Jailing peaceful protesters for asserting their rights undermines India’s democratic traditions.
One of the unique features of the Indian independence movement was the civil disobedience movement where people would non-violently break the law which curtailed their basic democratic rights such as the right to assembly. It caught the imagination of the world so much it had takers in several countries. The Defiance Campaign of 1952 in South Africa by the Black people where they gathered violating the segregation law and the civil disobedience movement, again, of the Black community in the United States in the sixties, were two such movements which ultimately triumphed. It may come as a curious piece of information that the latter took place in a country whose Declaration of Independence insisted that “all men are created equal”.
Making salt was no criminal act, but the Dandi march and the boiling of sea water to precipitate some salt violating the law shook the moral foundation of the British Raj. True, it took several more years and several editions of the movement for India to attain independence but its ethos continue to reverberate in the country’s conscience and are shared by all those who have at least a distant idea of the national movement.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi often tells the world that India is the mother of democracy, and he may have a point: we have democratic traditions in our past. But incarcerating people who violate simple laws for days together and burdening them with cases misusing the laws available in the statute book cannot be a democratic practice. CJP leaders Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das were given bail by a special executive magistrate after spending eight days in jail for entering Jantar Mantar. Of course, the government had indeed denotified the place as a designated protest site in the nation’s capital but to jail them for entering the spot and waving national flag as a mark of protest and in furtherance of their political campaign against the special intensive revision of voter rolls do not exactly brighten India’s image as a democratic country. As for the CJP leaders, they can take assurance in the words of Martin Luther King Junior, the leader of the American civil disobedience movement: unlearnt suffering is redemptive.
