India’s Supreme Court Grants Bail to Binayak Sen

India’s Supreme Court Grants Bail to Binayak Sen

India’s Supreme Court Grants Bail to Binayak Sen

Just over a month ago, Madhusree Mukerjee wrote in Dissent of the imprisonment of Binayak Sen, a doctor from the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh who faced persecution for having “investigated and publicized the forced expulsion, accompanied by killing, rape, torture, and house-burning, of about 350,000 aboriginal villagers in a state-sponsored campaign against Maoist guerillas.” Wrote Mukerjee, “In sentencing Binayak Sen, the judges invoked the selfsame law that, nine decades earlier, the British had used to convict Gandhi. If the Mahatma were alive today, he too would be in one of Incredible India?s many prisons.”

It is with higher spirits that we read today’s news in the Hindu:

The Supreme Court on Friday granted bail to Dr. Binayak Sen, observing that no case of sedition was made out against the rights activist, who was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by a trial court in Chhattisgarh.

A Bench of Justices H.S. Bedi and C.K. Prasad, after hearing senior counsel Ram Jethmalani for the petitioner and senior counsel U.U. Lalit for the State, granted bail to Dr. Sen.

The Bench said it was not giving reasons for granting bail to Dr. Sen, who would be released subject to the satisfaction of the trial court.

Mr. Justice Prasad told Mr. Lalit: ?We are a democratic country. He may be a sympathiser. That does not make him guilty of sedition.? Drawing an analogy, he asked Mr. Lalit: ?if Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography is found in somebody’s place, is he a Gandhian? No case of sedition is made out on the basis of materials in possession unless you show that he was actively helping or harbouring them [Maoists].?