19 May 2008. A World to Win News Service. A worldwide campaign is emerging to demand the freedom of Dr Binayak Sen, a public health doctor and human rights campaigner in the impoverished Indian state of Chhattisgarh who has now spent a year in prison, accused of aiding the rural rebellion led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist). The paediatrician distanced himself from the politics of armed revolution, but refused to stop exposing and denouncing the oppression and injustice practiced against the adivasis (tribal people). He has been particularly vocal against the authorities' attempts to unleash counterrevolutionary terror in the countryside through the state-sponsored paramilitaries called the Salwa Judum.

Support has particularly swelled during the past few weeks, with a dynamic relationship developing between prominent figures on an international level and local activists. On 14 May, to mark the anniversary of Sen's arrest, the Chhattisgarh People's Union for Civil Liberties staged a day-long dharna (sit-in) in Raipur, where he is being held. "About 450 citizens (workers, peasants, youth, women, intellectuals and political party workers, etc.) participated in the event," reported the group's press release. Sen is the organisation's national vice-president and head of the Chhattisgarh state unit. In the city of Kolkotta (formerly Calcutta), on the same day, nearly 150 doctors, people's health activists, human rights campaigners and others held a convention at the Medical College to demand his release. Another mass meeting was organised across from the Madras Medical College in Chenai. New Delhi, Bangalore and about a half dozen other cities saw Free Benayak film festivals.

Also on 13-14 May, protests were held outside of Indian consulates in London, New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Vancouver, while vigils and other gatherings happened in numerous European and North American cities.

More than 2,000 medical doctors from all over the world signed a petition after the case was publicized in the UK-based medical journal The Lancet. Among other internationally famous intellectuals who have lent their names to this campaign are Noam Chomsky, Arundati Roy, George Galloway, Amartya Sen, Shyam Benegal and Mahashweta Devi. The campaign received even more attention on the eve of these worldwide protests with the release of an open letter by 22 Nobel Prize-winning scientists and economists asking the Indian government to release Sen and allow him to travel to Washington to receive the prestigious Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights at the end of May. If that doesn't happen, Dr Ilina Sen, Binayak's wife, has received a visa to take his place.

A graduate of an elite Indian medical college, the 56-year-old Sen moved to Chhattisgarh in 1981. There he joined a coal miners' leader to raise money and set up a union-run hospital open to all, regardless of caste or background. The union leader was later murdered by an employer's goons. Now Binayak and Ilina Sen run Rupantar, an NGO that trains rural health workers in tribal and poor peasant areas, organises rural clinics and promotes campaigns against alcohol abuse and violence against women. These and other public health programmes Sen has been associated with have reduced the deaths of children due to diarrhoea and dehydration, helping to bring down the overall infant mortality rate in the state. All this has made him one of India's most prominent public health specialists – and his imprisonment all the more shocking to much of public opinion in India and abroad.

Sen's arrest followed on the heels of a campaign by the People's Union for Civil Liberties to draw attention to a massacre of at least a dozen indigenous tribal people in Santoshpur, Chhattisgarh, probably at the hand of the Salwa Judum paramilitaries. As a result of these efforts, the bodies of the victims were dug up from a mass grave. The state government refused to issue an order for the arrest of the police officials suspected of involvement in the killings. Instead, the police immediately announced that Sen had fled arrest on charges of helping the Naxalites (Maoists).

When a week later the doctor came back from a planned holiday and turned himself in, he was formally charged under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the "black laws", as they are known, reprising sections of India's notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which was overturned by parliament in 2004 after much protest. As the letter from the Nobel laureates points out, these laws, inspired by similar legislation in the U.S., "do not comport with international human rights standards". They criminalize political opinion ("uttering words… which propound the disobedience" of "established law and its institutions") and define guilt by vague association without any specific acts, so that the authorities can arbitrarily decide whom to prosecute. Even reporting about "subversives" can be prohibited.

Sen was indicted for committing sedition by providing medical care to Narayan Sanyal, an imprisoned leader of the banned CPI(M) held in Raipur jail. The police also claimed that he carried letters out of prison for Sanyal. The doctor had openly visited Sanyal in prison 33 times since the latter's arrest in 2006, in his capacity as head of the Chhattisgarh civil liberties organisation and a physician. His treatment of Sanyal, who is 70 years old and has a medical condition requiring surgery, like his meetings, was done with the permission of the relevant authorities and in the presence of jailers. As for the letters, the alleged recipient told the court that the police forced him to sign a blank piece of paper on which they later filled in a concocted confession.

Sen's imprisonment takes place in the context of a broader collision between the adivasis and other rural poor people in India and the interests of global capitalism. Chhattisgarh includes a portion of the vast forests of Dandakaranya, which spread into the states of Andhra Pradesh, Maharastra and Orissa as well. (For more on this area and the struggles of its people, see "Dandakaranya: Two paths of development", a reprint from the Indian Maoist journal People's March in AWTWNS 18 December 2006.)

These tribal lands have suddenly become highly prized for their natural resources. They contain much of the country's forests and most of its mineral deposits. In addition to gigantic mining operations, enormous new steel, aluminium and other industrial plants are springing up, sited to make use of the locally available energy and raw materials. Major multinationals are said to be considering strip mining for diamonds. This means the destruction of the environment and the existing rural economy, and the massive displacement of the inhabitants. The CPI(M), which is leading armed struggle in many parts of India, has long been deeply connected to the people of Dandakaranya in their struggles for survival.

The local and national government have responded by organising the Salwa Judum along the lines of the counter-insurgency vigilante bands sponsored by the U.S. in other countries from Guatemala and Peru to Turkey. Civil liberties and lawyers' groups in these states and on the all-India level, including Sen's People's Union for Civil Liberties, have exposed the Salwa Judum and the Indian security forces for using terror to force tens of thousands of people from their homes in the forests and keep them in roadside camps in an effort to isolate them from the Naxalites. (For a report issued by these organisations, see AWTWNS 18 December 2006.) Over the past two years the PUCL enumerates at least 155 people killed in fake "encounters" (murders falsely said to have resulted from fire fights) in the state.

One of the most recent "encounter" killings is said to be that of CPI(M) leader G. Saraiah (said to be known as "Azad") and his wife, fellow revolutionary Padma, on 2 April in the state of Andhra Pradesh. This was reported in Newspost India and The Hindu, although as far as we know, the CPI(M) has not released any statement of its own confirming it. The police claimed they killed the pair in an "encounter" in the forests of Kantanapalli in Warangal district, but the revolutionary writer Varavara Rao told the media that he believes they were captured elsewhere and taken to Warangal to be murdered. The police claim to have killed more than 300 Maoists in Andhra Pradesh the last three years.

In addition to the extra-judicial killings, there have been arrests – alarming to many people – of activists well known for their public involvement in political life. Some have been sympathetic to the Naxalites and others not. In Kerala, the case of People's March editor and publisher Govindam Kutty is still before the courts, although he has been released on bail. His magazine, registered with the government and published legally for many years, now remains banned. In Chhattisgarh, 43 people have arrested under the "black laws" in the last three years. A journalist, Praful Jha, was arrested in January for alleged links to the CPI(M). The latest prisoner is the filmmaker T. G. Ajay. A fellow member of the executive committee of the People's Union of Civil Liberties, Ajay was thrown into the same Raipur jail as Sen on 5 May. Under the state's "black laws", there can be no release on bail. Amnesty International has taken up this case, as it did with Sen.

Some supporters believe that the authorities deliberately took the unexpected and relatively uncommon step of persecuting such a widely admired "mainstream" figure like Sen, a man known for his belief in peaceful change, in order to set a chilling example. They are seeking to create a more intimidating political environment where people fear being punished not only for outright Naxalite activities (in which case they have always known that they can expect to be hunted and murdered), but also for even what have long been considered legal activities that can now be construed as aiding the CPI(M) or even simply opposing the authorities' brutal measures against the poor and the revolutionaries who have taken up their cause. Many people who do not support the Naxalites have supported this case because they fear the violent restriction of the political space for tolerated dissent and a change in the basic rules of the game in what is touted as “the world’s largest democracy”.

On 14 May the PUCL filed a challenge to the constitutionality of the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act of 2005 in the Supreme Court of India. A former Delhi Chief Justice is among those who drafted the petition.

A new court hearing for Sen is scheduled for 23 June. A further round of demonstrations is being planned for 16-25 June in Raipur, ending with a national convention 26 June. (See www.binayaksen.net)
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The AWTWNS packet for the week of 19 May 2008 contains two articles. They may be reproduced or used in any way, in whole or in part, as long as they are credited.

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