The arrest of Manish Sisodia is wrong. One need not be a lawyer or an expert of law to understand and say this.
This is for the simple reason that he is not a flight risk, he has been cooperating with the investigators without creating obstacles and could have been interrogated as many times as the agencies wanted.
You need not arrest a person for the purpose of an investigation like the one the Central Bureau of Investigation is carrying out. This is not to give any opinion on the merits of the charges levelled against him.
This principle of not arresting a person for the purpose of questioning or merely to get a statement from them has been routinely violated in India by the police.
People have a right to remain silent and the police cannot justify arrest and demand custody by saying that the person is ‘not speaking’. The investigators say they want to subject the accused to custodial interrogation and hence they need to arrest her/him.
Shahrukh Alam, a senior lawyer, has compared this typical Indian practice with processes in other countries and argued for a more civilised policing. Is the idea behind an arrest to humiliate, terrorise or punish? One must remember that the investigation itself should not be punishment for the targeted person. But it often is.
In this case, the CBI claims that it has collected incriminating evidence against Sisodia and wants to know more from him. But in other cases, even the process of collecting evidence begins with arrest.
This has not been discussed enough. Our political parties have never talked about it. They did not do it even when former finance minister P. Chidambaram was arrested for the purpose of investigation. The high court, too, kept denying bail to him. Ultimately it was the Supreme Court which came to his rescue, while coming down heavily on the judgement of the high court.
It was also futile to expect a word from the political class when someone like Sharjeel Imam was arrested or when Siddique Kappan was put behind bars. It is sheer travesty when the police asks for the custody of a person because its investigation is still on. The police often also takes the liberty of asking for time and extending the time limit for submission of the chargesheet. It then pleads that it will be submitting supplementary charge sheets. Thus this tactic of delay can go on forever.
We have seen people spending years in jail waiting for a trial to begin. The most recent cases of those jailed in the name of the so-called Elgar Parishad and the Delhi riots ‘conspiracy cases’ come to mind.
The 16 arrested in connection with the Elgar Parishad case. One of them, Father Stan Swamy, passed away in custody. Photo: The Wire.
It is unfortunate that some leaders of the Congress party are celebrating the arrest of Sisodia and demanding the arrest of Arvind Kejriwal. By doing it, the party is endorsing a wrong practice. It must remember that when you sacrifice principles because it hurts your opponent, the violation of the principle becomes the norm.
We also need to understand that the Bharatiya Janata Party is using this culture of arrest and long incarceration to whip up and satiate the blood lust of its constituents. They have been so trained as to keep demanding blood regularly. This sadism in a section of Hindu society needs either brutalisation of Muslims, violence against them or their humiliation or the persecution of those considered opponents of the regime.
The sights of the arrest of Chidambaram, long interrogation of Rahul Gandhi or Sonia Gandhi and long incarceration of Sharjeel Imam give this section a kick. But for this craving to become a societal habit, Manish Sisodia and his colleagues of the AAP have themselves to blame. Their old tweets from the days of the ‘India Against Corruption’ movement have been unearthed. In those they ask for the arrest of Lalu Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav. Sisodia himself mocks them asking why they fear arrest if they have done nothing wrong.
I remember a senior member of the IAC berating Lalu Prasad Yadav, calling him a ‘chor‘ in a discussion on a TV channel. When I told him that he should not do that, he defiantly justified it as he felt that Lalu Prasad was a thief.
One does not know whether the IAC, which later morphed into AAP, had ever imagined that its messaging will be utilised more systematically and cynically by the Bharatiya Janata Party and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
The idea of inventing enemies and punishing them is seductive. AAP is guilty of going even beyond this and ensuring their target audience enjoys the thrill of persecutive ‘enemies’. And despite what is happening to Manish Sisodia right now, one also knows there is not going to be any rethinking on the part of AAP because it is the same thinking and methods of the ruling regime which constitute its own politics.
Apoorvanand teaches at Delhi University.