[The Raipur Sessions Court verdict condemning Dr. Binayak Sen to life imprisonment under a range of draconian laws including ‘sedition,’ has been met with an outpouring of protest all over the country. Binayak Sen come to represent all those thousands of people today who are routinely framed in false cases on fabricated evidence, tortured in police custody and convicted in political judgements. While Binayak still awaits justice and freedom, however, it is true that finally, after so many years of struggle, he stands vindicated for his social commitment and courage in the court of public opinion. In that people’s court, it the Chhattisgarh Government, the Central Government and the Indian judiciary that stand in the dock and are being asked to answer for their appeasement of corporates and crimes against democracy.

In a recent speech to IPS probationers, the Prime Minister laid stress on the fact that if "naxalism in the Central India parts where the bulk of India's mineral wealth lies" is not controlled, "we have to say goodbye to our country's ambitions to sustain growth rate of 10-11% per cent per annum." Clearly the Prime Minister is equating mass movements of adivasis and peasants against land grab and mining loot by corporations with 'naxalism.' Obliquely admitting that such land grab and loot are crucial to India's 'growth rate,' the Prime Minister is calling for the continued and intensified police repression of mass resistance. On cue, the war on people’s movements challenging corporate loot and land grab continues. Daily the newspapers tell us tales of ‘Maoists’ arrested or killed in encounters, of corporate plans for ‘development’ in remote forest areas, of a ‘Maoist’ hand behind every people’s protest... But we have only recently seen how the Niira Radias who manage corporate interests pull the strings of Ministers, courts, and media. What we read on the pages of newspapers is not necessarily the truth – especially when it concerns powerful corporate interests and movements challenging these interests.

The struggle against draconian laws, against the State's war on people's movements, against the silencing of public intellectuals, and for the freedom of the many Binayaks will continue and grow in the days to come.]

Free Binayak Sen, End Operation Green Hunt

In an ongoing Supreme Court hearing on a PIL against the Salwa Judum, the Counsel for the Chhattisgarh Government repeatedly tried to brand the petitioners as ‘Naxal sympathisers,’ even after being ticked off by the Bench for this. In fact, this tactic of branding any and every dissent as ‘naxalism’ is a familiar one, widely used by Governments all over the country and given the status of policy by Operation Green Hunt. In this sense, Binayak Sen’s has been the flashpoint case for Operation Green Hunt.

Binayak Sen was chosen because he exposed the Salwa Judum’s atrocities, fake encounters by police against adivasis, and, in his capacity of doctor and human rights activist, dared to visit prisoners who had been jailed under draconian laws. In 2007, he was booked and jailed under Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act (CSPSA) and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) on charges of aiding Maoists by acting as a conduit for letters from a jailed prisoner. Eventually he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment along with Narayan Sanyal and a businessman Piyush Guha.

The preposterous and farcical way in which the trial was conducted in the Raipur Sessions Court served better than any propaganda by human rights groups could have done to expose the fabricated nature of the charges against Dr. Binayak Sen.

What did the Chhattisgarh police have in the way of evidence that Sen was abetting Maoists? In the first place, the police claimed Sen had visited Narayan Sanyal (jailed on charges of being a Maoist leader) 33 times posing as his relative. However, jail records show that his applications for jail visits were made on PUCL letterheads. Moreover, jailers refused to support the police version and instead testified in court that it would have been impossible for Sanyal to smuggle letters through Sen since the visits were heavily supervised. The verdict failed to take this testimony of jailers into account.

The police claimed to have recovered three letters from Piyush Guha written by Sanyal, and that Piyush Guha confessed to having received these letters through Sen. But Guha’s custodial confession was inadmissible in court and Guha stated that the confession was obtained under torture and the letters planted by the police. The police claim they found the letters on Guha’s person when he was arrested at Station Road, Raipur. However, the police’s version is contradicted by its own affidavit before the Supreme Court where it had stated that it had arrested Guha from 'Mahindra Hotel.' The police explains this away as a ‘typing mistake.’ The witness to the recovery of the letters admitted that he arrived on the scene only after Guha was already in police custody. Yet the verdict discounts all these telltale signs of planted evidence. Instead of asking ask why the police are unable to clearly establish that the letters written by Sanyal were actually found in Guha’s possession, the verdict says that Guha ‘has been unable to clearly explain how the letters written by accused Narayan Sanyal were found in his possession’!

Confronted with the failure of a key piece of 'evidence' (a letter supposedly sent by Maoists to Dr. Sen) to find a mention in the list of articles seized from Dr Sen's home, the police airily explained it away by saying 'chipak gaya tha' - 'it must have stuck to some other documents.' The verdict, without any questions, accepted this flimsy excuse for planted evidence.

The verdict declares that Sen knew and helped a couple who were ‘hardcore naxals.’ Sen does not deny knowing the couple, but the verdict brands them without any definition of what is a ‘hardcore naxal’ or asking for any proof of their Maoist affiliation. The prosecution also produced one letter found in Sen’s home where Sen has been addressed as ‘Comrade’ – “Only Maoists are called Comrade,” the prosecution claimed!

The prosecution also Karl Marx’s Das Kapital to prove that Marxism divides society and preaches violence! There can be no better proof of the political nature of the charges against Sen that seek to brand Marxism itself as ‘terrorist.’

In particular, the Chhattisgarh police exposed itself to public ridicule for its attempts to link Dr. Sen's wife, scholar and activist Ilina Sen with terrorism based on her email to the well-known Indian Social Institute of Delhi, which the prosecution mistook for Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). According to Ilina Sen, the prosecution had also underlined all Muslim names in her mails, and would have further tried to present these as evidence of ‘ISI’ linkages, had the ‘ISI’ reference not been mocked by the media.

A range of eminent judicial personalities have condemned the verdict for violating all established norms. Former Delhi HC Chief Justice Rajinder Sachar declared the verdict to be ‘nonsensical;’ former Attorney General Soli Sorabjee has called the verdict ‘outrageous,’ saying, “At this rate no human rights activist will be safe in the country,”; and Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan has called for the Sessions Court judge to be removed from his post.

Now that the verdict has come in for severe censure all around, some leaders of the BJP and Congress have tried to suggest that such public protests against the verdict are uncalled for: Sen has a right to appeal and the judicial process should be respected. They ignore the fact that the entire higher judiciary including Supreme Court unlawfully denied Sen bail for 19 months even though the evidence against him was so flimsy! In other words, by denying him bail, they have already forced him to be ‘punished’ even before his crime was proven. As Arundhati Roy said in a protest at Delhi, “the process itself is the punishment,” and even if Sen is eventually set free, the very “judicial process” has been a serious miscarriage of justice.

It is welcome that a range of forces – including the CPI, CPI(M), and Left Trade Unions have come out against the verdict on Binayak Sen. However, it must be stressed that the Binayak Sen case is inseparable from the Green Hunt agenda (shared by the Central Government, as well as all hues of state governments) of branding all forms of dissent and struggle as ‘Maoist.’ In seeking justice for Binayak Sen, we must protest the injustice that is being done to scores of other activists, adivasis, journalists, booksellers, publishers, and intellectuals who are similarly being harassed by false cases and baseless imprisonment for protesting against Government policies of appeasing corporate loot.

UP Police Falsely Implicates CPI(ML)

Early this year, we witnessed an audacious and outrageous attempt by Brij Lal, the Additional Director General (ADG) Law and Order, of Uttar Pradesh Police to create a Maoist bogey out of an incident sparked by police high-handedness, and falsely implicate CPI(ML) in the process. A CPI(ML) team investigated the events subsequently to establish the facts.

In Jamania (Gazipur district, UP), on 5 January, hundreds of people from the neighbouring Kakrait village (Chandauli district) made their way on tractors to the tehsil headquarters to protest against the arrest of a youth (Manoj Bind) from their village on charges of theft from a post office. The protestors, including a large number of women, were from the extremely backward Bind community, and alleged that Manoj had been falsely implicated for the theft. According to them, police habitually ‘solved’ cases by arbitrarily arresting and torturing innocent youth from their community. (It may be remembered that in December 2009 in Gazipur, a tribal youth Jiut Vanvasi was similarly arrested for theft and tortured for a week in the thana. When CPI(ML) intervened, he was eventually booked and jailed, but leading CPI(ML) activists were also beaten up, booked on a range of false charges and jailed.)

CPI(ML) had held a dharna on January 3, protesting Manoj Bind’s arrest, and had the district administration acted then, the subsequent events could have well been averted. However, on January 5, CPI(ML) had no demonstration.

The protestors were stopped at the Jamania police post, and stopped from moving forward towards the district HQ. When the protestors insisted on marching forward, police fired on them. When a 60-year-old woman, a former gram pradhan, received a bullet, the crowd was enraged. Turning on th e sub-inspector, they beat him up severely and he succumbed to his injuries. They also set the police post on fire.

This episode clearly flowed from police high-handedness – first in arbitrarily arresting an innocent youth, next in preventing protestors from taking their grievance to the district headquarters, and finally in firing on unarmed protestors.

Next, the ADG Brij Lal held a press conference at Lucknow where he deliberately issued a maliciously fabricated version of the events. He claimed that CPI(ML) Liberation activists had launched a pre-planned attack on the police post, and had shot dead the SI; he even claimed that 12 bore shells and live cartridges were recovered from near the body. A press release issued by the Public Relations department of the UP Government on the same day states, “all the demonstrators were of CPI(ML) Liberation but were demonstrating under the banner of Shoshit Samaj Dal.”

Subsequently, the post mortem report in the SI's death gave the lie to the ADG’s claims: showing no bullet injuries and proving death by wounds inflicted when he was beaten up.

Several news channels and national English dailies as well as local Hindi papers obediently carried the ADG’s version, and even elaborated on it. For instance, the Telegraph story, titled “Left mob shoots policeman dead” says, “a CPI(ML) Liberation mob attacked a police post in eastern Uttar Pradesh" and killed an SI while attempting to "storm the court" since "three Liberation supporters were to be produced in the court on a charge of theft."It claims to quote a "Liberation spokesperson in Ghazipur, Saroj Singh," though the party has no spokesperson of this name. The story also claims "Liberation leader Santosh Sahar recently told party workers in Uttar Pradesh to work among the state’s Dalits and backwards with an eye on the 2012 state polls.” Santosh Sahar is a leader of the party in Bihar, and one wonders where the reporter managed to get this statement by him regarding UP polls!

The TOI story titled 'Mob kills cop, torches outpost' quotes “senior cops” to term the incident as the “first-ever known Maoist attack in support of a civilian issue in the state.” It also repeatedly refers to "banned CPI(ML) group" and "banned CPI(ML) cadres," saying “Police sources said that the violence was orchestrated by members of the banned CPI(ML) group the protesters were carrying the banner of Shosit Samaj Party (SSP) which is not banned in the state.”

The CPI(ML) state-wide protests on January 7 on the issue eventually forced the police to retreat from the absurd story. The IG range and the Collector also stated that the incident had nothing to do with naxalites. Demanding a high level enquiry into the entire Jamania incident the CPI(ML) held a three day long dharna from 10 January onwards at Gazipur, led by CPI(ML)’s State Standing Committee member Comrade Ishwari Prasad Kushwaha and SCM and District Secretary Comrade Rampyare Ram.

Fake Encounters in Odisha

On the day Binayak Sen was sentenced, CPI(ML) Odisha Secretary and party CCM Khitish Biswal issued a statement condemning the verdict. The next morning, a large police force entered the party office premises and swarmed all over it. When Comrade Biswal demanded why they had done so, a senior police officer asked him, “Why did you issue a statement on Binayak Sen?” When Comrade Biswal asserted that in a democracy the judiciary is accountable to the public and asked who had authorised this forced entry into the CPI(ML) office, the police force went out but waited outside the office for two hours.

In Odisha, Operation Green Hunt is on in full swing, and anyone who questions it is liable to be branded as ‘Maoist.’ Recently, even as Union home minister P Chidambaram met with DGPs of nine ‘Maoist-affected’ states in New Delhi, the Odisha police gleefully claimed a major victory: the ‘encounter’ killings of 20 ‘Maoists’ between 28 December and 12 January at key anti-mining and anti-land-grab struggle areas of Kalinganagar, Rayagada, Keonjhar and Gandhamardhan hills.

At Kalinganagar, five tribals were picked up by the police on 20 December, and after two weeks of illegal custody and torture, they were shown to have been killed in an encounter on 2 January, 2011 – the exact anniversary of the Kalinganagar firing in which 14 adivasis protesting land grab for the Tata Steel Plant were killed in 2006. 2 of the 5 were young girls, one of them a mere 12 years old.

We can clearly recall how in the Radia tapes, Tata lobbyist Niira Radia assured columnist Vir Sanghvi with ‘hand on her heart’ that ‘we are fighting Maoists in Kalinganagar.’ The Kalinganagar struggle is well known to be a mass movement of adivasis devoid of any Maoist leadership. The Radia effect could be seen when newspapers reported without any question that the killed ‘Maoists’ included a 12-year-old girl.

At Gandhamardhan, two men killed and branded as ‘Naxals’ have been identified by villagers as local BJP members who were active in the anti-mining struggle, and in recent times had been especially active against Vedanta’s plans to shift its mining operation to Gandhamardhan after being denied permission at Niyamgiri.

A prominent Niyamgiri activist, Lenju, who in the Frontline (June 5-18 2010) had predicted that he would be branded a Maoist and killed, is also suspected to have been among the 9 people gunned down in their sleep in Rayagada district. All were shown to be ‘Maoists’ killed in an encounter.

Apart from this, a tribal woman was killed on 29 December, and two tribal men on 12 January at Keonjhar – also claimed to be Maoists.

These ‘encounters’ raise the serious doubt that the police is now paving the way for the corporates by massacring activists of people’s movements and, with the help of the Radia-run media, branding them as ‘Maoists.’ After this series of encounters, on cue, Vedanta has announced its plans to challenge its expulsion from Niyamgiri, and Tata has released a statement promising to turn Kalinganagar into Jamshedpur.

When the adivasis had pushed Vedanta out of Niyamgiri, Rahul Gandhi had gone there to declare that ‘I will be a soldier in Delhi for adivasis of Odisha.’ Why is the brave soldier silent now when 12-year-old girls are being gunned down in Odisha as ‘Maoists’? Why does he not at least ask for an enquiry into each of these encounters, as according to the NHRC directives?

BOXES

Sedition Law: Colonial Tool Against Today’s Dissenters

India inherited Section 124-A from the British Raj – but Britain itself has long back scrapped the sedition law and held its last sedition trial in 1947, the year of India’s independence. This law states: “Whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards, the Government established by law in India.”
In Lokmanya Tilak’s trial for sedition, the judge defined ‘disaffection’ as ‘the absence of affection.’ This colonial hangover makes disloyalty to the Government a crime! Thereby, every individual or organisation critical of the Government’s policies and mobilises people against it is liable to be labelled ‘seditious.’

This is what M K Gandhi had to say about the sedition law: “Section 124-A, under which I am happily charged, is perhaps the prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code, designed to suppress the liberty of the citizens.” How can a law “designed to suppress the liberty of citizens” in colonial India have place in independent India, unless today’s governments too seek to suppress the liberty of citizens?

In a debate in Parliament in 1951, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had said, “Take again Section 124-A of the Indian Penal Code. Now so far as I am concerned that particular section is highly objectionable and obnoxious and it should have no place both for practical and historical reasons, if you like, in any body of laws that we might pass. The sooner we get rid of it the better.” However, India never did get rid of this obnoxious law, and it has been routinely deployed against all manner of political dissenters. The Supreme Court in 1961 did rule that this law be used only in cases where acts of violence are involved – but even so, the political character of the law as a tool to punish dissent remained unchanged.

In recent times, the Karnataka Government booked E Rati Rao, PUCL activist and AIPWA Vice President, under this law, but has subsequently been forced to withdraw the case. Some years ago, the RJD Government in Bihar used this law against four AISA activists who showed black flags to L K Advani. The Binayak Sen case ought to serve as an urgent call to scrap the sedition law once and for all.

These Binayaks are still in jail

Commenting on the Binayak verdict, Antara Dev Sen has written:

“This ‘ridiculous judgement’ has given us a great opportunity to examine our justice system, rectify its dangerous flaws and review the arbitrary use of laws relating to terror and sedition to silence dissenting voices. Hundreds of citizens are imprisoned and tortured on false charges particularly in ‘disturbed’ areas, ordinary citizens whom we don’t know and can’t vouch for, people who don’t have the support of powerful well-wishers as Sen, a celebrated human rights worker, has. I am sure the higher courts will rectify the huge miscarriage of justice towards Sen. I only hope that it doesn’t take too long. And that they rectify the system in a way that lesser mortals too do not suffer this fate anymore.”

Today, Binayak Sen awaits justice from higher courts. But in one such case, even the Supreme Court upheld a verdict that equated protest with terrorism. In 2004, the SC upheld the sentencing of 14 CPI(ML) activists of Bhadasi village, Jehanabad to life imprisonment by a TADA Court. While the Court did not establish that the defendants had conspired in any terrorist act, it still condemned them as terrorists because they were alleged to have clashed with the police during a struggle over the right to harvest a water-chestnut pond. In that case too, Marxist literature, Kisan Sabha and IPF documents were presented and accepted as ‘proof’ of terrorist involvement. Worst of all, the SC upheld this sentence 9 years after the draconian TADA was discontinued!

Those unfairly convicted included one person who had been a minor at the time of the incident, as well as elected mukhiya Shah Chand. All continue to languish in jail.

BOXES

Draconian Laws Proposed in Punjab

On January 20, 34 trade unions including the AICCTU and its affiliated unions held protests at district HQs all over the state, against two draconian laws that the state government has proposed to introduce. Around 2000 people participated in the protest at Mansa.

The proposed Punjab Prevention of Damage to Public and Private Property Act 2010, will be like permanent imposition of Section 144: organizations will have to take special permission for each protest from the district magistrate, and the route, number of participants, slogans and so on for protests or agitations will have to be finalized by and with permission of the SSP! The Punjab Special Security Group Bill 2010 proposes to allow VIP security personnel ‘special’ powers similar to those endowed by the AFSPA on forces in Kashmir and the N East.

Dalit activist charged with sedition

Sudhir Dhawale, a Dalit activist and journalist in Maharashtra, has been charged with sedition recently. Dhawale is known for his efforts for justice in cases of atrocities against Dalits, such as the massacre of Dalits in police firing in Mumbai in 1997; the Khairlanji massacre in 2006 and many others. His wife Darshana, also an activist, has alleged that the police intimidated her into signing the list of seized items in spite of the fact that procedures and safeguards regarding seizure of these items from their house were blatantly disregarded. There is every possibility that the police planted evidence and seek to frame Dhawale.

Human Health and Human Rights

(Contributed by Tapan Sen)

Dr Binayak Sen believed that human health and human rights walked hand in hand and he stood for all struggles and interventions, including reforms that strengthened both. In a recent article in leading international medical journal The Lancet, titled ‘Securing the right to health for all in India,’ he wrote:

“The final irony is that any recourse to public action and public finance is necessarily to be based on the manifest commitment of the state to the welfare of its citizens. In India today, such an assumption does not always appear tenable. The state, in its commitment to blind indicators of growth, stands before the people as the guarantor of widespread sequestration of resources in the hands of Indian affiliates of international finance capital. There is widespread displacement and disenfranchisement of citizens and, in large parts of the resource-rich hinterland of the country, loss of livelihood and loss of access to common property resources vitiates the right to health. It is difficult to fit this scenario into one in which public funds are being used for public welfare.”