The Public Interest Litigation appeal by Professor Nandini Sundar and others in the Supreme Court sought a review of the manner in which the state was supporting the murderous vigilante movement lef by Congress MLA Mahendra Karma, and sought the winding up of the movement. The highly critical PUCL report on Salwa Judum was what drew the attention of the state security agencies to Dr. Binayak Sen. But after initially passing strictures against the Government of Chhattisgarh for possibly abetting murder, the Chief Justice and his brothers on the bench decided to ask the National Human Rights Commission to appoint a committee to investigate the allegations made by Sundar and others in their appeal.
The NHRC was given a free hand in appointing the investigation team. It duly appointed a commission staffed principally by serving police officers. It ignored the appeals of non-governmental human rights organizations associated with the NHRC to be included in the commission. The commission went in armoured cars on a carefully protected visit of the affected districts, surrounded by security forces. The villagers living in the districts surveyed by the commission complained of intimdation by the security forces.
Now - surprise, surprise - the commission has "given a clean chit" to the Salwa Judum, concluding that investigations of violence were mostly based on false rumours, and minimizing the violence visited by the movement and the accompanying security forces on the villagers in Bastar.
It's probably a foregone conclusion that the Supreme Court will dismiss the PIL petition filed by Nandini Sundar and others. I won't be surprised if the laptop bombardiers of shining India now swing into action discrediting the entire human rights community, and activist intellectuals like Sundar, and smearing them with their vilest invectives as terrorist sympathizers and traitors.
This is part of a more generalized pattern emerging in other states too in the last few months, most recenty in Orissa, where anyone protesting the displacement of tribals and forest communities to make way for mining projects by POSCO and Vedanta has been arrested as Maoists. In Uttaranchal, this trend has claimed Prashant Rahi, the fearless journalist, as a victim. No doubt there will be others of whom the public is unaware.
The government, both at the centre and the states, would rather that champions of the powerless and marginal ike Binayak Sen and Prashant Rahi remain silenced for as long as possible. Binayak's case has received a certain amount of attention in the media, and succeeded for a while in embarrassing the state when 22 Nobel Laureates from other countries petitioned for his release to receive the Jonathan Mann Award. But it has not stopped the state from continuing in their efforts to concoct evidence against him, which has so far failed to stand up under cross examination in his trial.
But who will speak for Rahi? Some journalists have highlighted his case, but otherwise he seems to have dropped into the memory hole as far as the media generally are concerned. Only his daughter Shikha maintains a website as a valiant reminder to an apathetic public of the War against "Sympathy" which is claiming mostly innocent victims all over the country.
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