A city court in Delhi, in a verdict of far-reaching importance, acquitted Syed Maqbool Shah after 14 years of captivity in Tihar Jail for a crime he had never committed.
Maqbool Shah was a 17-year old student of class XII, when on June 17, 1996, while on a visit to Delhi he was taken into custody by a squad of Delhi Police from his room in South Delhi for his alleged involvement in the Lajpat Nagar bomb blast. The court acquitted him for want of any evidence. The legal and moral question of basic nature here is why an innocent young citizen was kept behind bars for such a long period without any iota of evidence against him and why our judicial system took so long to pronounce his innocence? Nothing can compensate the mental and physical trauma, social stigma and financial loss he suffered.
Shah, in an interview with The Indian Express (April 27), taking out a mobile phone from his pocket, said, “My brother gave me this ‘little box’ to carry. I do not know how to use it. The first time it rang in my pocket, I jumped. There was just one landline in our entire locality in 1996. My brother explained to me how it works. I still cannot dial a number.” This is just one example showing how he was cut off from society for 14 long years which made him a stranger to time and space in which he has been thrown out now.
He is not the only victim in the country to fall prey to injustice. There are thousands who are suffering the same fate.
In an earlier case the Supreme Court had acquitted S.A.R. Geelani, a lecturer in Zakir Husain College of Delhi University, for his alleged involvement in the attack on Parliament on December 13, 2001. He also suffered a murderous attack after his acquittal and even his lawyer was attacked. And who does not know the similar story of illegal detention and later acquittal of Iftikhar Gilani, who wrote about his ordeal in My Days in Prison.
On November 13, 2009, a Delhi court acquitted Gulzar Ahmed Ganai (23) and Mohammad Amin Hajjam (32), who were alleged to be operatives of Lashkar-e-Taiba. They were charged of possessing explosives to carry out terror activities in the Capital three years ago. The police could not substantiate the charges.
In another case Maulana Yahya Ilahi Baksh (52), former Imam of Haj House was acquitted by a Mumbai court, in January 2010, after serving terms behind bars for four years on the charges of having contact with Lashkar-e-Taiba.
On December 30, 2008, a local court in Hyderabad acquitted all the 21 youths arrested after the serial blasts in Hyderabad in May and August 2007. Their acquittal also exposed the false claim of police that the youths were part of a plot for waging jihad in the city.
At first most of the youths are charged under Section 120(b) of the Indian Penal Code for conspiracy and subsequently some other terror charges are slapped under various sections of the IPC. Hardly any mandatory procedures are followed by the cops who handle the cases.
The police invariably use force to make the accused admit their role in some blasts or even in a conspiracy. If fortunately one is acquitted by a court of law, his activities are monitored by the police round the clock.
There are hundreds of cases in which innocent youths belonging to a particular community were arrested under false and concocted charges, and tortured and their life made miserable. Now they are a desperate lot whose frustration knows no bounds. When can we expect the time when every Indian would be free from fear and torture.