Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Full Chapter A Life in Law and Activism 1St Edition Sudha Bharadwaj PDF
Full Chapter A Life in Law and Activism 1St Edition Sudha Bharadwaj PDF
Sudha Bharadwaj
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/a-life-in-law-and-activism-1st-edition-sudha-bharadwa
j/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
https://textbookfull.com/product/national-security-secrecy-
comparative-effects-on-democracy-and-the-rule-of-law-sudha-setty/
https://textbookfull.com/product/shareholder-activism-and-the-
law-the-future-of-us-corporate-governance-1st-edition-ekrem-
solak/
https://textbookfull.com/product/everyday-communalism-riots-in-
contemporary-uttar-pradesh-1st-edition-sudha-pai/
https://textbookfull.com/product/extinction-rebellion-and-
climate-change-activism-breaking-the-law-to-change-the-world-
oscar-berglund/
Global Perspectives on Stem Cell Technologies 1st
Edition Aditya Bharadwaj (Eds.)
https://textbookfull.com/product/global-perspectives-on-stem-
cell-technologies-1st-edition-aditya-bharadwaj-eds/
https://textbookfull.com/product/multi-dimensional-approaches-
towards-new-technology-ashish-bharadwaj/
https://textbookfull.com/product/industrial-applications-of-
marine-biopolymers-1st-edition-parappurath-narayanan-sudha/
https://textbookfull.com/product/lgbtq-activism-in-central-and-
eastern-europe-radzhana-buyantueva/
https://textbookfull.com/product/competition-law-in-china-a-law-
and-economics-perspective-jingyuan-ma/
A Life in Law and Activism
SUDHA BHARADWAJ
SPEAKS
Layout : Vinay C
Dedicated to all those who have been
unjustly imprisoned for exercising their
constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression
INTRODUCTION
Sudha Bharadwaj and the Right to Dissent
Arvind Narrain......................................................................... 19
ANTI-TERROR LAWS
UAPA: Law as Instrumentality of
State Tyranny and Violence
V. Suresh....................................................................................43
BHIMA KOREGAON
The Bhima Koregaon–Elgar Parishad Conspiracy Case:
A PUCL Background Document
Shalini Gera and V. Suresh.......................................................83
APPENDICES
1. Sections 2, 13, and 15 of the Unlawful Activities
(Prevention) Act (UAPA) .................................................. 287
2. Section 65(3) of the Madhya Pradesh
Industrial Relations (MPIR) Act, 1960 and
Section 17(B) of the Industrial Disputes Act
(IDA), 1947.........................................................................290
3. Problems in Section 2 (Definitions) of the
Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act
(CSPSA), 2005 ..................................................................292
4. Janki Sidar Case................................................................296
5. Kashiram Yadav v. Union of India...................................298
6. Extract from Janhit Bulletin, October 2013..................... 300
7. Sections 4, 5A, 6, and 17 of
the Land Acquisition Act (LAA), 1894..............................303
8. Section 25N and 25F of
the Industrial Disputes Act (IDA), 1947........................... 310
11
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has had a long gestation period. It first took shape with
the interview of Sudha Bharadwaj, conducted by Darshana Mitra
and Santanu Chakraborty, in 2012. Additions to that document
were made by Atindriyo Chakrabarty who did the hard work of
providing meaningful and illustrative annotations by digging
into contemporary archives on Chhattisgarh. Siddhant Kalra did
another valuable round of editing.
Special thanks to Shalini Gera who looked over the manuscript
from the perspective of all changes that the current year has
brought with it and provided useful updates in the form of
footnotes. Since the interview, a number of individuals read the
whole text and provided inputs, indicating its value as a resource
and pressing for the urgency of its public release. The assistance
of Lekha Adavi, Poorna Ravishanker and Vinay C has been
invaluable in the editing of the manuscript.
The inspiring activists at PUCL including V. Suresh and Kavita
Srivastava saw the potential of this work and were instrumental
in getting this out as a PUCL publication.
We would also like to thank the PUCL President, Mr. Ravi Kiran
for providing a foreword at short notice.
12
13
Foreword
Ravi Kiran Jain
National President, PUCL
1 People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) (2020), PUCL: Current situation
in the country worse than what it was during Emergency, in GroundXero,
26th June, available at https://www.groundxero.in/2020/06/26/pucl-
current-situation-in-the-country-worse-than-what-it-was-during-
emergency/, last seen on 9/9/2020.
Internal Security Act (MISA) to target activists and opposition
14
politicians in the period of the emergency. It is estimated that
today there are thousands of activists and ordinary people who
have been imprisoned by the authorities.
In the period of the ‘undeclared emergency’, the arrests of human
rights activists and dissenters have been in three big waves. The
state targeting of human rights activists began with an open-
ended FIR, which has been used to arrest as of now sixteen
activists in a false and fabricated case with respect to violence
following the Bhima Koregoan event. The state followed this
with the illegal detention of all political leaders and civil society
activists in Kashmir, following the unconstitutional abrogation
of Article 370 of the Constitution. The latest phase has been the
arrests that have followed the Delhi pogrom in which peaceful
anti-CAA protesters were wrongly, and maliciously, charged
with having been complicit in the Delhi pogrom.
While this development parallels the horrors of the ‘declared
emergency’ in every way, what makes the ‘undeclared emergency’
so much more dangerous are the following four factors:
Firstly, the attack on human rights defenders as ‘urban
naxals’, ‘anti-national’, and ‘anti-social’ and using that label to
launch and justify both state repression and induce targeted
personalised attacks and assassinations as has happened to
Gowri Lankesh and others. This is part of the state-sanctioned
politics of violence unleashed on all those who oppose the
majoritarian agenda of the state.
Secondly, the power of the coercive state is further
supplemented by a mob, which operates outside the rule of law.
The mob’s lawless actions of murder and violence are justified
and legitimised on the platform of a majoritarian nationalism
and these actions threaten the very rubric of life governed by
15
the Constitution.
Thirdly, the media is awash with hate speech against minorities.
The hate speech has further crystallised and unfortunately
deepened the ‘communal common sense’ that Muslims are
outsiders to the Indian nation and not entitled to the right to
equal citizenship. This has resulted in ‘social and economic
boycotts’ of Muslim businesses and small vendors and calls for
the physical elimination of the Muslim community, all of which
presage a dangerous phase reminiscent of Nazi Germany.
Fourthly, the ‘shock’ induced by the COVID-19 pandemic
and the subsequent lockdown has been used to push through
radical pro-corporate measures such as anti-labour reforms,
dilution of social welfare legislation, land laws, farm laws, and
environmental safeguards.
How do we envisage a way forward in this challenging time?
Firstly, we must defend the values of the Constitution. We have
to defend the values of freedom in all its dimensions, the idea
of substantive equality, and the importance of fraternity as ‘a
mode of associated living’. Our defence of constitutional values
has to be imbued with the spirit of what Ambedkar called
‘constitutional morality’.
Secondly, while the defence of constitutional values is important,
by itself it may not be enough. We must recognise that while
protests against unjust policies are vital, ‘no is not enough’. We
must build a positive programme that has the ability to capture
the wider public imagination.
Thirdly, we have to be able to inspire more and more people
to break their individual silos of isolation and begin to come
together to question unjust state actions. Though people are
dissatisfied with the status quo, they feel that nothing will
change and so prefer to do nothing. We have to alter that feeling
16
of helplessness and disempowerment with more solidarity
actions in defence of the Constitution, and protest against
unjust persecution. If people begin to come together in protest,
solidarity, and resistance, that itself can ignite the demand that
‘another world is possible’.
It is in this context that we at PUCL are proud to bring out a
publication that documents the life and struggle of Sudha
Bharadwaj who is one of our own—an inspirational human rights
lawyer and activist who has devoted her life to the struggle of the
most marginalised. She has spent more than two years in jail
since she was falsely arrested, under the draconian UAPA, with
no end in sight.
Sudha’s arrest under the draconian UAPA only demonstrates yet
again why the UAPA is at odds with the vision of a democracy
founded on the basic principles of any rule of law jurisprudence:
namely, that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty,
that when the liberty of the individual is at stake the trial must
be conducted expeditiously, and that the state must not use the
criminal justice machinery in a vindictive manner.
The struggle against the UAPA is not just for the release of the
many detained but is really a struggle for the protection of the
right to dissent. The protection of the right to dissent is at its
heart a call to defend the values of the freedom struggle, which
stand embodied in the Constitution.
This short book nourishes our constitutional imagination and
we hope it will inspire young people to come out and demand
the repeal of unjust laws like the UAPA that criminalise dissent
and also demand the withdrawal of prosecution against all those
falsely arrested.
17
INTRODUCTION
18
19
SUDHA BHARADWAJ
AND THE RIGHT TO DISSENT
Arvind Narrain
2 Shaheen Welfare Association v. Union Of India & Ors, (1996), SCC (2) 616,
JT 1996 (2) 719, available at https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1208997/, last
seen on 10/9/2020.
And just like in the world of 1984, the innocent have become
the accused, those working for the Constitution are accused of 21
working against it, and the actual perpetrators of violence roam
freely on the streets and occupy positions of power. The innocent
are meanwhile lodged in jail indefinitely without trial.
The final section in the book comprises the interview with
Sudha Bharadwaj. It covers Sudhaji’s journey through activism
and law for over forty years. This part of the book, based on
an unpublished interview that Darshana Mitra and Santanu
Chakraborty did with Sudhaji in 2012, reflects on her life and
work. Although the interview was conducted over eight years
ago, its content is as relevant—if not more—today. Some of the
insights in the interview have been contextualized through the
use of extensive footnotes. The footnotes also provide updated
information on cases and incidents where required. The
interview’s insights are best understood if the reader engages in
a reading with full attention to the footnotes.
3 Hari Narke, Ed., Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Vol-
20, pp. 445-55.
address human suffering using the ideals of the Constitution. To
treat this form of ‘constitutional faith’ as a subversive activity 25
is to seek to criminalise the very attempt to realise the ideal of
‘Justice: Social, Economic, and Political’.
Even as this book is really a documentation of Sudhaji’s life, we
know that Sudhaji herself may not be too comfortable with being
the focus here. There is an innate modesty that runs right through
the interview, and we can imagine her saying that it is not the
one person but really the many that should be written about. In
the interview, Sudhaji, while seeing the portraits of judges in the
National Judicial Academy, reflects on the importance of having
similar portraits of clients and ordinary people who persist in
the face of impossible odds, whom she sees as the ‘real heroes’.
A close reading of this detailed interview also exposes the claim
of the state that those arrested under the rubric of being ‘urban
naxals’ endanger the safety and security of India. Instead, this
book will show that lives such as that of Sudha Bharadwaj are
exemplary lives. Sudhaji and the others arrested using the ‘urban
naxal’ tag, work tirelessly to bring that Preambular promise of
Justice: Social, Economic and Political to the most marginalised
and exploited sections of the Indian population.
4 ‘She invoked awe and reverence as a woman who toiled amongst the most
socially turbulent parts of the country with quiet strength and navigated
the corridors of power with the claims of the powerless, all while exuding
both the idealism of someone who had worked with India’s
26
poorest, as well as the practical experience of what the law meant
at the grassroots. The Visiting Professorship was in addition
to her continuing human rights work as the General Secretary,
PUCL (Chhattisgarh), the National Secretary, PUCL, and Vice
President, the Indian Association of Peoples Lawyers (IAPL).
This phase of Sudha Bharadwaj’s life, which combined being
a lawyer, an activist, and an academic, was interrupted by her
arrest. She was detained on 28 August 2018, under provisions of
the UAPA (Sections 13, 16, 17, 18, 18B, 20, 38, 39, and 40) and
under Sections 153A, 505(1) (b), 117, 120(b), 121, 121A, 124A and
34 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). She has been in custody ever
since, without a trial, and has been denied bail multiple times.
As detailed in Section 3 of this book, the events that led to
Sudhaji’s arrest began with the protests around the attacks on
Dalits who were marking the anniversary of Bhima Koregaon in
December 2017. The state’s arbitrary responses to the attacks
and civil society’s efforts to counter state action set the stage
for the persecution of activists. The subsequent state response
to the violent counter-protests, that followed the attack on
Dalits at Bhima Koregaon, was to launch a sweeping attack
on human rights and arrest human rights activists around the
country. Activists countered this by mobilising legal frameworks
and filing cases questioning the legality of state action both in
jurisdictional High Courts and in the Supreme Court.
an air of warmth and dignity. Her own life and work evoked reverence
and inspiration among even the most cynical of us.’
Yashita Gour, (2018), Sudha Bharadwaj’s student pens a heartfelt tribute
to her teacher at National Law University, Delhi, in The Leaflet, 1st
September, available at https://www.theleaflet.in/to-maam-with-love-
sudha-bharadwajs-student-pens-a-heartfelt-tribute-to-her-teacher-at-
national-law-university-delhi/, last seen on 10/9/2020.
The hearings in the High Court, Magistrates Court, and finally
in the Supreme Court were reported extensively in the media. 27
The hearings resulted only in delaying judicial custody, and
finally the Supreme Court in Romila Thapar v. Union of India5
dismissed the prayer of eminent citizens for an independent and
credible investigation monitored by the Supreme Court. The
majority opinion held that,
As presently advised, we find force in the argument
of the State that the crime under investigation in FIR
No.4/2018, inter alia is to investigate the allegations that
a banned organization, CPI(Maoist), organises events
such as referred to in FIR No.2/2018 to propagate ill-will
in different classes and turn them into unconstitutional
and violent activities. Further, such activities were
purportedly carried out by Kabir Kala Manch, Sudhir
Dhawale and other activists in different areas in the State
of Maharashtra by delivering vituperative speeches and
to spread false history, disputable statements and incite
objectionable slogans, sing songs and road dramas and
distribution of objectionable and provocative pamphlets
and books also.
However, J. Chandrachud delivered a strong dissent noting that:
The invocation of our jurisdiction under Article 32 in
this case is founded on the grievance that a group of
five human rights activists is sought to be persecuted
for espousing the cause of the marginalised which is
considered to be ‘unpopular’. Conscious as the Court is
of the public interest in the effective administration of
5 Romila Thapar & Ors v. Union of India & Ors, WP (Crl.) 260/2018,
Judgment on 28/9/2018, available at https://main.sci.gov.in/supreme
court/2018/32319/32319_2018_Judgement_28-Sep-2018.pdf, last seen
on 10/9/20.
criminal justice, it cannot be oblivious to the overriding
28 constitutional concern to secure the dignity of the
individual. The key to the balance between the two lies in
a fair, independent and impartial investigation of crime.
As a matter of principle, I am unable to agree with the
views expressed by the learned Chief Justice and my
learned brother Justice AM Khanwilkar.
Following the dismissal of the petition, and the expiry of the
interim directions for home arrest of those arrested, the state
remanded Sudhaji into judicial custody and has since then in
total, arrested 16 prominent activists from across India.
Als endlich alles fertig war, ging ich hinaus in die milde
Frühlingsnacht, durchschritt die stattlichen, so friedlich daliegenden
Ruinen, unter deren Mauern wir unser Lager aufgeschlagen hatten,
und befand mich plötzlich in einem kreisrunden, oben offnen Hofe,
von dem aus sich die vier Flügel der Kirche nach den vier
Himmelsgegenden erstrecken. Der Hof ist von einem unvergleichlich
schönen Säulengang umgeben gewesen, von dem noch jetzt viele
Bogen erhalten sind, und in der Mitte erhob sich in vergangenen
Tagen die Säule, auf welcher St. Simon lebte und starb. Ich kletterte
über die Steinhaufen bis zu dem die Basis bildenden Felsblock; es
war ein mächtiger, schiefriger Stein mit einer Vertiefung in der Mitte,
in der sich, wie in einer kleinen Schüssel, klares Regenwasser
gesammelt hatte. Ich wusch mir Hände und Gesicht darin. Die Nacht
war mondlos; eine verfallne Pracht, standen die Pfeiler und Bogen
im tiefen Schatten da, still wie ein unbewegter See lag die Luft, alle
Müdigkeit und aller Ärger fielen von der Seele ab, sie stand dem
Himmel und dem Frühling offen. Ich saß und überdachte, welch
einen Streich das Schicksal in diesen Stunden dem grimmigen
Heiligen gespielt. Für diese eine Nacht hatte es seinen Thron der
Bitternis einem Menschenkinde überlassen, dessen rosige Träume
einer tiefen inneren Zufriedenheit entstammten, die er wohl als der
erste verdammt haben würde. Bei solchem Sinnen nickte mir ein
großer Stern zu, der über den in Trümmer stehenden Säulengang
heraufgeklettert war, und wir beide kamen überein, daß es besser
sei, über Himmel und Erde dahinzuwandern, als bis zum Ende der
Tage auf einer Säule zu sitzen.
Am nächsten Tage ging ich daran, den östlich und nordöstlich der
Kirche gelegenen Dörfern des Djebel Sim'ān einen Besuch
abzustatten. Ein einstündiger Ritt in rein östlicher Richtung brachte
uns nach Burdjkeh, das den unverfälschten Charakter dieser Dörfer
des äußersten Nordens trägt. So hat es den fast unvermeidlichen
großen, viereckigen Turm. Alles Mauerwerk war massiv; oft waren
die Steine nicht einmal zu richtigen Lagen geschichtet, und wenn
schon, so zeigten diese Lagen ganz verschiedene Tiefen. Die Kirche
hatte eine viereckige, über die Mauern des Schiffes hinausgebaute
Apsis. Jedes Fenster krönte ein fortlaufender Fries, der sich in der
Höhe der Brüstung von einem Fenster zum anderen hinüberzog und
beim letzten in einer Spirale endete. Er machte den Eindruck eines
Bandes, das um die Öffnungen geschlungen, und dessen Enden
aufgerollt worden waren.
Kal'at Sim'ān, Westtor.
Grabmal, Kāturā.