Hindustan Times: New Delhi: Tuesday, July 11, 2017.
The national
commission for scheduled tribes (NCST) has written to all state governments to
identify tribal undertrials in jails who have no cases against them and can be
set free.
The
commission wants governments to ensure speedy trials in cases that have been
pending for long and to release those who have been held in prison without
formal prosecution.
In 2015, the
home ministry informed Parliament that according to the 2013 national crime
records bureau data, there were 11.34 % tribal undertrials in jail. This
percentage is higher in northeastern states, with Mizoram topping the list with
99.96%. In Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh, undertrials are 78.12% and 49.38%
of the total number.
“We have
asked states to collect information about the undertrials in jails and follow
up their cases to see for how long they have been languishing. It is an issue
of human rights,” Raghav Chandra, NCST secretary, said.
Helping those
who cannot afford legal representation is also being discussed.
The problems
of tribals incarcerated and awaiting release has been flagged by several human
rights activists over time; especially in Maoist-infiltrated states of
Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh.
The issue hit
headlines in 2011 and 2012, when the government began negotiations to secure
the release of two civil servants the then Malkangiri collector R Vineel
Krishna and former Sukma collector Alex Paul Menon who were abducted by the
outlawed CPI (Maoist).
Both times,
the outfit demanded the release of hundreds of tribal undertrials who, they
alleged, were being illegally held. After Menon’s release in 2012, the
Chhattisgarh government had set up a high-powered committee headed by former
Madhya Pradesh chief secretary Nirmala Buch to review cases of undertrials, who
were in jail for over two years.
In the Red
corridor, there has been a proliferation of complaints about tribals being
arrested on suspicion of being sympathisers of Maoists or their cadre.
Senior lawyer
and human rights activist Vrinda Grover said the government will need to speed
up trials for the hundreds of tribals who are lodged in prisons and have been
slapped with “a Maoist case”. Citing the case of south Chhattisgarh, which she
said has the highest percentage of such undertrials, Grover said: “RTI data
show that most of these tribals were eventually acquitted. Have prisons then
become holding areas for tribals while land acquisition is taking place?”
She also
stressed the need to delink Maoists from dissenting tribals. “Criminal law is
being used as a weapon to keep tribals from asserting themselves.”