On the night of September 1 0, the Delhi Police arrested ND Pancholi, General Secretary of the Citizens for Democracy (CFD), an organization which was founded by Jayaprakash Narayan and which has the distinguished jurist and civil libertarian, Justice VM Tarkunde as its chairman. The arrest was made following the release earlier in the day of this report prepared by the CFD on the Government’s atrocities in Punjab. The report was drafted by a five person committee consisting of Mrs Amiya Rao, Mr Aurobindo Ghosh, Mr Sunil Bhattacharya, Mr Tejinder Singh Ahuja and Mr ND Pancholi.
On September 13, the newspapers reported that a case of sedition had been registered against the authors of the report and the CFD. It was also indicated in the reports that Justice VM Tarkunde would be arrested along with the other authors and office bearers of the CFD.
The Government’s action need not shock us. With political parties of the Opposition not particularly active in fighting and exposing incidents of State violence, it is the civil liberties’ organization’s in the country that have been spearheading the movement against government atrocities on citizens, whether on a mass scale as in Punjab and Delhi, or on a group scale as in Bhanji in Bihar or Karamchedu in Andhra Pradesh, or on an individual scale as in deaths in police lock ups. These exposures have begun to unnerve the government, and hence the recent orchestration of attacks on the civil liberties groups and their leaders.
Several Congress-I members of Parliament have recently been using the immunity offered to them by Parliament to attack the PUCL, PUDR and other human rights and civil liberties organization’s in the foulest of terms. They have alleged that these bodies are antinational and are financed by CIA funds, without adducing an iota of evidence while making such patently false and malicious charges.
The case of the government and the Congress-I is simple: Their foul deeds and criminal acts shall not be exposed. They will run wild in Punjab, killing innocent people, they will organize mass killings of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere; they will promote criminals in politics and in public life; they will let the police kill people without provocation. If anyone should document these brutal and criminal acts and publish the reports, such individuals or organizations that do this must be scandalized, terrorized and suppressed. This is precisely what fascism is about.
It is not necessary to emphasize that if the government and the Congress-I succeed in silencing the voice of those engaged in the struggle for civil liberties and human rights, the biggest losers will be the working class and the toiling masses of our country. There is the experience of the Emergency of 1975-77 before us, and that is why we cannot afford to be passive spectators when the civil liberties organizations are under attack. It is necessary to launch a resolute campaign against the government’s attacks, and be willing to pay any price in the process.
For once, political parties with democratic and socialist inclinations have reacted with alacrity to the government’s attack on a civil liberties and human rights organization. The two major Communist parties have maintained a studied silence, which, however, need not surprise us. The Communists remember civil liberties only when their parties or persons are under attack from the Establishment, and then too not in a fundamental sense, but purely as an expedient. The Janata Party president Chandrashekhar’s statement hits the nail right on the head when he says that ‘‘R Gandhi’s government was poised to launch a serious onslaught on various civil liberties groups, in its sustained attempt to suppress the civil rights of the people”. Chaudhary Charan Singh, president of the Lok Dal has also been forthright while stating that the Government’s action in arresting Pancholi is a “grave threat both to the freedom of expression and civil liberties”.
The utterances of Srikant Verma, who has been trying with such persistence to become the new court jester can be dismissed with the contempt they deserve. What, however, should cause concern is the silence of the retired and sitting judges of the High Courts and Supreme Court to Verma’s remarks on the nature of justice that Mr Tarkunde may have meted out when he occupied the bench. Even if they should not have much use for Mr Tarkunde, their own self-respect demanded that the retired and sitting members of the Bench administer a sharp rebuke to the spokesman of the ruling party at the Centre. Judges who cannot protect the honour of one of their own may not be able to protect the honour and interests of those who go to them to seek justice; and when they wake up to discover that, it may be too late to do anything, as at least some of them may have discovered to their horror when Mrs Gandhi turned fascist in June, 1975.
One wants to hope that the trade unions and mass organisations will show some spine at this critical moment, and not only educate their members on the meaning and significance of the developing situation, but also prepare them for action to safeguard the democratic rights and civil liberties of the people. It is obvious that the civil rights organisations are by themselves not capable of countering the attacks launched on them by the government and Congress-I, and if they should wilt under the pressure that is now applied on them, then there will be nobody worth the name that will be able to speak up for people’s rights when the final crunch will have come.
