NEW DELHI: It has been felt for quite some time that injustice is being done to a large number of people in India who have been languishing in jail either as under-trials whose cases have not been heard for several years, or who have unjustly remained incarcerated, either because the police have fabricated evidence against them, or for want of proper legal assistance, have had to spend many years there.
Many such persons in jail belong to India’s minorities and have been accused only on suspicion and on preconceived notions that all persons of that community are terrorists. Whenever a bomb blast or such other terrorist event occurs, the police are often unable to trace out the real culprit, and yet have to show that the crime has been solved. Consequently, very often, the police rush to implicate and charge a large number of youths of that minority community on mere suspicion, whose bail application is very often rejected and who consequently spend several years in jail just awaiting trial.
In such matters, either the police often fabricate evidence against them to justify their acts and secure conviction, or the cases result in acquittal of innocent accused persons after they have spent several years in jail. A classic case is of that of a young boy, Aamir, who was 17 years of age when arrested, and who spent 14 years in jail after which he was found innocent.
A revealing article in Tehelka recently said that innocent Muslims have been jailed with impunity in India over the past decade because it was easy to jail them. Within hours of any terror attack, a bunch of Muslim boys would be arrested, and their names aired in the media as ‘masterminds’. Their guilt was assumed, it did not need to be proved.
Since 2001, a terrible maxim had seeped into the Indian mainstream: All Muslims may not be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims. And it did not matter if you caught the wrong ones. Everyone only wanted the illusion of security and “action taken”. Those who raised hard questions were scorned as “anti-national”.
All this is triggering new cycles of hate and revenge. Despair turns citizens into perpetrators, from the hunted to the hunter. Young men who have spent long years in jail cannot find jobs or houses on rent even when acquitted, their families are ostracised, and sisters find themselves unmarriageable because their brothers have been branded as terrorists. Unless this cycle of hate is now reversed, we are heading for terrible times, for injustice breeds hatred and violence.
This being the situation, it has been decided by a group of people headed by me and including eminent lawyer Majeed Menon, the film producer and social activist Mahesh Bhatt, Asif Azmi and other like-minded people to set up an organisation called “The Court of Last Resort”.
The concept of this idea has come from an organisation founded way back in 1948 by the eminent American criminal lawyer Erle Stanley Gardner, who later wrote the Perry Mason novels. In his book “The Court of Last Resort”, Erle Stanley Gardner mentions about the organisation which he set up consisting mainly of lawyers, who took up cases of persons whom they thought were wrongly accused or unjustly convicted. The organisation which we are starting in India will bear the same name “The Court of Last Resort” and have its headquarters in New Delhi, with me as its patron. It will have state units in all states of India.
The organisation appeals to the like-minded people among the public, particularly to lawyers, retired judges, academicians, students, social activists, professionals, media persons, etc. to help and get associated with this enterprise. It is made clear that this is being done for no personal benefit to any of us but purely because of our sincere desire that justice should be done to everybody, and no section of society is made to feel that it is being discriminated against.
Justice Markandey Katju
Chairman, Press Council of India
Former judge of Supreme Court of India
Published in The Express Tribune, April 8th, 2013.
