Miscarriage of Justice

By now all of you are aware of the outrageous judgment sentencing the president of the Chhattisgarh branch of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Binayak Sen to life imprisonment on the charge of sedition despite the lack of any legally admissible evidence. Sen’s unjust incarceration is also symbolic of the extremely difficult situation in our state of Chhattisgarh which is becoming a fascist police state intolerant of any dissent, where the judiciary is becoming incapable of protecting constitutional rights to life and liberty, where social activists are being persecuted and prosecuted on trumped-up charges, where a repressive law like the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act is being used to criminalise dissent, where thousands of adivasis are languishing in jails as “Naxalite undertrials” without hope of a fair trial, where the corporates are reigning supreme and have a stranglehold over the state’s rich resources, where state-sponsored bhagwa goondas attack democrats and minorities, where independent journalists are threatened, where hundreds of adivasis are being killed in “collateral damage” and thousands displaced in a war on people.

Even earlier many of you have organised campaigns and demonstrations protesting these situations and demanding the release of Binayak Sen and other prisoners of conscience. Once again this is the need of the hour. Particularly since preparations are afoot for escalation of war with direct deployment of the army and the air force in anti-Naxal operations and the grave humanitarian crisis intensifying, and at the same time all human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and social activists working in these areas are under severe threat after this judgment.