Arbitrariness of authority in Jignesh Mevani's arrest

The arrest of an independent legislator from Gujarat, Jignesh Mevani, by the Assam police is yet another instance of vindictive and arbitrary action against critics of the central government. Immediately after a court in Kokrajhar district granted him bail in connection with a tweet about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the police arrested him again in a fresh case registered in the neighbouring district of Barpeta. This time, the charge was that he assaulted and misbehaved with police officials. He was first arrested for his tweet in which he called Modi a “Godse worshipper” but asked him to ensure that peace returned to some areas in Gujarat that had seen communal violence. The tweet is critical of Modi but it did not deserve the penal action that it attracted. Mevani was charged under sections of the IPC and the IT Act relating to inflammatory speech, breach of peace, outraging religious feelings, conspiracy, and hacking of computers.

There are strange and inexplicable aspects to the action against Mevani. He was arrested in Gujarat by the Assam police on a complaint by a BJP leader in Assam’s Kokrajhar district. He has now been rearrested in a neighbouring district. The power of the Assam police to go to Gujarat and arrest an MLA there is questionable. No one in Gujarat had a complaint about the tweet but someone in a remote part of Assam thought it would disrupt peace and tranquility in that state. By no stretch of imagination can the tweet be considered capable of offending any religious belief and practice. It can only be assumed that the arrests are the result of a plan to harass a critic of the government. It was done on the most unconvincing grounds and in the most unreasonable way.

The police action exposes the arbitrariness of authority, the flouting of norms and procedures of the law, and a readiness to foist the most untenable charges against citizens even when there is no case at all. All this is done in the most brazen manner and with impunity. It shows that anybody in any part of the country can be arrested on the basis of a complaint filed by a person in a faraway state even though the person has no locus standi and the complaint has dubious legal value. Mevani’s arrest for a second time after he was granted bail shows that the police is really after him and does not plan to let him go. The message is that nobody is safe anywhere and citizens’ rights can be perversely and wrongly denied even without the government directly coming into the picture. It could only be politics at work, indirectly and insidiously.

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