What Attacks on GN Saibaba and Arundhati Roy Show About India

[The writer Mannish Sethi relates the court order to the arbitrary and malevolent character of law in India today.  —  Frontlines ed.]

Blind to justice

Why the December 23 order of the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court — refusing Professor Saibaba bail and issuing a notice of contempt to Arundhati Roy — takes one’s breath away.

by Manisha Sethi | The Indian Express | December 30, 2015

 

Social activists staged a protest in Nagpur Thursday, demanding Saibaba’s release on bail. (Source: Express Photo)

 Law is no stranger to prejudice or moral anxieties. Judicial pronouncements can sometimes cast aside constitutional values and defer to societal biases masquerading as righteousness. The recurrence of “collective conscience” in terror cases, where the threat of terrorism looms so large that it can overshadow the lack of evidence, is only too well known. Even so, the December 23 order of the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court takes one’s breath away. It rejected the regular bail plea moved by the lawyers of Delhi University professor, Saibaba, cancelled his interim bail which allowed him to receive treatment till December 31, and ordered him to surrender within 48 hours. Besides, the court issued a notice of criminal contempt to Arundhati Roy for her article, ‘Professor, POW’, published in Outlook magazine. The order will be remembered for its naked display of contempt for civil rights, partisanship and renunciation of judicial independence.

Wheelchair bound, Saibaba spent over a year in jail before the division bench of the Bombay High Court granted him interim bail on the plea of a social activist in June 2015. (Illustration by C R Sasikumar)

The System Says: All 59 Police Bullets Were Justified, Every One

4 San Francisco cops cleared in Alex Nieto killing

By Henry K. Lee and Kale Williams, sfgate.com

Friday, February 13, 2015 

March 24, 2014. Nieto was fatally shot by San Francisco police officers Friday evening at Bernal Heights Park. San Francisco police released the names of four officers involved in the shooting on Friday, Jan. 2, 2015, following a court order.

Four San Francisco police officers will not face charges for shooting and killing Alejandro “Alex” Nieto last year in Bernal Heights Park, because Nieto pointed a Taser shock weapon that the officers reasonably mistook for a pistol, the district attorney’s office said Friday.

The officers fired a total of 59 shots, District Attorney George Gascón said in a letter to Police Chief Greg Suhr. Two later-arriving officers opened fire on Nieto after they heard the popping of their colleagues’ gun blasts and believed Nieto was firing back, the letter said.

But Gascón’s report said all four officers had “continued to believe their lives were in danger … until Mr. Nieto’s head and weapon went down.”

The four — Lt. Jason Sawyer and Officers Roger Morse, Richard Schiff and Nathan Chew — had responded to witness reports that Nieto, a 28-year-old Mission resident, had a gun and was acting erratically on March 21.

—————————–

The Broken System: No consequence, no confidence. A response to the non-indictment of Alex Nieto’s killers. 

justice4alexnieto.org, February 13, 2015

Michael Brown jury: putting a value on a black life in the United States

Protestors in Ferguson, Missouri. ‘When black kids fill the jails and the morgues so disproportionately we are in a state of extreme dysfunction.’ Photograph: Michael B. Thomas/AFP/Getty Images

Is there a price to pay for summarily killing a man, or is it just what happens in Ferguson when one man has a badge and the other too much melanin?

• 
• • Gary Younge, theguardian.com, Friday 10 October 2014

 

 

In September 1955, an all-white jury took just 67 minutes to acquit Emmett Till’s killers. Till, 14, said either “Bye, baby” or wolf-whistled at a white woman in a grocery store in Mississippi. Three days later his body was fished out of the Tallahatchie river with a bullet in his skull, an eye gouged out and his forehead crushed on one side. “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop,” said one juror, “it wouldn’t have taken that long.”

In 2014, racism is more sophisticated but no less deadly. The grand jury investigating the killing of Michael Brown is taking its time. Brown, 18, was unarmed when he was fatally shot by police officer Darren Wilson in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, in August. Wilson has been suspended on full pay and has not been charged. The four-month period that a panel usually convenes for expired last month. The judge gave the grand jury 60 more days to make a decision, so it has until January 7 to decide whether to indict Wilson. That’s a lot of pop.

Cowardly, Hypocritical, Subservient Congressional Black Caucus Endorses Israeli Apartheid and Current War Crimes in Gaza

http://blackagendareport.com/content/cowardly-hypocritical-subservient-congressional-black-caucus-endorses-israeli-apartheid-and–

                                         Israeli President Shimon Peres hosts Marcia Fudge, chair of the US Congressional Black Caucus, and a delegation of the caucus at the president’s residence in Jerusalem.  (February, 2014)

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon, July 30, 2014

Back in the 1970s, when the Congressional Black Caucus began calling itself “the conscience of the Congress,” that was almost literally true. CBC members could be relied upon not just to reliably vote for raising wages and expenditures on housing, health care and education, but to keep the issues of full employment and opposition to unjust war near thefront of their public agendas.

By the late 1980s, a gaggle of former CBC staffers had moved through the revolving doors of elite affirmative action to become corporate lobbyists, with the same ethics and table manners as their white colleagues, but with black faces. Thanks in large part to their efforts, by 2000 a tsunami of corporate cash began filling up the coffers of incumbent CBC members, their black replacements, or in the cases of Alabama’s Earl Hilliard and Georgia’s Cynthia McKinney, their black opponents.

Only a single member of the CBC, Rep. Barabra Lee opposed President Bush’s blank check for invading anywhere he pleased in Septermber of 2001, and by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, four CBC members, some of them swimming in donations from military contractors, raced down to the White House to have their pictures taken with Bush as the bombs were about to explode over Baghdad.

Anti-COINTELPRO demonstration at Nebraska State Capitol for the Omaha Two

Banner in support of the Omaha 2 in front of Nebraska capitol

By Michael Richardson, COINTELPRO Examiner
http://www.examiner.com/cointelpro-in-national/anti-cointelpro-demonstration-at-nebraska-state-capitol-for-the-omaha-two

March 15, 2012 | Omaha — Several dozen demonstrators spread a 30 foot banner across the entrance to the Nebraska State Capitol on Tuesday in behalf of the Omaha Two.  Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (formerly David Rice) are serving life sentences at the Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln for the 1970 murder of an Omaha policeman.

FBI Director J Edgar Hoover organized the special COINTELPRO program to eliminate the movements against racism and imperialism. The targets were Black activists and other radical and revolutionary people's movements. The methods were frame-ups and imprisonment, cold-blooded murder, and campaigns of media malignment. Hoover was FBI director from 1924 to 1972.

The Omaha Two were convicted after a COINTELPRO-tainted trial where Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered evidence withheld from the jury.  Poindexter and Mondo were leaders of Omaha’s Black Panther affiliate chapter and targets of Hoover’s clandestine war of counterintelligence against domestic political activists.

Serving 41 years in prison, the Omaha Two are among America’s longest-held political prisoners.

The capitol steps demonstration was organized by Ben Jones of the Anti-Oppression Art project.  Jones used Facebook to help recruit people to help hold the giant banner.

Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa continue to maintain their innocence for the murder of Larry MInard, Sr. on August 17, 1970.  Minard and seven other Omaha police officers were lured to a vacant house by an anonymous 911 call about a woman screaming.  Instead of a woman, police found a booby-trapped suitcase filled with dynamite which exploded in Minard’s face as examined it.-

J. Edgar Hoover ordered the FBI crime laboratory to withhold a report on its analysis of a recording of the 911 call.  Omaha police had sent the tape to Washington to determine the identity of the anonymous caller.  The unknown caller presented a problem in making a case against the two Black Panther leaders.

Videotaping Philadelphia Police–legal rights and repressive reality

Even a top cop concedes a right to video arrests – but the street tells a different story

September 03, 2011|

BY JAN RANSOM, ransomj@phillynews.com

TAMERA MEDLEY begged the police officer to stop slamming her head – over and over – into the hood of a police cruiser.

Thinking they were helping, passers-by Shakir Riley and Melissa Hurling both turned their cellphone video cameras toward the melee that had erupted on Jefferson Street in Wynnefield, they said.

But then the cops turned on them.

Riley had started to walk away when at least five baton-wielding cops followed him, he said, and they beat him, poured a soda on his face and stomped on his phone, destroying the video he had just taken.

Meanwhile, two officers approached Hurling, urged her to leave and, after exchanging a few words, slammed her against a police cruiser, Hurling said. They pulled her by her hair before tossing her into the back of a cop car, she said.

Albuquerque, New Mexico: 13 dead from police shootings in past year–no justice in New Mexico

[More evidence of police impunity and the collapse of government accountability and credibility. — Frontlines ed.]

Albuquerque to seek federal probe of police conduct

By Frank Haley | August 3, 2011

ALBUQUERQUE — Responding to continued pressure from civil-rights
advocates and the families of some of the 13 people killed by
Albuquerque police in recent months, the city council has narrowly
agreed to seek a federal probe of police shootings.

After several attempts to put off the issue, the council just before
midnight Monday, Aug. 1, passed 5-4 a resolution that directs the city
to ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether there is
a pattern of civil-rights violations in the department.

Mayor Richard Berry’s office declined to say whether he would sign or
veto the measure.

Seven Black men killed by Miami Police–Where can Justice be found?

Since justice is not available in Miami, some look to Attorney General Eric Holder for justice. UPI/Roger L. Wollenberg

Miami mayor seeks federal probe of police

Aug. 4, 2011

MIAMI, Aug. 4 (UPI) — Miami’s mayor asked the U.S. Justice Department to probe the city police department after seven deadly police shootings of black men rocked Miami’s inner city.

“In light of the growing concern in the community regarding police practices and police accountability, I have concluded that an external investigation by [the Justice Department] would provide the resources, expertise and independence to begin to transform the department and assuage police-community tensions,” Mayor Tomas Regalado wrote to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Wednesday.

Regalado — who has engaged in a public battle with Miami Police Chief Miguel Exposito for more than a year — wrote he was concerned not only about the “pattern” of shootings but also about the “apparent lack of response” to questions from relatives and the community, The Miami Herald reported.

All but one of the shooting deaths remain under investigation by the state attorney’s office and police. Both agencies refuse to discuss open investigations.

Exposito told the Herald he “welcomed any federal probe into our police department.”

He said the same thing in February in a letter to the Herald after the last of the shootings after earlier demands for a Justice Department review.

India: Binayak Sen released on bail: “We are walking in a state of famine”

Human rights activist Binayak Sen is greeted by emotional family members as he left the high security Raipur Central Jail in the impoverished central Indian state of Chhattisgarh late in Raipur on April 18, 2011, three days after the Supreme Court granted him bail. Sen was arrested in 2007 on charges of waging war against India in Chhattisgarh. He was jailed in December 2010 after receiving a life sentence for sedition. AFP/STR

20/04/2011 — Interview with Binayak Sen 

After spending nearly four months in the Raipur Central Jail on charges of sedition and aiding the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), health and human rights activist  Dr. Binayak Sen was released on bail on Monday evening. In an interview with Aman Sethi at his residence in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, Dr. Sen spoke of the need to re-examine the sedition law and build a platform to tackle the structural violence, that he believes, pervades society.

Some of the most significant interventions on ideas of rights and freedom have come in the form of prison writings, for instance Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. From mundane issues like prison schedules, to your thoughts at the time, what was your time in prison like?

In prison you feel completely cut-off, as if you are only hearing the echoes of what is happening in the outside world. We received three newspapers for our barrack — The Hitavada, The Hindu and the Danik Bhaskar — but we get papers full of holes — literally. They [prison authorities] cut out all news regarding Maoists, naxalites, and anything related to the cases or trial of any of the people in jail…We also had a television that showed Doordarshan, that is how I learnt that the Supreme Court had granted me bail.

At present, the greatest violence is structural violence. Violence is not restricted to a few groups; it pervades the structure of our society. We need to break out of this structure of violence through a process of dialogue.

Could you elaborate on this idea of structural violence?

By structural violence I refer to the fact that half our children and our adults in this country suffer from malnutrition. Malnutrition casts a dark shadow over other diseases like malaria and tuberculosis.

Women Widowed by the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Hold Protest

Widows of the world’s worst industrial disaster, the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, protest in central India. They are demanding more compensation from the state government. Here’s more on the story.

Hundreds of women widowed by the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy took to the streets, demanding adequate pensions and enhanced compensation.

Balkrishna Namdev, Protester:  “It’s been 26 years since the gas tragedy, and in these 26 years the condition of the gas victims’ widows has deteriorated. The Madhya Pradesh state government has failed to provide adequate compensation to these women. Even the compensation decided by the Group of Ministers is very low.”

And their frustrations don’t end there.

Balkrishna Namdev, Protester:  “We also demand that all the gas victims, who used to receive about $13-thousand compensation, should now get another $6,800.”

Impunity and Murder in the Philippines

Asia Sentinel

04 October 2010

After years of international attention and outrage, the Philippines has only convicted fewer than 1 percent of the murderers responsible for a spate of killings of leftists, journalists and others during the reign of departed president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, according to a new study by Pacific Strategies and Assessments, a Manila-based risk assessment company. The PSA report, issued Monday, also questions whether the new administration of Benigno Aquino III has the intention to attempt to clean up the mess. “To date, President Aquino has made no categorical statement or substantive effort to shift away from Oplan Bantay Laya (Safeguarding Freedom) that rests at the core of extra-judicial killings and other human rights abuses in the country,” the report said. “His ambiguity or outright avoidance of the issue may simply be a sign that addressing the country’s extra-judicial killings problem is low on his priority list.” However, the report continues, “it could be that Aquino, like his predecessor, prefers a hard-line solution against perceived government dissenters which would favor security offensives to community development and socio-economic reform.

Bhopal gas tragedy a closed case now: US

August 20, 2010

Washington: The United States on Thursday said that the Bhopal gas tragedy is a closed case now. “Yes”, State Department Spokesman PJ Crowley told reporters when asked if US considers Bhopal gas tragedy as a closed case now. Later, the State Department official clarified that legally Bhopal gas case is closed.

In December 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal spewed toxic gas into surrounding neighbourhoods, killing thousands instantly and tens of thousands later.  In 1999, Dow Chemical Company bought Union Carbide.

This year, a court sentenced seven Indian managers to two-year jail terms. After public outrage that the sentences were not tougher, India promised to renew efforts to extradite Union Carbide’s former boss Warren Anderson.  Meanwhile, BJP and Left parties yesterday alleged that the US was trying to arm-twist India to let Dow Chemicals go scot-free with regard to its liability in the Bhopal gas tragedy.

PTI

Over 200,000 Narmada Dam Oustees Still To Be Resettled; A Crime That Goes Unpunished For 25 Years

 

People's Occupation Of The Maheshwar Dam Site January 11 2000

By Devinder Sharma

26 June, 2010
Ground Reality

For 25 years now, they have struggled to get justice. In a peaceful and democratic manner, over 200,000 people displaced from the rising waters of the Narmada dams, have waited endlessly for a rehabilitation package, which is their legitimate right. Justice has been denied to them.

Yesterday, July 24, about 200 displaced people were present in the Gandhi Bhawan, in the heart of Bhopal city, to listen to the conclusions and recommendations of the three-member Independent People’s Tribunal on displacements in the Narmada valley. Chaired by Justice (Retd.) A P Shah, former chief justice of the Delhi and Madras High Courts, I had the privilege and honour of being part of the panel. We had travelled through some of the affected areas in the Narmada valley in the first week of the month, and then spent some days putting it all together in the form of this report.

Twenty five years after the work for a series of dams on the mighty Narmada began, the displaced people, a majority of them being adivasis, have been treated worse than cattle by successive governments. Looking at their plight, and their lost years, and knowing that they will continue to be deprived of justice, I wonder why have these people not picked up arms? At a time when the UPA government is asking the naxalites in neighbouring Chhatisgarh State to give up arms and come to the negotiating table, I fail to understand why the government is not talking to those who never picked up the gun?