As many on these lists are probably aware, (medical, CMC, Vellore graduate) Dr
Sen, about whom his brother writes in the essay below, has been in jail as an
'undertrial' for over a year now. I have marked this post OT because many may
not agree that this is strictly a cyber issue, or a privacy issue. However, the
seizures of the doctor's personal possessions were made in the course of
uncovering cyber-evidence against him (so far none).

For those who do not know the background to this case, Dr Sen has been running a
hospital, the only one, in a tribal region in upcountry Chhattisgarh. Parts of
the area are dominated by Maoist cadres, with whom Dr Sen is accused of
collaborating.

Just yesterday, I came across a quote from Thomas Jefferson, 2nd US president:
"It is only errors that need government, the truth stands by itself." In the
light of the disquieting announcements by our IT&C Minister during his visit to
C-DAC Thiruvanthapuram regarding amendments to the IT ACT 2000, about which I
posted, this seems particularly apt.

While I find violence abhorrent (Mahatma Gandhi said, "An eye for an eye makes
the whole world blind"), it is clear to me that government, quasi-military,
solutions to the growth of the often-violent Maoist movement in India are dismal
failures. I have personally seen (in Chhatisgarh) that government forces operate
in 'fortresses' that do not actually command the area, nor provide law and
order.

The lessons of Naxalbari, Assam and Kashmir, to name three failures, are yet to
be learned. Worse, I note the popularity of militarists such as the notorious
KPS Gill, whose bloody failure in Punjab is overlooked, with his continuing grip
on the publicity machine, while the sustainable solution scored by his
successor, the quiet Julio Ribeiro, has seemingly been forgotten.

Anyway, if interested, please read:

Dr Binayak Sen, My Brother, Our Hero
By Dipankar Sen

26 August, 2008
Hard News


The courtroom was hushed as the prisoner stood awaiting sentence. The judge
donned his black skullcap as he deliberately passed the death sentence. That is
the sweat drenched nightmare that I sometimes wake up to. The prisoner is no
ordinary man: he is my brother, Dr Binayak Sen.

Recently, I went to visit him again in prison in Raipur in Chhattisgarh, just
before his last court hearing. I saw him again in court. The courtroom itself
was far from the courtrooms that we see in the movies. No pictures of a
toothless smiling Gandhi or Subhas Chandra Bose hung from the wall behind the
judge, a Sikh, Mr Balinder Singh Saluja. There were just two benches, one for
the lawyers and the second for visitors. The dock, a 1.5m x 1.5m enclosure, was
just enough space for the three standing prisoners while the lawyers argued
their case. Binayak stood leaning against the railing of the dock.

The expression on his face and his body language did not betray any anxiety or
distress of this unnecessary prison experience imposed on him through an
intricate web of lies. There, standing within touching distance was my Dada,
handsome, dignified, ever driven by the force of conviction, all of which showed
up in the gentleness of his composure and the calmness in his eyes. I asked him
how he was. "Without a purpose," was his reply. And that, I suspect, must have
been one of his weaker moments, because he actually said something about
himself. His reply would normally be, "I'm ok, don't worry about me. I am just
fine. How is Ma? Tell her not to worry. And how are you?"

As the proceedings started, there was a witness in the dock on the other side of
the room, closer to the judge. He was identifying the seizure list. The list was
long, and the monotonous but hypnotic tapping sound of the typewriter caused my
mind to float away. I looked at Dada and my mind drifted to the tune of "Where
are the green fields," which he would whistle when we were kids in Pune in 1965.
He had just passed his Senior Cambridge exams from Calcutta Boy's School with
brilliant results and had every reason to be chirpy. He had a lot of friends and
we would go out hiking, which meant a lot of walking through the wild grasslands
then surrounding the camp area in Pune.

I was just a fat 11-year-old then and often had problems keeping up. Dada often
had to carry me piggy back so that the tall grass would not cut me with the
sharp blades. By the time he became a doctor, his care for the little brother
had been replaced by constant concern for the health of poor Indians, the
tribals, workers, the dispossessed or others that are in the process of joining
their ranks.


Around May 9, 2007, I had called my mother in Kalyani, when I was told by my
niece that they had learnt through journalists that their father was supposed to
be arrested but was reported to be absconding. Binayak and his entire family
were at Kalyani then, spending some of their holidays with my aged mother. My
mind did not even register the urgency or the gravity of the situation. I just
thought it was some stupid mistake that the police had made. After all, who
could have anything against Dada...the poor man's doctor and helping hand? I had
even nicknamed him Father Teresa, except that he liked Kingfisher beer.

I suddenly realised that I knew very little about The BINAYAK SEN. It had been a
long time that we had gone our ways. But the prospect of arrest and prison for
Dada were a long way off from anything that we as a family could have imagined.

The next day, and everyday after that, I called Kalyani, and realised that
Dada's situation was much more serious than I had thought. That is when I
started begging him to come to me, in Belgium. Run... do anything but don't go
back to Chhattisgarh. He just said that he could not betray the trust of his
patients, who would be waiting for him from the May 14, 2007. He insisted on
leaving as scheduled, on May 13.

While sitting in an Italian restaurant in Paris on May 14, I heard of his
arrest. His older daughter Pranhita first called to say that he was called to
the police station in Bilaspur to give a statement, but that the police would
not arrest him. About 15 minutes later she called again to say that he had
indeed been arrested. It was around 12.45 in Paris that my life turned its page
on political innocence. I suddenly grew up.


During the course of Dada's year in prison, I read about him in the press, both
national and international. I found him on Wikipedia. I found his name on
numerous internet sites. There were the admiring letters that he received in
prison, and that must have helped to keep his sanity. Then came the recognition
from the Indian Academy of Social Sciences, the Keithan Gold Medal, the Jonathan
Mann award, the 21 Nobel Laureates writing to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the
demonstrations in India and around the world.

But I began feeling guilty and embarrassed. Because of my long absence in Europe
since the 1970s, I learnt about Dada's greatness, above all about his work,
through the press and through the mail of his admirers from distant lands. I did
not know about the hospital he helped build in Dalli Rajhara, his work in
Ganyari near Bilaspur, the Mitanin project, the Right to Food campaign.

Nor had I heard of his work with the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL),
or of the dedicated band of people that worked with him. They included doctors,
lawyers, journalists, filmmakers and the man on the street. His circle of
supporters included doctors from all over the world, the most active among them
being his own former teachers and class mates, as well as some who were not his
contemporaries at Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, but had attended the
same college. I learnt details about his career from his former teachers and
colleagues at the Christian Medical College, which bestowed on him the Paul
Harrison Award to recognise his work that exemplified their best ideals of a
doctor.

There were two images of my brother - the more familiar one of a fun-loving man
who liked good food, good music, and enjoyed horsing around with his family and
his many good friends; and the other of a serious doctor with concerns -
expressed even while he was a student -- about the health of poorer communities,
and its roots in their social and economic deprivation. This is what his former
teacher, Dr P Zachariah, wrote in a tribute to his student:

"Binayak is a very rare doctor - a man with a deep understanding of the social
and political dimensions of health. The governments of the world, the World Bank
and other organisations are now worrying about food security and alternative
food policies; Binayak was decades ahead of them all."

None of this apparently moves the State, which refuses to budge from its
position. If you ask someone in the government why Dada is in prison, the reply
is standard: "He is a Maoist leader and sympathiser, and we have enough evidence
against him."

So I asked the DGP of Chhattisgarh, so why is he not returning the computer
seized from Dr Binayak Sen over a year ago, especially since forensic
examination of the hard disc had failed to turn up any incriminating evidence.
He said that the Forensic Institute in Hyderabad could not break into a code.
When I reminded him that teenagers are hacking into banks and the Pentagon
everyday, his reply was patently evasive.

I also reminded him that I had heard that not one of the police witnesses gave
any credible witness/evidence against Binayak. He countered with the possibility
of a supplementary chargesheet that was in preparation based on some 53 pages of
telephone conversations with someone who is a known Maoist. Like an astrologer,
he predicted that the lower court would probably convict him but the higher
court would release him.

Now, how long the process would take is anybody's guess. Common sense tells me
that it could be years.

Back in the courtroom, my mind suddenly woke up to the noise of some strong
protests from defense lawyer Mahendra Dubey. He had just found that a letter had
been planted by the police and had clearly stirred some excitement in court. The
insistent tapping of the typewriter had stopped. The judge looked worried.

A letter to a senior Maoist party member which the police were claiming had been
found among the documents seized from his apartment was printed on a plain sheet
of computer paper, and did not even have his signature. Moreover, it did not
appear in the list of seized documents that Dada and the police had co-signed at
the time they were seized. It was indeed a plant. The old public prosecutor did
not bother to look embarrassed, he simply denied any knowledge of it or how it
got there.

I left the court dejected and heartbroken as he was driven away in the police
van. An entire State was conspiring to subject upon my brother a life without a
life... without a purpose, without any privacy, without any space of his own,
denying him the very means of contributing to society in a way that even the
State itself had acknowledged when it had implemented his ideas to start the
Mitanin programme. They are imposing a punishment upon an innocent man in the
full knowledge that they are doing wrong.

Now that we are convinced that his imprisonment is based on false and trumped up
charges, we will want to know who would want to inflict such a fate on this man
and above all why? Then we could have a possible basis and a clue to engage in a
sensible dialogue with them to secure his release.

My Dada was one who, at a very early age, wondered why we could not invite the
servants in our home to eat with us. At the age of five, he had the sensitivity
to write:

I saw a bird in the morning sun

Flying high up in the sky,

A man shot it down with his gun

And I began to cry.

He does not deserve this fate. But for someone who has withstood more than a
year-and-four months of prison, solitary confinement, harassment, humiliation
but not shame, we have a simple message: Tum akele nahin ho Dada... My brother!


The writer is an options trader in the commodities market based in Antwerp,
Belgium. The print version of this article will appear in the September edition
of Hardnews magazine. The magazine will hit the stands on September 1, 2008

Vickram
http://communicall.wordpress.com
http://vvcrishna.wordpress.com





[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]