At what point do the actions of the State towards its subjects turn from governance to persecution? Three events in the past few weeks have raised this question with some urgency. The first was the Central government's decision to change certain excise laws in order to invalidate a Supreme Court ruling in favour of the tobacco giant ITC. This dispute had originated 17 years ago when the government found that cigarette retailers were selling ITC's cigarettes at a higher price than the one printed on the container. ITC claimed it had no control over the retailers and should only have to pay the duty on the printed price. The claim may well have been specious, and ITC may have been in collusion with its retailers to dodge some part of the then exorbitant tax on cigarettes. But the fact remains that after 17 years the Supreme Court of India ruled in ITC's favour.
The government was well within its rights, and in fact did well to change the definition of retail price to close the loophole that the Supreme Court judgement had revealed. But the law it actually passed was specifically written to take effect retrospectively. Based upon it, instead of refunding ITC some Rs 350 crore with interest, it has asked the company to pay another Rs 450 crore within 30 days. That is the point at which the Indian State crossed the boundary between administration and persecution.
ITC may be able to weather the shock. Rs 450 crore is only 6 per cent of the Rs 8,370 crore that it is expected to earn as pre-tax profit this year. But what about smaller, humbler, more vulnerable people whose lives are routinely being laid to waste by an increasingly oppressive and callous bureaucracy? Take the case of Anara Gupta, the former Jammu beauty queen whom the Jammu and Kashmir police implicated in a pornographic CD racket with full media fanfare, only to have the state's forensic laboratory declare that she was not the girl in the CD. When this happened, the state government suspended the six police constables who had released Anara's name to the media. That was the right thing to do, for, if Anara's family is to be believed, her name had not even been listed in the FIR that the police lodged after making its haul of pornographic CDs on December 15 '04.
But the Jammu police will, apparently, do anything to save its own, even if that requires it to sacrifice justice and a young girl's reputation. It sent the CD to a forensic laboratory in Chandigarh and obtained a verdict that the girl in the CD 'could' have been Anara. That is where, once again, the State crossed the line between administration and oppression. The Chandigarh finding will not enable the j&k police to prosecute Anara. It may also not help to get the constables reinstated because they had no business letting out her name in the first place. But it will lay to waste Anara's life, for in the intensely conservative and prurient society of small-town India, most people will choose to believe that there could have been no smoke without a fire.
The third and most reprehensible case is the decision by the Delhi police to appeal against its own high court's dismissal of a lower court conviction of Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani of conspiracy in the December 13, '01 Parliament attack case. As if this is not enough, the police has shadowed Geelani day and night ever since he was released from jail. They have maintained a continuous and gruelling psychological pressure on a man who had already suffered far more than anyone should ever be asked to bear. Since I read the police case as deposed before the magistrate court from cover to cover, I can state with some confidence that there had never been a case against Geelani. All the police had was the fact that he knew the key conspirator, Afzal, and had talked to him on one or two occasions on his cellphone.This was easily explained by the fact that the two belonged to Baramulla and lived in the same colony in Delhi. As for Geelani's actual involvement with any of the terrorists, the police had absolutely nothing. Despite this, he was arrested on the basis of the cellphone contact alone, tortured in jail to force him to confess, and lodged in the same cell as a known killer to break his nerve. He was perversely sentenced to death in a truly extraordinary judgement by the special judge S.N. Dhingra, and lived under the shadow of death by hanging for two years.
One would have thought that Geelani had paid a high enough price for being a Kashmiri and knowing Afzal, but the Delhi police had not yet extracted its pound of flesh. Today he lies in a hospital bed all because someone who had been trailing him day and night shot him at point blank range as Geelani made an unscheduled visit to his lawyer.
The constant surveillance, and psychological harassment of Geelani has made his family jump to the conclusion that he was shot by a special cell of the Delhi police. This may not be true, but the accusation raises disturbing questions. Is there a special cell in the Delhi police? Is it entrusted with the task of eliminating those whom the police determine as dangerous? If so, is this being done with the tacit collusion of senior police officials and the entire Delhi and Central government? Unfortunately, the proliferation of 'encounters' across the entire country and the rising frequency of so-called 'shoot-outs' in Delhi itself suggests that the state is increasingly bypassing the judiciary and has become a law unto itself.
We, who belong to the elite of this country, need to examine our lives and our most cherished beliefs against this grim background. While we trumpet our democracy and hold conferences on human rights, we turn a tacit blind eye to the systematic oppression upon which we depend for our own safety. We therefore become accessories to the oppression being practised by the State.