New Delhi, Nov 17: A delegation of Communist Party of India (Marxist) Saturday met President Pranab Mukherjee to protest against the alleged targeting of Muslims in terror cases and demanded that innocent youths harassed by the police and investigative agencies be compensated.
CPI (M) General Secretary Prakash Karat led the delegation to the President and submitted a memorandum, which details cases where youths slapped with terror charges were found to be innocent and acquitted after spending several years in prison. The delegation included CPI (M) leader Subhashini Ali, the party's Jammu and Kashmir legislator M Y Tarigami, three youths who had spent 14 years in jail before being acquitted and another who had served eight years in a Kanpur prison.
The youth included in the delegation - Muhammad Aamir from Delhi, Syed Maqbool Shah from Srinagar and Wasif Haider from Kanpur - were arrested arbitrarily when they were just eighteen or nineteen years of age, implicated in dozens of cases, incarcerated for over 10 years and each one of them was, as held by the courts, innocent.
"While no quarter can be given to any individual or group responsible for terror attacks, the arrest of innocent Muslim youths has reached serious dimensions and requires immediate attention," the memorandum said.
"It's a blot on the principles of secular democracy. At the same time, the arrest of innocent people means that the culprits go free," the memorandum said.
The CPI(M) demanded compensation and rehabilitation for those implicated in cases, action against those who framed innocents and the scrapping of draconian provisions in the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
“In some cases these young men have been incarcerated for ten to fourteen years as under trials and then finally acquitted by the Courts as being innocent. Muslim youth are the most vulnerable targets today. The draconian provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act are used to deny the normal processes of justice, while there is no time bound procedure for the judicial processes. There is growing feeling of fear and apprehension on the one hand and anger on the other that innocents are being implicated. Young lives have been destroyed, families stricken, forced into social isolation, driven into debt to pay the huge expenditures in legal fees - the terrible conditions caused by State led justice,” it said.

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