Wish for 2024: Freedom without fear

India is headed towards being a police State, which will manufacture cases with abandon. Representation Pic

You experienced the heady feeling of freedom as you partied hard to celebrate the dawn of 2024. But Banojyotsna Lahiri switched off the lights long before the midnight hour, despondent at what lay in store for her partner Umar Khalid, who was among the 20 sent to jail under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, for fomenting the 2020 Delhi riot.

Banojyotsna smiled her way through 2021 and 2022, but hope can, in a queer way, begin to feel unreal. Khalid appealed to the Supreme Court, in June 2023, against the Delhi High Court rejecting his bail application. Since then, his case has been tossed from one bench to another without even the argument beginning.

Banojyotsna's freedom is laced with sadness and anxiety.

Mahesh Raut's fate is even more tragic than Khalid's. An accused in the Bhima Koregaon case and in prison for five years, the Bombay High Court granted him bail in September. Yet he ushered in 2024 in jail, for the State went in appeal against his bail to the Supreme Court, where the case awaits hearing. Hope the bells of freedom chime for Raut in 2024.

Look at the injustice meted out to nine out of the 20 who are, like Khalid, accused in the 2020 Delhi riot case. Their bail applications were before the Delhi High Court's Justice Siddharth Mridul and Justice Rajnish Bhatnagar, who had reserved judgment in six out of the nine cases. But the proceedings came to a standstill on July 5, 2023, journalist Saurav Das recently wrote, when Mridul was recommended for transfer to the Manipur High Court as its chief justice, which took place only in October. A month or so later, Bhatnagar, too, was transferred.

A new bench will now hear the cases anew!

During the argument on the bail application of Aam Aadmi Party leader Manish Sisodia, the Supreme Court said the case against him in the Delhi liquor scam will fall flat in two minutes. Yet bail was denied to him.

Can your freedom be without fear, with the course of justice running so erratically, so callously slow?

Yes, in case you merely shop and party, are not an activist, not a writer tilting against the government, do not belong to a party the Bharatiya Janata Party sees as a threat, do not howl against the Prime Minister on social media, and refrain from joining protests.

You have the freedom to be silent. You also have the freedom to shout, but to do so without fearing State reprisal, you must be an Arnab Goswami, the TV anchor. In 2020, before he became the Chief Justice of India, D Y Chandrachud, while granting bail to Goswami in a case, said, "Deprivation of liberty for a single day is one day too many."

In 2021, he quoted the phrase Patanjali Sastry, the second CJI, employed to define the Supreme Court's role as that of the "sentinel on the qui vive", or sentinel on the alert, against the State's encroachment on fundamental rights. Chandrachud explained, "The phrase may have become weather-beaten…[but] judges must constantly remind themselves of its value through their tenures, if the call of the constitutional conscience is to retain meaning."

The "constitutional conscience" roared for Arnab Goswami. It has not for Khalid, Raut and Sisodia. There is a sense that all those arrayed against the BJP cannot exercise their freedom without fear, for the judiciary will not intercede on their behalf as swiftly as it did for Goswami.

Given this perception, can you fault Amit Chakraborty for becoming an approver in the UAPA case involving NewsClick, of which he is the HR head, allegedly accessing illegitimate foreign funds to threaten India's sovereignty? Paralysed from the waist below, with no hope of quick judicial intervention, as NewsClick is no Republic TV, Chakraborty might have thought his body would not endure a prolonged spell in jail.

Along with Chakraborty, the State has locked up NewsClick's founder-editor Prabir Purkayastha under UAPA. He is 74 years old. The outlet's bank account has been frozen, overnight depriving scores of journalists of income. Let us see whether the sentinel on the qui vive will stop the harassment of NewsClick.

And how soon.

Our freedom is tinged with fear because the Union government uses its brute majority to awe institutions into submitting to its wishes, and arm itself with laws legitimising the imperilling of citizens' rights. An example of the last is the new criminal code, which allows the police to keep a person in its custody for 90 days, up from the present 15 days.

The 90 days of detention do not have to be at a stretch but can be split over a period of time. This process will render bail meaningless until the 90 days of police custody are exhausted, and mount pressure on the detainee to provide testimonies the police want.

India is headed towards being a police State, which will manufacture cases with abandon. Indeed, there cannot be a better wish for 2024 than to hope for freedom without fear, which would be possible only if, in the forthcoming election, the people do not give a party a majority that overwhelms us all.

The writer is a senior journalist.
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