Over a 100 retired bureaucrats on Monday penned an open letter to fellow Indians making out a case for replacing the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act with a legislation that fights terrorism while safeguarding personal liberties.
They urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be true to his comments on democracy at the G7 summit and initiate the process of replacing the draconian law that has no place in a civilised society; that, too, in the world’s largest democracy.
“Though this law has been in existence in India’s statute books for over five decades, the harsh amendments it has gone through in recent years has made it draconian, repressive, and amenable to gross misuse at the hands of ruling politicians and the police,’’ the signatories to the letter said, citing the cases of the three anti-CAA student protesters — Devangana Kalita, Natasha Narwal and Asif Iqbal Tanha — who were arrested under the UAPA and secured bail only recently after over a year behind bars.
Referring to a reply given by the junior home minister in Parliament wherein the data show a 72 per cent increase in the number of persons arrested under the UAPA since 2015, the retired bureaucrats, who penned the letter jointly under the banner of their apolitical collective Constitutional Conduct, said: “We may conclude that the vast majority of the arrests under UAPA were made on specious grounds just to spread fear and muzzle dissent.’’
Tracing the “chequered history’’ of UAPA since it was first enacted in 1967, the open letter said the Government of India “seriously departed from the principles of criminal jurisprudence and from the provisions of the Constitution when the UAPA (Amendment) Act, 2008, was codified after the 26/11 Mumbai terror attack’’.
Flagging the fact that this was done by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, they said successive governments at the Centre from across the political spectrum are equally responsible for the “extreme stringency’’ of the UAPA, referring to the amendments brought in by the NDA in 2019 with the help of most political parties. “For the UPA members or any other party to act outraged now is, therefore, disingenuous,’’ the letter said.
Listing some of the prominent persons imprisoned under the UAPA — Sudha Bhardwaj, Rona Wilson, Gautam Navlakha, Anand Teltumbde, Arun Ferreira and Varavara Rao besides late Stan Swamy — the letter quotes former judge of Patna High Court, Justice Anjana Prakash, stating that 66 per cent of the total number of persons booked under this law were charged for conspiracy without any allegations of accompanying acts of violence.
“She (Justice Prakash) also revealed that out of the total number of 386 cases being investigated by the NIA, 74 cases were for non-UAPA offences while 312 pertained to UAPA offences. She added that NIA has not been able to submit chargesheets in 56 per cent of these cases, meaning that the accused in these cases still remain in custody. These figures definitely point to an unhealthy practice of ‘governance by fear’ which has no legitimate place in a democracy,’’ it said.The signatories to the letter include former national security adviser Shivshankar Menon, former foreign secretaries Shyam Saran and Sujatha Singh and several retired IPS officers.