New Delhi: The People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) has condemned the “malicious and spiteful” arrest and detention of Jesuit Father Stanislaus Lourduswamy.
The National Investigation Agency on October 8 arrested the 83-year-old social activist from his residence at the Bagaicha campus, a Jesuit center, near Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand.
“PUCL is shocked by and condemns the detention and arrest by NIA police team of 83 year old Fr. Stan Swamy,” the human rights body said in a message on October 8.
The rights body also says the federal anti-terror agency that has taken the priest to Ranchi would take him to Mumbai, some 1, 710 km southwest of Ranchi, to be remanded “in the Bhima Koregaon case for allegedly being part of the larger conspiracy to cause unrest.”
The PUCL statement, signed by its president Ravi Kiran Jain and general secretary V Suresh, terms the Jesuit’s arrest as an “inhuman and insincere act” of “sheer vindictiveness.”
The rights boy points out that the priest had cooperated fully with the investigating officers, who quizzed him for more than 15 hours on four days in July and one day in August.
“Despite his advanced age and other age related ailments, Fr. Stan patiently answered all queries put to him,” says the statement that points out that the Pune police had raided the priest’s residence on August 28, 2018, and seized his laptop, tablet, camera and other things.
The statement notes that Father Swamy has “consistently denied any link with extremist leftist forces or Maoists. He had also clearly told the NIA that some so called extracts allegedly taken from his computer shown to him by the NIA were fake and fabricated and that he disowned them.”
The rights body recalled the police telling the Bombay High Court in October 2018 that the Jesuit priest was only a suspect in the Bhima Koregaon case and not an accused. It sees the arrest as motivated and “completely fabricated” to support the NIA’s “non-existent conspiracy of Bhima Koregaon case.”
The rights body says the priest was arrested because of his courage to expose “the large scale abuse of anti-terror and sedition laws” by Jharkhand’s previous government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party. “Thousands of Adivasis were falsely implicated and arrested for exercising their fundamental right to protest in the Pathalgadi movement and kept in prison without hearing,” the PUCL statement said.
“Fr. Stan’s meticulous documentation of the untold suffering experienced by Adivasi youth, hundreds of whom were imprisoned for no offence at all, earned the ire of the police and the state which launched a witch hunt against Fr. Stan and some others in the human rights movement in Jharkhand,” the statement alleged.
The government was upset after the priest put the data analysis of thousands of Adivasis arbitrarily arrested by the police as an affidavit in a Public Interest Litigation filed in the Jharkhand High Court.
“Fr. Stan has always professed his commitment to the Constitution of India and peaceful means of expressing dissent while questioning abuse of power by state executive and police. Through the arrest of Fr. Stan, the NIA is yet again sending a message to the rest of the human rights community that there is no level to which they will not stoop to silence and crush dissent,” the PUCL warns.
The rights body wants the NIA to immediately release the priest and refrain from carrying out such arbitrary and motivated arrests of innocent law abiding citizens.