is not new. It was first tabled and passed in the Indian parliament in 1967. The law carries a presumption of guilt, suspends most of the fundamental freedom granted to the Indian citizen under article 19 of the Constitution and allows wide-ranging executive powers of arrest and incarceration. Since its inception in 1967, it has gone through a series of amendments, each change strengthening its anti-democratic core.
Notwithstanding the design and use of the law by the previous regime, the law, even in the 2004 and 2008 amendments, retained the category “organisation” in defining an act of terror. Individuals arrested under it had to belong or associate with a specific banned, unlawful, terrorist organisation. The state thus had to perform some labour to build a case against an individual. It had to demonstrate the individual’s connection to one of these organisations, however flimsy this might be.
by this new definition can be categorised as terrorists. The profound totalitarianism this move unfurls is shocking. Added to the power the UAPA grants the executive to arrest people on the basis of intention it creates the perfect legal instrument that potentially transforms any dissident thought into an act of terror. Any independent opinion critical of the present government, in this system, is already a step towards terror until it is proven otherwise.
Each dissenting citizen is thus a potential terrorist until acquitted by the executive. This is what is happening with the new spurt of arrests in India right now. Delhi police are usingof civil society members — replete as they are with disagreements, demands of action against police brutality, calls for moderations — as evidence for complicity in the Delhi riots. In a way, none of this is new.
of 1929 is one of the more infamous examples of this practice. The government collected evidence for five years or so before they brought the case to the court. the colonial state could grasp and base its indictment on; consequently, the five years of labour was spent in painstaking incubation of a conspiracy. In 2020, the amended UAPA allows BJP to ditch such circuitous routes to “conspiracy”. The citizen, by dint of her ability to think and critique, is already conspiratorial.
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