| POTO Musings
One of the strongest objections that opponents of the ordinance raised against POTO which the Union government introduced, but one which could not find passage in Parliament to become an Act is its clause that envisages to make interrogation reports by the police, or call it confessional statements by the suspect, a cognizable evidence in the court of law.
While confessions to interrogating authorities, may in all likelihood contain the truth, there is also always the possibility that it was made under duress. By duress, it does not necessarily mean physically arm-twisted, but coaxed by playing on very subtle nuances of the fugitive's psychology which trained interrogators must obviously be expert in identifying. In the Wild East state of Manipur, nobody even bothers about psychological nuances. We even hear people made to sign on blank papers, or else absolve all guilt to raiding parties in writing, after the most atrocious of rampages.
Although there are nothing very much that can be more alarming in POTO than there is in the already existing Armed Forces Special Powers Act, we too had raised our objections to the ordinance on the ground that the few new additions can be dangerous for the ordinary citizenry. In the existing circumstance, we were also at a loss as to what safeguard can be introduced to make this and some other clauses, harmless to putative innocent victims.
Another clause that attracted a lot of criticism was the one that seeks to make intercepted messages, electronic or otherwise, as admissible evidence in court. To this clause we only say it is a point of law only and hardly of practical relevance to the situation here, at least not as much as the earlier.
Our vocal objections to POTO however seem blunted when we see that many underground militant organizations have no scruples at all about employing the very same methods that we objected to in POTO. So very often we hear of the accused in offences being punished, brutally too, purely on the basis of confessional statements and circumstantial evidences. More often than not the accused may actually be guilty of the offences charged against him, but the short-circuiting of justice is rather disturbing, just as the short-circuiting that POTO seeks to bring into effect is.
It will be worthwhile noting that Pol Pot, till the time of his death, believed earnestly he acted in the interest of justice. We all now know how brutal that justice was. Our defense of our stand on POTO however is that when we too joined in raising objections to it, we were not speaking on behalf of any particular group or individual, underground or
overground, but for the larger interest of justice, specially pertaining to the common hapless citizenry, caught as they are in the crossfire between the wielders of guns.
And for this reason, despite whatever has come to pass, despite September 11, and despite December 13, we cannot still imagine a POTO sanitized of the dangers posed to the common man that we mentioned earlier. We still think, POTO is draconian and still object to it. But as much as we speak up against the state actors to not infringe on the humanrights of the ordinary citizen, our appeal also goes out to all non state actors, particularly to those who call themselves as governments, to respect internationally established cannons of human rights and justice.
(Courtesy: The
Imphal Free Press) |
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