Detained for serving meals to 'militants'
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COMMENTS 
Hundreds of women are picked up by the police and imprisoned under the draconian Prevention Of Terrorism Act, often under frivolous charges
A group of armed men broke into the homes of four adivasi families living in a small hamlet in Jharkhand's Gumla district. Six adivasi girls were ordered to prepare dinner for them. They did so under duress. The next morning a posse of policemen arrived in the hamlet and arrested all six girls for having harboured members of the banned MCC ( Maoist Communist Centre) in their homes.
Charged under POTA (the Prevention Of Terrorism Act), the girls, all aged between 16 and 18 years, were taken to Jhansi jail located 100 km from Gumla. They remained in lockup for the next 18 months and would probably have stayed there but for the efforts of Stan Swamy, convenor of the POTA Virodhi Jan Morcha (PVJM) in Jharkhand.
The PVJM made several attempts to obtain a list of POTA detainees from the state government. Failing this, two PVJM women members were deputed to visit Ranchi jail, one Sunday morning, to 'visit' some sick relatives.
"We chose Sunday because it was the jailor's day off. Our PVJM members had to visit the jail three times before they could establish contact with the girls. The girls were in a pathetic condition -- frightened out of their wits. The women reassured them and promised to help in their release," says Swamy.
Jharkhand enjoys the dubious distinction of having the largest number of people arrested under POTA. According to G N Saibaba, member of the All India Fact Finding Team (AIFFT) that visited the state in February 2003, there were over 3,200 arrests under POTA, including 10-12-year-old girls and boys. Most occurred under a frivolous charge.
Take the bizarre case of 17-year-old Ropni Khari of Tira Masori Toli village, also in Gumla district. A matriculate, Ropni encouraged girls to attend school and was trying to get the women of her village to raise their voices against patriarchal oppression. Then some villagers decided to teach her a lesson. They told the police she was a member of the MCC. The police searched her house for incriminating evidence but found nothing. Still, they hounded the male members of her family and forced Ropni to 'surrender'. Arrested under POTA, Ropni has been in lockup for over a year.
POTA was introduced by the earlier NDA government to arm the police and paramilitary forces with special powers to fight terrorism. But, more often than not, it was misused to extract so-called 'confessions' from victims who were then arrested. The two-year law saw the arrest of thousands of people, although no records of the exact number of people arrested are available at the home ministry. Colin Gonsalves, lawyer and activist, who is a member of the tribunal demanding the repeal of POTA, claims: "Nobody has a number on the arrests. The home ministry says they do not know, the National Human Rights Commission says they do not know, and at the state level we received the same reply."
It is even more difficult to pin down the number of women arrested under POTA, though some lawyers claim there could be over 200 detainees. Even pregnant women were not spared under this draconian law.
One of the more prominent women detainees was Navjot Sandhu, arrested for conspiring against the Indian state in the December 13 attack on Parliament. Navjot's husband, Shaukat, a Kashmiri Muslim, was accused of being a militant. Deposing before the POTA tribunal hearing cases of atrocities, Sandhu's lawyer Nitya Ramakrishnan explained how her client had been arrested on the basis of an innocuous conversation that had taken place between her and Shaukat. Following the attack on Parliament, Navjot asked her husband: " Shaukat, tum pahuch gaye ?" (Shaukat, have you reached?)" He replied: " Main pahunch gaya." (I have reached.) Navjot then went on to say: " Kuch log aye the," (Some people had come) referring to some policemen who had arrived at the house to question her.
Navjot was kept at Tihar jail for two years where she gave birth to a child. Traumatised by the experience she has become a schizophrenic and is undergoing treatment at VIMHANS in Delhi.
The second woman arrested under POTA in Delhi is Zamroada, a Kashmiri who is a member of the Hurriyat. Zamroada was caught with a large sum of money outside the Pakistani High Commission in New Delhi. The police accused her of being a conduit for financial transactions between the Pakistani government and the Hurriyat. Zamroada continues to be under arrest in Tihar.
Parvez Imroz, a Srinagar-based lawyer actively involved with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, points out that six women have been arrested under POTA in the valley. The present government released them, along with other POTA detainees. However, Imroz maintains that unless the Armed Forces (J&K) Special Powers Act 1990 is revoked Kashmiris will continue to remain vulnerable to state violence.
The southern states of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu also saw the arrest of several women accused of being Naxalites or harbouring militants in their homes. Vijaya, alias Ramani, one of the five women arrested in Uthangari in Dharmaori, on November 24, 2003, continues to be lodged in Saidapet jail in Tamil Nadu.
Mohin Giri says that during her tenure as chairperson of the National Commission for Women she met several girls who had been under arrest for three-four years. Their only crime was that militants had forced their way into their homes. "What can these women do? If they refuse to cook food for them, the militants will kill their family members," says Giri.
Although no women in Gujarat have been arrested under POTA, there are 1,300 women highlighting the plight of their male family members presently arrested under this law. One such woman is 62-year-old Halimabibi Mansuri. Her social activist son was working as a volunteer at the Lokhandwala Trust Hospital in Ahmedabad when he was picked up by the police. "Old women like us are running from pillar to post to get our sons freed. No one listens to us," says Mansuri.
Syeda Hameed, a member of the Planning Commission, expresses her outrage at how the testimonies of hundreds of POTA victims reveal that the law is being used primarily against poor and disadvantaged sections of society.
Writer Arundhati Roy, a member of the tribunal hearing cases of POTA atrocities, believes this divisive law is being interpreted differently by different states. "It is a law which has been passed in order for any state to use it in any way. In J&K, it's used for one reason, in Tamil Nadu for another and in Andhra and Jharkhand for yet another. It's not just the state using it in Jharkhand, but people using it against each other. It's such a disruptive provision," Roy says.
Civil activists around the country are demanding that POTA be repealed. Justice H Suresh (retd) from the Bombay High Court cites how TADA resulted in the arrest of 77,000 persons, of which several thousand were women. Seventy-two thousand of them were released without trial, but not before they had spent several years in jail. POTA is a much more draconian form of TADA. Says Giri: "Women face a double stigma: their husbands do not want them back and society treats them like pariahs. Unfortunately, most of the women detainees have been imprisoned for the most trivial offences."
(Rashme Sehgal is an independent writer and journalist based in New Delhi)
InfoChange News & features, August 2004