Misuse Of Laws Resulting In Continued Violations of Human rights By The State In India 

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Misuse Of Laws Resulting In Continued Violations of Human rights By The State In India 
Misuse Of Laws Resulting In Continued Violations of Human rights By The State In India 

The continuing incarceration of Chandrashekhar Azad Ravan in Uttar Pradesh highlights the range of human rights violations being perpetuated by the state in India.

Ravan is the founder of a Dalit organization called Bhim Army, and is accused of inciting violence following clashes between Rajputs an upper caste community and lower caste Dalits which resulted in several casualties and burning of Dalit houses.

He was arrested in Himachal Pradesh this June, and sent to jail after being denied bail by a lower court. The High Court granted him bail after 146 days noting that the charges against him were political in nature and hence the detention was illegal. However the government booked him under National Security Act (NSA) within 24 hours and sent him back to jail.

It may be six months at the minimum before he will be able to appear in court to seek freedom.

The NSA was introduced in 1980 after the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) expired in 1977. It allows a government to detain people on the grounds of being necessary for national security as well as for “maintenance of public order.”

Continuing Misuse of Sedition Laws

The law of sedition has been widely used against activists nationwide to supress them.

  • An example is Akhil Gogoi, a social activist arrested in Assam for sedition and jailed since September this year.
  • Jayaraman, an environmental campaigner In Tamil Nadu, was booked for sedition in October for publishing a book that criticised the government’s river interlinking project.
  • Another case is of Tushar Bhatacharya of Maharashtra who was arrested recently under the sedition by the police claiming that he was an absconder in a 2010 case.

Sedition Law Traps Those Accused In Jail

According to Section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code, sedition is defined as creating disaffection “by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise,” towards “the government established by law in India” . The penalty for it is life imprisonment.

Initially introduced in 1870 to suppress freedom movement,  the sedition law is a vague statute that is today incompatible with the idea of democracy.  It promotes the eradication of the right to criticize elected governments as invites severe punishment.

Civil liberty activists have repeatedly appealed to Indian authorities to repeal the law to no avail.

The National Crime Research Bureau (NCRB) 2016 report reveals that out of 112 sedition cases filed in the last three years, just two have led to conviction. There is no data available which shows the number of prisoners awaiting trial for sedition as the NCRB started compiling data on the sedition law only after 2014.

Additionally, several states omit to report cases filed under the law. For example, Tamil Nadu government booked over 8,880 people for sedition during a mass protest but reported zero to the national database.

The accused often remain in jail for years.  The NCRB report notes that around 67.2% of the overall prison population is awaiting trial. At the end of 2015, over 3,599 under-trials were in jail for over five years without even a single court appearance.

Handicapped judiciary

The Indian judiciary system is severely overworked which hampers the delivery of justice for those afflicted.

As per data from the ministry of law and justice, around 26.4 million cases were reported to be pending at the end of 2014. Of these , 2.04 million have been pending for over 10 years.  Before the 24 high courts, nearly 4.15 million cases were pending with 777,630 of them pending for over 10 years.

With the Indian criminal justice system badly impaired, a visionary plan is need to fix the issue.

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