A Trim For Pota

A Trim For Pota
The Act reduced life in Gujarat to a gulag without walls
SHIV VISHWANATHAN

Illustration: ANAND NAOREM
ORDINARILY, A law is a secular instrument of well-being. It provides some of the entitlements of citizenship. In the everyday world, the law is the bargaining chip in the bazaar of survival. It is subject to negotiation, a process of extraction which appears Alice in Wonderland to one side and pure Kafka to the other. Even in terms of such a world, the use of POTA in Gujarat was grotesque.
Even after the UPA Government repealed POTA, it remained a lingering malady in Gujarat as the cases had not been repealed with retrospective effect. The police and the Nanavati Commission clung to a conspiracy theory of the Godhra incident, which had devastating consequences for those under suspicion.
What POTA created was two forms of tyranny, that of the politician and the policeman. These creatures realised that in the topsy-turvy world of Gujarat, the victim could be dubbed a terrorist. He then has to pay in order to liberate himself from the labelling. What follows is a cat and mouse game which few journalists follow and few human rights activists understand.
POTA turned the everyday life of these people into a gulag without walls. They were playthings in the hands of official authority. It had eerie implications. The journalist Jumana Shah, while covering Godhra during the last elections, was surprised to see the absence of Congress flags. BJP officials were canvassing confidently and had even opened an office there. Intrigued, Shah asked local people to help her understand the situation. After Godhra, many people had been arrested and remained in jail. In fact, POTA for the innocents and POTA for the terrorists was the same. Dozens of youth were in jail and the BJP promised to look into their cases if the Muslims voted for them. The Godhra Muslims realised that democracy was as obscene as the Rule of Law in a POTA-affected zone. But they had no alternative. The Congress was indifferent or impotent and the cynical BJP politicians were the only ones who could negotiate.
The Supreme Court judgement returns as a sliver of sanity by lifting the dragnet of the Act from those accused in the burning of the Godhra train. To see the perpetrators of the train carnage as terrorists appears far-fetched. Even IB reports do not substantiate it. Terrorism presupposes planning and logistics. No riot or street fight can be seen as terror, as they always have a hint of the spontaneous. It was not just the forced act of classification that the court challenged but the implicit corruption.
Terror and the legislation around terror creates its own Animal Farm, an Orwellian world, where some can be tortured more than others. In Gujarat, the policeman and the Hindu citizen are more equal than the Muslim ethnic, perpetually suspect under the law. The POTA act had literally reduced suspected Muslims into a criminal tribe subject to atrocity by authorities.
There is an everyday economics which makes innocence expensive. Imagine you are a family in Godhra earning Rs 60 to 90 a day. It takes a few hundred rupees to travel to Ahmedabad, a few thousand rupees to placate and feed the policemen who play the POTA lottery happily. Multiply this in terms of the cycle of visits — some futile — that a family has to make and one realises the draconian cost of the act for a Muslim family in Gujarat. Understand also that is everyday news that never makes the news. One must be grateful to the court for dropping POTA charges against the ‘accused’ and reverting to the Indian Penal Code.
(Vishwanathan is an Ahmedabad-based anthropologist)
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 44, Dated Nov 08, 2008