Court overlooked weak links in Binayak Sen case

NEW DELHI/ RAIPUR: A ‘‘ typographical error’ ’ in a Chhattisgarh police affidavit before the Supreme Court could turn the location of a crucial arrest from Station Road to something as different as ‘ Mahindra Hotel’ . Or so it seems from the Raipur sessions court verdict holding human rights activist Binayak Sen guilty of conspiracy to commit sedition.

In its December 24 judgment , the trial court overlooked the improbability of such a drastic change resulting from mere typographical error. This latitude shown to the prosecution resulted in Sen’s conviction even after key prosecution witnesses had turned hostile.

When Sen had approached the Supreme Court last year for bail, the police admitted in their affidavit that they had arrested his co-accused Piyush Guha from Mahindra Hotel. This came across as a Freudian slip as the location of the arrest was a major point of contention to determine whether the police did recover from Guha the seditious letters that Sen had allegedly passed on to him.

Guha’s version is that he was picked up from Mahindra Hotel and kept in illegal custody blindfolded for six days before he was finally produced before a magistrate on May 6, 2007. But the police claimed in the Raipur trial court that they had arrested Guha on Station Road and seized those incriminating letters from his bag.
Sen’s jailors punched holes in cops’ take

If it accepted the police’s claim that the mention of Mahindra Hotel in their affidavit before the SC as the location of Guha’s arrest was no more than a typographical error, the trial court was relying entirely on the testimony of the seizure witness , a cloth vendor called Anil Kumar Singh.

Such reliance on Singh’s evidence seems tenuous given that, by the police’s own admission, the seizure memo was not drawn up on the spot. Instead , it was only after they had taken Guha to their police station that the arresting team listed the seized documents and got Singh to sign that memo.

Yet another reason why the court should have been skeptical about the police story was that Singh, by their own admission, was just a passerby. He did not accompany the police before the arrest and could not have vouched for the veracity of the sequence of events given by the police, ruling out the possibility of any documents being planted on Guha.

Worse, the court accepted Singh’s hearsay evidence on what Guha said. Singh said he overheard Guha telling the police that letters of jailed Maoist leader Narayan Sanyal had been passed on to him by Sen. Sen stands convicted on such thin evidence although the jailors punched holes in the police version by deposing that all the meetings between Sen and Sanyal were strictly supervised, thereby ruling out the possibility of any letters being exchanged.