Liberal justice
by
AJ Philip |
It is not the first time that the Supreme Court has been lenient
The Supreme Court of India crowned itself with glory when, on April 15, it granted bail to human rights activist and practising physician Binayak Sen, sentenced to life imprisonment in a sedition case by a court in the state of Chhattisgarh. He is expected to be released on Monday when this column appears. For many in civil society, the verdict is the best news that has come from the highest court in the country in recent times.
Sen is no ordinary convict. After passing out with flying colours from Christian Medical College, Vellore, one of India’s oldest medical colleges, he opted to serve in a remote area in Chhattisgarh, then a part of Madhya Pradesh. He chose serving the poor tribals of the region as the mission of his life. But in the course of his work, he realised the kind of exploitation the aborigines suffered at the hands of the triumvirate of contractors, government officials and police.
Merely prescribing medicines to cure people of their diseases could not have been the be all and end all of his mission, particularly when he found gross exploitation all around. That is when Sen turned into a social activist and became an office-bearer of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). It was in that capacity that he developed contact with all those who were fighting against the exploitative social order.
No, it did not mean that he became a sympathiser, let alone a Naxalite (Maoist), a member of the ultra-leftist group that liberated a village named Naxalbari in West Bengal in the sixties in the belief that it would pave the way for a Chinese-model revolution. Today the Naxalites are strong in the ‘Dandakaranya’ area, which is where deity Ram, his wife Sita and brother Lakshman had spent 14 years in the forest, according to Valmiki’s Ramayana.
It may be recalled that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once described Naxalism as the gravest security threat the country faced. Tribals in the area believe that development has not been inclusive and they, therefore, fall easily into the trap laid by the Naxalites, who urge them to take up arms against the state. The Naxalites are now strong enough to kidnap a district magistrate — the highest government official in a district — in Odisha and demand ransom.
They have at times ambushed the security forces, drawn up from all over India but with little knowledge of the topography of the area, and killed some of them. Such attacks have evoked retaliation from the state, particularly Chhattisgarh, which has promoted vigilantism among the people by arming them with weapons. However, the tit-for-tat approach has not yielded dividends as it has only exposed the government to charges that it was allowing the people to take the law into their own hands.
While fighting for the human rights of the people, Sen got into the bad books of the government. And he fell into the police trap when he visited the Raipur jail to provide medical aid to Naxalite leader Narayan Sanyal, incarcerated there. It was easy for the government, which had drafted draconian laws to deal with anybody who even sympathised with the Naxalites, to frame charges against him that he was aiding and abetting Naxalism.
Soon, he was charged with sedition and sent to jail in May 2007. He was alleged to have passed on secret information to Sanyal. That all his visits were with the permission of the jail authorities, who were also present when he met them, was overlooked. Finally, it was the Supreme Court which took a magnanimous view and granted him bail on May 25, 2009.
But the freedom did not last long as the Raipur Sessions court hearing the case found him guilty of sedition and awarded him life imprisonment on December 24, 2010. That some Naxalite literature was found from his possession turned out to be ‘clinching evidence’ against him. Details of the chargesheet against him shocked the conscience of all thinking sections of the people, who found them flimsy. Amartya Sen was among the many Nobel-laureates who pleaded for mercy towards him. And when the Chhattisgarh High Court turned down his plea for bail, he had no other option but to approach the Supreme Court.
It is not the first time that the Supreme Court has taken such a lenient view. A few years ago, it took a liberal view in what has come to be known as the Jehovah’s Witness case. A few students belonging to this sect refused to sing the national anthem, which is compulsory in schools in India. They would stand up in reverence but would not sing as their religion prohibited them from singing in praise of anything other than the Creator.
The students were expelled from the school but the Supreme Court took a liberal view and gave full credit to the fact that the students did not show any disrespect to the national anthem, while refusing to sing it. In the current case, the Supreme Court judges, who heard Sen’s bail application, demolished the prosecution’s argument in one fell swoop when it asked whether finding Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography ‘My Experiments with Truth’ in the possession of someone would make him a Gandhian.
Of course, it is not the end of the matter for Sen, whose appeal challenging his conviction has been pending before the High Court. The main charge against him is sedition which, in law, is overt conduct, such as speech and organisation that is deemed by the legal authority to tend toward insurrection against the established order.
The law has its colonial moorings and needs to be amended, particularly when the country needs people like Dr Binayak Sen and Swami Agnivesh, who can act as intermediaries with the Naxalites, to solve the problems of unequal development that they highlight without any need for bloodshed.
The writer is a New Delhi-based senior journalist.
Oman Tribune |
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