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Journalism of Courage
In the run-up to his much publicised 60th birthday, Amitabh Bachchan was asked by a newsweekly if he agreed with the politics of his friend Bal Thackeray. Bachchan unhesitantly described the Shiv Sena chief as 8216;a close friend from a very early age8217; and added that they had 8216;great regard and respect for each other8217;. Within days of the publication of the interview came Thackeray8217;s customary Dussehra message. And that message has turned out to be so incendiary that it probably shook even a die-hard admirer like Bachchan.
Thackeray8217;s appeal to Hindus to form suicide squads to take on Muslims is by far the most brazen incitement of terrorism. Indeed, Thackeray has surpassed all his old records in Muslim bashing. Unwittingly, he has also served a grim reminder of how the seemingly secular terrorism law operates differently with regard to Hindus and minorities. However grave the implications of his speech, Thackeray cannot and will not be hauled up under any of the otherwise draconian provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism Act POTA. This is thanks to an improvement POTA is claimed to have made on its notorious forerunner, Terrorism and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act TADA. While POTA focuses on terrorism, TADA had provisions dealing with terrorist as well as disruptive activities. This meant that even if no terrorist act was committed, a person was liable to be booked under the provision of disruptive activities in TADA if he had written an inflammatory article or delivered a incendiary speech. Such a thing cannot happen any more because when POTA came into being last year, the NDA government excluded disruptive activities from its purview ostensibly to check the abuse of the law.
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The hue of terrorism 8212; saffron or green 8212; will determine whether an activity comes under POTA8217;s ambit or not |
The communal bias is built into the law. This is evident even from the Law Commission8217;s 173rd report, which provided the blueprint for POTA. In a rather questionable analysis, the Law Commission traces religious militancy in India to bomb blasts that rocked Mumbai in 1993. 8216;8216;Religious militancy, which had first raised its head in 1993 with bomb explosions in Mumbai, continues to make its presence felt,8217;8217; it said, in the report submitted in 2000. The erudite authors of the Law Commission report, including former Supreme Court judge Jeevan Reddy, make no acknowledgement of the obvious fact that the bomb blasts were a reaction to another instance of religious militancy, the Babri Masjid demolition, and the subsequent communal violence in Mumbai and elsewhere.
Mercifully, for all the bias that works in Thackeray8217;s favour in POTA8217;s framework, there are provisions in the ordinary law that could get him. The most obvious one being Section 153-A of the Indian Penal Code which seeks to punish those who promote enmity between different groups on the ground of religion. It is however doubtful whether the Congress-NCP government in Maharashtra has the political will to take action against Thackeray. The same government made an abortive attempt in July 2000 to arrest and prosecute him under Section 153-A for his writings in his newspaper, Saamna, during 1992-93 riots. The state government8217;s inordinate delay in granting sanction to prosecute Thackeray came in handy to the magistrate to let him off even without considering the chargesheet. This, despite the fact that the law of limitation does not apply to the government8217;s delay in granting sanction. Like Bachchan, members of the executive and judiciary too seem to have soft corner for Thackeray.
