[Reader-list] The Day of the Jackal

[hpp at vsnl.com]

The Day of the Jackal

by Rahul B
rahul.indauri at gmail.com
http://rahulbanerjee.notlong.com/


Sagarbai a Bhilala adivasi (tribal) widow has finally emerged victorious after a long drawn legal battle for justice fought in the High Court of Madhya Pradesh over the last eight years against a government and administration bent on disregarding the "rule of law" and their constitutional obligations towards the adivasis.

In September 1999 a team of forest department officials raided the village of Katukya in Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh at 6 am in the morning and fired on and killed Roopsingh, a Bhilala adivasi who was returning from answering nature's call. The forest officials had gone ostensibly to arrest one Balu for allegedly having cut timber from the forest. Why they had to go at the unearthly hour of 6 a.m. to do this and why they had to enter the village with their guns spitting bullets remains officially unexplained to this day. However, the fact is that this murderous foray was part of an ongoing illegal exercise sanctioned by the government of the day to crush a mass organisation of the adivasis, Adivasi Morcha Sangathan (AMS), which had over the past four years or so been protesting against the corruption and mis-governance rampant in the area since independence and demanding the implementation of the special provisions of local governance enacted for Scheduled adivasi areas
 in accordance with the Panchayat Provisions (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act 1996.

The murder of Roopsingh evoked an immediate protest response from the AMS members as they amassed in thousands in front of the Police Station in Udainagar with his dead body demanding the immediate filing of a case of murder and the arrest of the guilty officials. The administration had to yield to these demands under public pressure. According to the provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Rules 1995, the state has to provide monetary compensation to the heirs of the deceased when an adivasi is murdered by a non-adivasi. So the AMS pressed for this compensation to be paid to Roopsingh's widow Sagarbai. Despite all the formalities being completed the District Magistrate did not pay the compensation making the specious plea that since the forest guard who had fired on Roopsingh was an adivasi, the provisions of the Atrocities Act did not apply. The counter arguments of the AMS that all the members of the team, which included and was 
led by non-adivasis, had gone together to perform state duty and had illegally killed Roopsingh and so they were all together along with the state responsible for the crime were summarily brushed aside.

The AMS then went to the High Court in Indore against this arbitrary decision of the District Magistrate in September 2000 and the case was admitted. However, on the day of the final hearing the honourable judge gave the astounding excuse that since the rules for Madhya Pradesh were framed in Hindi he could not give a judgment as this latter had to be written in English. No amount of pleading that the rules in question had been published in the gazette of Madhya Pradesh in Hindi only could make the judge budge and he demanded an official translation from the government advocate. The latter conveniently dilly-dallied and so the case was thus pushed back onto the slow backburner of pending cases.

Even though the judge hearing the case was changed after some time the government advocate would make some plea or other and get the case postponed every time it came up for a hearing. Things would have continued in this frustrating manner had not the Supreme Court sent strict orders to the High Court that during the summer vacation of 2005 a special bench should be constituted to dispose of the 1000 oldest cases that were still pending in the court. Roopsingh's case happened to be in this list and so it came up for hearing on 19.5.2005. This time the government prosecutor made the weird plea that since the District Magistrate had not passed any written order refusing to give the relief that was demanded there was no cause for action by the High Court. Surprisingly the learned judge despite protests from the petitioner's lawyer went along with this to some extent but had the grace to admit that the District Magistrate had no business not to give a written order even after so
 much time had elapsed. So he passed an order directing that the District Magistrate should give the relief to the petitioner in accordance with the rules and write a reasoned order based on the facts of the case within two months of a repeat application being made by the petitioner along with the certified copy of the High Court's order.  

When Roopsingh's widow Sagarbai met the District Magistrate and gave him this new application along with the High Court's order, the first comment that he made after reading it was that in his opinion this was not a fit case as the forest guard who had fired and killed Roopsingh was an adivasi! This was a different person from the District Magistrate who had initially given this same idiotic excuse some six years back but such is the consistency of the training in stonewalling given to the bureaucracy in this country that they invariably come out with the same checkmating answers regardless of the person. 

The AMS once again went to the High Court against this order of the District Magistrate. On December 6th 2006 the High Court passed an order directing the administration to deposit Rs 2,00,000 in a fixed deposit in a nationalised bank in the name of Sagarbai within a month of the passing of the order, failing which it would have to pay interest at the rate of 9% per annum on the amount. The honourable judge while passing the order made note of two landmark judgments of the Supreme Court stating that -

1.      Functionaries of the government cannot themselves become law breakers and adopt inhuman methods in trying to enforce the law against alleged offenders as they had done in this case while ostensibly going to apprehend Balu for an alleged timber cutting offence (D. K. Basu vs State of West Bengal, 1997 (1) SCC 416).

2.      The Government is vicariously liable to compensate the victims of such lawlessness on the part of its functionaries and if it doesn't then it is the responsibility of the High and Supreme Courts to ensure that it does so (Nilabati Behera vs State of Orissa, 1993 (2) SCC 746).

The AMS persisted with this case and spent Rs 50,000 on it not just for the compensation, which is paltry in any case, but more importantly to make a small contribution towards establishing the non-existent "rule of law" for the long suffering adivasis in this country.

I have fought many battles for the rights of the Bhil adivasis over the past quarter of a century and lost most given the odds that are stacked against them. This is one of the rare victories won in the teeth of governmental opposition and it is by far the sweetest.  In a presently pending case before the honourable Supreme Court filed by the National Council of Civil Liberties of Ahmedabad against the Narmada Bachao Andolan, I too have been impleaded along with the NBA for allegedly being a seditious anti-national. The basis for this serious charge as usual is a farrago of lies and false cases against me compiled by the biggest law-breakers in this country - the police. If one is to believe their story then I am as dangerous and wily as the assassin "Jackal" in Frederick Forsyth's thriller "The Day of the Jackal". While Forsyth's nefarious Jackal failed in his mission to assassinate the French President Charles de Gaulle, our own nefarious government has finally been checkm
ated by this jackal!