The trial closely resembles the kangaroo court model of reaching a predetermined verdict by substituting suspicion, surmise or conjecture for substantial evidence and ignoring the facts and arguments presented by the accused. The judgment has been condemned the world over by conscientious citizens—because Dr Sen is himself a voice of conscience and civic courage.

The Sen case has become India’s L’affaire Dreyfus (the Dreyfus case), a transformative moment in French history which exposed anti-Semitic prejudices in society. A century ago, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, was falsely charged with espionage and sentenced to death. The verdict caused widespread outrage and provoked the great writer, Emile Zola, to write a searing indictment of the state under the heading J’accuse (I accuse). It’s to be hoped that the Sen case will prove therapeutic for Indian society.

Dr Sen’s trial was a grotesque travesty of justice. The police concocted a cock-and-bull story. The judge accepted it. The case against Dr Sen, businessman Piyush Guha, and alleged extremist politician Narayan Sanyal, was filed under Sections 124A and 120B of the Indian Penal Code, and sections of the Chhattisgarh Special Public Safety Act 2005 and Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. Sections 124A and 120B pertain to sedition and conspiracy for sedition. CSPSA and UAPA punish membership of and support to unlawful/terrorist organisations.

To pronounce the accused guilty, Judge Verma needed to establish beyond doubt that they directly indulged in seditious activities or conspired to abet them. He failed to do so and instead resorted to sleights-of-hand. All but one of the 97 prosecution witnesses proved unreliable or hostile. The entire case hinged on the testimony of only one person, cloth merchant Anil Kumar Singh, who claimed he witnessed the police seizure from Guha of three letters written by Sanyal.

Singh claimed to overhear a conversation between the police and Guha, while Guha was in their custody, in which he said he was given the letters by Dr Sen to be carried to top Maoist leaders. But statements made to the police in custody are not admissible as evidence. Singh didn’t accompany the police when they allegedly arrested Guha. A mere passer-by, he couldn’t have known if they planted the letters on Guha. The police admit the seizure memo wasn’t made on the spot, but only after taking Guha to the police station.

The judge wrongly accepted Singh’s hearsay and made much of Dr Sen’s 33 meetings with Sanyal over 18 months in his capacity as a doctor and People’s Union of Civil Liberties office-bearer. Several jail officials testified that the meetings were strictly supervised in the jailor’s room, thus eliminating the possibility of any letters being transferred.

This writer finds it hard to believe that such transfer could have taken place in the jailor’s chamber. Dr Sen’s wife Ilina and I visited him in Raipur jail in September 2007, with official permission. The jail superintendent and at least one constable kept a watch on our movements and conversations. Every single magazine/newspaper brought for Dr Sen was thoroughly screened. So, the story of a furtive transfer doesn’t hold much water.

Judge Verma ignored the fact that Dr Sen in his writings and speeches has opposed violence of any kind and has never been previously accused of a crime. Worse, he accepted and reconciled contradictory accounts of the place of Guha’s arrest on May 7, 2007. The police swore before the Supreme Court in 2009 that they had arrested Guha from Mahindra Hotel. But they told the Sessions court that that they arrested Guha on Station Road.

The discrepancy was explained away as a “typological error”! The judge uncritically accepted this and put the onus of proof to the contrary on Guha. This is legally impermissible. Logically, the concerned policeman should have been tried for either filing a false affidavit in the Supreme Court, or perjury in the Sessions court.

According to Guha, he was arrested on May 1 at Mahindra Hotel and kept blindfolded in illegal custody for six days and produced before a magistrate only on May 7. The judge ignored Guha’s statement to the magistrate. Had Guha’s testimony been accepted, the entire case would have collapsed. Even the inference that Sanyal is a Maoist leader is based on cases in other states, in which he hasn’t been pronounced guilty.

The prosecutor’s argument confirmed that the trial was a farce. He started by quoting Marx’s Capital, which is irrelevant to the case. He concluded with a claimed “master-stroke”—an email addressed to “Fernandes of the ISI”. He triumphantly declared: We don’t know who “Fernandes” is, but we know the ISI is Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Of course!

It didn’t strike Judge Verma as absurd that links were alleged between the intransigently secular Maoists and the fanatically religious elements whom the ISI backs. In reality, the “Fernandes” is Walter Fernandes, a former director of the Delhi-based Indian Social Institute, a Jesuit body.

In another absurdity, Judge Verma accepted the police claim that a letter by the Maoist leadership thanking Dr Sen for his work was recovered from his house. But the letter is unsigned. Supposedly two years old, it still looks fresh. It wasn’t part of any seizure memo.

The judge justified the life sentence on the ground that “the way that terrorists and Maoist organisations are killing … paramilitary forces and innocent Adivasis, and spreading fear, terror and disorder across the country … implies that this court cannot … give them the minimum sentence …”. So, the sentence was decided on political considerations, not legal ones.

The legal rationale against treating sedition cavalierly was set out by the Supreme Court in the 1962 Kedarnath Singh case. It held that sedition, defined as spreading disaffection against the state, must be interpreted not as a means of muzzling dissent—the reason it was introduced in the IPC by the colonial state and used against the Freedom Struggle—but in a manner consistent with the fundamental freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution. Sedition must involve direct incitement to violence or to public disorder.

This emphatically doesn’t apply in the present case. In 1995, the Supreme Court quashed the conviction of two Punjab government officers who publicly raised pro-Khalistan slogans after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The trial court had sentenced them to one year’s imprisonment. But the Supreme Court overturned even that by rejecting the claim that the act’s consequences would prove detrimental to India’s unity and integrity.

Dr Sen’s conviction is a huge miscarriage of justice and a judicial monstrosity worthy only of kangaroo courts in a Banana Republic. Regrettably, and to the abiding shame of India’s judicial system, Judge Verma has reduced India to that status.

An appeal will of course be filed against his judgment in the Chhattisgarh High Court. But there’s no guarantee that the High Court of the state—where the elite’s minds are poisoned by paranoia and rationalisation of a Maoist witch-hunt by a murderous state-sponsored militia, Salwa Judum—will overturn the verdict. It had refused Dr Sen bail for two years.

The Verma verdict fits in with the government’s fashioning of a militarist approach to the Maoist problem while letting off scamsters, corrupt businessmen, politicians, and those responsible for mass-scale violence—the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, the post-Babri demolition riots of 1992-93, and the butchery of Muslims in Gujarat (2002).

The official anti-Maoist strategy uses methods that are downright unconstitutional, illegal, obnoxious and inhuman. It’s as if these were calculated to aggravate disaffection in the tribal belt—rooted in appalling social indices, chronic malnourishment, and state cruelty—and thus help the Maoists.

Chhattisgarh has witnessed massive state atrocities because of its abundance of natural resources which capital wants to appropriate. To facilitate this, the government must crush the Maoists. It muzzles people like Dr Sen to demonstrate that it’s willing to be unreasonably brutal. This is the stuff of which Banana Republics are made.

Of the major parties, the CPI alone has officially condemned Dr Sen’s conviction. The Congress, the BJP and the CPM have refused to do so—the BJP out of its machismo and suspicion of civil liberties, and the CPM, even more short-sightedly, because of its “Naxal problem” in West Bengal. The Congress says dismissing the verdict would amount to admitting that India is a Banana Republic. But that’s standing logic on its head.

If the Congress has any sense, and unless it really wants to turn India into a Banana Republic, it should condemn the verdict and dismantle the entire structure of oppression built into the colonial law on sedition. The Verma verdict demands no less. (IPA Service)