Binayak Gets Bail - When Will All our Binayaks Get Justice?
Dipankar Bhattacharya
Dr. Binayak Sen has finally got bail following a favourable directive from the Supreme Court. In granting him bail, the apex court has also questioned the flimsy basis on which the Chhattisgarh government has charged him with sedition. The judges, Justice Harjit Singh Bedi and Justice Chandramauli Kumar Prasad, are reported to have said that Binayak may well be a Maoist sympathizer but that does not automatically attract charges of sedition. They have also said that just as mere possession of Gandhi’s autobiography does not make one Gandhian, the same also holds good for the works of Marx, Lenin or Mao. It should however be noted that the comments made on the issue of sedition, though made in open court and reported widely in the media, are not part of the court’s order. In fact, the judges did not give any reason “lest they prejudice any party” in the case!
It is nevertheless refreshing to hear such words of sanity from the apex court at a time when the state has identified ‘Maoism’ as the biggest threat to internal security and cutting across ideological divides, central and state governments are joining hands to wage a veritable war on democracy in the name of combating the Maoists. Indeed such sanity is quite rare and on plenty of occasions the apex court has just upheld lower court verdicts without giving any relief to victims of state repression and lower court injustice. To remind our readers of just one such case, Comrade Shah Chand and thirteen others from Jahanabad district in Bihar who had been sentenced for life by a TADA court in Bihar in 2003 got no justice from the Supreme Court. No arms were recovered from these comrades; the inventory of articles found with them included copies of the Communist Manifesto, Mao’s articles and manuals of Bihar Pradesh Kisan Sabha and studies on Bihar’s agrarian economy. The TADA court had dubbed this literature ‘terrorist’ and the Supreme Court merely upheld this fiat of the TADA court!
Let us not forget that even in Dr. Binayak Sen’s case, he has just got bail and acquittal is still a long way off. It took nearly two years and a sustained campaign across the country and an international outcry by human rights campaigners to secure the first bail after Sen had been arrested in May 2007 on charges of ‘sedition’. Yet we know the Raipur trial court went on to convict him and once again the High Court rejected the bail plea. And let us also remember that while Dr. Sen has been granted bail there are many languishing in Chhattisgarh jails on sedition charges including tribal activists Kopa Kunjam and Kartam Joga and businessman Piyush Guha and hundreds of tribal people from entire Chhattisgarh villages designated as hotbeds of sedition! In spite of periodic interventions by the Supreme Court and repeated directives to the Chhattisgarh government to disband the unconstitutional Salwa Judum campaign, Chhattisgarh remains a veritable graveyard of human rights.
In the second week of March, Chhattisgarh police claimed to have fought an encounter battle with Maoists in the jungles of Dantewada. A fact-finding team visiting Chintalnar, Morapally, Timmapuram and Tadmetla villages in that area found the police claim to be nothing but a hoax. They said what had happened in reality was a full-scale rampage by state-sponsored Koya commandos and the “CoBRA” unit of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) from March 11 to 16 in the course of which at least three tribals were killed, three women were raped and over 300 houses/huts, granaries and other properties were set on fire. A few days later when Swami Agnivesh took a relief team to the villages, he was attacked forcing the NHRC to take notice and the Supreme Court to call for yet another hearing on the Salwa Judum case which is going on for four years now. And the latest SC hearing once again brought out the real truth that Chhattisgarh is experiencing a systematic war on human rights and that the war is being jointly sponsored by the state and central governments.
While welcoming the bail granted to Dr. Binayak Sen and the remarks made by the judges, the human rights movement cannot lose sight of this larger ongoing war. In fact, the time is now absolutely ripe for a powerful countrywide people’s movement for democratic rights. The draconian laws – some of them archaic, and some are of recent origin – must go. The sedition law (Section 124A of IPC), the AFSPA, the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005, the sweeping and draconian provisions of the UAPA – these are all utterly incompatible with the notion of a functional democracy. The awakened public opinion which has forced on the government the agenda of drafting an anti-corruption legislation must also call for repealing all these terrible laws which make a complete mockery of our constitutional liberties and rights. Let anti-corruption campaigners and human rights activists march together and unfurl the common banner of a democratic India free of corruption and repression.