Under the 1980 NSA people can be detained without charge or trial for loosely defined security reasons for up to one year (two years in Punjab), but must be brought before an Advisory Board within seven weeks of arrest. (If the Board finds insufficient grounds for detention, the detainee is bound to be released.) In 1987 the government included more stringent provisions in existing special and preventive detention laws, which were already causing concern because they lacked important legal safeguards. A June ordinance, replaced by an act of parliament in August, amended the NSA as it applied to Punjab so as to allow detainees to be held for an extended period of up to six months before being brought before an Advisory Board. The amended NSA thus reintroduced provisions which had earlier been eliminated by the High Court of Punjab and Haryana as unconstitutional.
3.1.1 The use of the NSA to curb legitimate opposition
Although the Home Ministry gave assurances that the provisions of the act would not be misused, opposition members in the Lok Sabha argued that the NSA was being used indiscriminately. In March 1988 the Minister of Home Affairs informed the Lok Sabha that 74 detainees held under the NSA had been released in January but that 653 were still being held under its provisions. Many hundreds are known to have been held under its provisions throughout India, a number of them for the one-year maximum period, some of them for peaceful political activities. The NSA requires that a detainee should know the grounds of detention within five, or, in exceptional circumstances, 15 days of the date of detention but some detainees have been held without receiving this information. In January 1987, for example, the Supreme Court held that the detention on the orders of the Sikkim Government of Hem Lall Bhandari, a Bombay- based Sikkimese lawyer, had been illegal because the
