Chandan Srivastava
When the television story which started in the first week of the month has reached the last week of the month, then in the climax the answer is received that Aryan Khan has finally got bail. But this is not the real question of the Mumbai cruise ship drugs case. You will have to recreate the climax scene to identify the real question of this case.
Suppose there would not have been a cruise going from Mumbai to Goa at the place of incident, instead there would have been a farm in Mandsaur district of Madhya Pradesh. There would have been no Aryan Khan in the story, but an unnamed farmer doing a licensed cultivator of opium.
And, this farmer would have been caught by the officials of the Central Narcotics Department on the allegation that he had embezzled some quantity of the opium grown. Then would the story of the arrested farmer make headlines on news channels, newspapers and internet news sites for months?
Would we have been sharing our joys and sorrows with each other playing forward-forward like a zealous patriot, emanating from the story of the arrested farmer on our WhatsApp chats as now? Leave aside the matter of making headlines for a month, think whether news channels and websites even consider the caught farmer to be newsworthy?
The Other Side of the Cruise Ship Drugs Case
You will find these questions a figment of imagination and exaggerated. You will say, this game of diversion will not work. Aryan Khan has gone if caught, then where did the mention of the farmer come from in this story? It is true, the climax scene created above about the farmer is fictional.
But fantasies have a ground, they are credible by being built on the foundation of truths. One such fact is that section 19 of the NDPS Act (Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985) provides that if a farmer is cultivating opium under a license and is found to be smuggling opium, he will be liable to 10 shall be punished with rigorous imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to 20 years, and shall also be liable to a fine of Rs 1 to 2 lakh.
An interesting aspect of this fact is the cultivation, production, storage, distribution, purchase and sale of narcotic substances (such as heroin, cocaine) associated with them in section 8 of the NDPS, such as opium and ganja-cannabis. explicitly banned.
According to this law, you can produce opium which is prohibited to be taken by the same plant if you get a license and if the Central Narcotics Department thinks that you have hidden some part of the opium grown, then you are at the mercy of the Narcotics Department.
You can be arrested or given the benefit of doubt. Meaning, there is nothing in your hands, which is in the hands of the authorities. If, once you are arrested, then forget about your bail because the offense has been made non-bailable under the NDPS Act.
The second truth related to the scene of the climax created above is that if any department of the government (especially the police) wants to allow you to cultivate opium licensed and if you want, on the basis of this, you are in connivance with the gangs who break into the security of the nation. Present it as an enemy of the country.
This has happened in Mandsaur of Madhya Pradesh only in 2017. According to reports, in June 2017 in Mandsaur, the police opened fire on the protesting farmers. The farmers were troubled by the falling prices of the produce and were agitating to fix the remunerative price of the crop. A total of 6 farmers were killed in the firing. Soon after the incident, the police released a list of 36 farmers. The farmers included in the list were named by the police as opium smugglers.
Alleged that these same people are the culprits of instigating the farmers’ movement and arson and the police started roaming around for the arrest of these so called opium smugglers. Then, the story of one such farmer, Amrit Ram Patidar, was published on a news website titled ‘The Opium Trap’. (Mandsaur is one of the few areas where some farmers do licensed cultivation of opium under government supervision.)
The question is about ADPS Act
The real question of the Mumbai cruise ship drugs case is not whether Aryan Khan’s arrest is justified or illegitimate or whether he has been a victim of a conspiracy or not. The real question of drugs case is the NDPS Act itself, under which arrests are made in such cases. This Act does not differentiate between hunter and prey. The difference is only in the amount of punishment received, not the crime itself. If you do business of banned drugs, then according to the Act you are a criminal and if you ever get caught in the clutches of drug dealers and get intoxicated with banned drugs, then you are also a criminal.
If you did not consume charas, ganja, opium but found it with you or found in the premises of your house or found with your partner, you can be considered guilty of the crime. Even if you have cultivated plants related to the production of drugs without taking a license, even if you are guilty and with a license, there will be a possibility that you will be arrested for colluding with opium smugglers like the farmers of Mandsaur.
To put this thing in more simple language, in the NDPS Act, the crime has been conceived in such a way that it is not discovered who is harmed by the crime. Generally, crime is taken to mean such an act which causes loss of life and property or causes any physical or mental pain to another. At the same time, it is also seen whether the intention was to cause harm to anyone while carrying out such work. If these two things are proved, the guilty is punished.
But, the NDPS Act itself talks about punishing the drug addict, that is, the person who has himself become a victim of someone’s conspiracy (for example, a drug dealer). Secondly, it is not necessary to see whether the crime was knowingly or unintentionally.
According to section 35 of this Act, unless proved otherwise, the court may presume that the offenses relating to prohibited drugs (means consuming, possessing, buying, selling, delivering, producing, making, submission etc.) has been intentional.
This means that there is no evidence of someone’s intoxication, but if an intoxicant is recovered from him, then it will be considered that that person has kept the drug with the intention of intoxicating. As such, it becomes difficult to make the necessary distinction between the victim of crime and error and conspiracy and conspiracy.
If you want to understand the irony of the situation, then remember here for example, the Kumbh-Mela being organized under government supervision, where it is common to meet the sight of people blowing chillums in a group of sadhus.
The other major anomaly related to the NDPS Act is that it has violated the very basic law of justice. The natural belief of justice is that a person will be considered innocent until proven guilty. In the NDPS Act, the situation is opposite.
Section 35 of the Act imposes the responsibility on the accused to prove his innocence in the court. The second point of this connection is that the NDPS Act weighs the thief of cucumber and the thief of diamonds on the same balance.
Sometimes a person takes intoxicant or a person is intoxicated, a person sells ten-twenty grams of ganja daily, or he is so vicious that it is a game of jokes for him to spend two to four kilograms of charas-all NDPS Act equally guilty.
The third and perhaps the saddest part of this series is that the methodology that the NDPS Act adopts in the matter of justice, in a sense treats the drug addict and the terrorist as equal.
Section 37(1) of the Act provides that unless the court has reasonable grounds to believe that the accused is completely innocent and, in the event of being granted bail, will not commit any offense, he cannot be released on bail. In this respect, the NDPS Act is similar to the infamous TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act, 1987) and POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002). Similar provision was made in TADA and POTA to release the accused on bail.
In short, in spite of the stringent provisions of the NDPS Act, there is full scope for misuse of this law in the hands of the investigating officers or in collusion with drug dealers, politicians with criminal background and officials of law enforcement agencies and this is how we react. Not only in the case of bright personalities like Chakraborty or Aryan Khan, one can see it happening in the case of an unknown farmer.
(The author is a socio-cultural affairs scholar)
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