Don’t Cry for Them India

MARGIN SPEAK

They were implicated in multiple cases. As in the case of Ferreira, the police did not have any evidence against them. As such they were acquitted by the courts one after another but not before they had borne their share of torture and jail terms. It left a permanent scar on their minds and a blemish on their future. Last year, the ATS supposedly busted a Maoist den in Pune, arresting among others one Angela Sontakke, reportedly a very important Naxal cadre in Maharashtra. Angela, an ex-college lecturer with BSc (Microbiology), BEd, MSc (Zoology) and MA (Sociology) degrees, has as many as 20 cases against her. By simple extrapolation, she could spend at least a decade in jail, if not rearrested or implicated in additional false cases. Among the arrested are also the activists of the Kabir Kala Manch of Pune, which had become well known as a radical Ambedkarite cultural outfit. Police terror has completely decimated this rising group, sending many of its talented activists into hiding. These people with their humble backgrounds of course did not make news.

The case of Sudhir Dhawale, noted writer, editor of Vidrohi (a radical Ambedkarite monthly), and a social activist however created a stir. Almost the entire who’s who of progressive Maharashtra led by noted socialist leader Bhai Vaidya and veteran activist in the educational, social and political fields N D Patil had come forward to press for his release. Dhawale was arrested on 3 January 2010 at the railway station while returning after attending a literary conference at Wardha. He was charged with sedition (Section 124) and under Sections 17, 20 and 39 of the UAPA. When confronted by the people, all that the police had to say was that they found incriminating literature and that his name was mentioned by one Bhimrao Bhoite, an alleged Maoist who was arrested earlier. The literature in question was 87 books by Ambedkar, Marx, Lenin, and Arundhati Roy, which were confiscated by the police in the raid on his house. As regards their other charge, if some alleged Maoist’s mere mention of a name is ground enough for arresting a person, Ferreira had named Bal Thackeray as funding Maoist activities in Maharashtra, a serious revelation that came out during the narco test. Should

Economic & Political Weekly

not Thackeray have been arrested and subjected to investigation?

Unlawful Police Acts

As regards unlawful rearrests after acquit

tal by the courts, there were 27 cases of

political prisoners in the Nagpur jail

alone. It has become the modus operandi

of the police to hold people they want

inside the jail as long as they wish.

Nowhere in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) is

Maoism defined as a crime but the police

treat it as such. Even after the Supreme

Court ruled that mere membership of a

banned organisation does not make a per

son criminal unless he or she resorts or

incites people to violence, the police per

sist with their high-handed behaviour.

Surely this constitutes contempt of court.

To commit violence or incite people to

commit it is a well-established crime in

the IPC, whatever the ideology of the com

mitter. When the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s

Acharya Giriraj Kishore had publicly justi

fied the lynching of five dalits in Jhajjar in

2002 for allegedly killing a cow, he was

directly inciting people to repeat it but the

police did not act. In the case of Dhawale,

they kept repeating that he had links with

the Maoists.

As the case of Ferreira illustrates what

the police did is blatantly unlawful. By his

illegal arrest they violated his fundamen

tal right to liberty, belief and expression

guaranteed in the Constitution. This was

followed by a series of unlawful acts: in

threatening his friends with dire conse

quences if they voiced their support, in

torturing him in police custody, in forging

his signature on the consent form for the

narco test, in obtaining a fraudulent order

from the court for conducting the second

narco test, in concocting false charges

against him, in making a series of false rep

resentations before courts, in kidnapping

him after his release from the jail, in man

handling his lawyers, and much more.

One does not have to be a Maoist to expe

rience this unlawful conduct of our law

enforcing agency; it has been its abiding

character vis-à-vis the common masses. If

at the very basic level of its interface with

people, the state conducted itself in such a

grossly anti-people manner, the entire

constitutional superstructure with its high

sounding phrases just crumbles, crushing

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whatever hopes people had in the state. This is the very process that makes Maoists out of ordinary people.

Dreaming a Revolution

Arun Ferreira and most others have denied being Maoists. But even if they are so, that does not make them criminals. It is not the issue of Maoists being right or wrong, and even less so of justifying or condemning their actions. After all, they are people, who are responding to the deceit and violence of the state in their chosen way. One may disagree with their ideology or methods but one has to admit the horrific conditions, which propel them to take a radical path. After six decades of the constitutional regime proclaimed in the name of people, promising all kinds of lofty ideals, it has only aggravated the inherent injustice, inequality, violence, corruption, and doublespeak in the society. While the rich flaunt their opulent life styles, a vast majority of people go hungry. The country has the dubious distinction of having the largest number of malnourished, anaemic, hungry people and underfed, underweight, and stunted children in the world. The ruling classes just rely on their deceitful responses using caste and other such divisions. Indeed, the rot has gone much deeper than normally imagined. All middle class attempts at tinkering with the system therefore appear amiss. In contrast, the alleged Maoists stand apart with their agenda of revolution. They are the only ones who appear to have correctly comprehended the problem. It is utterly stupid of the state to think that imprisonment, torture, encounters and custodial deaths are going to deter them from their goal. No revolutionary has ever buckled under these methods and shunned revolution.