The fear has now become reality. The amendment to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) enabling the State to declare a person a ‘terrorist’ even without any connection with a terrorist organization is being rampantly misused across the country. It is shocking that persons who are exposing State terror even before the United Nations Human Rights body are also being booked as terrorist, apart from those who voice their dissent against government policies and actions.The misuse of the amended UAPA is not only rampant in Jammu and Kashmir, which has been under the shadow of terrorism since 1989, but also across the country, as revealed in the Rajya Sabha in a written reply by Minister of State for Home Nityanand Rai. It said that as many as 4,690 people were arrested in different parts of the country under the stringent anti-terror law, UAPA, in the past three years, and 149 of them got convicted.The data itself proves that very large number of people were languishing in jails on charges of terror, and the government was not able to speedily provide conclusive proofs against them, thereby causing delay in judgements. It is either due to the dismal performance of the investigating agencies, or there is nothing against them except government vendetta for exposing State terror against its own people or their misrule through ‘policies and actions’.The reply of the Minister also contains a defense of the government’s dismal performance regarding a very low level of conviction. It says that “the conviction is an outcome of an elaborate judicial process and is dependent on various factors, such as duration of the trial, appraisal of evidences, and examination of witness”. “There are adequate constitutional and statutory safeguards, including in the UAPA, to prevent misuse of the law,” it added.
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