India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
The punishment of due process
In a marvellous piece in the Indian Express, "Truth, confessions and videotape", Pratap Bhanu Mehta pinpoints why India's justice sustem is so dysfunctional. He writes:
Mehta points to Geelani, Anara Gupta, the Shankaracharya and Vicky Thakur as examples of people to whom, regardless of the question of their innocence or guilt, injustice was done by the justice system. Gupta's case, in my mind, is especially bizarre, because even if she did what she was accused of, it shouldn't count as a crime. We have too many archaic laws in our books, but even if we didn't, the system would still be a mess.
In India, we do not get punishment after due process. Due process is the punishment. After all, aren’t there more than seven million arrests a year, a thousand undertrials in prison who have already been there more than five years? And what about the scourge of custodial deaths, a phenomenon every civilised police force has managed to abolish. Perhaps Pappu Yadav is an apt symbol of the inversion of values that corrosive skepticism allows: the jail as a secure rest house, freedom as fraught with danger, as [SAR] Geelani has found out. At whose discretion we get justice, who knows.
Mehta points to Geelani, Anara Gupta, the Shankaracharya and Vicky Thakur as examples of people to whom, regardless of the question of their innocence or guilt, injustice was done by the justice system. Gupta's case, in my mind, is especially bizarre, because even if she did what she was accused of, it shouldn't count as a crime. We have too many archaic laws in our books, but even if we didn't, the system would still be a mess.
