The sanction to prosecute them is a particularly egregious and constitutionally suspect exercise of state power, it says
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI — The PUCL has demanded that the Delhi Lieutenant-Governor Vinay Kumar Saxena’s sanction to prosecute writer Arundhati Roy and Sheikh Showkat Hussain, former professor of International Law at the Central University of Kashmir, in a 2010 case for offences under Sections 153A, 153B and 505 of the Indian Penal Code be withdrawn forthwith.
Roy and others are accused of making seditious speeches at a convention on Kashmir, ‘Azadi: The Only Way’, organised in New Delhi in October 2010.
A PUCL statement issued on Thursday said it was baffling that a 2010 case has now been put on the front burner, with sanction being granted by the L-G almost thirteen years after the alleged incident.
The statement noted that according to the L-G, Roy’s speech fell within the understanding of sedition (Sec 124-A), but sanction to prosecute for sedition was not given as “the Supreme Court on May 5, 2022, in another case has directed that all pending trials, appeals and proceedings with respect to the charge framed under Section 124A (Sedition) of IPC shall be kept in abeyance and thereafter the three-judge Bench headed by CJI had referred the matter to a Constitution Bench on September 12, 2023”.
The PUCL said a mature constitutional democracy ought not to prosecute speech, which by itself has no direct causal connection to violence or disorder. “It is shameful that an FIR was even registered for speech which by all accounts did not incite or provoke any form of violence,” it said.
The PUCL said the L-G’s sanction does a great disservice to the Narendra Modi government’s belief that India is the ‘mother of democracy’, when the ‘mother’ prosecutes one of her most illustrious children. Arundhati Roy is one of India’s most eminent writers who has used her writings to amplify the concerns of those whose voices are ignored or muted. In her writing be it on the Indian nuclear tests, the dams on the Narmada, or the US war on Iraq she has sought to remind Indians and indeed the inhabitants of the world of the human costs of nuclear technology, development and war, the PUCL noted.
By writing on issues which the powerful would rather forget, she has forged her ‘contribution to our collective refusal to obediently fade away’. As a writer, she has been unafraid to tackle difficult and controversial issues. In a constitutional democracy, such voices even if they shock or disturb the government ought to have free play, because dissent is the beating heart of a democracy, the statement said.
The L-G granting sanction to prosecute is a particularly egregious and constitutionally suspect exercise of state power as is evidenced by the fact that even thirteen years after the utterance of the words those words have not resulted in any violence.
Arundhati Roy, the statement said, is being prosecuted for “worrying the edges of the human imagination” for writing as if “the only thing worth globalizing is dissent” and believing that dissent is “India’s best export”. This is a tragedy for a country which prides itself on being the “mother of democracy”.
