Were the authorities sure of what they were doing when they arrested Syed Iftikhar Gilani, the journalist son-in-law of Hurriyat leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani? This was the question the Express had asked in these very columns seven months ago. It now transpires that not only did they mess up, big time, they did their very best to hide this fact. Until three days before the government finally withdrew the case against the journalist, it had been insistent that the ‘sanction for prosecution is in order’. If it were not for some nimble footwork by Gilani’s counsel, the man may have been incarcerated for years together with nobody in the circles of power particularly concerned about this patent miscarriage of justice. Justice is truth in action and there cannot be any justice if those in authority are economical with the truth when it comes to dealing with those they label as the ‘enemies of the state’. In the process, they undermine the image of the nation and end up, ironically enough, providing a handle to those who are indeed inimical to its interests. As often happens in cases like this, institutions that should ideally act as a check to the misuse of state power, invariably play along for what they perceive as the interests of the state. In this case, too, the intelligence wing of the military took its own time — once it was pointed out that the material found in Gilani’s computer had been openly published in a Pakistani journal — to pronounce the vital opinion that it was of ‘negligible security value’. The case is of special significance to all those who deal in information, particularly media professionals. It also raises questions about what, precisely, is an ‘official secret’, and whether the colonial Official Secrets Act should deserve to be on the statute books in the first place. Now that the state has finally seen sense on this case, it is to be hoped that it draws the right lessons from it and ensure that such unconscionable and arbitrary action is never resorted to in future.
