‘Udta Punjab’ by Anurag Kashyap has brought the crisis of drug abuse that has gripped the State into mainstream discourse. The movie provides rare glimpses of the extent of the menace that affects all, without the bias of gender or class. The following section provides succinct previews about the worsening condition of Punjab.
At the outset, the intensity of the problem can well be gauged from the fact that about 60 per cent of the drugs confiscated in India are seized alone from Punjab. Also in the news was the the Drug Situation Report, September 2015, released by Narcotics Control Bureau, that claimed a seizure of 13.755 kg of heroin from Khemkaran, Amritsar. Dr. S.P.K. Jena, Associate Professor, Department of Applied Psychology, University of Delhi, says “not only these drug addictions have led to decrease in efficiency of the youth of Punjab but also has given rise to a number of criminal and anti-social activities.”
In a 2013 working paper, ‘Factors Driving Drug Abuse in India’s Punjab’ by Rahul Advani, Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS), it is stated that although there is no comprehensive study to determine the number of drug addicts in the State, it is estimated that 40 per cent of the Punjabi youth in the age group of 15-25 years have fallen prey to drugs.
If we were to apply this statistic to the total youth population of Punjab, this would suggest that roughly a population of about 1.5 to 2 million young Punjabis are addicted to drugs. According to a study ‘Drug Addiction in Punjab: A Sociological Study’, 2013, by Dr Ravinder Sandhu, UGC Emeritus Fellow, Department of Social Work, Punjab University, Patiala, reveals that such crimes in Punjab are nine times more than the national average. The study further states that 73.5 per cent of drug addicts belonged to the 16-35 age group. Dr Suman Gupta, Psychiatrist, Social Worker and Counsellor at Neuropsychiatry and Drug Deaddiction cum Rehabilitation Centre, Chandigarh, adds “the trends for drug consumption in Chandigarh are on its peak and are being equally consumed by both poor and rich sections.’’
As per the ISAS paper, the high proliferation of drug rackets and consumption in Punjab can be attributed to unemployment, agricultural economy, obsession with masculinity etc. as the economic growth of the State is hampered due to a downturn in agricultural productivity, resultant from over consumption of pesticides and fertilizers in the wake of green revolution. As per the study, “Impact of Delay in Investment Implementation in Punjab”, 2015, conducted by Assocham, a sharp declining trend has been observed in the growth performance of Punjab’s economy as the State’s overall growth has declined from 10.2 per cent in 2006-07 to 5 per cent in 2014-15.
The green revolution resulted in a large influx of workers from the states of UP, Rajasthan and Bihar because of which the native youth are subjected to competition in employment opportunities, along with substandard quality of education and unemployment. This incompetency further gives rise to distress due to which drug consumption shoots up not only for high priced drugs like opium and heroin but also cheap drugs in the form of tablets, capsules and injections. Most villages in Punjab do not have health clinics but usually have three to four drug stores which sell cheap pills as an affordable alternative to heroin.
The ISAS paper also adds that ‘increasing masculinity’ has also become a growing phenomenon for drug use. Usually, the most popular reason for drug abuse given by abusers is that they wanted to increase their sexual performance. This suggests that drug abuse is partially consumed for both display and realisation of masculine identity. Maqboolpura, a village in Punjab is called the ‘village of widows’ because of the large scale deaths of young men due to drug abuse, the paper points out.
As per the Punjab Opioid Dependency Survey, 2015, carried out by the Society for Promotion and Youth Masses and National Drug Dependence Centre, AIIMS, almost 80 per cent drug addicts report that they have tried to give up drug use in the past but just about 35 per cent have received any kind of help or treatment.
Jena further said that “not only does heroin and other drugs lead to slowing down of one’s reasoning ability, mental functioning and blockage of thought processes, but also has further consequences, in the form of secondary effects, like committing crimes and engaging in anti-social activities.” He also suggested methods, to overcome addiction, such as “counselling, psychotherapy and vocational training of people suffering from addiction.
Policies should be formulated with missionary zeal and strong political will power. The government should stop putting the drug abusers behind the bars and should rather try to understand their reasons for adopting drug addiction of any kind. The state is earning around INR 13 crore daily from the excise duty on sale of liquor but nothing is spent on the research on drug abuse.”
In Punjab, a host of factors are aggravating the depressing situation. And what further accentuates the crisis is the fact that the population suffering from drug addiction is primarily the youth who are fundamental to economic growth of any region.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.