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Raw exposed
India’s
Dirty Tricks Agency Now Into Marital Dispute Settling Business
WSN Bureau
 Government wants
to ensure your security, so every single one of your rights will be
appropriated and violated by the government. Nation States are
becoming gross violator of human rights and are marshalling the law,
resources and technology to intrude into your private space and
business.
But as the world
entered the new year,
India
has set a new example of how it is becoming a police state.
New Delhi
in any case is going shamelessly ahead with Operation Greenhunt by
arguing from a reductive logic's view point that Maoists are lawless
people, and are a threat to internal security; therefore they must
be killed with all force available.
Now, it has gone
a step further. The nation state's agencies, with the fullest
knowledge of the rulers, the bureaucrats, police and entir
offialdom, is picking up people from their homes and places of work,
bundling them on to planes and deporting them without even a piece
of paper moving from one desk to the other.
Welcome to the
official police state
republic
of India.
A Nepali student
with pronounced social concerns suffered peremptory deportation
under the national security apparatus at work under Indian Home
Minister P Chidambaram.
Indian Nation
State has always had laws granting its agencies enormous power to
regulate the movement of persons, especially when the bogey of
national security is raised. Section 109 of the IPC actually
empowers a police officer to arrest anyone on the basis of any
doubt.These powers include the preventive detention of citizens
under one pretext or the other and, under the Foreigners Act, the
summary deportation of foreign nationals, including those that have
legally entered the country and have not violated the laws of the
land in any way. Indian nationals who are unable to prove their
citizenship to the satisfaction of the police are also subject to
summary deportation, without the automatic right to be heard by a
court.
 If anyone
believed that such extraordinary powers are granted because a state
is expected to use them cautiously and in a reasoned and justifiable
way, new Delhi has shown its true face over the decades. The usage
of such immense power is arbitrary, and the abuse of power has
become a norm.
Just as the
young Sikh leader Bhai Daljit Singh Bittu is picked up on completely
false charges, remanded in custody and then embroiled in several
cases, simply because the political forces currently ruling cannot
engage with him on a political level, a case has now come to light
where a girl student was plucked by the intelligence sleuths from
the hostel of a prestigious institute and put on a plane and sent to
Nepal.
Neetu Singh, the
young woman from Nepal, is a final year student at the prestigious
Film and Television Institute of India at Pune. On the night of
December 5, 2009, the city police landed up at the FTII hostel
without any warrant or paperwork, took her into custody, gathered
her personal effects and moved her to Mumbai, from where she was
deported to
Kathmandu
the next day.
The only reason
cited by the Pune police was that Ms. Singh had indulged in
“anti-national activities”.
Now, what is an
anti-national activity is something that can be defined in India in
such a way that almost anyone can be arrested. Some time back, when
a Sikh politician had opposed the statue of a Congress leader in
Jalandhar accused of running a regime that killed hundreds of Sikh
youth in fake encounters, he was booked under a charge no less than
launching a war against India. For weeks, Indian courts refused to
grant him bail.
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This was
a strange line of action. If someone was indulging in “anti-national
activities”, you arrest and prosecute them, try to find other people
involved, the networks etc. You don't pluck people off the roads and
put them in planes and deport them in secret operations. Since when
are any country's top intelligence agencies started getting involved
in marital disputes? And how in this case was “national security” of
India
invoked by the authorities? |
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In case of Neetu
Singh, the same blatantly cruel face of the Indian state was seen.
No detail of any activities that she allegedly indulged in was
provided, no mention was made of any laws taht she broke. And a DCP
rank officer of Delhi Police claimed, "It was a high-level secret
operation which our team completed successfully in quick time… We
are not supposed to share details. The case is high-profile and
various investigative agencies are involved.”
Now, this was a
strange line of action. If someone was indulging in "anti-national
activities", you arrest and prosecute them, try to find other people
involved, the networks etc. You don't pluck people off the roads and
put them in planes and deport them in secret operations. Clearly,
the charges could not stand any scrutiny and New Delhi did not want
to file any criminal charges.
But what was the
real story? The fact is that Neetu Singh is the wife of Amaresh
Singh, a member of Nepal’s Constituent Assembly who had served the
Indian interests by acting as an interlocutor between the Nepali
Congress, which is his own party, the United Communist Party of
Nepal (Maoist), and the Government of India.
India’s external
intelligence agency, RAW, was deeply involved in many clandestine
talks and operations. Neetu seems to have fallen out with her
husband and RAW acted in favour of the husband and engineered the
wife's deportation.
Since when are
any country's top intelligence agencies started getting involved in
marital disputes? And how in this case was “national security” of
India invoked by the authorities? Foreign nationals can only be
deported from India if they are illegal migrants or if they have
overstayed their visa, or if they have finished serving their
sentence for any crime they might have been convicted of, or if
their presence in the country is deemed by a minister to be
prejudicial to public order.
In most cases,
the process of deportation is so leisurely that some of those
targeted even manage to bring their case before a court, or to
escape, as the three Pakistanis who relieved themselves of their
police escort in Delhi did recently. Clearly, “anti-national
activities” has become a thick smokescreen for RAW, IB and such
agencies to hide behind in cases of covert operations. That the
highly provocative deportation has come at a time when Indian
official establishment is scurrying for cover on the issue of
tweaking legal norms to save influential bad cops as in the case of
S.P.S. Rathore case shows the blatant attitude of RAW towards public
opinion.
Ministry of Home
Affairs under P. Chidambaram has a lot of egg on its face in this
case. But this is time Chidambaram, if he means a word of what he
espouses ostensibly, should take up the matter of complete
unaccountability of the intelligence agencies.
Most of these
agencies do not even report to any ministry, and are directly run by
the Cabinet Secretariat, the Prime Minister’s Office, and the
National Security Advisor. Among these are RAW, the Aviation
Research Centre and the National Technical Research Organisation.
When people are demanding to know the assets and income and mode of
appointment of the topmost judge of the country, why should the
functioning, expenditure, work of RAW remain shrouded in mystery?
Neetu's
deportation has proved that India is now almost a banana republic
and top law enforcers act with a high degree of caprice and contempt
for the rule of law.
13
January 2010
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