The Supreme Court’s order for immediate release of Alt News co-founder Mohammed Zubair and the observations it made on Wednesday are again an assertion and endorsement of the right to free speech and an indictment of increasing State actions against citizens for exercising their basic right. A bench led by Justice D Y Chandrachud granted him bail in all cases registered against him by the UP police and transferred all the FIRs filed in various places to Delhi. It also ordered that the interim bail would be applicable to all the FIRs that may be lodged against him in future. Delhi Police had arrested Zubair on June 27 for a 2018 tweet. After a Delhi court granted him regular bail, UP Police lodged six FIRs against him, alleging that his tweets would cause communal disharmony. It also set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the cases, but the court has disbanded that too.
The court’s orders are welcome at a time when people are being arrested on the flimsiest and most untenable of charges and are subjected to repeated harassment and persecution. When a court grants bail in one case, more cases are filed and arrests made again. The court underlined the principle that the power of arrests should be used sparingly and said that the vicious cycle of arrest and bail and more arrests should be broken. Zubair is the latest victim of the vicious attitude and policy of those in power who want to teach a lesson to critics, dissenters and others who express an inconvenient opinion. This is what Chief Justice of India N V Ramana meant when he said last week that the process of law had become the punishment for many.
The UP government’s plea to the court that Zubair should be told not to post any “offensive” tweets shows the wrong notion the government has about the right to free speech. The court rightly said that “we cannot anticipatorily interdict him from exercising his right of free speech”. Only when an individual violates the law can action be taken against him, and there cannot be a preventive gag order. It is not the first time that the higher courts have decisively intervened to protect the rights of citizens. But violation of rights happens again and again, calling into question the rule of law and the Constitution. The subordinate judiciary needs to be sensitised in the matter. When police personnel blatantly violate the law and use it as a weapon to harass citizens, they should be held accountable for their actions. An ill-motivated and wrong arrest is as much a crime as any other crime.