HUNDREDS OF human rights activists demonstrated in India’s capital, New Delhi, yesterday protesting against the harsh life sentence handed down to a highly regarded paediatrician and human rights activist on charges of aiding Maoist rebels.
For decades Binayak Sen (60) worked among tribal communities in India’s central Chhattisgarh province to rally depressed, impoverished and neglected locals to fight for their rights.
He was convicted of waging war against the state by a local court in the state capital Raipur on Christmas Eve.
Sen, who was running health clinics in Chhattisgarh and training tribal communities whose plight Maoist rebels claim to champion, faces the prospect of 14 years in jail.
His case, severely criticised by Amnesty International, indigenous and global human rights groups and Nobel laureates, lasted 3½ years in the course of which the doctor spent 22 months in prison before being granted bail by the Supreme Court last year.
While still in jail, he was awarded the prestigious Jonathan Mann Award for health and human rights in 2008 in recognition of his services to the poor and disadvantaged by the US-based Global Health Council.
At the time 22 Nobel laureates had written to the Indian government criticising his imprisonment and requesting that he be freed in order to collect the council’s award in person. Their appeal was ignored.
“We wish to express grave concern that Dr Sen appears to be incarcerated solely for peacefully exercising his fundamental human rights,” the letter declared adding that the internal security laws used to charge him did not “comport with international human rights standards”.
Amnesty International concurred when it declared at the weekend that Sen’s life sentence violated international fair trial standards and was likely to inflame tensions in the conflict-affected area.
“Dr Sen, who is considered a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, was convicted under laws that are impermissibly vague and fall well short of international standards for criminal prosecution,” Amnesty’s Asia-Pacific head Sam Zarifi said.
Sen wept when the verdict was announced by the provincial sessions court last Friday after which his lawyer said that he would appeal as the basis for the conviction was “flimsy”.
“There is no suggestion of warlike activity anywhere in the judgment copy,” he complained after the sentence was pronounced.
Sen’s outraged wife Ilina, who was in court with their two daughters, categorised the verdict to be “totally irrational”.
The Maoists’ “Red Corridor”, controlled by about 20,000 armed cadres, is spread across a third of India covering 220 of about 620 administrative districts in over half of the country’s 29 provinces.
This year alone, some 1,000 people have died in Maoist-related violence in what prime minister Manmohan Singh has labelled India’s most serious internal security problem since independence in 1947.