This means that the Centre should have brought the investigating officers of the various criminal cases against the alleged SIMI accused to depose before the tribunal, so that the SIMI lawyer could get a chance to cross-examine them on the various aspects of the case such as how the arrests and the seizures were made as well as about the confessions of the accused, etc. But an overwhelming number of the witnesses who were brought to the tribunal — nearly all of whom were police officers — were those who hadn’t directly led the investigations of the criminal cases, and hence took refuge in saying that they couldn’t answer the question put to them because they had no personal knowledge about the crime’s investigation, and were only deposing from their study of the documents.
ALSO, THE scheme of the 1967 law is such that an organisation will be banned only for two years at a time. If a fresh ban has to be promulgated after the lapse of the previous one, then it must be based on evidence of new unlawful activity arising after the first ban was notified. In other words, the second ban cannot be based on the basis of the unlawful activity that occurred before the first ban and had formed the grounds for its imposition. Such safeguards were considered necessary at the time the bill for the law was debated in Parliament. After all, the right to associate is a fundamental right guaranteed in the Constitution, and endless bans on an organisation without fresh cause to do so would severely compromise the constitutional right of that association to exist.
Thus, the Centre’s decision to ban SIMI on February 7, 2008 should be based on fresh ground arising only after February 7, 2006, when the previous ban was imposed. Despite this requirement, an overwhelming majority of the cases that the Centre brought to this tribunal from the various states pertained to periods as far back as 1999 which have been led in evidence in the previous three tribunals. (In fact, the Centre had so much as admitted before the third tribunal that it didn’t have any new cases against SIMI. Yet, the third tribunal had inexplicably upheld the ban notification.) The law also says that the ban notification can be based only on grounds arising before the notification is promulgated. The only valid period here is Februray 7, 2006 to February 6, 2008. Thus, the Centre could not bring cases arising after February 7, 2008 — like Safdar Nagori’s arrest in March this year — before the tribunal. Yet, in state after state, that is exactly what the Centre did.
Such was the indefensible weakness in the Centre’s case before the tribunal that Judge Geeta Mittal, who throughout the hearings relied extensively on points of law, found that the Centre’s ban of SIMI was unsustainable. Kudos must go to the judge for a decision that goes against the prevalent widespread prejudice against SIMI in the government, the police and most certainly in the media. Even if it has promptly been stayed. •
