BJP-ruled Tripura is the latest State to join others in brazenly using the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) to stifle citizens’ right to freedom of speech and expression. It’s police have charged lawyers, journalists and 100-odd social media users with UAPA for posts on communal violence, which followed after reports emerged last month from Bangladesh that Hindu minorities there were attacked during ‘Durga Puja.’

Significantly, on Thursday last, the Supreme Court was convinced to entertain a petition of two advocates and a journalist seeking quashing of an FIR and a criminal case lodged under UAPA provisions against them for bringing facts through social media posts about the ‘targeted political violence’ against Muslims in the north-eastern State, as spelt out by a fact-finding report “Humanity Under Attack in Tripura #Muslim Lives Matter”.

While the court asked the petitioners to first approach High Court on the FIR, the latter’s concern over UAPA misuse, made it agree to hear the case. Indeed, what emerges is yet another example of the sheer high-handedness of the government to quash dissent.

The petition makes a critical point: “If the state is allowed to criminalise the very act of fact finding and reporting — and that too under the stringent provisions of the UAPA in which anticipatory bail is barred and the idea of bail is a remote possibility — then the only facts that will come in the public domain are those that are convenient to the state due to the ‘chilling effect’ on the freedom of speech and expression of members of civil society. If the quest for truth and reporting thereof itself is criminalised then the victim in the process is the idea of justice.”

Therefore, the judiciary must draw the laxman rekha for the government in Tripura and elsewhere, particularly UP and J&K, to protect what the Constitution gives to citizens, its fundamental rights. No encroachments, please.

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