Union Minister H.S. Puri’s sudden announcement about the housing of Rohingya refugee families in the National Capital Territory of Delhi is either inspired genius or the cat’s paw for the Hindutva dispensation to explore the process of enforced ghettoization, starting with the Rohingyas.
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Disclaimer: This is an allegory. It is an entry for Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Many truths, deep analysis, some plausible guess work and healthy imagination arising from knowledge of the principal actors reveal a heady cocktail, the classic whodunit. It is advised that it be read with a healthy attitude of Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
What had Puri tweeted?
EARLY yesterday morning, the Union Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs, Hardeep Singh Puri, tweeted, “India has always welcomed those who have sought refuge in the country. In a landmark decision all #Rohingya #Refugees will be shifted to EWS flats in Bakkarwala area of Delhi. They will be provided basic amenities, UNHCR IDs & round-the-clock @DelhiPolice protection”.
That day we spent only finding out who all had been arrested and who had escaped the police dragnet. The next day, I had wanted to walk down to the Delhi State Socialist Party office and our trade union office. I was cautioned not to go anywhere near it. It was feared that Gobind, the office caretaker, was a police informer.
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ON the morning of June 25, 1975, Than Singh Josh, the leader of the socialist trade unions in Delhi, and I had just reached Bangalore, as Bengaluru was then known. From the train station, we took an auto rickshaw to Subedar Chatram Road. We were going to the office of the Karnataka state Socialist Party. It was actually the office of K.G. Mahewarappa, a lawyer, who was a long time socialist. We were going to sleep there for the week.
Perhaps the legal community would care to demonstrate how they make the fine distinction between an Emergency regime that subverts the Constitution and suspends fundamental rights, and other regimes that do likewise in a society that is bereft of due process of law and is yet considered an electoral democracy, however tawdry.
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WRITING in 2013, Justice Rajinder Sachar, former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court asked the question as to whether the Emergency would have collapsed if the Supreme Court had decided the ADM Jabalpur case of 1976 differently. The court had failed to show spine and follow well-established law that in cases of habeas corpus, every imprisonment is prima facie unlawful and that it is for a person directing imprisonment to justify the act.