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Ashwin Mahesh

Doing right, on our own

A few miles down the interstate heading south out of town, is the headquarters of one of the world's largest animal rights groups, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. If you haven't heard already, this is the organisation whose efforts have prompted various American and European retailers to impose a moratorium on the import of leather goods from India on the ground that transport and slaughter of cattle in India is cruel and unethical. PETA's crusade in India comes at an interesting time in our nation's evolution and some of the answers to the charges raised here will determine how we move forward.

To be sure, PETA has some semblance of the fringe element that makes so many non-profits seem such obstructionists, and far from an asset to the public interest. In the past, PETA's actions have been widely lampooned in the mainstream media. By some people's reckoning, PETA is out to veganise the world, populate it with mink and lynx, and if possible drive humans to extinction instead. Every now and then, the demands that emanate from Norfolk aren't quite rooted in reality, there's no gain-saying that.

That is not to say, however, that there isn't a fair measure of idealism to the organisation's objectives. Whether we are deeply conscious of it or merely sufficiently aware to pass off with a shrug, at some level, there is the pervasive belief in most societies that needless cruelty is to be eschewed. We have all seen various advocacy groups -- ranging from those urging vegetarianism to others protesting against biologists sticking electrodes into animal skulls to study brain activity -- that present similar questions. Of a sort, anyway. And by and large, society's answer has been a wavering, "Yes, but ...."

The reasoning has been fairly straightforward. The slaughter and processing of animals, just as experimentation with them, offers identifiable advantages to humans. These range from necessities such as food to luxury furs that despite the best efforts of various groups, or perhaps because those efforts, draw such attention to their use among the fashionable, which continue to command a market. Whereas at the latter extreme, some changes in our behavior might be possible, adopting entirely plant-based diets is about as likely at this time as eradicating poverty -- it is mostly in the mind. And with uses for animal products spanning such a spectrum, it is understandable that large numbers of people, even those uncomfortable with the horrors associated with processing, nevertheless find ways to ignore those concerns.

And so it is in India too, but that isn't the end of it. As in many developing parts of the world, there is in India the tendency to treat outside opinion on public interest matters as the condescending leftovers from colonialism. Animal rights, while they may be relatively new to the imbroglio, are by no means alone.

We regularly hear of Amnesty or Human Rights Watch reports which speak of atrocities by armed forces personnel against civilians in Kashmir and elsewhere. Various commissions have their ears pricked to reports of atrocities in which minorities are victims, whether by intent on the part of the majority or not. Many of our own Non-Governmental Organisations that regularly report on child labor, bonded labor, child prostitution, etc. have strong links to outside funding agencies and co-believers. PETA's foray into this circuit merely adds to the litany of accusations.

The counter-arguments, admittedly, are readily at hand, and with good reason. By most accounts, this view posits that some white-man-come-lately and his Japanese accompanist, having abused every notion of environmental and human decency one might proffer in times past, now lectures us at length about our failing standards for the same. Somehow, sweat shops in El Salvador, the rape of Nanking, slavery, devastating plunder of the colonised world and other such failings are assumed to be lessons en route to an enlightened state, rather than the contrived behavior that actually produced prosperity and better standards in the worlds of the rulers. And so we turn to the accuser with the immediate retort -- have you looked in the mirror lately?

But if that repartee were not to hand, would we be more obliged to address these issues? Is there a measure of decency that we would ourselves profess to uphold, without the need for outside scrutiny? When a fair measure of counter-accusations have passed under the bridge, we must pause to examine if the river is indeed polluted.

Ultimately, this is not an issue about the right of a first-world, non-profit organization to set standards for Third World employment and other practices. This is also not an issue about sovereignty; whereas we might contend that standards of cruelty are inherently ties to the mores of individual cultures, we cannot countenance the deliberate physical torture as being within that spectrum. Some things are just flat out wrong and cruel, whether in India or in America.

As we are in transition from high levels of poverty and the ills associated with it, to being more integrated with the global economy and its accompanying rewards, these are issues worth pondering. The ascension on to the world's stage must not merely be in dollar terms and not driven by the material self-interest of consumers alone. Those bread-and-butter considerations aren't irrelevant, and I won't pretend otherwise. Equally, Indian self-interest is both valid and vital to developing, maintaining and preserving a visage of India that is recognised around the world.

Aligning the self-interest with simple human dignity of the sort that anyone would recognise will make that visage one of character and strength as well. Every cry of "foul" about once-colonial powers lecturing third world nations assumes, to some degree, that without the clash of worlds that colonialism produced, the mores of the modern first world would surely have developed in the third as well. We would be just as fine and humane democracies as you if you hadn't come along, we tell ourselves. The proof of that pudding demands that the simple integrity of this defense is never an import, but instead is a commodity that transcends the organisation of our own society. We must possess the greatest measure of it ourselves, and in the instances when whiffs of it blow in from across the seas, they must remain free of the tariff of imaginary self-interests.

Decency need never wear the awkward badge of Macaulay's triumph.

Ashwin Mahesh