PROTESTS WITHOUT A CAUSE

The Supreme Court on Tuesday said that those who had sought to hold the country to ransom by staging a violent nation-wide bandh against its order in the case pertaining to the anti-atrocities law to protect Dalits were totally ill-informed. There was no ground for them to get agitated since they had not, repeat, not in any way diluted the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. In other words, the fears of the Dalits were baseless. The court refused to stay its original order of March 14 wherein it had prescribed welcome safeguards before the stringent provisions of the anti-atrocity law could kick in. On the face of it, no sensible person ought to have taken umbrage at the SC order which was aimed at ensuring that there is no abuse of the law and that innocent people are not harassed. Mischief was done by political elements who immediately latched on to the apex court order to serve their own narrow agendas. It was suggested that the Modi Government was anti-Dalit and the SC order reflected its bias against the underprivileged sections. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. The court pronounced the original order on a petition filed by a Pune-based citizen who was wrongly made a victim of the anti-atrocity law. The government was hardly involved. However, on Tuesday, the Centre and the Maharashtra Government approached the court for an interim stay on its order. The court agreed to hear the parties in next ten days while making it clear that it had at no stage diluted a single provision in the anti-atrocity law. “The judgment is not in conflict with the SC/ST Act. It does not dilute the law in any way. We only flagged one issue — can the liberty of an innocent be taken away without application of mind? We only said protect an innocent from being falsely implicated under the Act, which has stringent provisions. People agitating may not have read the judgment. They may have been misled,” the bench of Justices A K Goel and Uday Lalit said.

Meanwhile, two further points would make it amply clear that the court was right in laying down safeguards before, as it said, the complainant became the prosecutor and the judge in his own case, making an innocent person a victim of the law. One, contrary to the motivated propaganda by the vested interests, the Government in 2016 had further strengthened the law, adding a number of new offences in the Act. The 2016 amendment included, for instance, tonsuring of head, moustache and garlanding with footwear, digging of graves, carrying human or animal carcasses, manual scavenging, etc in the list of offences in the original Act. Besides, in order to ensure speedy justice, it laid down that the trial by a special court must be completed within two months of filing of the charge-sheet. The second point concerns the orders issued by the Mayawati Government with the singular objective of preventing the misuse of the law to settle personal scores or to harass innocent people, something which is clearly the sole objective of the highest court in the land when it passed its March 14th order. The two separate orders were issued by the chief secretary of the Mayawati Government, one in May 2007, and, the second, in October 2007. These emphasised that innocent people must not be implicated under the law and that arrests should be made only after establishing a prima-facie case against the accused. Further, arrests should be made only in serious offences such as murder or rape, but only after a medical proof of a sexual assault. Besides, in case a false report is lodged, the complainant must be duly penalised under the law. Now, you may ask, what is so different in what Mayawati had done and what the SC ordered? Virtually nothing. But she was the first one to incite her followers to protest and hold the nation to ransom. In other words, she and the other Opposition parties were less concerned about the plight of the Dalits as they were keen to do politics in their name for advancing their own political agendas. Dalits should be wary of such leaders.