A R C H I V E S
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| creating Fear without reason |
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| jaihoon |
| 07/15/02 at 00:19:13 |
| [indian-express editotrial] Police force Arbitrary arrests, harassment and detention: creating fear without reason The case against Kashmiri journalist Iftikhar Gilani, who has been arrested under the Official Secrets Act, is getting curiouser. When he had been arrested on June 9, it was for what appeared to be the extremely serious charge of possessing ‘‘classified information’’ on Indian troop movements. That this was done in tandem with the booking under Pota of his father-in-law, Hurriyat hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani, and the detention of his brother-in-law, Ghulam Hassan, seemed to lend it the flavour of a larger conspiracy against the state. Before long it became clear that the so-called classified information that was ‘‘seized’’ by the police after their search of Iftikhar Gilani’s New Delhi residence was nothing more than information that could be routinely accessed through the Internet, possession of which by no means constitutes a crime under any law of the land. Faced with this embarrassment, the Delhi police in a desperate manoeuvre to justify Iftikhar Gilani’s detention, now accuses him of distributing and exhibiting pornographic material because his computer, allegedly, had evidence of such material. By this token, half the computer-owning public in this country could be hauled up and placed behind bars, given the wide prevalence of cyber sleaze. So what are we talking about here? Are these policemen or quick change artistes? Serious foot soldiers of the state or old-fashioned dragoons with the licence to intimidate all and sundry? Are we now to see the enactment of a POPA (Prevention of Pornography Act), or even a POMA (Prevention of Media Act), all the better to lock up hyperactive journalists? Will a government, presided over by those who felt the whiplash of the emergency, now proceed to make the politics of intimidation a cornerstone of state policy? If this is, indeed, the case — and a rash of recent cases of intimidation against journalists in the Capital would seem to indicate that it is — then all we can say is that it is doing a great injustice to the nation. The NDA government must remember at all times that the Constitution had made Article 19 — dealing with the rights to freedom of expression — a cornerstone of its imagined democracy. Any set of policies or practices which threatens to dislocate that principle, threatens the larger edifice of the republic. |
Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board |