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| No Country for the Brave | | |
BHASWATI CHAKRAVORTY
There is almost a mythic power in the spectacle of India going to the polls. Just the number of people going to the booths in every corner of the country, the gigantic scale of the organization, the numerous political parties — all add up to a fascinating and undoubtedly significant exercise in democracy. Especially now, with the civilian governments in countries around India gasping for life, or turning into ruthless victory-mongers at the expense of minority populations. Within India, too, tragedies stalk the exercise of the people’s franchise. In the mythic perspective, these endow India’s general elections with something akin to a noble aura.
The last day of this magnificent exercise will also be the day on which Binayak Sen completes two years in prison. The doctor, who has for years been treating adivasis in the poorest and least developed areas of Chhattisgarh, has been repeatedly refused bail, although on May 4 this year the Supreme Court issued a notice to the Chhattisgarh government to provide him with “the best possible medical aid”. Sen is seriously at risk from cardiac problems and has reportedly said in open court that he may get a heart attack any time. To be fair to the Chhattisgarh government, it is willing to offer its hospital facilities to the prisoner. But their prisoner insists on being treated in his old medical college in Vellore. Although he is within the law in choosing his place of treatment, the state government does not see why it should comply.
Worse, his wife, Ilina Sen, has been telling the world exactly what the Sens and their friends fear — that Binayak may not leave a Chhattisgarh hospital alive. Ilina has carefully documented the sequence of events since his application for medical treatment, and recorded her use of the Right to Information Act to find out what means the government used to make the denial of her husband’s request official. At the end, she writes: “Under these circumstances, Binayak is absolutely right to fear that his life may be in danger in any facility controlled by the state in Chhattisgarh.”
No doubt the chief minister of Chhattisgarh would consider this a wife’s paranoia, since according to him, in “the lanes and by-lanes of Chhattisgarh [Sen] is a non-issue”. Faced with demands for his release, the Union home minister has reportedly said that the Centre cannot do much, since Chhattisgarh has a Bharatiya Janata Party-led government. That does make Binayak Sen into a “non-issue”, a mere object of political balancing acts, of reductive reasoning — or conditioned unreason — that has, in the 62 years since Independence, lost all touch with the desire for justice, equity and human rights which must have once inspired the democracy now going so studiously, so spectacularly, to the polls.
With Binayak Sen, we touch the dark heart of India’s democratic glory. Amid the terrors that reside in that secret place, one of the keenest is the fact that today very few thinking people in India are unaware of who he is, and how much he has achieved in his life before prison. But even the world’s knowledge of what true courage means, what it is to be just, to stand up to all forms of violence — particularly that against the poor, what legal procedure is, how State repression works, has made no difference to Sen’s incarceration.
Last Friday, a group of British members of parliament signed a resolution expressing concern at Sen’s continued detention under “politically motivated and trumped-up” charges, the delay in giving him a fair trial, the denial of his constitutional right to bail and his state of health “due to lack of appropriate medical care”. It asked for the prime minister’s intervention. They are not the first. In April this year, a former Supreme Court judge wrote to the prime minister, saying that the case against Sen should have been dismissed by now, or he should have at least got bail, since the hearings have not thrown up “a shred of evidence” against him.
Earlier, a statement by Noam Chomsky and many others had expressed distress at the grave injustice being done, and asked that Sen be released. Scholars, doctors, lawyers, activists within and outside India have condemned Sen’s imprisonment (part of which was in solitary confinement for no given reason); they have been organizing protests, and constantly writing to the Chhattisgarh chief minister, the president and the prime minister to free the doctor. The People’s Union for Civil Liberties, of which Sen is the general secretary, has been running a ceaseless campaign for justice. Amnesty International has called his arrest “manifest evidence of an increasing trend worldwide to silence peaceful dissent by imprisoning lawful humanitarian activists on charges of terrorism”.
If a system is blind, deaf and ruthless at heart, is it democratic?
On May 14, 2007, Binayak Sen was detained under the provisions of the Indian Penal Code, the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2006 and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967 that was amended in 2004 to include certain features of the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act. This had been repealed earlier the same year because of abuse and rights violations. Sedition, waging war against the State, using the proceeds of terrorism, being part of an unlawful or terrorist organization are some of the charges. He was specifically accused of couriering letters on behalf of an imprisoned Naxalite leader while pretending to treat him (although Sen treated the prisoner with official permission, under supervision, and in his own identity).
In spite of unremitting efforts by the police, nothing against him has been established. By March 2009, of the listed 83 witnesses, 16 were dropped by the prosecution, six were found “hostile”, and 61 deposed without corroborating any of the charges. The distortion of the justice process is only one part, although a major one, of the monstrous list of violation of rights against the doctor. He is still in prison.
Sen’s work for the health of the poor led him to the belief that health is impossible without equity, livelihood, justice and the access to human rights. But fighting for the rights of the poor in a state like Chhattisgarh, where Maoists overrun districts in which development is almost non-existent, is, as he remarked in the context of deciding to treat the Naxalite leader in prison, like walking into the lion’s den. What damns him is his opposition to all kinds of violence, whether perpetrated by the Naxalites or by the State. In the darkness of the lion’s den the State meets anti-State violence with equal force, and devours anyone who tries to come between. Here the champion of rights for the disenfranchised appears to be as dangerous an enemy as those who organize mass killings.
Sen has been sharply critical of the Salwa Judum, the so-called “popular resistance” to Naxalites, created by the state government by arming and training a people’s militia: a programme that has set adivasis against one another in perpetual conflict. In March 2008, a bench in the Supreme Court said that arming a civilian and allowing him to kill is tantamount to abetment of murder. That Sen, with many others, objected to murder is what makes the state so adamant about silencing him.
Alongside his medical work, which included setting up a hospital for the poor, membership of the government’s advisory committee for public health, pioneering work for the Mitanin health workers programme, founding an NGO with his wife to train rural community health workers and running mobile clinics, Sen has been working with the PUCL in investigating human rights abuses, especially fake encounters and extra-judicial killings — most recently that of innocent villagers, lined up and shot point blank by the police.
Sen has called himself “an index case”. We are ashamed before the world that we are unable to get justice for this winner of the 2008 Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights, which is the latest in a string of honours for a doctor who has been called the true “alternative model”, and has inspired other doctors to reach out to the unempowered. But we do not always remember Irom Sharmila in Manipur, fighting for nine years against a law similar to the CSPCA; we barely recall the journalist, P. Govindan Kutty, or the documentary filmmaker, T.G. Ajay, arrested for alleged links with terrorists, later released on bail; we hardly know of other human rights activists and journalists, such as Lachit Bordoloi in Assam, Vernon Gonsalves in Nasik, Prashant Rahi in Uttarakhand, Praful Jha in Chhattisgarh, Arun Ferreira, Ashok Reddy, Dhanendra Bhurule and Naresh Bansode in Vidarbha, Pittala Srisailam in Andhra Pradesh, all arrested under the UAPA and charged, sometimes tortured, for alleged Maoist links. And Sheila Didi, an adivasi women’s activist among the most deprived women of Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Bihar, a former president of the Nari Mukti Sangh of Bihar, arrested, released on bail, rearrested, interrogated and tortured for waging war against the State.
But is our democracy really such a failure? Surely such things would not have been possible if the empowered classes did not isolate and disown those who speak for the rights of the poor? Can it be that the rights of the poor are totally wrong for the rest of us?
Who is the enemy of democracy?
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