Editor,
Amartya Sen rightly said, “Under British rule, Indians were often arrested and imprisoned without trial, and some were kept in prison for a long time. As a young man, I had hoped that as India became independent, this unjust system, in use in colonial India, would stop. This has not, alas, happened, and the unsupportable practice of arresting and keeping accused human beings in prison without trying them has continued in free and democratic India.”
Citing data from the National Crime Records Bureau, the People’s Union of Civil Liberties in its draft report pointed out that out of 8,371 persons arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) between 2015 and 2020, only 235 were convicted. The high rate of acquittal (97.2 percent) showed that prosecution under the UAPA did not have merit in the huge majority of cases.
Indeed, the data that out of 8,371 persons arrested under the UAPA between 2015 and 2020, only 2.8 percent were convicted raises serious questions about whether this law should be pursued in an independent, democratic country.
A democracy cannot survive without dissent and free speech. It needs to be reviewed whether the UAPA tends to erase lines of demarcation between political dissent and criminal activity.
Sujit De,
Kolkata