Caution needed

The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday upholding the provisions of the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA) which allow for intercepting telephone and other electronic communication reflects the mood of the country as it were. Ordinary people are living in an atmosphere of fear and they feel helpless in the face of a menacing underworld. And they expect the state to establish order and ensure the safety of life and property of people.

The apex court has said that the state has the right to make special laws to combat special organised crimes such as extortion, gun-running, money-laundering, terrorism and insurgency. Earlier, the Bombay High Court had struck down those very provisions on the ground that they violated the Central Telegraph Act.

The judgment is being welcomed as something that will enable the police to track down those involved with the underworld and in activities that threaten our social fabric. It will surely help in bringing to book subversive elements bent on destroying public peace.
The administrations in Maharashtra and Gujarat have both been demanding stricter provisions to deal with terrorist and underworld elements. The police would like to bring back the now banned POTA (Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act). But there is need for extreme caution in the matter, given the record of police in India, where all too often innocent and poor people are framed and persecuted.

There is a need to state explicitly the axioms of law — presumption of innocence, the right to privacy, the inviolability of fundamental rights — because the police force continues the colonial legacy of presuming guilt of the accused person. The very availability of laws which give unhindered power to the police makes the careful monitoring of those laws imperative.

This problem is not confined to India and from the hidden US prisons of Guantanamo Bay to the human rights abuses of China, we have to fight the abuse of the power of law. The Supreme Court has allowed telephone-tapping in extreme cases. This ought not to become a licence to trample over individual rights and to harass those whose innocence is still within reasonable doubt.

It is of utmost importance that the state should protect the life and property of citizens, but it cannot be armed with unqualified power that it can misuse to traumatise those very citizens. The tendency of the police to believe and act as agents of an absolutist state needs to be disabused. In a democracy, the state is under watch as well.