by MUKUL DUBE
The judgment of the Raipur sessions court against Binayak Sen is unlikely to stand up to scrutiny, given that a crucial piece of “evidence” appears to have been fabricated by the Chhattisgarh police and that other parts were described by the Supreme Court last year as circumstantial.
I think it is wrong, however, to blame Chhattisgarh alone, or a judge of a lower court. We must consider also Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s frequent presenting of Maoism as the greatest menace, Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s threat to hound those who even obliquely express sympathy for the Maoists, and Congress spokesperson Abhishek
Singhvi’s ostensibly neutral statement in which he says, in fact, that the judiciary cannot be wrong. The matter is much larger than Chhattisgarh.