The following is from the Sentinel:
A Flawed Justice System Tavleen Singh When human rights lawyer, Nandita Haksar, rang me to ask if I would write something about the 'Geelani case' my first reaction was unsympathetic. Was this the Geelani who was the son-in-law of the Kashmiri politician, I asked, because then I was definitely not interested. Even if he were only a journalist he would surely have known that the Jamaat-e-Islami his father-in-law headed openly supported militant groups waging a violent struggle to make Kashmir part of Pakistan. I must have got to about this point in my sanctimonious tirade when she interrupted me to say she was speaking of Syed Abdul Rahman Geelani, who before his arrest in connection with the December 13 terrorist attack on Parliament had been a professor at Delhi University. "I am as opposed to terrorism as anyone" she said "but this man has been wrongly arrested and it will not help the fight against terrorism if this kind of thing is allowed to happen". She then sent me a large bunch of papers on the case, which include copies of appeals from Amnesty International and Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) teachers as well as details of Geelani's arrest and trial. Reading through them left me horrified and saddened and came as yet another reminder that unless the evils of the criminal justice system in India are not removed urgently we could one day soon see a total collapse of the rule of law. The week of the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on Parliament - what some call our 9/11 - is a good one to draw attention to the grave injustice done to Mr Geelani and his family. On December 16, his case comes up for judgement and his lawyers are hopeful that he will be acquitted but what happened to him needs to be recounted, over and over again, to draw attention to the kind of injustice that is being perpetrated in the name of fighting terrorism. Professor Geelani, who taught Arabic at Delhi University, was arrested a day after the attack on Parliament. Why? Because as a Kashmiri his telephone calls were being routinely tapped by the police and they intercepted a conversation between him and his brother in Kashmir. The police claim that during his conversation, the professor said something that sounded like he was justifying the attack on Parliament. The translation from Kashmiri to Hindi, on which they based this charge, was done by an illiterate vegetable seller and when Geelani's lawyers had it translated by two other people they found that the words yeh zaroori hota hai that supposedly justified the attack did not exist on the tape recording of the conversation. But, since the arrest was made under the dreaded POTA the professor has spent his past year in Tihar Jail in a maximum security cell. POTA does not allow for bail. In Geelani's statement to the special court in which he is being tried, this is what he says happened to him after his arrest. "On December 14, 2001 after I was arrested I was blindfolded and taken to some place which was like farmhouse. At that farm house tea was ordered by the police officials and on the sugar sachles (sic) Ashoka Countryside was written. At the farm house I was made naked and tortured and I was hanged upside down. I was forced to make confessional statement but I made no confessional statement as I was not involved. Thereafter I was threatened if I made no confessional statement, my family members would be eliminated. On 14th night I was brought to special cell Lodhi Colony where I found my wife, my two children, my brother, my brother-in-law and one another relative at the special cell. They had already been arrested." Despite eminent journalists, lawyers and writers - including Arundhati Roy and Rajni Kothari - being part of the All India Defence Committee for Syed Abdul Rehman Geelani, despite the appeals from Amnesty International, the professor has remained in jail. If Professor Geelani is acquitted next week he will, ironically, be considered among the lucky ones who manage in their lifetime to get justice from a system so deeply flawed that ten years after 200 people were killed in the Mumbai bombings, justice has still not been done. Last week, on the very day that Dawood Ibrahim's brother, Anees, allegedly one of those who masterminded the bombings, was arrested in Dubai, the trial finally ended in a Mumbai special court. It began on June 30, 1995. If this is how long it takes to bring terrorists to justice in India can we even dare to claim that we have a working criminal justice system? When I put this question to a Mumbai lawyer who supported last week's lawyers strike against longer working hours he said, "The problem is not created by us lawyers but by the fact that we have too few judges. If there were enough judges then cases would not take so long to be concluded." When looked at from the perspective of an outsider, though, it seems pretty much as if everyone is to blame for the fact that to clear the backlog of cases in Indian courts it is estimated that it would take more than 325 years. Most of all, though, the Government is to blame for never having paid enough attention to rectifying the wrongs in the system. When did you last hear, for instance, of action being taken against police officers who arrested and tortured an innocent man? When did you last hear of police officers in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu being punished for their inability to catch a murderous criminal like Veerappan? When did you last hear of a Law Minister making a determined effort to rid us of the hundreds of obsolete laws that clog the system? When did you last hear of action being taken against government departments that contribute to the clogging by filing pointless cases? It is estimated that more than 70 per cent of civil cases in our courts involve some government department or other as litigant. In most cases, the matter could be settled out of court but in a criminal waste of taxpayers' money and the nation's time, these cases languish in courtrooms across the country. Is it any wonder then that even when terrorists are on trial the case can take anything from ten to 20 years? Things are so bad that even if we did manage to extradite Dawood Ibrahim's brother for trial in an Indian court he could remain under trial and unpunished for the rest of his life. It is important to remember, as I have said before in this column, that two of the subcontinent's major terrorist leaders Azhar Masood and Omar Sheikh were in Indian jails for five years before being released in exchange for the passengers of IC 814. Sheikh has since been convicted by a Pakistani court for the murder of journalist, Daniel Pearl, and Masood is believed to be the mastermind of the attack on Parliament. A justice system that punishes innocent people and allows terrorists to remain 'under trial' is a justice system that is sick. When are we going to get a Law Minister or a Chief Justice who realizes that the malaise is now terminal?
