The Supreme Court of India deserves gratitude from those who believe in the values of freedom and democracy. That “jail is the exception and bail is the rule” has been repeated endless times, yet it appears to many in India that jail is the norm and bail the exception.
So far as the media is concerned, over the years dozens of journalists have been sent to jail in states across the country. Some have been silenced in a more permanent way.
In another field, numerous personnel connected to India’s nuclear and missile industries succumbed to “suicides”, “accidents” & “break-in murders” since the 1990s, when President Clinton declared a public as well as a covert war on both nuclear & missile activity in our country.
The time has been overdue to investigate the arrest, intimidation and deaths of numerous Right to Information (RTI) activists across the country who seek to probe wrongdoing by those in authority.
Given the range of ways in which a citizen can be deprived of his or her liberty in India, it is no surprise that even so prominent a journalist as the editor who had been incarcerated in Maharashtra remains enmeshed in a criminal case.
The Supreme Court needs to set a high bar for the taking away of liberty or the confiscation of property of the citizen. Such forfeitures should not continue to take place in India in the manner that used to happen during the colonial period.
The country has a penal code that has a vintage of more than a century and a half in an era when technologies get transformed every few months. Over the decades, rather than get reduced, penal provisions have been added on to over the years, especially in economic activity.
The Prime Minister and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court can separately work to ensure that colonial laws and practices be discarded so that the governance system reflects the 21st rather than the 19th century.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
