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“I hope I get to see her before I die. After all, I’m getting old,” Mahavir Narwal yearned to meet his daughter Natasha while talking to a journalist in October 2020. In another interview, he urged his incarcerated daughter to continue her resistance against injustice. “There is nothing to fear about being jailed,” he said.
Natasha Narwal has been languishing in Tihar’s Jail's prison for women for over a year. She’s was charged under the draconian anti-terror law – Unlawful Activities Prevention Act – for allegedly inciting communal riots in Delhi’s northeast district in February 2020.
While granting her bail in FIR No. 50, a judge in Karkardooma’s district court noted that Natasha doesn’t pose any flight risk, and there’s no possibility of her tampering with evidence as all the witnesses in her case are either police officers or protected witnesses.
Further, the court raised serious doubts on the strength of the prosecution’s case against Narwal, poking holes in the only evidence against her.
When the visual evidence doesn’t support the allegation of inciting violence, what is the case under UAPA even founded upon?
The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, India’s anti-terror law, which was amended by the present government, has become a primary tool for stifling dissent.
One of the UAPA's severely problematic provisions is Section 43-D(5), under which the court can deny bail if it believes that the accusation is prima facie true after relying on the police material.
Section 43-D(5) not only sets a higher standard of assessing “prima facie truth” at such a preliminary stage of the investigation, but also restricts the court’s decision-making to material produced by the police. This gives unfettered powers to the police to produce only that material before the court, which favours its narrative. This means that evidence pointing to other possible narratives, which could go in support of the accused, simply may not appear before the court.
So, the process of arriving at the “prima facie truth” is heavily, and unfairly, skewed against the accused at the bail hearing.
Singh further claims that UAPA “engenders a culture of political witch-hunts" where selected organisations that question the legitimacy of the state and the ruling classes, find themselves are outlawed and targeted.
Natasha Narwal is one of those dissidents who has been marked as “outlawed” by a law that legitimises the egregious practice of prolonged pre-trial incarceration under the ambiguous, manufactured, and exclusionary ground of “national security”.
Even in prison, in a space that by its very design engenders pain, hopelessness, and fear, Natasha Narwal has been a reformer. She is actively engaging with other women inmates to understand their plight of incarceration and how penal institutions end up punishing instead of “reforming” women offenders.
It was due to their efforts, that the Delhi High Court passed a series of directions to help the women incarcerated in Tihar’s Jail No. 6. The court directed the jail authorities to provide a tele-calling facility to quarantined prisoners, to provide a policy for vaccinating inmates, to make e-mulaqats functional, and assuring adequate legal aid and functional computers and internet in the computer room.
Narwal’s continued incarceration despite her background, behaviour, and beliefs, is a punishment in itself. A punishment that is meted out without proving her guilt, a punishment that stands antithetical to all established principles of criminal justice.
Despite her plea, Narwal was never released to spend time with her ailing father. The only parent she was left with after the demise of her mother a few years ago. On May 10, the Delhi High Court allowed her to be released on interim bail to attend her father’s last rites.
It is not just her continued incarceration, but also her release on interim bail that exposes the insatiable punitive fetish of the State. She was told to give her phone number to two police stations, strictly comply with COVID protocols, submit a personal bond of Rs 50,000, and most disturbingly, to maintain “radio silence” about her case.
The central government, while it did not oppose her interim bail at this stage, asked the court to direct Narwal to not “tweet” or “post anything on social media” about her case or the Delhi riots in general.
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