The SC today asked the CG government to take the NHRC report seriously
and withdraw support to the Salwa Judum:
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Salwa-Judum–SC-tells-Chhattisgarh-to-
follow-NHRC-report/363644
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/mar/31sc.htm
http://news.webindia123.com/news/Articles/India/20080919/1056975.html
This is an important development for the democratic and human rights
activists in CG.
Almost every other day, newspapers are agog with stories about ‘dreaded Muslim terrorists’ being nabbed across the country. At the same time, savage violence unleashed by Hindutva groups continues unabated without any effective steps being taken against them. In the on-going ‘war on terror’. globally as well as within India, Muslims have come to be framed collectively as ‘terrorists’, while terrorism engaged in by people belonging to other communities is generally condoned or ignored altogether or, at least, is not described in the same terms. In India today, Muslim youths are being indiscriminately picked up and tortured by the police, in many cases falsely accused of being terrorists. Many of them have been languishing in jails for years now and yet no one ever seems to care.]
Take the case of Muhammad Parvez Abdul Qayyum Shaikh of Gujarat. According to his aunt, Qamar Jahan, on the 2nd of April 2003, while he was on his way to fit a water appliance, he was arrested by CBI officer Tarun Barot and others. For three days his family knew nothing his whereabouts. On the fourth day, she says, ‘We saw the news and realized that Parvez had been arrested under allegations of having a Chinese made pistol and some gun powder. However, this powder is used for cleaning the Aqua Guard machines.’
Parvez, she says, was brutally beaten and tortured by the officers, with Officer Vanzara allegedly asking Parvez to refer to him as Khuda (God) and beating him ruthlessly. While in jail they forced him to sign on blank papers. He was reportedly taken by the CBI officers to Gandhinagar where he was further tortured for 21 days. He was then charged in the DCP-6 case, Tiffin bomb blast case and in the Haren Pandya murder case (the last mentioned of which, incidentally, Pandya’s own father accuses Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as having instigated). He was sentenced to fourteen years in jail for the last-mentioned case, although his aunt maintains that he is innocent.
27 year-old Sardar, a Muslim youth, works as a plumber in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu. He was arrested at the age of 17, some months after the February 1998 Chennai bomb blasts. The initial accusation against Sardar was that he had been involved in a street fight. He was apparently kept illegally imprisoned for a month, and only after that was an FIR was lodged against him. This time he was accused of carrying two pipe bombs and rioting. The offence was non-bailable. He was remanded and kept in the Vellore Jail for first fifteen months, even though there were no witnesses against him. The special court set up for the bomb blasts refused to let him be tried as he was a minor. Eventually, nine and half years later, in the final judgment the court apparently found him not guilty of any of the charges put on him and he was acquitted, but only after having spent almost a decade languishing in jail, where he was brutally tortured. Even after his acquittal the
police have allegedly not stopped harassing and hounding him, and they still restrict his movements.
Noor ul-Hoda, the son of a desperately poor daily-wage labourer from Malegaon in Maharashtra, is yet another hapless Muslim man who has, so he insists, been falsely implicated as a terrorist by the police. In September 2006, he was picked up by the police from his home. On the same day, they brought him back , searched the house (without producing a search warrant), and, finding nothing, took him back into police custody. The next day the police charged Noor with possession of twenty books considered as ‘illegal literature’. While in police custody, he is said to have been forced, through torture and threats by his interrogators that they would kill his family, to sign a blank piece of paper, which was later used as evidence of a ‘confession’. This was, it is claimed, used to charge him under the draconian MCOCA for allegedly being a member of the team that carried out the Malegaon bombings. This, he says, is completely false as he was at the local
mosque on the day of the bomb blasts. The local special executive officer has given an affidavit validating this. Noor claims that Police Inspector Sachin Kadum had threatened him thus: ‘Although I am aware of the fact that you are not involved in the bomb blast, we will still capture you and we will see if you can get out of this situation.’
In October 2006 Noor was taken to Bangalore for brain mapping and narco-tests. These proved negative, but the experience was harrowing. During the narco-test he was given powerful electric shocks and was badly beaten. His ribs were also battered. The doctor, Malti , asked him to say what the police wanted him to say or else he would be more deeply implicated in the bomb blast case. ‘When I did not repeat the words electric shocks were given to my ear’, he says. While he was in the custody of the Nasik police, they tortured him severely at the ATS office, saying that he should state what the police wanted him to—in other words, to give a false ‘confession’. ’In the month of Ramzan while I was fasting I was beaten so much that I fainted’, he says. ‘Inspector Sachin Kadum and Inspector Khan Gekar used to abuse me and say that if you do not confess we will bring all your sisters here. We will make them naked and photographs will be taken and they will
also be beaten,’ he adds. They also threatened to implicate Noor’s brother in the case. Finally, they were able to force him to make a false ‘confession’ by taking his signature on a blank piece of paper, but he later retracted this ‘confession’.
Muhammad Hanif Adul Razzak Shaikh from Gujarat is yet another victim of state terrorism. On the 28th of April, 2003, around two dozen men rushed into Hanif’s house, but since Hanif was said to have been away attending a friend’s funeral in Himmatnagar, they dragged his brother, Yasin, to the police station where he was beaten up. They picked him up without an arrest warrant and detained him for twelve days until the 3rd of May, when Hanif came back and presented himself at the Crime Branch. He was immediately put into detention and the CBI searched his factory but recovered nothing.
Mohammad Hanif was in the business of making bags. The police claimed that the bomb which was used in the Tiffin bomb blast and in another such blast had been made in his factory. But when Hanif refused to accept these allegations, the police tortured him severely and even threatened to arrest his brother Yasin if he did not comply with their orders. After this, they allegedly forced a false ‘confession’ out of him to implicate him in the blasts. His interrogators tortured him mercilessly and he was then presented in court on the 10th of May 2003. There, Hanif refused to accept the charges against him, which allegedly prompted the magistrate to say that the police should take Hanif in for some more khatirdari (‘hospitality’), by which was meant even greater torture. During this remand, Hanif was said to have been subjected to third degree torture, brutally beaten and forced to sign numerous false statements. The forced ‘confession’ was apparently used as
evidence to prolong his remand stay. He retracted his statement in the court but after appearing in court for the second time the judge ordered that he should be treated to some more ‘hospitality’. After this, he is said to have been compelled to sign another ‘confession’, on the basis of which he was sentenced to 10 years in jail. During the five years he has spent in jail so far Hanif’s wife as well as his mother died. A father of four, one of his daughters has tuberculosis. His small bag-making unit has been closed ever since he was put into jail and his family now lives in abject penury.
Maulana Mohammad Naseerudin of Hyderabad was arrested in August 2004 immediately after addressing a meeting of fellow Muslims at a local mosque. The Anti-Terrorism Squad accused him of conspiring to blow up a Hindu temple in Hyderabad, a charge that he denied. The next month he was released on bail, but on the condition that he would report to the CID office on a weekly basis. On 31st September, 2004, when the Maulana reached the CID office he found the Gujarat police waiting for him. They took him into custody, accusing him of incitement violence in Gujarat in his speeches in the mosque. In actual fact, so it is said, he had preached for relief and aid for Muslims in Gujarat who had been brutalized by the state, the police and Hindutva forces. The police failed to give any evidence at the time of his detention and subsequent trial, simply claiming that he was inciting communal hatred during his sermons.
The news of the Maulana’s arrest spread quickly and he was put into a bus and given a drug to incapacitate him. The protestors asked the police for the arrest warrant. 23 year-old Mujahid Saleem Azmi, a friend of the family, started questioning the procedures during the arrest, and, after some prompting by the expanding crowd, the police released the Maulana. A heated exchange between Police Officer Narendra and Mujahid began. The officer shamelessly shouted at Mujahid, ‘Have you people forgotten Gujarat? I will finish you all off.’ Mujahid replied that he was not scared of his threats and that the officer should conduct himself on the basis of the law. The police officer then said that if he was looking for a warrant he would show him a warrant and took out his gun and fired point blank at Mujahid. The rest of the police officers started firing in the air. They pushed the Maulana back into the van and drove off. The ATS provided safe passage for the
police to flee Hyderabad. Meanwhile, Mujahid, 23, was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Thousands of people collected outside the hospital and they asked for a case to be filed against the police. Several different Hindutva organizations came together to try and disrupt the funeral procession the following day. The police used their special division – the Greyhound Task Force – normally used to combat Naxalism to beat and tear gas the processionists. The Greyhound Task Force forced their way into Mujahid’s house and attacked the family with sticks.
Meanwhile, the Maulana was transferred to a prison in Ahmedabad, where, it is said, he was forced him to make a ‘confession’ . He appealed against it, but the special POTA court denied the appeal and accepted the ‘confession’ of Maulana produced by the Gujarat police. His first bail application took four long months to be heard from the day of his judicial custody. A judgment on the bail application took another year. The application was rejected on the grounds that he was ‘anti-American and pro Osama bin Laden’. Another year passed and the high court upheld the POTA court’s order. Six months later, the Supreme Court asked for a swift trial, but rejected bail. Two years have passed since the Supreme Court’s order and yet nothing has happened. The Maulana continues to languish in jail and is presently seriously ill. He has only one kidney, a thyroid problem, and early signs of arthritis, none of which has been taken into consideration during his time in
prison. His illnesses have worsened. He cannot walk or handle food that he has to chew, but yet, despite several appeals, the authorities continue to refuse to send him to hospital. In the meantime, the police have also arrested two of his sons for allegedly conspiring to take revenge for his arrest.
Scores of cases of innocent Muslims being deliberately targeted by agencies of the state, in addition to Hindutva forces, abound across the country, and the situation seems to be getting worse with every passing day. This is not to say that none of the several blasts that have occurred in India in the last several years could have been the handiwork of Muslims. Sympathisers of some fringe radical Islamist outfits or Muslims seeking to take revenge for the atrocities and large scale slaughter of their co-religionists, as in Gujarat, might well have planned some of these, and Muslim leaders themselves have rightly called for stern punishment for their perpetrators. However, the mounting indiscriminate arrests, torture and detention of vast numbers of innocent Muslim youth across the country in the name of countering terrorism not only makes a complete mockery of our claims to secularism and democracy but is a perfect recipe for making Muslim terrorism a
self-fulfilling prophecy. And, to make matters worse, at the same time as the hounding of innocent Muslims continues, Hindu mobs are allowed to operate free of any effective restraint, lionised as ardent ‘nationalists’ as they continue to wreak murder, mayhem and naked terror on Muslims, and now, as in Orissa and Karnataka, Christians. That, surely, is no way to combat terrorism. Far from it, it can only further exacerbate the problem.
Note: The details of the above-mentioned cases have been procured from the testimonies submitted to the jury of the People’s Tribunal on the Atrocities Committed Against Minorities in the Name of Fighting Terrorism organised by Anhad and the Human Rights Law Network in Hyderabad, 22-24th August, 2008.
Pioneer News Service
Sept. 17, 2008
The Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) has admitted that existing laws are inadequate to deal with terrorism, in the process virtually endorsing the BJP’s demand for tough federal legislation to deal with terror.
“Terrorism is an extraordinary crime. Ordinary laws of the land may not be adequate to book a terrorist. This may require special laws and effective enforcement mechanism, but with sufficient safeguards to prevent its misuse,” ARC chairman Veerappa Moily told newspersons here on Tuesday.
The commission, headed by the senior Congress leader, contradicts the UPA Government’s stand that existing laws were adequate to deal with terrorism. Moily, who also heads the Congress media department and future challenges committee, came out with the recommendations of the panel when the noose tightened around the UPA to revive a POTA-type law.
Moily said the report had been submitted to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil two months back and he had “authentic information” that the Government was working on it (a tough law). The ARC, opposed to a POTA-type law, had suggested a comprehensive and effective legal framework to deal with all aspects of terrorism that could be incorporated in a separate chapter in the National Security Act, 1980. “What was not there in POTA, we are providing it here. It is not POTA, not TADA, not MCOCA-it is a standalone,” Moily clarified.
The timing of the release of the report, though it was submitted two months back to the Government, indicated that the Government might be finally contemplating action on the Opposition’s demand for a tougher anti-terror law to distract attention from its all-round failure on internal security front. The recommendation of the ARC may come up for discussion before the Union Cabinet’s special meeting on Wednesday.
Ironically, however, many of the ARC recommendations were parts of POTA. For example, the panel suggested that no person accused of an offence punishable under NSA should be released on bail and confession before the police be made admissible in the court.
“The commission is of the view that there is no need to dilute the provisions of bail as they existed in POTA,” the 18th report of the ARC on combating terrorism reads. On page 58 of the same report, the ARC recommends, “POTA tried to achieve a fine balance (between CrPC and TADA) as far as these time limits of (remand) were concerned. Therefore, the commission feels the provisions of POTA regarding remand and completion of investigation may be restored and incorporated in the new law.”
On shifting the burden of proof on the accused, the ARC admitted that both TADA and POTA had provisions wherein the court was under obligation to draw adverse inference, provided certain facts were established. “The commission feels that such presumptions should be made a necessary part of the new anti-terror law,” it recommended.
The Moily-headed panel suggested a federal agency to investigate terrorist offences and recommended that a special division be created in the CBI to deal with terror cases. Setting up of special fast track courts for exclusive trial of terrorism-related cases was also recommended.
The ARC maintained that there was a need to define “more clearly” the criminal acts which can be construed as “terrorist” in nature and should deal with the use of firearms and explosives to cause damage to life and property, assassination of public functionaries, including such attempts, and providing finances for such activities.
Moily rejected the demand for MCOCA-type laws in Gujarat and Rajasthan, saying such ad hocism was not an answer to terrorism.
ARC’s recommendations
The law should have adequate safeguards to prevent its misuse
Clearly define criminal acts that can be construed as being terrorist in nature
Give priority to defeating political subversions
The capacity-building exercise should extend to the intelligence gathering machinery, security agencies, civil administration and the society
Amend Prevention of Money Laundering Act
Block flow of funds to terror outfits
The new law may incorporate provisions regarding freezing of assets, funds, bank accounts, deposits and cash when there is reasonable suspicion of their intended use in terrorist activity
Six-year-old Simran, whose father was killed and mother was critically injured in the Delhi serial blast, taking part in the protest to condemn terrorism in New Delhi on Tuesday – PTI http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=front%5Fpage&file_name=story1%2Etxt&counter_img=1
Recent Comments