THE WIFE of a leading Indian human rights activist recently sentenced to life imprisonment for aiding Maoist rebels has claimed she may seek political asylum in a “liberal and democratic” country as she was being “hounded” by the police.
Ilina Sen, wife of Dr Binayak Sen, said she and her family were “not feeling safe in India” after her husband’s incarceration, and her only recourse was to “go to some embassy of a liberal, democratic country and ask for political asylum”.
Dr Sen is one of India’s most respected and globally acclaimed human rights activists who for decades laboured to empower dispossessed and oppressed tribal people in India’s central Chhattisgarh province. Last month, he was found guilty of carrying letters to proscribed Maoist rebel groups from their comrades in jail.
“We are constantly followed by police, receive anonymous mails, threatening calls and our telephones are tapped,” said Mrs Sen, a social worker who runs an NGO in New Delhi.
This harassment had forced her to move to Wardha in neighbouring Maharastra province but the persecution had continued.
“Even my landlord in Maharastra was called up by police and made aware of my antecedents,” Mrs Sen declared.
Chhattisgarh government officials, however, denied Mrs Sen’s allegations, dismissing them as a “publicity stunt”. Mrs Sen said her husband’s trial was a “farce”, the allegations against him “vague” and that even a child could determine there was not an “iota of truth” in them. The judgment, she said, was part of a larger design by the Chhattisgarh administration to hand over the province’s mineral wealth to multinationals by ousting tribals there for centuries.
“I can see my life being torn apart by this conspiracy,” she added.
The thickly forested Chhattisgarh region is a rich repository of minerals like diamonds, gold, iron-ore, coal, corundum, bauxite, dolomite and tin, which western mining and manufacturing companies are anxious to exploit.
But they cannot do this until the tribal population is moved out.
The Chhattisgarh court found Dr Sen and three others guilty of treason and sedition for aiding Maoist insurgents in the area and re-arrested the paediatrician who was freed on bail in May 2009 after being jailed for two years.
Dr Sen has steadfastly maintained that he did not support the Maoists, but merely ran a weekly clinic for dispossessed tribals in Chhattisgarh, one of India’s poorest and most backward regions. He said he was piloting a community-based health programme.
Faced with a 14-year jail sentence, Dr Sen planned to challenge his sentence in the provincial high court.
The jailed human rights activist was also the recipient of the prestigious Jonathan Mann Award for global health and human rights in 2008 for his services to poor and tribal communities and his unwavering commitment to civil liberties and human rights.
He received the award while still in jail. Some 22 Nobel laureates had requested India’s government to release him so he could collect the award in person in the US. This request was refused.
Dr Sen’s sentence has been received with indignation and shock by Indian and overseas human rights organisations and academics such as Noam Chomsky. Countrywide protests by civil society across India greeted the judgment, which the human rights group Amnesty International said violated international standards.