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Speakers at an anti-GUJCOC rally organised here on Saturday asked the central government not to accept the demand of Chief Minister Narendra Modi for passing the GUJCOC (Gujarat Control of Organised Crime) Bill, 2003, maintaining that it was a draconian piece of legislation.
Addressing the gathering at Sardar Baug, leading advocate Mahesh Bhatt said unrestricted power could not be given to police as senior police officials, including IPS officers such as D G Vanzara and Dinesh M N, had been allegedly found misusing powers for staging false encounters.
Quoting an Allahabad High Court judgement of Justice Anand Narayan Mulla, Bhatt described police as the “biggest organised gang of criminals” and said unrestrained power given to them would not be in the interest of society. GUJCOC Bill, which contained provisions empowering police without any restrictions, should not be passed by the Centre, he demanded.
“Crime and terrorism can never be controlled by the law. Despite the existence of POTA, the attack on Parliament did take place in New Delhi. Similarly, Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar was attacked. POTA could not stop such attacks,” said Bhatt.
Representative of Jan Sangharsh Manch (JSM) and advocate Mukul Sinha said Modi’s justification for asking for GUJCOC Bill in relation to the trial of the accused of July 26 serial blasts was hollow and misleading since even if the President gave assent to the Bill, then too the law would not be applicable to the July 26 blast incident because no criminal law could be enforced retrospectively.
Others who spoke on the occasion included activist Ibrahim Sheikh, Iqbal Mirza, Anmrish Patel and Shamsuddin Peerzada.
Organisations that took part in the demonstrations included Jan Sangharsh Manch, New Socialist Movement, Jamaat-e-Islami, Aman Samuday, Jamaat-e-Ulema, Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Samiti, Aman Samuday and Ahmedabad Muslim Women Association.
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Just how close is Gujarat to becoming an authoritarian police state under the Fascist leadership of Narendra Modi? The events of the year 2002 where over 3,000 people were murdered by the State terrorists, can answer part of that question. Those events dwarfed all other events that had ever happened in this land of Mahatma Gandhi. The history of Gujarat state since the emergence of a Hindu terrorist like Narendra Modi addresses the rest. Gujarat served as a testing ground for ‘riot’ control and police powers during that time. Both protesters and media professionals were beaten and jailed without discrimination or consideration of their Constitutional rights to assemble and for the media to report the news. And now with the GUJCOC, this totalitarian regime of Narendra Modi wants to give more powers to the police to enable them to extract confessions by torture. How can that be allowed to happen?
And now with the GUJCOC, this totalitarian regime of Narendra Modi wants to give more powers to the police to enable them to extract confessions by torture. The alert and enlightened judiciary in this country has so far made confession obtained by torture inadmissible while the Fascist Narendra Modi with this draconian bill wants to make torture by police legal. How can that be allowed to happen? In a 1995 interview in Z Magazine, Israel Shahak, an Israeli professor of chemistry and a writer said: “The conclusion is that human society is composed of a mass of ordinary people who can become exterminators but who in their ordinary lives are completely usual people, of a minority which protests and a minority which plans murders and enjoys murder.” His conclusions are not much different from those of Hannah Arendt reached in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ (1951). Arendt focused on the gross political abuses of Stalinism and Nazism. Which direction Gujarat will travel on the road to the further erosion of our Constitutional freedoms and civil rights is perhaps already etched into both official and unofficial policies of Gujarat’s Fascist government.