Chhattisgarh has lost the plot (editorial)

  • 13/05/2008

  • Hindu (New Delhi)

One year after jailing the eminent doctor, Binayak Sen, State authorities have arrested another leading civil liberties activist, journalist and filmmaker, Ajay T.G. A file picture of Dr. Binayak Sen with his patients in Chhattisgarh. On May 5, the Chhattisgarh police announced the arrest of Ajay T.G., a Raipur-based journalist and filmmaker, under the State's draconian Special Public Security Act (PSA). He has been charged with sedition under the Indian Penal Code and with having unlawful contact with a banned organisation, the Communist Party of India (Maoist), under Sections 3, 4 and 8 of the PSA. Like Binayak Sen, who was arrested last year on May 14, Ajay is a leading member of the People's Union for Civil Liberties. He is also a prominent social worker whose contribution to the education of young girls from poor slum-dwelling families is well known. The circumstances leading to his arrest are so bizarre and reflect so poorly on Chhattisgarh's approach to dealing with the naxalite problem that they bear recounting in some detail. During the Lok Sabha elections of 2004, Ajay was part of a fact-finding team that visited a number of interior villages in the Dantewada region of the State to study the reaction of ordinary villagers to the Maoist call for a poll boycott, on the one hand, and heavy CRPF deployment, on the other. The team went through several deserted villages before arriving at a village around 4 p.m. As Ajay started taking photographs of a deserted polling booth, the team was surrounded by a group of angry, young Maoist villagers. The youth accused the group of being police agents and detained them for several hours. They were eventually allowed to leave late in the evening but Ajay's camera was confiscated. For Ajay, the loss of his camera was a real blow. His only source of income was the freelance filming he did as a mediaperson. His family was also terrified at the thought that the Maoists believed him to be a police agent and decided not to file an official complaint with the authorities. But as word spread in Raipur about the threats to which the fact-finding team had been subjected, the Maoist leadership in the State moved to control the fallout and declared that it would compensate him if the camera was not recovered. The fact that this incident occurred and that Ajay and his colleagues were the victims of Maoist high-handedness is public knowledge because the media covered it in June 2006. A year-and-a-half later, on January 21, 2008, the Chhattisgarh police intercepted an alleged arms drop by two Maoist women. When the house of one of the women was searched, they recovered a letter addressed to the Maoist spokesman by Ajay on the letterhead of the "The Campaign against Child Labour' (an organisation of which he is convenor). The letter, written in 2004, was about the return of the same camera. When the police arrived at his house to question him, Ajay, in the presence of lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, readily acknowledged authorship of the letter and also explained the unfortunate circumstances in which it had been written. Nevertheless, the police seized his computer. Since filmmakers these days rely as much on their computers as on their cameras, Ajay moved the local courts for the return of his PC. His case was posted for hearing on May 10. Five days before that, however, the police came and arrested him, invoking the Public Security Act which was not even in force in 2004 when the letter was written. Incredibly, stories are now being planted in the local press about how the police only discovered he was the author of the letter after going through his computer and conducting "handwriting analysis.' Think about this for a second. Here is a journalist who was actually the victim of a crime committed by the Maoists. For weeks, the family fretted about what the Maoists would do to Ajay since they seemed to believe he was a police agent. And now, the same police steps in to victimise him again, this time with perhaps deadlier consequences since the grant of bail under the PSA