Judging Sedition: The Case of the Good Doctor

Raja bola raat hai, mantri bola raat hai, court bola raat hai, ye subah subah ki baat hai! (King said it is night, minister said it is night, court said it is night, it was early morning!)

On December 24, 2010, the District Court in Raipur, in Chhattisgarh state of central India, sentenced Dr Binayak Sen to life imprisonment. Given the flimsy nature of the evidence, the sentence came as a shock, and represented a shot in the arm for the state's strategy of silencing human rights activists and social workers who dare to dissent.

The targeting of Dr Binayak Sen, well-known civil rights and public health activist, has much wider implications for democracy and civil rights in India. Sen is the National Vice President of the Peoples' Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), one of the most respected civil liberties organizations in India, founded by the late Jayaprakash Narayan during the 1975-1977 internal Emergency, the worst era in the history of post-Independent India. Dr Sen's work in the area of public health is well known; in fact, he was part of the group to set up the rural health care system for Chattisgarh. This is a man for whose release on bail twenty-two Nobel laureates had appealed, with the British House of Commons moving a motion for his release.

Binayak Sen completed his basic medical studies from the prestigious Christian Medical College, Vellore, in 1972, and awarded the degree of MD (Paediatrics) by the same institution in 1976. He then joined the faculty of the Center for Social Medicine and Community Health at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, where he worked for two years. After that, he worked in a field-based health program at the Friends Rural Center, at Rasulia in Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh, concentrating on diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis.

A growing understanding of the social and economic causes of the disease nudged Sen to move in 1981 to Dalli-Rajhara, the site of the captive iron ore mines of the B