In West Bengal, the new BJP government has passed a law allowing the government to detain for a year anyone who is “generally reputed to be desperate and dangerous to the community” and to restrict the detainee’s access to a lawyer. The opposition has labelled the law as “scary” and said that it wouldn’t stand judicial scrutiny. But what were our Constitution-makers thinking when they enshrined preventive detention in the Constitution?
Prevention is a convenient word that gives citizens the feeling that something has been or will be averted. But what systems exist to judge whether officials actually acted in the best interests of citizens in an enforcement and legal system as opaque as ours? The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), 1987, another avatar of the UAPA, too gave the State unbridled powers. AG Perarivalan was arrested under this law as a conspirator in the Rajiv Gandhi murder case. He was only 19 years old then. He languished in jail for three decades. The only evidence against him was his own so-called confession, which was not recorded in its entirety and conveniently left out portions where he stated that he had no idea about the use of the two nine-volt batteries he...
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