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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Court overlooks weak links in Binayak Sen case by Manoj Mitta & Supriya Sharma

Court overlooks weak links in Binayak Sen case by Manoj Mitta & Supriya Sharma

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published Published on Dec 27, 2010   modified Modified on Dec 27, 2010

A "typographical error" in a Chhattisgarh police affidavit before the Supreme Court could turn the location of a crucial arrest from Station Road to something as different as "Mahindra Hotel". Or so it seems from the controversial Raipur session's court verdict holding human rights activist Binayak Sen guilty of conspiracy to commit sedition.

In it's December 24 judgment, the trial court overlooked the improbability of such a drastic change resulting from a mere typographical error. This latitude shown to the prosecution resulted in Sen's conviction even after crucial prosecution witnesses had turned hostile.

When Sen had approached the Supreme Court last year for bail, the police admitted in their affidavit that they had arrested his co-accused Piyush Guha from Mahindra Hotel. This came across as a Freudian slip as the location of the arrest was a major point of contention to determine whether the police did recover from Guha the seditious letters that Sen had allegedly passed on to him.

On the one hand, Guha's version is that he was picked up from Mahindra Hotel and kept in illegal custody blindfolded for six days before he was finally produced before a magistrate on May 6, 2007. But, on the other, the police claimed in the Raipur trial court that they had arrested Guha on Station Road and seized those incriminating letters from his bag.

If it accepted the police's claim that the mention of Mahindra Hotel in their affidavit before the Supreme Court as the location of Guha's arrest was no more than a typographical error, the trial court was relying entirely on the testimony of the seizure witness, a cloth vendor called Anil Kumar Singh.

Such reliance on Singh's evidence seems tenuous given that, by the police's own admission, the seizure memo was not drawn up on the spot. Instead, it was only after they had taken Guha to their police station that the arresting team listed the seized documents and got Singh to sign that memo.

Yet another reason why the trial court should have been skeptical about the police story on the seizure of the seditious letters was that Singh, again by their own admission, was just a passerby. He was not somebody who accompanied the police before the arrest and could therefore have vouched for the veracity of the entire sequence of events given by the police, ruling out the possibility of any documents being planted on Guha.

Making matters worse is the cavalier manner in which the trial court accepted Singh's hearsay evidence on what Guha had to say about those documents. Singh said he had overheard Guha telling the police that those letters of jailed Maoist leader Narayan Sanyal had been passed on to him by Binayak Sen. When the defence argued that Guha's confession in police custody was inadmissible in evidence, the trial court overruled the objection.

Sen stands convicted on such thin evidence although the jailors punched holes in the police version by deposing that all the meetings between Sen and Sanyal were strictly supervised, thereby ruling out the possibility of any letters being exchanged.

Other prosecution witnesses who turned hostile included three hotel managers who contradicted the police story that Sen used to meet Guha in their hotel.

In a bid to buttress its finding that Sen was guilty of sedition, the trial court read much sinister significance into the Maoist-related magazines and leaflets found in his house. In its concluding paragraphs, the verdict refers to these magazines along with those three letters to sustain the sedition charge.


The Times of India, 27 December, 2010, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Court-overlooks-weak-links-in-Binayak-Sen-case-/articleshow/7169580.cms


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