ELECTIONS '98
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Justice denied

Forget the United Nations charter of human rights, forget our written Constitution and the elaborate civil and criminal procedure codes inherited from the erstwhile British masters. Forget too the national and state human rights commissions, owing their existence to the nagging of such external bodies as Amnesty International and World Watch. In the final analysis, whether human rights are respected or trampled to the ground depends solely on the persons who guard the outposts of law and order.

This is, of course, not an impeccable statement. It is given to human beings, wherever they might be, to opt out of a system, to veer away from an ethos and code of conduct which they might find to be suffocating and to strive to chart an altogether independent course. Such people, in the language of the establishment, are outlaws, or those who have taken the lawless road.

Very often, not many alternatives are left for these people to choose from. Consider the scandal of bringing to book the hoodlums who murdered Shankar Guha Niyogi. By now it is a well known story. Guha Niyogi had travelled all the way from West Bengal to Chhattisgarh in Madhya Pradesh, declassed himself, became a tribal to the core, and built, bit by bit, through dogged perseverance, an immensely powerful organisation of the wretched of the earth.

For decades on end, the Chhattisgarh tribals were victims of merciless exploitation by private land grabbers, moneylenders and mining overlords. Surplus value was extracted in vast quantities via repression let loose by the upper classes against the hapless tribals. The latter were divested of their land, denied the rudiments of education, deprived of health care and nourishment. Guha Niyogi was determined to change all that.

Twenty years of sustained effort, and the Chhattisgarh tribals developed a new persona. They learnt defiance, they reached the awareness that they have as much right to the assets and opportunities strewn around them as their better-off neighbours -- they have however to fight for these rights. The affluent have attained their affluence by stealing and snatching off what once belonged to the tribals.

Guha Niyogi's genius for mobilisation transformed the landscape. Not only was the Chhattisgarh Sangram Samiti a labour of love, it also proved the strength of love and of faith. Guha Niyogi and thousands of his supporters soon became a nuisance to the traditional exploiters, the local tycoons, who had a symbiotic relationship with the local police. There was nothing surprising in this: the supposed protectors of law and order, instinctive reactionaries, know which side of their bread is buttered.

Guha Niyogi was a nuisance; much more than that, he was a menace. Therefore he had to be liquidated. Following several abortive attempts, the conspiracy to remove him not just from Chhattisgarh but from the face of the earth finally succeeded. He was gunned down at dead of night, in his living quarters.

Who had committed the dastardly crime was common knowledge in the neighbourhood. Nonetheless, the police would not bestir themselves. The minions of law and order, rumour had it, even partook of the sweets distributed by the tycoons' men as soon as Guha Niyogi's murder was an established fact.

It was a most curious spectacle. The identity of the culprits -- those who actually shot him through the window of his bedroom and those who financed them -- was no secret; some of them bragged openly about what they had done. The police, however, would not even register first information reports.

Guha Niyogi's tribal wife and his devoted comrades in the Chhattisgarh Sangram Samiti refused to give up. They mobilised the entire strength of the toiling masses in the area and raised an outcry over the police's passivity. The state government was forced to take cognisance of the matter and launch prosecution. The local administration tried to elongate, as much as it could, the process of investigation and filing of cases against the accused named by the samiti.

Nearly five years after the murder, the judiciary at the district level gave their verdict. Despite the obstreperousness of the local representatives of law and order, the judges did not deviate from the notion that murder deserved to be out; one of the accused was sentenced to death. Half a dozen others, including two industrialists from Bombay, were found complicit in the conspiracy and were sentenced.

In case you think the ends of justice were thereby met, once and for all, you are living in a cuckooland of your creation. An appeal was lodged in the high court by those who had been sentenced. Going by reports, the state authorities attended to the formalities of contesting the appeal in a conspicuously perfunctory manner. Influences must have been at work. The division bench of the Jabalpur high court, which heard the appeal, has recently given its decision. It has acquitted all the accused, including the one who had been sentenced to death by the lower court.

The high court judges had their reasons for arriving at the verdict they did. The prosecution of the case, it is obvious from the observations of the judges, was most shoddily conducted and the evidence adduced had wide gaps. The government, it seemed, could not care less whether the guilty were brought to justice or not. Because a hullabaloo is otherwise bound to ensue, the state government will presumably file an appeal before the Supreme Court. But if those in charge of handling the appeal happen to be the same species who had overseen the details of the prosecution from the first stage onwards, the denouement is likely to be no different from the experience till now.

Should it be so, what counsel should one offer to Guha Niyogi's wife, his children and the thousands of his frenzied followers? That they should not lose faith in the nobility of justice, that they should perambulate within the four corners of the law, that, whatever the vicissitudes, in the end the system always delivers? Once the parody of rendering justice reaches its finale in the Guha Niyogi case, the possibility is overwhelming that many who have till now operated within the system and reposed faith in it will choose to opt out. They will opt out because they can legitimately make the point that those who exist within the ambit of law have no different experience than those who are out of its ambit. The law, true enough, takes its own course, and more often than not, this course is a cul de sac.

Or, for a change, why do not we refer to the curious instance of administrative atrophy apropos the several misdoings of the supreme chief of the Shiv Sena? It was already established during the post-Ayodhya riots in Bombay in 1992-93 that this gentleman is beyond the pale of law. He could incite mayhem and murder, he could encourage acts of violence by one group of citizens against other groups, he could fill the air with the venom of communal hatred, neither the Union government nor the state government concerned would ever have the courage to tangle with him.

The latest in the series of quasi-fascist posturing on the part of his followers is the attempt to expel from Bombay a handful of peace- loving Indian citizens whose only crime is that they speak a language which also happens to be the language of a neighbouring country, and who belong to a particular religious denomination.

The Shiv Sena maestro is joyously secure in the knowledge that he is above the law, the government at the Centre is frozen by the fear of him, the government nominally in charge of administration in Bombay and the rest of Maharashtra is in any case under the thumb of the Shiv Sena boss. A no nonsense applied philosophy has assumed centrestage. Much in the style of the Austrian ex-corporal in the closing days of the tottering Hindenburg regime, the Shiv Sena chief is spreading the legend that law is what he says it ought to be and order is to let loose his bandicoots, on whomever he does not approve of.

It is pointless for Amnesty International to tell us any further about the nitty-gritty of human rights. A government exists at the Centre, state governments exist one level down the echelon. It does not matter, though, India has already attained a state of total lawlessness. Fresh evidence of this drift to the lowest depths is provided by the impending transformation of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act into the Foreign Exchange Management Act, and, supplementing it, the Money Laundering (Prevention) Act.

The former crooks, these legislations claim, have ceased to be so, they are henceforth citizens of the first water to be revered morning, afternoon, evening and deep into the night. Even those who underinvoice exports and overinvoice imports, or otherwise indulge in promoting capital flights, are from now on to be treated by the apparatus of the state with benign indifference. And why not, through the courtesy of these legislations, the rupee will in effect be made freely convertible on the capital account too, gladdening diverse hearts.

Article 14 may enter into the debate at this stage. If crooks of a particular species are to be offered benediction by the state, all crooks, it could be argued, must be treated in identical fashion and exempted from prosecution because of any infringement of the law on their part. Wouldn't that be lovely?

Ashok Mitra