By Sondip Bhattacharya
The Supreme Court has ruled that apart from the right to privacy, the right to sleep of the public was impugned during Baba Ramdev’s yoga camp at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds as police used tear gas to disperse the sleeping mob that had assemble to support the Baba
A good night’s sleep is known to be a factor in health and well- being. This was discovered by interrogators long before doctors and sleep- deprivation has been a genteel instrument of torture for decades. It was part of the armoury of the pioneering brainwashers during the Korean War and, most recently, has found use in Guantanamo Bay. Clearly, the deprivation of sleep attacks the right to life as much as deprivation of food does.
However, the elevation of the right to sound sleep to the level of a fundamental right will remain problematic until its status relative to competing rights is established. For instance, if a worker is caught sleeping on the job, can he or she avoid a reprimand or an adverse service record by pleading that domestic problems had banished sleep at night? Or would the right of the employer to exact work prevail? The answer would affect the lives of millions of workers, from the lowliest functionaries right up to legislators, who are frequently caught sleeping in the House during important debates.
And what of the rights of the police? Admittedly, they went over the top at the yoga camp. And it’s illuminating to know that all the worthies who had the nasty experience of the midnight knock during the Emergency lost not two rights but three — the rights to privacy, to liberty and to sleep. But in the routine course of their duties, the police have a natural preference for the wee hours to make arrests. Difficult customers are more likely to come quietly before they’ve had their first cup of tea. And difficult situations are easier to defuse before the daytime tempo picks up.
When Anna Hazare was arrested last year, he was picked up at 7 am, which made it very difficult for his followers to immediately organise the jail bharo andolan that they had promised. However, such cases are unusual. The police typically pick up criminals, not activists, and it’s not at all a bad thing to approach them when they’re not at their most alert.
Finally, there’s the question of spousal rights to sound sleep. In some countries, loss of sleep due to a spouse’s snoring is now regarded as a valid ground for divorce.
Even the Indian market is flooded with a range of devices to prevent snoring, from little widgets to prohibitively expensive respirators. But the human rights of snorers versus those of their spouses remains to be clarified.
However, perhaps the court has missed out on the greatest enemy of sleep in India — the mosquito. If inefficiencies due to loss of sleep via the depredations of mosquitoes were totted up, they would probably be a sizeable fraction of GDP. And one must also factor in morbidity and mortality due to mosquito– borne diseases, which assume near- epidemic proportions in parts of the country every year. Rarer infections like chikunguniya and Japanese encephalitis have added to the load on health services and the drain on the economy, while older afflictions like malaria and dengue continue to flourish unabated.
In contrast, the campaign for the eradication of polio has been a success. For the first time ever, India is off the polio map of the world, since no fresh infection has been reported in the wild for a year. The campaign against HIV/ AIDS can be deemed to be successful too since the Indian pandemic predicted in the Nineties has been held off.
One must conclude that the campaign against malaria and other mosquito- borne diseases has not received the attention that the polio and HIV programmes have enjoyed. The health and communications apparatus of government is fully deployed against HIV and polio, which is a scourge as old as malaria. But the malaria campaign, which used to be a priority until the Nineties, seems to have been neglected. Means to contain the problem continue to be researched, but they are not deployed in a sustained, systematic manner.
At the same time, the mosquito population is growing in pace with the human population, which means that the volume of the problem is much larger than before. Containment is an incremental process which must fail if it is done in fits and starts. If the polio programme had been patchily implemented, India would still figure on the map of hotspots. The mosquito menace can never be eradicated because insect vectors easily cross borders. But it can be contained and brought down to a level where the nation’s prospects are not threatened by chronic morbidity. However, since this is an incremental process, the more the vector population is allowed to grow, the longer it will take to contain. If we ignore the problem now, it will become prohibitively expensive to face in the future, and containment could take decades rather than years.
What would it take to make this happen? The Malaria Eradication Programme was once a dynamic body seeking to implement cutting– edge ideas like bio-control, but it seems to have lost the interest of policymakers and legislators. And though millions of people are affected by the mosquito menace, no one is about to make it an election issue, not even at the panchayat level. What remains is the last resort for every issue which India chooses to ignore — the law. However, nobody and nobody seems to be exercised enough to file a public interest case.
The case involving the police action on Baba Ramdev’s yoga camp could have provided just the opportunity for the court to weigh in. Since it expanded considerably on the right to a decent night’s sleep, it could have enlarged some more on the theme. This ruling will certainly be cited by people seeking to end their marriages on the argument that their spouses snore. But one doubts if any attention will be given to the mosquito vector problem, which is far weightier than a family court issue. It is reducing the growth potential of the country and preventing citizens from leading full and healthy lives. INAV
