Justice
Deepak Gupta retired as a Supreme Court Judge, on 6 May 2020. A couple of
months before he retired, on 24 February he was invited to
deliver a lecture at an
event organised by the Supreme Court Bar Association. In a hard-hitting,
no-holds barred lecture which focused on
‘
The
Right to Dissent is the Most Important Right Granted by the Constitution’ he
said,
“to
question, to challenge, to verify, to ask for accountability from the
government is the right of every citizen under the constitution. These rights
should never be taken away otherwise we will become an unquestioning moribund
society, which will not be able to develop any further”.
He emphatically stated that,
“
Dissent is essential in a democracy. If
a country has to grow in a holistic manner where not only the economic rights
but also the civil rights of the citizen are to be protected, dissent and
disagreement have to be permitted, and in fact, should be encouraged. It is
only if there is discussion, disagreement and dialogue that we can arrive at
better ways to run the country”.
“There can be no
democracy without dissent”, was his constant refrain. He went on to quote a
fellow
Justice D.Y. Chandrachud who in
another speech
put the
matter very succinctly, saying,
“The
blanket labelling of dissent as anti-national or anti-democratic strikes at the
heart of our commitment to protect constitutional values and the promotion of
deliberative democracy”. Strangely enough, on 23 July in a case regarding nineteen
dissident Rajasthan Congress MLAs including Sachin Pilot, a Supreme Court bench
headed by Justice Arun Mishra re-echoed the very same words,
“
Voice of dissent in
democracy cannot be shut down!” Lofty ideal indeed, if only the apex court had
remained true to its own dictum, in letter and in spirit! Sadly this is not the
case!
Today
in India if you show any dissent or dissidence to anything which the regime
does- woe to you! There is the midnight knock! One is hounded and harassed,
intimidated and threatened; false cases are foisted. There are investigations,
your phones are monitored, and your computers are searched. Your premises are
raided; income tax starts looking into the returns of your relatives. If you
are an NGO and have an authorized account to receive foreign remittances that
is cancelled. You are thrown into jail on fictitious and fabricated charges; abused,
beaten and subject to all kinds of torture. Your family is put under severe
pressure. You can conveniently be bumped off in one of those ‘encounters’. All this and more- the regime uses all
existing mechanisms to silence you. It is clear: this regime brooks no dissent.
There
are any amount of examples in India today to show how
the Preamble to the Constitution of India which promises liberty of
thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; and Article 19(1) which guarantee
freedom of speech and expression;
freedom
to assemble peaceably and without arms; and the freedom to form associations or
unions- are being trampled upon mercilessly. Justice Gupta reiterates,
“these
three freedoms are vehicles through which dissent can be expressed. The right
of freedom of opinion and the right of freedom of conscience by themselves
include the extremely important right to disagree. The right to disagree, the
right to dissent and the right to take another point of view would inhere
inherently in each and every citizen of the country. When we view all these
together, it is more than obvious that the right to dissent is the biggest
right and, in my opinion, the most important right granted by the Constitution.”
Strangely enough, words like dissent, or its synonyms
like dissidence and protest emerged very often in the context of religious
and/or political establishments that were not in sync with the reality or had
moved away from the legitimate aspirations of the people. Justice Gupta in his speech drives home the
point saying,
“if a person does not ask
questions and does not raise doubts questioning age-old systems, no new systems
would develop and the horizons of the mind will not expand.
Whether it be Buddha, Mahavira, Jesus Christ, Prophet Mohammad, Guru Nanak Dev,
Martin Luther, Kabir, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, Karl Marx
or Mahatma Gandhi, new thoughts and practices would not have been established,
if they had quietly submitted to the views of their forefathers and had not
questioned the existing practices, beliefs and rituals”.
St Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus (the
Jesuits) in 1540. He had to the face much hostility from the powerful of those
times (including the Inquisition) because he dared question practices which he
believed were no longer relevant or responded to the cries of the people. He
founded an order which was radically different from the existing orders of that
time. He even had the audacity to taking education to the common folk, which
was during his time a monopoly of the clergy and royalty .A parallel (in the
sixteenth century too) can be seen in the life of St Teresa of Avila , who
through her relentless questioning and search was able to reform the Carmelite tradition.
There are several classic examples of how dissent within established structures,
brought about not only fresh thinking but also radical changes.
So at the heart of every vibrant democracy is dissent! So
why is the Government afraid of dissent and doing its best to silence everyone
who is visible, vocal and critical of them? Hundreds of citizens have signed
statements condemning the arbitrary arrests of anti-CAA protestors,
“We, the undersigned citizens, have been
watching – with anger and dismay – the ceaseless harassment, interrogation and,
in many instances, torture of protesters who participated in the recent sit-ins
and agitations against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019. Gulfisha,
Khalid Saifi, Ishrat Jahan (both are Muslim community leaders), Safoora Zargar
(member of the Jamia Coordination Committee) and Meeran Haider (president of
the Rashtriya Janata Dal youth wing’s Delhi unit) have been arrested in the
last few weeks. Safoora Zargar and Meeran Haider, both students of Jamia Milia
Islamia, alongside Gulfisha, have been slapped with the draconian Unlawful
Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). Umar Khalid, former student activist of
Jawaharlal Nehru University, is also understood to have been slapped with the
UAPA for his role in the protests, although the latest statement of a senior
police officer suggests that he is still under investigation”.
It is amply clear that innocent persons are being
victimized to cover up the violence created by right wing Hindutva groups
everywhere. These arrests seem to mark the continuation of a disturbing trend:
the BJP government’s practice of covering up the violence committed by Hindutva
groups by blaming democratic activists and citizens for the same, and its
general disregard for the lives of citizens. Gautam Navlakha, Anand Teltumbde,
Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves and others have been arrested over the Bhima
Koregaon violence of 2018, even as its real perpetrators such as Milind Ekbote
(a leader of local Hindutva groups) roam free. Although the self-proclaimed Hindu
Raksha Dal took responsibility for the armed assault by masked goons on
students and teachers inside the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus on 5
January 2020, and some of the attackers identified in the videos belonged to
the Hindutva student organisation Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, Union
Minister Ashwini Choubey claimed in its aftermath that the “Leftists” had been
beaten up “by their own people”.
Then
there is the case of poet and activist Varavara Rao, also an accused in the Elgar-Parishad-Maoist
links case, who is languishing in jail.
Recently a statement signed by
more than two thousand intellectuals and other concerned citizens demanded that
Varavara Rao be immediately released on
bail from a prison in Maharashtra due to his deteriorating health condition.
“The health of poet, litterateur and
political rights activist P Varavara Rao, incarcerated for nearly two years in
the Bhima Koregaon conspiracy case, has significantly been deteriorating since
he had a fall on May 28 in the Taloja jail,” the statement said. They
quoted his family as saying that he is hallucinating, unable to walk and even
brush his teeth.
The latest is the arrest of Dr Hany Babu
an Associate Professor at the Department of English in the University of Delhi
on 28 July 2020. The National
Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested Dr. Hany Babu, in connection with the Elgar
Parishad-Bhima Koregaon Case. On 24 July, Prof. Babu (54) was summoned to the
NIA office in Mumbai as a witness where he was subsequently arrested after five
days of questioning. He had requested to provide testimony via Video
Conferencing considering the travel risk related to COVID-19, but his request
was denied. As the questioning started, Prof. Babu was forced to provide false
testimony against other activists and to accept allegations of being a
functionary of the Maoists. Even under immense pressure, Prof. Babu, a
conscientious teacher and activist, refused to concur with these lies. Because
he stood for truth, Prof. Babu was arrested after five days of harassment in
the name of interrogation.
The arrest of Prof. Babu is the
continuation of an almost year-long harassment which began with a raid of his
house on 10 September 2019. The Pune Police, who claimed the raid was in
connection with the Bhima-Koregaon case, confiscated his laptop and mobile
phones as well as barred him from using his social media handles. Prof. Babu
has clearly stated that he has no connection in any way whatsoever with the
incidents at Bhima-Koregaon. The Bhima-Koregaon case is related to the eruption
of violence at the annual celebratory event of Dalits on 1 January 2018.
Although violence at the event was triggered by the interference of Hindu
right-wing groups, the incident was used as a pretext to arrest Dalit scholars
and other activists.
Prof. Babu is the twelfth person to
be arrested in relation to the case. As anti-caste scholars and activists, we
understand that the framing of Prof. Hany Babu, a tireless anti-caste
intellectual and activist, is an attempt to penalise Dalitbahujans for raising
their voice against casteist practices. It is a tragic irony that the Indian
Government is using a celebratory event of Dalits to frame anti-caste scholars
and activists. Prof. Babu, who has consistently worked to ensure equal
opportunity for Dalitbahujan students, views social justice as one of the main
aims of scholarship. He also raised his voice to defend the rights of Prof. Sai
Baba, a Delhi University Professor with 90% physical disability who was
arrested on charges of having Maoist links in 2014. Prof. Babu’s commitment to
social justice is penalised by his arrest. This is the latest example of the
current Indian Government’s attempt to annihilate dissent and freedom of life
for its vocal public.
On 31
July, the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’ had a telling article on the
situation in India entitled, ‘India
arrests dozens of journalists in clampdown on critics of Covid-19 response’
.The incisive report says,
“
facing a continuing upward trajectory in
Covid-19 cases, the Indian government is clamping down on media coverage
critical of its handling of the pandemic. More than 50 Indian journalists have
been arrested or had police complaints registered against them, or been
physically assaulted. The majority of those facing action are independent
journalists working in rural
India
, home to more than 60% of the 1.35 billion population.
“The indirect message is that we cannot show the government in poor light. It
does not matter if we have to turn a blind eye to issues we witness,” said Om
Sharma, a journalist with a Hindi daily in Himachal Pradesh, a mountain state
in north India. Police had charged him over a Facebook live report that showed
stranded workers in need of food during the lockdown.”
This is just the tip of the iceberg!
For almost a year now, since 5 August 2020, and with the abrogation of Articles
370 and 35A, the people of Kashmir have been imprisoned. Well known Supreme
Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan tweets about the way the Chief Justice of India
is publicly portraying himself – and he is hauled up. Those who take a stand
are charged with sedition and under the UAPA- the list is endless.
Justice Deepak Gupta is unequivocal
when he states, “
the right to dissent includes the right to criticise. We all must be
open to criticism. The judiciary is not above criticism. If judges of the
superior courts were to take note of all the contemptuous communications
received by them, there would be no work other than the contempt proceedings.
In fact, I welcome criticism of the judiciary because only if there is
criticism, will there be improvement. Not only should there be criticism but
there must be introspection. When we introspect, we will find that many
decisions taken by us need to be corrected. Criticism of the executive, the
judiciary, the bureaucracy or the Armed Forces cannot be termed
‘anti-national’. In case we attempt to stifle criticism of the institutions
whether it be the legislature, the executive or the judiciary or other bodies
of the State, we shall become a police State instead of a democracy and this
the founding fathers never expected this country to be. To question, to
challenge, to verify, and to ask for accountability from the government is the
right of every citizen under the Constitution. These rights should never be
taken away otherwise we will become an unquestioning moribund society, which
will not be able to develop any further”.
“
Voice of dissent in
democracy cannot be shut down!”
*(
Fr
Cedric Prakash SJ is a human rights and peace activist/writer. Contact:
cedricprakash@gmail.com)
