Doctor in the dock
by
AJ Philip |
Travails of a human rights activist
SELDOM has a judicial verdict shocked the conscience of the nation as when eminent doctor and human rights activist Binayak Sen was given life sentence for conspiring to wage war against the state on Friday last. In a country where even murderers and rapists are given bail, he languished in jail for more than two years despite 22 Nobel Prize winners, including welfare economist Amartya Sen, making an appeal for his release.
Finally, he was given bail by the Supreme Court but his freedom was short-lived as the judge hearing the case was extraordinarily harsh and sent him, again, to jail. The reason why the verdict was found outrageous by most people is not far to seek. The charge against him is that in the guise of treating alleged Naxalite (a Left-leaning extremist group) leader Narayan Sanyal, incarcerated in a jail in Raipur in Chhattisgarh state, he was acting like a conduit.
Some aspects of the trial were hilarious, to say the least. For instance, the police produced before the judge a letter written to one “Fernandes” of ISI, as clinching evidence that he was in touch with the “dreaded” Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The police was blissfully unaware of the fact that the letter was written to Walter Fernandes, Director of the Indian Social Institute (ISI), run by the Jesuits.
Similarly, an e-mail in which he referred to an occupant of the White House as a “chimpanzee” was produced as evidence that he used the kind of “code language” terrorists resort to. An unsigned typed letter, allegedly written by him, which was not part of the original case file, was produced to implicate Sen. The defence lawyer was able to pick holes in the police theory but the judge was not impressed.
The miscarriage of justice would, of course, be challenged in a higher court of law but till then, Sen will have to suffer for no fault of his. Like the Shakespearean tragic hero, he is more sinned against than sinning. A brilliant medical student, he passed out with flying colours from Christian Medical College, Vellore, whose motto is “not to be ministered unto but to minister”. He could have set up a clinic of his own in one of the big towns and lived a comfortable life.
Instead, he went to a God-forsaken place in Chhattisgarh to work among the tribals there. He set up a small hospital where costly medicines were never prescribed. He believed that a good doctor could diagnose most cases with just a stethoscope and a torch. He also knew there were cheap drugs sold by their generic names, which were as effective as the costly branded ones.
Sen believed that the role of the health professional is to alleviate, as far as possible, those factors which caused disease, fragmentation, alienation and suffering. Disease in an individual is often a symptom of a community that is poor, divided, oppressed and lacking in confidence. It is no surprise that he won the hearts of the poor people.
In all this, his wife Dr Ilina Sen was with him. The Sens are the co-founders of Rupantar, a community-based non-government organisation that has trained, deployed and monitored the work of community health workers spread throughout several villages. Its activities include initiatives to counter alcohol abuse and violence against women and to promote food security. Nobody was, therefore, surprised when he won the 2004 Paul Harrison award for a lifetime of service to the rural poor.
He is also a recipient of the R.R. Keithan Gold Medal instituted by the Indian Academy of Social Sciences (ISSA). The citation describes him as “one of the most eminent scientists” of India. Sen is the National Vice-President of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and General Secretary of its Chhattisgarh unit. It is his work in this capacity that had upset the Chhattisgarh government. There is no denying that Naxalites are a force to reckon with in Chhattisgarh. The people are poor, a vast majority of them living below the poverty line, i.e., with an income of less than $1 per day. They fall easy prey to Naxalism.
But in the name of fighting Naxalites, the Chhattisgarh government has come up with a strategy called “Salwa Judum”. Under this, civilians are armed with weapons to fight Naxalites. It is not difficult for the armed vigilantes to take the law into their own hands and cause human rights violations. This is what Dr Sen has been fighting against.
In a recorded statement immediately preceding his arrest over two years ago, Sen said, “For the past several years, we are seeing all over India — and as part of that in the state of Chhattisgarh as well — a concerted programme to expropriate from the poorest people in the Indian nation, their access to essentials, common property resources and to natural resources including land and water... The campaign called “Salwa Judum” is a part of this process in which hundreds of villages have been denuded of the people living in them and hundreds of people — men and women — have been killed”.
Journalist Sudeep Chakravarti in his book Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Penguin) describes how draconian the state law against Naxalites is. Under the law, it is easy to arrest anybody on the pretext of aiding Naxalites.
The Supreme Court, too, came down heavily on the practice when it said, “The allegation is that the state is arming private persons. You can deploy as many police personnel or armed forces to tackle the menace. But, if private persons, so armed by the state government, kill other persons, then the state is also liable to be prosecuted for abetting murder.”
That is exactly what has been happening — the state abetting murder. Sen is not a supporter of Naxalism. He has clarified his stand on several occasions but the government wanted an excuse to jail him. And it struck over two years ago on the pretext that he had been passing on information to some Naxalite leaders in the Raipur prison. It is true that as a doctor he had met some detainees in his professional capacity but all such meetings were under the gaze of the jail staff. Alas, truth is the casualty as Binayak Sen languishes in a jail, this time for life.
Oman Tribune |
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