Call to release Binayak Sen getting global

The civil rights groups in India and the US joined in chorus and have called on India’s government to set free medical practitioner and human rights activist Binayak Sen, now languishing in a jail for ‘helping’ the Maoists.

A Chhattisgarh court on Friday handed Sen and three others for life sentence for aiding the Maoists. He was found guilty of carrying messages and setting up bank accounts for Maoist rebels in Chhattishgarh, a state in central India plague with Naxalite violence.

The human rights group, Amnesty International, however claimed Sen’s trial had violated international standards.

“We are deeply shocked by the judgment of a Chhattisgarh court holding Dr Sen to be guilty of sedition, and sentencing him to life imprisonment,” said a statement signed by US author Professor Noam Chomsky, Indian historian Professor Romila Thapar and dozens of noted Indian academics.

“As a doctor he served the people with devotion and helped to save many lives; as a human rights activist he stood up in defence of the rights of the downtrodden. And yet he has been handed down this sentence whose savagery is unbelievable,” the statement said.

The statement called on the higher judiciary to “hear his appeal expeditiously, must grant him immediate bail till the end of the appeal process, and must judge his case with enlightened reason”.

Historian Ram Chandra Guha in a newspaper article on Monday wrote ” Doctor-activist Binayak Sen’s conviction happened in a court subject to intimidation by a state government run by paranoid politicians.”

“In the eyes of the government in Chhattisgarh, the crime of Binayak Sen is that he dared question the corrupt and brutal methods used to tackle the Maoist upsurge. In 2005, the state government promoted a vigilante army that spread terror through the districts of Dantewada, Bijapur and Bastar.

“In the name of combating Naxalism, it burnt homes (and occassionally, whole vilalges), violated tribal women, and attacked (and sometimes killed) tribal men who refused to join its ranks. As a result of its depredations, almost a hundred thousand adivasis, with no connection at all to Maoism, were rendered homeless,” the historian wrote in the article titled ‘Not to question Why’.

The court in Chhattisgarh found Sen and three others guilty of treason and sedition.

Sen, who was out on bail since May 2009, was arrested. He was first arrested from Bilaspur town in May 2007 for alleged links with Maoist leader Narayan Sanyal, whom he used to visit in jail.

Guha, in support of his article, mentioned that “Binayak Sen never fired a gun. He probably does not know how to hold one. He has explicitly condemned Maoist violence, and even said of the armed revolutionaries that theirs is an invalid and unsustainable movement.”

Sen, a pediatrician and an awardee of prestigious Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights for his services to poor and tribal communities, does not support the Maoists.

A report from Kolkata said his mother Anasua Sen would move to a higher court to challenge the sentence of the Chhattisgarh court.

Anasua Sen (84), now almost bed ridden due to age and sickness, said she would move even to the Supreme Court in an attempt to undo the judgement.

“My son is absolutely innocent and worked for the betterment of poor people in Chhattisgarh,” she said.

She would also write to the President, Prime Minister and other leaders for her son’s freedom.