Congress, Amartya support Binayak Sen, Ram Jethmalani offers to fight case

More support poured in for Chhattisgarh-based human rights activist Binayak Sen, convicted and sentenced to life for sedition by a sessions court on Friday along with Maoist ideologue Narayan Sanyal. Sen, a paediatrician, was arrested from Bilaspur on May 14, 2007, for allegedly colluding with Maoists to wage a battle against the state, and jailed for two years before the Supreme Court granted him bail in May last year. The 58-year-old vice-president of People’s Union of Civil Liberties was accused of acting as courier for jailed Sanyal by carrying his messages to Maoists.

After initially saying that as a political party, it would not like to comment on a verdict, Congress called for a review of the judgment on Tuesday. Party spokesperson Shakeel Ahmed said, “If there are infirmities in the judgment or the evidence, these need to be looked into.”

Senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh also asserted that the judgment needed to be revisited. “He is a fine human being,” Singh, who is famously against the use of the gun against Maoists, said.

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen also threw his weight behind Binayak. He said the Chhattisgarh court’s judgment was a “huge perversion of our system of justice, and particularly of the laws concerning sedition. It is not at all clear, to start with, that the thing he has been exactly accused of — passing letters — has been really proved beyond doubt”.

Calling the activist a “very dedicated social worker”, Sen said, “to turn the dedicated service of someone who drops everything to serve the cause of neglected people into a story of the seditious use of something...the whole thing seems a ridiculous use of the laws of democratic India”.

BJP Rajya Sabha member and eminent lawyer Ram Jethmalani offered to fight Sen’s case against the party’s government in Chhattisgarh.

“I would do it for him, I would fight for Binayak Sen. No party line says a lawyer should not fight a case,” he said.
—With agency inputs