Sen and Seema Azad, were convicted by trial courts in Chhattisgarh and UP, which did not fulfill their judicial duty to scrutinise the evidence put forward by the state independently and without bias. Despite the very flimsy, fictitious evidence brought to court by the police to prove that they conspired to commit seditious, anti-national activities including waging war against India, the trial courts sentenced both of them (and others too), to life imprisonment. In Binayak’s case, the Chhattisgarh state went one step ahead by filing a petition before the High Court demanding enhancement of life sentence to death penalty! So intolerant is the Indian state against human rights defenders who courageously challenge the corrupt deeds of the government of the day.
It is in this complex and violence ridden context, when `rule of law’ is seriously threatened, when state terrorism and terror is the rule of the day, when systemic and institutionalized violence threatens the underpinnings of democracy itself, that we in the PUCL are meeting for the 11th National Convention. How should we, as one of India’s largest human rights movements, respond to the dire threat to human rights and democracy in India today?
The challenge before us is real, direct and forceful. At the core of the challenge is a simple question: can we continue to function the way we have till now or do we need to drastically recast or reorganize ourselves?
For some time now, inside the PUCL there has been a growing demand to initiate a process of critical examination of PUCL’s functioning, both in the States as also nationally, in terms of our contribution to the national human rights discourse. There is a growing opinion that we need to find newer definitions of our role and relevance by reformulating our perspectives and creating new conceptual frameworks of understanding the multi-dimensional challenges before us. Many feel that we can strengthen PUCL only by bringing in new and fresh voices from a variety of communities, which are the receiving end of the relentless globalization – privatization –urbanisation – commons appropriating process currently underway in India. Many urge the urgent need to honestly audit ourselves in terms of our practice, perspective and politics so that we are better equipped ideologically, organisationally and politically to safeguard human rights, rule of law and constitutional values.
We, in the PUCL have to ask hard questions about ourselves: To what extent has PUCL contributed to the growth of human rights discourse in India or to the development of human rights jurisprudence? Putting the query differently, have we contributed to the progress of human rights ideology in India to the extent that we could have? If we are satisfied with what we have achieved, then how do we go forward? If we conclude that there was a lot of potential, which could not be realized, then how do we reorganize ourselves to play a more influencing role?
Asking these questions is not meant to diminish, demean or disrespect the work done by numerous members of the PUCL family. The large body of PILs filed by PUCL, in the Supreme Court as also in various High Courts, is testimony to our contribution to the fundamental rights of citizens to life and liberty expressed in cases relating to right to privacy, elections, against bonded labour and more recently in the challenge to Koodankulam Nuclear Power plant.
The PUCL case in the SC on `Right to Food’ (also called as the starvation deaths case) is unparalleled anywhere in the world, and is responsible for ensuring that crores of young children across India get at least one freshly cooked, hot meal in a day. The expansion of Right to Food as including `food security, nutrition security and livelihoods security’ in the PUCL case (still pending since 2001) is an outstanding jurisprudential leap which occurred because PUCL Rajasthan took up the case.
We remain the largest human rights organisation in the country. And yet, despite these impressive achievements, we still need to ask ourselves: can we rest with these achievements.
The truthful answer is no, we cannot. We need to reorganize ourselves better to build on our strengths and utilize the wealth of knowledge, talent and skilled people we have and the larger good will we enjoy. By and large, we have been responding to human rights violations, in a `reactive and firefighting mode’. As and when a human rights violation occurs, we send `Fact Finding Teams’. Reports are followed up with interventions like initiating campaigns, engaging with state authorities, and in some situations filing court interventions. We have also worked to raise human rights awareness through meetings, conferences and workshops. We have invited others to campaign with us and on a case-by-case basis joined campaigns launched by others. In general, both the media as also other political organisations treat us with respect and regard. These are our strengths, even if they are not to be equally found in all the states.
We cannot however rest with these activities. We need to think differently.
A reality confronting us is the near total failure of politics or bankruptcy of most political parties in India (barring to some extent the left parties), to address the serious threat to people, common resources, constitution and to democracy itself due to the collusion of the Indian state with global capital to colonise India. The need is to protect the people from the structural and systemic violence being unleashed against them making them illegal aliens, encroachers and beggars in their own land. There is equally the urgent task of expanding the politics, ideology and jurisprudence of human rights in such a way that it empowers the struggle to create a larger human rights based alternative conceptual and ideological framework to globalization. This will help channelize people’s struggles and protests against current developmental processes and to create a newer, vibrant, coherent, equity focused, justice centred and sustainability aimed socio-economic and political framework.
Intrinsic to this task are internal issues of bringing about more coherence, discipline and uniformity within the PUCL in terms of our approach to issues, response to crises and requests for interventions. We need to address the issue of knowledge expansion within the PUCL on `human rights approach’ to development, on current international norms and standards on various issues and information on International Instruments like ICCPR, IESCR, Torture Convention, Geneva Protocols, ICC and so on as not all of our members are equally well versed in the variety of dimensions of the human rights challenge. Considering that our strength is our national presence we should strengthen documentation so that we have meticulously compiled information from across the country. Our publications, our web site and our Bulletin all need improvements to enhance readability, interest and reach.
We need to build on India’s greatest strength – the demographic youth bulge!! Across India, the human rights movement is yet to find the right method to attract young people to work on human rights issues. This remains our greatest challenge.
More important than all of this, is for us to initiate a more sustained, serious and involved process of understanding the complex character of socio-economic, political, cultural change underway in India. We need to unbundle many of these complex processes as old perspectives do not help us much to appreciate the manner of growth of global capital and impact of domestic laws and policies. Let us not forget that India is not just being colonized by global foreign capital through MNCs. Indian capital and industrialists themselves have become global and become Indian – MNCs, extending their financial tentacles across many countries in Africa, South and South-East Asia.
One such area which has missed attention by the larger human rights movement in India relates to the change in the financial architecture of the global market system.
To illustrate, in June 2012 the Rio+20 Global Heads of State Conference was held in Brazil to create an architecture of environmental protection by placing an economic value on nature and natural processes. Nature would be treated as “products” to be traded in “commodities and futures” markets, open for speculation in the “derivatives” markets. Similar to “carbon credit trading,” those who damage nature in one region could continue environmentally damaging processes by growing forests in some other part of the world to earn “natural resource” or “bio-diversity” credit. The heart of the new UNEP “green economy” paradigm is a corporate-led, evolved and inclusive vision of the future of the planet. This definitional paradigm is, however, destructive, dangerous and damaging.
The Green Economy proposes that a financial value be placed on “nature” and, what the paper calls “Nature’s Services” like clean air, water, trees, fruits and so on. In simple words, what the Green Economy proponents propose is that organisms like “bees, butterflies and birds” act as nature’s service providers providing “services” like pollination, fertilization, seed germination which today, they say, is done free. If these services are “priced” they can be made available for sale in the “biodiversity” market! “Ecosystem services”, “biodiversity banking” are new economic buzzwords. Forests and rivers thus become “natural capital” and natural processes such as pollination by bees become “ecosystem services” provided by the corporate entity, “Earth.”
This new economic paradigm is not merely problematic; once implemented it is going to change fundamentally the character of economic institutions, nature of industries and control over environment and `commons’ on the part of citizens. Several worrying issues arise as for example the nature of laws and environmental protection, the role of the state and liabilities of corporate. Thus in all these issues, the human rights concerns remain paramount. Yet these major changes have hardly received the attention of human rights activists in general. Thus the manner in which the human rights community is going to respond to such a direct assault on nature and environment is going to determine how we are able to safeguard the fundamental rights of people to the commons, to livelihoods and to life itself.
These challenges cannot be met by PUCL alone. Wherever there is common cause and concerns, PUCL has a role in helping to strengthen the wider human rights movement. We need to be able to work with other fraternal human rights movements, organisations, specific issue campaigns, mass movements of citizens, trade unions, experts and specialists and concerned citizens to pool resources and knowledge and synergise our activities to safeguard the human rights of citizens, nature and of all life itself.
The challenges before the Indian human rights community is not just national, but is actually common with other people of South Asia. For millennia, people across the regions comprising India, Pakistan, Bangla Desh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives and Afghanistan have shared a common history and intertwined culture as people moved about freely, sharing, contributing, absorbing, learning from one another’s culture, religion, arts, commerce and trade. The geographical boundaries are relatively new and the hostilities politically stoked. But we cannot wish away the stark reality that our futures are interconnected. It is from this viewpoint that we, as citizens of South Asia, need to respond to human rights crises in each other’s countries as issues of common concern too.
The decades long anti-Tamil pogrom against Tamils in north Sri Lanka witnessed one of the worst war crimes and genocidal attacks by the Sri Lankan army in 2009 and resulted in the cold blooded killing of thousands of Tamils. The complicity of the Indian state has been well exposed in the massacres, which occurred in 2008-09, and yet the Indian government support to the highly intolerant and dictatorial Sri Lankan regime of Mahinda Rajapakse goes without challenge. Neither does the Indian Government comment on the brutal suppression of democratic voices in south Sri Lanka leading to a sinister threat to democracy itself in that country. The question that arises for us in the PUCL is can we afford to be unbothered about suppression of democracy and human rights violations occurring in our neighbouring countries?
We cannot trust the leaders of the governments in South Asia to be great defenders of human rights. It is up to us, the citizens of South Asia, who need to find common ground to unite, work together and protect democracies in the states in South Asia. It is only through the collective strength of the people of South Asia that we can exert moral and political influence on all the countries to follow a developmental path which does not bring internal development in one nation at the cost of endangering neighbouring countries. There is enough wisdom amongst the people of South Asia to find the strength to come together to reclaim democracy and ensure development with dignity!
History beckons us.