November 6, 2015
The Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group or JagLAG
is a group of committed human rights lawyers who have been working
towards documenting the plight of adivasi undertrial prisoners in
Bastar and providing them legal aid in the trial courts. The
following presentation contains data obtained by them from the NCRB
and through RTI from the courts, prisons and police stations of
Bastar which has been collated and analysed to clearly show how the
criminal justice system has been misused by the state in Bastar to
arrest and imprison large numbers of adivasi men for prolonged
periods of time under severe, and mostly false charges. This is a
means by which the state is waging war on the adivasi people of
Bastar with the aim of breaking the backbone of the Maoist insurgency
which has been going on in central India over the last decade.
As the meticulous work by JagLAG has
exposed the way in which the criminal justice system in Bastar has
been subverted by the state to persecute and victimize large sections
of the adivasi population, and has endeavoured to provide legal aid
to the victims of state repression, they have themselves been
targetted by the state and its agents. Recently, the Bastar District
Bar Association, in an unprecedented move, has taken a resolution
that JagLAG lawyers will not be permitted to practice in Bastar
District Courts under the pretext of prohibiting “outside lawyers”.
By this highly unethical move, the bar association has tried to
prevent the exemplary legal aid work done by JagLAG lawyers. The
following presentation is a clear example of the importance of the
work that JagLAG is doing which requires that all democratic-minded
people stand in solidarity with them.
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