Respect for human rights in Asia has been seriously eroded over the past year. With some governments committing the worst abuses, US-based Human Rights Watch reported on January 18. Highlighting violations in Nepal, Cambodia, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and China in its annual report, the group charged that governments were hiding behind the so-called ‘Asian values’ argument to commit abuses.





Some Asian leaders have argued that the supposedly universal human rights documents and treaties actually privilege Western values to the detriment of Asian values. Since not all Asian nations are as economically developed as Western nations, they contend, it is not fair to expect them to uphold all of the global human rights requirements.





The fact is that in Asian countries, human rights activists suffer from inaudibility syndrome. The human rights groups ‘bend over backwards’ to prove their radicalism. And this radicalism seems to consist of a ‘gleeful and malacious’ state-bashing, of ‘proving’ that the law and order machinery is not only excessively violent but is invariably biased against the minorities and the weak; terrorist violence is almost excusable in the face of ‘State terrorism’, and so on.





That the dominant sections of the guardians of public discourse — the intelligentsia and the media — too fall easy prey to these sentiments is preditable. Their willing complicity in a self-imposed censorship or a deliberate distortion (or worse, fabrication) of news only further strengthens the votaries of an authoritarian state.