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Let’s peep
inside
Amit
Bhattacharyya
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The first of
its kind conference on political prisoners is scheduled to be
held in
Delhi
on March 31-April 1, 2008.
The degree of civilization in any society can be judged by
entering its prisons. This conference is expected to focus on
how
India
deals with dissent by looking at how it deals with political
prisoners. This article is WSN’s way of welcoming the
initiative. |
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 Maulana
Nasiruddin, Sheela Didi, Nanak Baghel, Suraj Tekam, Nirmal
Brahmachari, Dr. Binayak Sen, Lachit Bordoloi, Mohammad Afzal,
Perari Valan, Pozhilan, Kunangudi Haneefa, activists of Bhoomi
Ucched Pratirodh Committee (BUPC) in West Bengal, Narayan Sanyal,
Sushil Roy, Malla Raja Reddy — these are just a few names of the
growing list of political prisoners abounding the prisons in various
regions. Besides, there are the Sri Lankan Tamils, Bangladeshi
Muslims, and people from
Bhutan, Pakistan
and Afghanistan who are being denied the rights of refugees, put
behind bars.
A year before, numerous people from Nepal were put
behind bars in India accused of being associated with the Maoist
movement there. The growing statistics of prisoners lodged in
various prisons in India run into several lakhs. A fairly good
number of them are political prisoners. The numbers are fast
increasing day by day. The overwhelming approach of the government
to dub any issue of socio-economic and political significance as a
‘law and order’ question has made prisons the venue of
‘disciplining’ through torture, rape, humiliation and mistreatment.
The Kashmiris,
Nagas, People of Manipur,
Assam, the Bodos,
Kamtapuris and other communities demanding their right for self-
determination have been put behind bars for waging war against the
sovereignty and integrity of the Indian nation. There are thousands
of Kashmiri Muslims lodged in various prisons in India. Most of them
are even without proper charges framed against them. The Muslim
community has been a specific target of the so called ‘war against
terror’ of the Indian State. The cases of Naxalites such as Maoists
and others being arrested from various regions such as West Bengal,
Bihar, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Orissa,
Madhya Pradesh, Kerala have filled the headlines of newspapers
It is the media,
its multi-dimensional effects on public psyche where the image of
the ‘terrorist’, the ‘anti- national’, the ‘single largest internal
security threat’, all get profiled; towards manufacturing the
consent for a State devoid of impunity — any regard for norms,
procedures, for the basic human rights of the detained as guaranteed
by the UN. The construction of the ‘enemy’ of the State starts well
ahead in the media as it caricatures all outstanding problems faced
by the vast sections of the people. The obliging media in the times
of Liberalisation, Privatisation and Globalisation produces a
surfeit of images of the people, their issues, their movements
against exploitation, oppression, mistreatment and discrimination,
against displacement, destitution, destruction and death as
something which have frozen and fossilised in time and should hence
be repackaged akin to the politics of charity promoted by foreign
and State funded NGOs and the so-called civil society.
Thus tribal
communities are poor as they are anti-development; Muslims have gone
astray because their religion is conservative and they don’t feel
proud to be Indian; every Kashmiri Muslim is a suspect because of
being a Kashmiri as well as a Muslim; the Maoists are trigger happy
Robin Hoods devoid of any politics who resort to extortion, drug
peddling and live out of plunder of the forest wealth. All
nationality movements are against the sovereignty and security of
the Indian nation. The civil and democratic rights activists who
demand the enforcement of norms and procedures or the rights of the
political prisoner are portrayed as accomplices in fomenting
terrorism, as being against the integrity of the nation.
In the age of
standardization, protests or dissent has not been an exception.
Dissent has also got standardized terms of advocacy as well as
petitioning. All other forms of dissent hence are against civility
and should be punished. Thus, when a detainee is brought before the
people through the trial enforced by the media, the prejudice is so
much that the opinionated public gives a passive consent to the
State to do whatever it wants to the political prisoner. Any such
vilifying campaign of the media goes against the right of the
detained to be presumed innocent as required by Article 14(2) of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
Being a
political prisoner is a definite political act: To confine a people,
a person, a community behind bars for the reason that they have
refused to be treated the way the States is dealing with them; they
have refused to be oppressed, exploited, discriminated and
mistreated; is the inability of the State to deal with its own
limitations. It is also a clear sign that the State has lost the
humanity that it claims to have or vouches for every citizen. The
haste with which the State has targeted all these people as ‘evil’,
‘anti-national’, ‘foreign’, ‘anti-development’, shows that it has
lost its possibilities and is threatened by its own limitations. Yet
it dreads the free movement of such citizens. Thus limitations take
precedence and become the norm. Today, in addition to the already
existing draconian laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA),
Disturbed Areas Act and Unlawful Activities Prevention (Amendment)
Act, we have every state of India enacting its own internal security
laws that have given the military, paramilitary and police sweeping
powers to apprehend anyone under the slightest of suspicions or even
without it. It is the State that has violated the norms and
procedures and the rule of law, to act politically to prevent the
other opinion from taking precedence among the people. The fight for
the release of these prisoners becomes important at a juncture where
the law has failed to be impartial and fair. In fact, going through
the numerous cases of incarceration, one is forced to say that all
laws and procedures have been bypassed to ensure the confinement of
the political prisoner for life. Even in cases where the prisoner
has been released in certain specific instances, the traumatic life
after acquittal for the prisoner denotes the magnitude of the
prejudice that society has undergone vis-à-vis the hatred and
hysteria of the ‘war against terror’ created by the State.
Political
Prisoners are the measure of our humanity. Political prisoners are
people who are convinced about the possibility of a better society
for the greater common good. Not only were they convinced about the
need for a better world but were deeply involved in making it a
possibility. One might disagree with their ideology. Yet some might
have reservations about the means they resort for the betterment of
a world of miseries and wretchedness. Those who are in power might
strongly disagree with their socio-economic and political
aspirations. These people, who are defied the light of the day,
condemned to live death within the dark walls of the prison by the
powers that be, belong to a wide spectrum of political beliefs
through which they dream to espouse the social cause that they have
given their life.
It is this
conviction that forced Rabindra Nath Tagore to defend the cause of
the political prisoner during the days of anti-colonial struggle
against the British. The people who fought against British were also
against the exploitation and oppression of the freedom loving people
of India.
Today when India is being sold in the form of Special Economic
Zones, for loot and plunder of her forest wealth, mineral wealth,
water, land, people, everything, by the rich and powerful, made
possible by the rulers of this country, it is natural for the
freedom loving people to oppose and fight it. Anyone who fights
against any form of oppression, exploitation, mistreatment and
discrimination cannot be a prisoner.
A good number of
prisoners are condemned to rot in the prisons as they have hardly
any means to meet the bail fee. The preamble of the United Nation’s
Universal Declaration of Human Rights ensures the need for countries
to uphold the rights of anyone resorting to dissent against the
policies of the State. This guarantees the rights of the political
prisoner. Contrary to the claim of being the largest democracy in
the world,
India has not
even recognized political prisoner as a category. Though the
West Bengal
government has come up with a definition of the political prisoner,
it is never implemented. It becomes important to defend the right of
the political prisoner to have safeguards against all forms of
torture, rape, solitary confinement, right to have a lawyer of their
choice, right to books, periodicals, to communicate, assemble among
themselves, right to their religion.
Especially, at a
time when there is a growing consensus among the judiciary,
executive and the legislature with active connivance of the fourth
estate to deny any possible rights to political prisoners. In such a
scenario, for a political prisoner, it becomes important to fight
for every moment of her/his life behind bars. There is no other way
the right of the political prisoner can be achieved as she/he has
been denied the right to express their political opinion or to that
basis.
The inaugural
conference on political prisoners is a historic and definite step in
this direction.
(The author
is Coordinator, Convenor’s Committee of the Conference Preparatory
Committee)
19
March 2008
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