JOIN USGogoi verdict slap on NIA, govt’s face
The discharge of rights activist and Assam MLA Akhil Gogoi of all charges under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Indian Penal Code for his alleged role in anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protests in 2019 shows yet again, if more showing is necessary, how wrongly and badly these laws are used to harass critics of the government and to suppress dissent. The court not only set the activist, who has been in jail since December 2019, free but also criticised the “conduct and approach’’ of the National Investigation Agency and the prosecution “to be discouraging, to say the least.”
Gogoi had been charged with criminal conspiracy, sedition, promoting enmity between groups on various grounds, assertions against national integrity and support to a terrorist organisation. He has now been acquitted of charges in all the cases filed against him.
The court said that there was no prima facie material to frame charges against Gogoi and other accused persons and that the “ends of justice demand that the accused be discharged, without making him suffer the process of trial.” Cases have been filed against many others also for taking part in anti-CAA protests or protests against the government on other issues. They are facing charges as serious as sedition.
Some of them have been discharged by courts but there are many others who are languishing in jail. The court clearly said that “protests in a democracy are sometimes seen to take the form of blockades also, even causing inconvenience to citizens. However, it is doubtful whether such blockades for temporary periods, if unaccompanied by any incitement to violence, would constitute a terrorist act within the meaning of Section 15 of the UAPA. That, in my mind, is beyond the intention of the legislature.”
The views expressed by the court in Guwahati have been aired in different ways by other courts elsewhere but the trend of deliberately and vengefully charging people with exaggerated and serious offences, including sedition, continues.
Cases are filed not only for participation in protests but even for a single word of criticism of the government. In Gogoi’s case, the court said that “rather than inciting violence, he was exhorting people not to indulge in violence,’’ and still he was arrested and arraigned before the law on an array of charges. The court also said that it has “high expectations from a premier investigating agency like the NIA’’, and that it hopes that “high standards will be upheld, for sake of the country, and this one will be just an exception.” When the State criminalises criticism and dissent and uses draconian laws to throw protesters and critics in jail and to terrorise others, it loses its democratic credentials.