Jamia and justice

The decision of the Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi to provide legal aid to two of its students accused of being the perpetrators of the Delhi serial blasts is a step in the right direction coming as it does on the heels of the Nanavati Commission report which has reopened festering wounds over the Gujarat riots in which Muslims were wantonly massacred as police looked on. Though the Jamia move has been criticised on political grounds, which is only natural given the nature of the national discourse on the issue of domestic terrorism, on the one hand, and the involvement of Muslims in the recent bomb blasts on the other hand, it is pertinent that a level-headed approach is taken to the purely humanitarian gesture by the university. The issue here is, as Jamia Vice-Chancellor Professor Mushirul Hasan said, about “principles” not politics, which tragically has now been reduced to viewing both terrorism and humanitarian issues through the narrow prism of majority-minority politics.
Though the police have denied Muslims’ allegation of a witch-hunt against the community following the recent serial blasts across the country, there is no denying the fact there is more than a grain of truth in the allegation, which is all the more reason for applauding the Jamia move. But on the flip side there is also the issue of how the Indian police are conditioned to behave. A relic of the British Raj, the police even after 60-plus years of independence behave in exactly the same way they were originally conditioned to act against the natives. Police rudeness is a big issue in the UK and the authorities are taking it very seriously. But Indian police even in this age behave as if human rights are some luxury only the West can afford and that wanton arrests and beating up of suspects are the norm not the exception. Things are just getting worse and any sensible man, let alone a Muslim, will think twice before approaching the police for assistance if he can help it. The worst part is that the picture of a rude, abusive and draconian police as the norm has been so thoroughly ingrained in the popular consciousness that there is no public demand to rectify the rather grim situation. While one has to applaud the police for having brought the guilty from previous terror acts to justice, most of the time many innocents are caught up in their overzealousness to parade an array of ‘terrorists’ before the press and the judiciary based on pure circumstantial evidence. And with courts taking more than a decade to pronounce verdicts on terror cases, it is only natural many innocents’ and their families’ lives are ground to the dust under the wheels of the slow-moving justice juggernaut.
In the backdrop of these tragic realities, the move by Jamia Millia should be applauded, for the Indian penal code upholds the principle of ‘innocent until found guilty’. As most of those arrested in the blast case are from the middle and lower middle class it goes without saying that most of them will be unable to able to put up a good defence in court and that could lead to miscarriage of justice. While it is deplorable that police go scot-free in their violation of human rights and the principles of natural justice by imprisoning many of the accused for long periods without a shred of evidence, the more sickening part of the issue is the attitude of the political class, both the Right and the Left, to that tends to ghettoise Muslims from the national mainstream much against the wishes of the community. Therefore, any opposition or support from the political class on the Jamia move has no relevance, particularly since minority issues have now been turned into political football. Since ‘justice should not only be done but it should be seen to be done,’ Jamia’s move is a right step.

This is an editorial published in Oman Tribune on Sept. 27, 2008