NEW DELHI: For more than 50000 persons languishing under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) in various ill-defined prisons throughout India with a two percent conviction rate ‘of those arrested the Supreme ‘Court ruling last week has come Tike a shot in the arm.

 The highest court has ruled that the specially designated course no power to remand a TADA used to custody of the police failed to complete investigations thin six months to a year “Irrespective of gravity of the offence the accused has the night to be released on bail if the police fails to complete investigations within 180 days or with the permission of the court in one year the Supreme Court ruled: while ‘ordering the release on bail of Jitendra Vishnu Thakur an MLA from Maharashtra held under TADA

What that means is that investigations in the case cannot be taken lightly The alteration is basically procedural” says lawyer R S Sodhi who fights cases of TADA detainees in the Supreme Court According to Home Ministry statistics the exact number of those detained under TADA is nearly 53000 throughout the country even though unofficial estimates put the Humber of much higher  than this   States Punjab tops with   24557 detainees followed surprisingly by Gujarat which does not have any serious law and order problem but has 14084 detainees and Assam which has 10779 persons held under TADA Some states like Jammu and Kashmir which has the largest number of proclaimed offenders and groups have relatively lesser numbers Whiles mailer states like Manipur has made 1003 arrests under the act in Uttar Pradesh where militancy in the Terai region has been a factor over 800 have been detained under TADA while in Haryana the figure is 916

Lawyers and human right activists Say that the police has been using the act indiscriminately Once activist quotes from a seminar organized by the Law Commission recently in Delhi which proud that a wide majority of those held were arrested under Ordinary crimes with sections 3 and 4 of TADA attached to the section in the First Information Report (FIR) by the police That automatically becomes a TADA case

In Punjab for instance there is no case of common crime Everyone including those held in commence landlord-ten an disputes are booked under TADA Not surprisingly not a single known terrorist is being heard in any of the specially designated TADA courts Similarly in Andhra Pradesh not a single Naxalite leader of any standing has been booked under TADA   crooks are spending time as guests of the state in prisons

If booked under TADA under the old rules it took a year before the ‘challan’ was produced Now with the Supreme Court Judgement the time period has been slashed to six months

One home ministry official admits that more than 30000 of these TADA cases and these could  well be conservative figures-have been going on for more than five years The counts are notoriously slow because in a wide majority of these cases there is simply no hard evidence

But experts say the new ruling is unlikely to affect those people who have been behind bars for a number of years as it does not take into account the question of retrospective effect What’s

Worse the number of cases every year is going up every year According to home ministry estimates 26000 cases were registered in 1990

Article extracted from this publication >> July 22, 1994