Mind your online
footprint, particularly if your conscience is pricked by injustice. Big Brother
is lawfully watching and virtually anything you do can amount to sedition.
Do you browse civil
rights sites? Often enter Niyamgiri or Kudankulam as search words? Call, text
or mail friends reminding them about that weekly visit to the local slum to
distribute medicines or teach kids? Or blog and tweet angrily about the live
skeletons you encountered during a jungle holiday in a tribal belt? You better
watch out.
On Friday, The Guardian exposed how
British agencies used the top-secret American eavesdropping program ‘PRISM’ — that
carries out extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored
information of virtually anyone anywhere in the world — to spy on its citizens. While the outrage in the UK already
has the David Cameron government on the back foot and there is anxiousness among Indian netizens, few at
home notice that India itself is not far behind on this dangerous global trend.
This April, our
government started putting in place its Central Monitoring System to get access
to everything in the country’s telecommunication network, ranging from your
emails, social media exchanges, web browsing history, chats to phone calls and
text messages. Forget public debates, not even Parliament had an opportunity to
debate the move.
Nobody, however, can
complain about this mega anti-privacy mechanism which is perfectly legal on
paper. Then information technology minister Milind Deora told Parliament last
December that the Rs 400 crore monitoring system would “lawfully intercept
internet and telephone services”.
Indeed, India’s
Information Technology Act 2000 has been amended twice in 2008 and 2011 and
allows government officials to access personal emails, phone calls or text
messages as part of reasonable security practices and procedures. The
‘reasonability’ remains conveniently undefined and depends on official
discretion.
So what exactly does the
government want to listen in on? Why do the human rights groups deny it the benefit of doubt in this age of terror? Anyway, why should you worry if you
do not have something criminal to hide? Well, you could be jailed for life for,
if nothing else, “exciting disaffection” — which includes “disloyalty
and all feelings of enmity” — towards the government.
Section 124A of the IPC
has remained unchanged since 1870 when the British framed the all-encompassing
Sedition Act. It says “whoever by words, either spoken or written, or by signs,
or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into
hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards the
Government established by law in India shall be punished with imprisonment for
life, to which fine may be added, or with imprisonment which may extend to
three years to which fine may be added”.
Prominent freedom
fighters including Mohandas Gandhi and Bal Gangadhar Tilak were booked under
Section 124A during the raj. In the recent years, sedition charges have been
slapped on paediatrician Dr Binayak Sen (for trying to improve public
health standards in the state-forsaken hinterlands), writer Arundhati Roy
(for repeating Jawaharlal Nehru’s view that accession of a disputed territory
cannot be against the wishes of the people) and young Aseem Trivedi (for
drawing an aesthetically-challenged and inconsequential cartoon).
The latest in the
government’s arsenal is the all-season-any-reason invocation of the Maoist
spectre. The first widely publicised case was that of Kamlesh Painkra in
Chhattishgarh. A grassroots reporter, Painkra was the first journalist to
report the gross human rights violations of the state militia called Salwa
Judum in 2005. He was promptly dubbed a Maoist. His brother, a teacher, was
arrested on charges of sheltering Naxalites and Painkra’s PDS licence, the
family’s main source of income, was cancelled. Fearing death in a staged encounter,
he left Chhattisgarh and the CRPF demolished his house in Bijapur to build a
volleyball court for its jawans.
In 2009, Laxman
Choudhury, a stringer with a vernacular newspaper in Odisha’s Gajapati
district, was charged with having links to Maoists for writing on the police-drug
mafia connection. He was booked under Sections 120 (B) and 124(A) — criminal conspiracy and sedition —
for apparently receiving eight Maoist leaflets sent through a bus conductor and
made to spend 10 weeks in jail before the high court granted him bail.
In March 2010, Gujarat
police arrested Niranjan Mahapatra, a freelance journalist, for his alleged
involvement with the Maoists. Gujarat police said they recovered plenty of Maoist
literature written in Oriya from his rented accommodation, that Mahapatra was
associated with a workers union, used to visit demolition sites in slums and
networked with the affected, and that his source of income could not be
immediately ascertained. And yes, his neighbours apparently told the cops that
his house often remained locked for 15-20 days. Did you ever imagine that any
of this could make a journalist a Maoist?
Then again, journalists
have not been the only targets. In April 2010, Sunil Mandiwal, an
assistant professor of Delhi University, was detained twice by the police for
suspected links with Maoists. As usual, the cops claimed they recovered “Left-leaning”
literature and books from Mandiwal’s home, which, for them, was evidence
enough.
In June 2010, scientist Nisha
Biswas, college professor Kaniska Chowdhury and writer Manik Mondal were
arrested for visiting West Bengal’s Lalgarh area where they were surveying the
severity of state-sponsored atrocities carried out by the central-state joint
forces. Their crime included participation in street corner meetings organized
by various human rights and resistance groups including the People's
Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCAPA).
In July, Debalina
Chakraborty, a student of Jadavpur University, went on an indefinite fast after
the state CID dubbed her a Maoist leader. Chakraborty, secretary of a women’s
organisation working in tribal areas of Nandigram and Lalgarh, was booked under
the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) by the cops after they recovered
a letter from a Maoist courier written by one “Debu”.
Such instances are too
many but for want of space, let’s jump to more recent ones. In December 2012,
Kerala police arrested Gopal, a former scientist of the Indira Gandhi Centre
for Atomic Research, Kalpakkam, and six others and booked them under the UAPA
as Maoists. While Gopal was a vocal member of the Committee for the Protection
of Civil Liberties (PUCL) in Tamil Nadu, others were active student union
members and took part in various protest movements such as the anti-Kudankulam
agitation.
Only last week, Anam
Vivekananda Reddy, MLA from Nellore rural, dubbed Telangana Joint Action
Committee chairman professor M Kodandaram a “terrorist” who was
“preaching terrorism to students instead of giving lessons”. The professor,
Reddy told the media, was working to strengthen the Maoists and deserved
exemplary punishment including termination of his job at Osmania University.
Not all of us join
rallies against injustice — social, environmental, political or economic — or
visit slums and villages to help out the victims of a lopsided system. But most
of us have a thing or two to say about the affairs of the state and those
occupying our public offices. Not all of them use sanitised language in
personal communications. Now that the biggest of brothers have built the
capacity to snoop on every spoken and written word, even the most casual and
inconsequential comments can be used against you.
Going by the instances
cited above, and the sarkari sleuth’s ingenious ability to make a travesty of
truth and common sense, most of us may soon qualify to be a Maoist, a
sympathizer or, at any rate, merit a sedition complaint. It will all depend on
if and when the authorities have scores to settle or need a few scapegoats.
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