Basil Fernando

The Committee on Reforms of the Criminal Justice System presented its report to L. K. Advani, the deputy prime minister of India, on April 21, 2003. The recommendations made by the committee will remove all safeguards to protect people¡¦s civil liberties available in Indian criminal law. The recommendations include virtual undermining of the presumption of innocence, abandoning proof beyond a reasonable doubt and substituting a lesser standard of proof, abandoning criminal trials and adopting a civil arbitration approach, abandoning the right of silence of the accused, the admissibility of confessions in trials and the appointment of a police officer as a director general of public prosecutions. The total impact of these changes will be a draconian police state.

The worst affected will be the Dalits, the indigenous people and minorities. The rich and the powerful have always enjoyed absolute impunity. The organisations of Dalits struggling to liberate themselves will have to pay a heavy price. Bondage and torture will be easily revived with no effective response to tyranny. The upper-caste right-wing organisations that have gained tremendous power in recent times will now also have the complete backing of the police. These words from the novel The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is grim reminder of what lies ahead: "They heard the thud of wood on flesh. Boot on bone. On teeth. The muffled grunt when a stomach is kicked in. The muted crunch of skull on cement. The gurgle of blood on a man¡¦s breath when his lung is torn by the jagged end of a broken rib. Blue-lipped and dinner-plate-eyed, they watched, mesmerised by something that they sensed but didn¡¦t understand: the absence of caprice in what the policemen did. The abyss where anger should have been; the sober, steady brutality, the economy of it all."

The Dalit movement must take up the fight to see that these recommendations will never be implemented. A major campaign to compel the Indian government to ratify the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT) and to make torture a crime punishable with serious penal consequences is highly essential to resist the fascist agenda.