The curtains came down on the 12-year-old saga of Operation Leech in a Kolkata court on Monday,with the stage set for the release of 34 Myanmar nationals undergoing a trial on gun-running charges for the past four years. This was one of the rare cases in which the CBI agreed to participate in a plea bargain,perhaps since a detailed judicial order would have exposed the grey areas in investigations into the mysterious 1998 military intelligence operation on the Landfall Islands. The Myanmarese,as per the plea bargain agreement,were given a sentence of one year and three months and have to pay a fine of Rs 6,000 each. However,as their lawyer Akshay Sharma pointed out,since they have already been in prison for over five years and been detained for 12 years,they should be freed immediately. The order pronounced today shows how much flexibility there is while following the plea bargaining procedure. There was no conviction and neither did the accused plead guilty to any of the charges, he said. Human rights activist Nandita Haksar,who has been campaigning for the early release of the Myanmar nationals,however,said that the order on fine was unfair. There is no scope for imposing fine during a plea bargain and this option was never taken up during arguments, she said. While the trial may have technically ended,the uncertainty over the future of the 34 accused remains. During the plea bargain arguments,the defence lawyers had filed appeals requesting that the Myanmarese not be deported back to Burma but instead be allowed to stay in India as refugees. They had also informed the court that they had obtained under consideration certificates from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Haksar says that during their discussions with the Kolkata jail administration and officials in the state government,they received a lukewarm response to the Myanmarese being immediately released in view of the UNHCR certificate. As far as the lawyers and supporters of the alleged gunrunners are concerned,the plea bargaining has succeeded at least in that an appeal against acquittal cannot be filed in the Supreme Court. But the final decision on whether to allow the Myanmarese to live as refugees in Delhi or to give them the liberty to walk free may well end up being a political one.
