The Allahabad High Court’s order quashing the detention of outspoken Dr Kafeel Khan under the National Security Act was a slap on the face of the UP administration that had him imprisoned for months. While the local district magistrate (DM) Chandra Bhushan Singh invoked the NSA citing a ‘provocative’ speech Dr Khan delivered at the Bab-e-Syed gate of the Aligarh Muslim University against the Citizenship Amendment Act last year, the court found nothing objectionable in the address.
Instead, the Bench said the speech actually gave a call for national integrity. It hauled the DM over the coals for his selective reading of the address, ignoring its true intent. The administration used every dilatory tactic, the Bench pointed out, like providing radiograms of the extension of his detention under the NSA without giving him a hard copy of the order that would have enabled him to seek judicial redress.
Besides, to satisfy the Constitutional mandate that a detenue must be provided adequate material to seek relief at the earliest, Dr Khan was given a compact disk of his AMU speech but without an instrument to play it! Neither was he given a copy of the speech’s transcript. The NSA was invoked against him by the DM in February, days after a local court granted him bail following his arrest in late December at the Mumbai airport.
Incidentally, the court’s decision came a day before the Union Cabinet cleared an ambitious plan to reform the bureaucracy and build capacity to make government employees “more creative, proactive, professional and technology-enabled”. But would that training reform the likes of the Aligarh DM, who clearly had an axe to grind against Dr Khan? Politicisation of the bureaucracy is the elephant in the room.
Reforms that sidestep political meddling cannot fully repair the nation’s steel frame, which is how Sardar Patel had described the civil services. The DM apparently invoked the NSA because people can be detained under it without charges for up to 12 months. His abuse of the draconian law reignited the debate on whether it should exist at all in a progressive democracy. After all the opprobrium, the UP government ought to take action against the DM; else it could be accused of being his instigator. Will it?