All questions of Reading Comprehension for Judiciary Exams Exam

Amnesty International's charge that 'tens of thousands' of political prisoners, including prisoners of conscience, are "languishing" in Indian jails and that prisoners are routinely tortured in this country has to be seen in a much wider context than the organization's annual report cares to do. In its overall appraisal of 151 countries, Amnesty has accused 112 of torturing prisoners, 63 of harboring prisoners of conscience, 61 of resorting to political killings and 53 of detaining people without a trial. Of these apparently "overlapping" categories, India seems to have been excluded from the list of the 61 which undertake political killings. The report has, however, pointed out that "scores" of people in India die of torture in police and military custody and that many also simply disappear. Clearly, only a thin line separates the 61 charged with political murders from the rest. Before coming to such conclusions, however, it may also be necessary to classify the various countries according to their political systems. Torture by the security forces and killings at the behest of the government make no difference to the victims whether they are in a democratic country or a totalitarian one. It is also nobody's case that a democratic country is less "culpable" than dictatorship in the event of human rights violations. But the point that still needs to be made perhaps is that torture or 'disappearances' represent a failure of the system in a democracy in contrast to being an integral part of state policy in a country ruled by an autocrat who is answerable to no one.

India may be guilty of keeping 'tens of thousands' behind bars and of the other human rights abuses mentioned by Amnesty, but it still remains a qualitatively different place from a totalitarian country. It is in this respect that Amnesty has been less than fair. It has chosen to ignore the distinctions between the good, the bad and the ugly. The openness of Indian society will be evident to anyone who spends half an hour in one of its chaotic marketplaces or visits the law courts or watches a political rally or reads a newspaper or "strikes up" a conversation with any person on the roads. There is no sense of fear in India, as in a dictatorship. There is also scope for securing relief from the heavy-handed behavior of the authorities, even if the human rights commission has not yet lived up to expectations. Unless such points are recognized, Amnesty's assessment will seem to be a dry recital of statistics which may "pillory" India simply because of its larger population. Mercifully, Amnesty nowadays at least notes that the terrorists also indulge in human rights violations and that India has to cope with several insurgencies "fomented" by a country where the military does not always seem to be under the control of the elected government. True, there is much that is wrong in India's prison system and with the way the terrorist challenge is sometimes met, but the stress should be on activating the self-correcting mechanism within a democracy and not merely on painting a grim, even biased, picture.

Q. Which of the following is the meaning of the phrase "strike up" as used in the passage?

Hunger is about people; it is also about oppression and inequalities. Hunger is about corrupt politicians and corrupt bureaucracy; it is also about power and powerlessness. Hunger is about borrowed ideas of science and technology and development which have not worked in local realities; it is also about the disintegration of local communities; about loss of values, traditions, culture and spirituality. Ending hunger is the important unfinished agenda of this century and of independent India.

The world as a whole has achieved dramatic increase in food production, enough to cover the minimum needs of the projected population globally. Yet hunger and malnutrition persist in alarming measure in India and other Third World countries. The World Bank’s estimates are that over a billion people in the world have problems of food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates point out that in the coming decades, 64 developing countries out of 117 will be unable to feed their population adequately and that 38 out of these developing countries will be able to feed less than half of their population adequately.

India believes that its problems of hunger and food security are almost over because of the significant increase in productivity achieved through the use of new technologies of the Green Revolution. Food grains per capita increased from 395 grams in 1951 to 466 grams in 1993. There are reports about surplus stocks used for exports; also reports about surplus stock rotting because there are not enough storage facilities. And yet in such a situation, we have millions who go hungry and who die a silent death of starvation and malnutrition. In 1974, the FAO organized the first World Food Conference, where its members took a pledge to end hunger by 1984. Henry Kissinger, then US Secretary of State vowed at the meeting that “within a decade, no man, woman or child will go to bed hungry”. A quarter of a century later, more people are dying of hunger. The FAO organized its second World Food Conference in 1985 which re-affirmed its moral commitment “to achieve the goal of ensuring that all people at all times are in a position to produce the basic food they need.” In 1996, yet again the FAO organized its third global conference on food security with much fanfare. The result of this third summit meeting was another declaration, called the Rome Declaration, affirming once again the right of everyone to be free of hunger. The summit also offered an action plan to reduce the numbers of hungry people by half within two decades – a more modest commitment than that made by Kissinger a quarter of a century ago.

In spite of the three global conferences, the future of food security looks as bleak as ever. Fidel Castro, communist leader, who also attended the third FAO summit meeting, pointed out “Hunger is the offspring of injustice and the unequal distribution of wealth. Indeed, the history of hunger has always been which has marginalized the poor and deprived them of the means to eat”.

The NGO’s and people’ representatives who had also gathered for this summit meeting said in their final declaration, ”Ensuring food security demands an approach to agricultural policy that is in almost every respect the reverse of that adopted by the Summit delegates.” They suggested that instead of pursuing policies that encourage corporate agriculture, there should be policies in labour, organic production, reducing or eliminating the use of pesticides and other agro-chemicals. And instead of locking farmers into a global economy over which they have no control, they suggested that resources be shifted in favour of local farming and regional food producers and food systems.

Q.  What had led India to believe that it does not face any food crisis?