Life Sentence for Activist Raises Concerns Over Civil Liberties in India

When the trial of Indian human-rights activist Binayak Sen concluded on Dec. 24 with a sentence of life imprisonment, the reaction was resounding: Indian national dailies cried foul, Nobel laureates around the world protested and Human Rights Watch accused the Indian government of attempting to "silence peaceful political dissent." After decades of work as a doctor and civil-liberties activist in the eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh, one of the country's most problematic areas and plagued by a violent Maoist insurgency, the court found Sen guilty of sedition.

In India, which prides itself on its rambunctious but tolerant democracy, Sen's conviction has raised serious concerns about free speech and called into question the soundness of reasoning in the Indian judicial system. Activists in India view Sen's conviction not just as an isolated miscarriage of justice, but the latest incident in a troubling trend in the country, where they say basic civil liberties are being trampled by the government's goals of economic growth and security.

Nowhere is this balance between security and individual rights more tenuous than in Chhattisgarh, where Sen had been most active. In the state and surrounding areas, the Indian government faces one of its gravest threats: the Maoist insurgent group, or Naxals. Earlier this year, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh reaffirmed that the group, which controls large swaths of India's eastern tribal belt, is the country's biggest internal security threat.

Sen worked in the region to expand rural health care and as an advocate for groups under-served by the state government. He founded a hospital and trained women to provide basic health care in remote communities without access to public medical care. He served as an adviser to the state government's public-health committee until May 2007, when he was accused of aiding a Maoist group operating in the area, branded an enemy of the state and put in jail.

During his two-year trial, the prosecution accused Sen of acting as an intermediary for the Maoists, claiming that during Sen's repeated visits to an alleged Maoist's prison cell he had acted as a courier for the Naxal leadership. Sen has consistently denied acting as a middleman, maintaining that the visits were made as a physician and representative of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, a leading Indian human-rights organization, and were conducted with police consent and supervision. Sen's lawyers accused the prosecution of fabricating evidence.

Sen was convicted under India's sedition law, a colonial holdover that was used by the British against Mohandas Gandhi. The law gives wide berth to the courts in determining what is considered sedition, and has been rarely used. But according to Colin Gonsalves, the executive director of the Human Rights Law Network in New Delhi, that is changing. "There's a huge explosion of the use of this section to deter activists from speaking against the state," he says.

The provincial court's guilty verdict, coupled with the charge's maximum sentence of life in prison for the 61-year old, raised eyebrows in India's legal community. "I've never seen such a weakly reasoned order in criminal law," says Gonsalves. "The judgment is very weak, almost as if there was political interference."

Despite the criticism of the ruling and the widespread belief that it could well be overturned by India's Supreme Court, the government has evidently been content to let the case resolve itself in the courts. "Binayak Sen has been convicted by a court of law," Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said following the ruling. "That judgment according to many people is an unsatisfactory judgment. It may be unsatisfactory but the only way that it can be corrected is by filing an appeal."

Critics of the judgment claim that Sen was being targeted because he found fault in the government's heavy-handed methods in combating the Maoist insurgents, particularly by supporting Salwa Judum, a paramilitary force that forcibly cleared hundreds of villages in Chhattisgarh and displaced tens of thousands in an effort to disrupt the Maoists' activity in the area. In a 2005 memo, Sen outlined evidence of torture and abuse by the group. "In this crisis, we appeal to all democratic forces, all human rights organizations, to join hands in investigating the reality of the Salwa [Judum]," he wrote.

Finding a solution to the Naxal problem has proven difficult. Between 2006 and 2009, nearly 1,000 members of the Indian security forces were killed — almost the same number as coalition forces killed during the same period in war-torn Afghanistan. So far, the government has made little progress in its 50-year battle against the insurgents, who operate within 20 of India's 28 states. To help security forces quell the group, the government has given them greater legal leeway to detain and investigate potential suspects. With the legal flexibility, however, has come a cost. "It's empowering security forces to detain people and coerce confessions," says Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. "That's not to say that Maoists aren't abusive or violent, but this is not the way for the state to meet the challenge."

Targeting activists — or even sympathizers — diverts attention from an effective counterinsurgency campaign, says Ajai Sahni, the executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi. "It's a process of punishment by trial," Sahni says. "The trial process can be so damaging to people that simply putting a man on trial and incarcerating can inflict tremendous punishment and be used as an example."

But the slow machinery of the Indian justice system can serve as a deterrent in itself. When Sen was arrested in 2007, he spent months in jail without being charged. His trial took over two years to complete, and much of that time he spent behind bars. "A number of people held under [the sedition] laws haven't been tried, the poor don't have lawyers, there's no legal aid and the charges against them are vague," says Ramesh Gopalakrishnan, a South Asian specialist at Amnesty International. "Some are human-rights defenders and some are Maoists. But you have to charge them; you can't hold them forever."

This week, Sen is in court again to prove his innocence. On Monday, his legal team, now headed by Ram Jethmalani, a high profile lawyer and MP, put forth his appeal with the Chhattisgarh high court to challenge the life sentence. "The whole case is nothing but a political persecution," Jethmalani said during the hearing. Sen will now try to convince the court that he has lived his life as a defender of human rights, not as an enemy of the state.