A CASE IS PUNISHMENT ITSELF

In Maharashtra, a few days ago, Arun Ferrera, alleged Maoist and a resident of Bandra was acquitted of all charges by the High Court. The police had also accused him of a crime which took place when he was already in prison. He was acquitted of that too. Yet instead of being released, Arun Ferrera was taken out of prison by plainclothes cops, put into a car without a number plate and driven off to face more charges. He is charged in a crime where his name was never mentioned in the First Information Report.
Ironically, one of Arun Ferrera's thesis' from Nagpur Central Jail was titled, "Where Arrests Follow Acquittals", where he studied the cases of countless others in Nagpur Central Prison, especially adivasis from Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, which borders the Maoist-stronghold Abujhmarh.
Arun Ferrera's case is very similar to the case of Padma, wife of Balakrishna, resident of Ramnagar, Hyderabad. Like Ferrera, she was acquitted of all charges on 10 August 2009 by the Bilaspur High Court, Chhattisgarh. But instead of being released from Raipur's Central Jail, she disappeared.
A few days later she was booked under Sections 147, 148, 307 of the IPC, and Sections 25 and 27 of the Arms Act, and remanded to judicial custody. Padma, wife of Balakrishna, was now identified as Padma, wife of Rajana, a resident of Bhopalpatnam, Bijapur district of Chhattisgarh who was actually shot dead in an encounter on 15 October 2006, in the Ballampalli forest.
The Chhattisgarh police was arresting ghosts.
And yet Padma remains in jail because it is a known fact that she is the wife of Maoist Balakrishna, aka Bhasker Rao, a member of the Andhra-Orissa Border Committee. The harassment of family members of known Maoists has been standard operating procedure in counter-insurgencies.
The slow agonizing process of the judiciary becomes punishment itself. Arun Ferrera had also alleged that the police had tortured him, but the High Court found no evidence of it, and yet the wait for freedom, which is swiftly postponed as another case is slapped on the recently acquitted, is also torture.
Hope becomes the weapon of the state.