Justice Without Any Discrimination

Repression is the real ‘deep state’ of India. An extract from Dr N.C. Asthana’s forthcoming book State Persecution of Minorities and Underprivileged in India

No other country of the world registers as many cases against its own citizens for having committed offences against the State as India does—they include ‘hurting of religious sentiments’, sedition, and the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act). In simple, non-legal terms, anything you do against the government can be stretched to mean a terrorist act. People have been charged with sedition for liking a Facebook post, criticising a yoga guru, cheering a rival cricket team, drawing cartoons, asking a provocative question in a university exam, or not standing up in a cinema when the national anthem was being played!

Have we ever wondered why? There can be only two possibilities. If all these cases are genuine, it can only mean that there is clearly something fundamentally wrong with the nation-state of India. Either the manner in which this nation was created was defective or the people of this country have no love lost for their country. Alternatively, they are false cases foisted upon innocent people.

We are now in a paradoxical situation where constitutional values are being violated in the name of upholding the law. Law enforcement having metamorphosed into the dreaded ‘coercive arm of the State’, means that the ‘thought’ comes from the State, which, in turn, is executed by the ‘muscle’ of the law enforcement. Law has, in fact, been ‘weaponized’ by the State as the most preferred tool of persecution of all those who dissent. By using law as a weapon, this nation is now shooting from the cloak of law to murder justice!

In a police State, as its definition goes, the government abuses its legal powers over its citizens. We have, however, become worse than a police State because the legal powers are used to ‘selectively’ target and persecute a part of the citizenry. The great Chinese strategist Sun Tzu had said, “Kill one frighten ten thousand”. This has been modified by the Indian State as, “Implicate one in a false case; frighten ten thousand.”

As a result, injustice has become the norm; justice only an aberration, with the quality of justice one could hope to get being directly proportional to the amount one could spend.

Amongst the judgments cited in the book, there are many in which innocent Muslim youths were falsely implicated under terror charges but got acquitted later. They could get justice only after their lives, families, livelihoods, and social prestige; everything was destroyed by the unjust incarceration of up to two decades. What do these acquittal