By TCN News,
New Delhi: Popular Front of India chairman E. M. Abdul Rahiman has supported the demand to amend the sedition law in the light of the observations made by Supreme Court while granting bail to human rights activist Dr. Binayak Sen. The Indian Penal Code section 124A concerning sedition has been misused by consecutive governments at the Centre and States to suppress political dissent and victimize social movements and human rights activists, said PFI chairman in a statement on 16th April in New Delhi.
“The present Supreme Court verdict has noted that since we are a democratic country, being a sympathizer (of Naxalites) did not make one guilty of sedition. It is also worth notice that Gandhiji during his sedition trial by the British government in 1922 has accused that sedition law was designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen. It is a disgrace to our democracy that even after attaining freedom, our legal system could not discard this colonial legacy. In this context, let us hope that the promise by Union Law Minister Mr. Veerappa Moily to change the outdated sedition law will be fulfilled by the central government,” Rahiman said.
Dr. Sen has spent 121 days in jail convicted of sedition, a charge even the Supreme Court finally deemed unproven. He also spent two more years in jail before the Supreme Court had to step in to grant him bail. The case of Dr. Sen is representative in the sense that there are thousands of under-trial prisoners who are languishing in jail for years under the charges of sedition and unlawful activities. It is an irony that the victims are neither granted compensated for their illegal under-trail detention nor the guilty administrators are police officers who had falsely implicated the innocents in cases punished, even after the courts finding that the accused were innocent. And an earlier observation by the Hon’ble Supreme Court that bail is the rule and jail is an exception is being ignored by courts in applications for granting bail.
E. M. Abdul Rahiman pointed out that the IPC section on sedition is not an isolated piece of law to be repealed. “The issue is not merely of misuse of a particular section, but the very existence of black laws under various garbs of preventing unlawful activities and maintaining national security. Hence he urged the central government to entrust the Law Commission of India the task of revisiting entire set of Indian laws in tune with the spirit of civil rights, individual liberty and freedom of association and to take follow up steps to repeal or revise all black laws,” he said.