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A year on, India's anti-terrorist laws
backfiring
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI - One year after India passed a tough
anti-terrorism act, government officials and critics are
scratching their heads over a law that has put in jail
an unlikely assortment of people - from politicians
allied to the ruling party to people aged from 12 to 83
years old.
In other words, the chickens are
coming home to roost, and the anti-terrorism act is
becoming a useful weapon in quelling insurgencies and in
political tussles.
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It will victimize innocent people
through unwarranted detention. This can only lead
to more discontent and provide the ideal breeding
ground for terrorists.
New
Indian terror law strikes fear
(March 27,
2002)
Asia Times
Online
| Post-September
11, India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
responded enthusiastically to a call by US President
George W Bush for tighter national laws against
terrorism. Six months later, by March 26, 2002, the BJP,
supported by it allies in the National Democratic
Alliance (NDA) ruling coalition, had rushed through
legislation on terrorism.
In the process, it
ignored warnings by opposition groups and human rights
activists that the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA)
was draconian and likely to be used against innocent
people and politicians. Today, as politicians allied to
the BJP stay in jail, the party's leaders say they are
helpless since law and order is a state subject and the
implementation of POTA has been left to provincial
governments.
There is thus the spectacle of
India's Defense Minister George Fernandes flying down to
southern Tamil Nadu state several times to visit in jail
Vaiko, leader of a local party that is a member of the
BJP-led nationally ruling alliance - but unable obtain
his release. "This is a clear case of misuse," the
outspoken Fernandes has been forced to admit to news
persons. "The NDA [ruling coalition] has made it clear
that this is not the purpose of POTA."
Vaiko,
who had vigorously supported the introduction of the
anti-terrorism act, has been hoist by his own petard. He
has been in jail without trial for eight months now for
making a speech supporting Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger
rebels. But more pertinently, he has fallen afoul of
Tamil Nadu's chief minister, Jayaraman Jayalalithaa.
Another "terrorist" is a prominent, pro-BJP
politician from Uttar Pradesh state, Raja Bhaiya,
arrested in October by Mayawati after he failed to
engineer the fall of the minority state government that
she leads. For good measure, by January, Raja Bhaiya's
father had also been arrested under the anti-terrorism
law.
But even more bizarre are the mass arrests
carried out under the anti-terrorism act in states like
western Gujarat and eastern Jharkhand, prompting the
intervention this month of the National Human Rights
Commission, a statutory body which has all along opposed
POTA. The commission's official view of the
anti-terrorism act was that "existing laws are
sufficient to deal with any eventuality, including
terrorism, and there is no need for draconian POTA".
India already has the National Security Act,
passed in 1980, which permits the central and state
governments to preventively detain persons considered a
danger to the security of the state. On the eve of the
passage of the anti-terror act, the central government's
defense of the bill by Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani,
who later became deputy prime minister, was that
"terrorism had acquired catastrophic dimensions" and
that the "extraordinary situations created by terrorists
called for extraordinary laws to deal with them".
Advani now finds himself having to answer
uncomfortable questions in parliament not only from
opposition parties but also from members of the ruling
BJP and its allies, as a result of the highly publicized
intervention of the human rights commission.
Taking cognizance of newspaper reports of how
the "world's biggest democracy now also has the youngest
and oldest terrorists", the rights commission issued
notices early February to the central government and the
state government of Jharkhand to explain the mass
arrests under POTA of 200 alleged supporters of a Maoist
movement in the state.
These reports referred to
the arrests of 12-year-old Gaya Singh and 83-year-old
Rajnath Mahto for allegedly supporting the Maoist group
called the People's War Group, active in Jharkhand.
Confidential police files showed that at least 10
children had been arrested under POTA in Jharkhand, and
that anyone caught with a copy of Maoist literature or
the Communist Manifesto was liable to be arrested.
"If this is how a terrorist is defined, I could
be arrested any time," Somnath Chatterjee, one of
India's longest serving parliamentarians and a member of
the Marxist Communist Party of India, said in parliament
during a discussion last week on POTA's misuse.
At the discussion, opposition Congress party
leaders like Suresh Pachauri asked why leaders of the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a Hindu-based organization
closely linked to the BJP that foments communal trouble,
were not being arrested under any law.
This
month another BJP-ruled state, Gujarat, ordered the
arrest of 200 people, all of them belonging to the
minority Muslim community, for alleged involvement in
the ghastly incident of arson, a year ago, in which 60
people were burned alive in a train near Godhra station.
That incident sparked off an anti-Muslim pogrom in
Gujarat which left more than 2,000 people dead and
rendered another 150,000 people homeless, their homes
and businesses destroyed.
In spite of evidence
and testimonies recorded against top supporters of the
BJP and VHP for such criminal acts as mass rape, murders
and arson, neither the state government nor the central
government cared to take action.
"Does all this
mean that the normal criminal justice system is to be
replaced by POTA?" M G Devasahayam, a former member of
India's elite India Administrative Service, demands to
know. Devasahayam says the blatant misuse of the
anti-terrorist law could soon "sound the death knell for
freedom, civil rights and human dignity" in the country.
That the BJP is beginning to see the light came through
an admission from one of its senior leaders, V K
Malhotra, who admitted in parliament that it was time
the government considered amendments to the
anti-terrorism act to safeguard it against misuse.
But any amendment bill must be moved by the
opposition, because the ruling BJP party is loathe to
admit on record that the worst fears of rights activists
and its political opponents have actually come true.
(Inter Press Service)
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