Umar Khalid and the Paradoxical Danger of ‘Prevention is Better than Cure’ in laws-Why India seems like a dystopian Anime
To those who have been following the arrests of activists Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, and others in the Delhi riots case in 2020, the disappointment in bail still not being granted for them is deeply present. For quick refreshers on the proceeding click here. For those who wish to understand his views, a quick Youtube search is enough. This activist is steadfast and open about his opinions and dissatisfaction with the political system. His repeated message often seems to urge citizens to ask questions and hold their government accountable. He reiterates that it is our right and duty as participants in a democracy. We must always ask questions. And in light of the recent hopefully positive news on this case, the Supreme Court refused to give the police two weeks to respond to the bail pleas on October 27 , we wait to see if the ‘imprisoned on an accusation yet not put on trial for four years’, will finally get bail and a fair hearing.
Umar Khalid
But while we wait the supreme court’s verdict, I found myself thinking of an anime (animated series) I watched as a nineteen-year-old, of a futuristic dystopian world, and how that world reminds me of our current systems.
This anime, called Psycho-Pass, is set in a dystopian 22nd Century Japan where crime is controlled through the preventive mechanism. But not by way of bettering institutional and social infrastructure to deter crimes. Instead, in the world of Psycho-Pass, citizens can be measured as dangerous or peaceful by their propensity to commit crime. An incredibly powerful machine system- called the Sybil System, can ‘read’ humans and produce a quantifiable result of ‘dangerous’ or ‘peaceful’.
In this world, your crime co-efficient is what dictates to police authorities whether you are a criminal or not. The sybil system can read a person’s minds and inclinations and label them. If your crime coefficient number is not the desired limit, you can be sent to rehabilitation centers, removed from society as you are proclaimed a threat to peace, or even killed if your crime coefficient is too high, all without having actually committed a crime. The system doesn’t even identify the nature of crime or predicts what crime a person is going to commit, just that they are showing criminal tendency. The workings of the system are trusted by law enforcement and even police officers and detectives themselves are subjected to the system’s analysis, wherein they must maintain a decent crime coefficient to be able to use their firearms. The sybil system is the ultimate authority. But ordinary citizens and the law enforcement don’t know how the system actually computes and decides. Its inner workings and make-up are furtive and obscure yet accepted as final verdict. That is the all-encompassing power of the Sybil system. In this world, propensity to or likelihood of committing crime is itself the crime liable for punishment.
(still of database in the anime of crime co-efficient readings of citizens)
Now, present reality begs- Is there truly a way to determine, with enough data about a person, whether they are characteristically a criminal? Let’s consider the widely accepted notion of what makes peoples criminals. Criminals are those who have committed and been convicted of crimes. Crimes are codified. Law spells out exactly what acts result in one being charged with what crime and what punishment they ought to receive. Even with the acceptance of degrees of crimes- for example if one reads the definition of murder in Section 103 of the the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita (previously Indian Penal Code), there needs to be an act committed which is then classified as various degrees of murder or homicide.
It is also considered a crime if one does an act to incite violence or unrest. Under Section 152 of BNS, a criminal law to protect ‘nation integrity’, it is declared “Whoever, purposely or knowingly, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or by electronic communication or by use of financial mean, or otherwise, excites or attempts to excite, secession or armed rebellion or subversive activities, or encourages feelings of separatist activities or endangers sovereignty or unity and integrity of India; or indulges in or commits any such act shall be punished with imprisonment for life or with imprisonment which may extend to seven years and shall also be liable to fine”.[1] In laws such as these, the problem is lack of exactness, which could lead to potential misuse. What exactly accounts for a subversive activity is open for interpretation, meaning it is open for abuse by those with the authority. But as things get vaguer and the law seems more tipped against the citizens, one notices that still there is a vaguely worded yet definitive codified law describing an action that can mark criminal activity. So it is not like Psycho-Pass still, where the system doesn’t predict or describe nature of crime, simply a propensity to commit crime. Here we see though that those with the power to do so can misappropriate legal provisions for political reasons or personal benefit.
Now let us fully enter the legal power of accusation, where accusation can be justified as prevention, and from a codified crime we move to a codified criminal, where one can be punished and imprisoned merely for their propensity to commit crime and cause unrest. Here is when one does not need to specify crime or wait for it to happen. The ‘system’ can decide one’s likelihood of committing a crime and punish them. One can be accused of a criminal ‘disposition’, an accusation of marking a character that brings violence, unrest, and disruption of peace. Again, the system is what decides peace. These are marked as special provisions though, not the standard by which the country operates. Still, a provision like preventive detention breeds fear and deters from voicing dissent and valid criticism, causes a fearful atmosphere and establishes an unequal balance of power between state and citizen, as is proven in Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, and others’ case.
In his book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michelle Foucault traces the genealogy (historically tracing how power and knowledge result in the development of ideas and social beliefs) of crime, punishment, and power. He says punishment and crime evolved from the nature of the spectacle of the scaffold, where a sovereign reinstates their power through public executions, where through the sovereign’s will a subject has the right to live or be condemned to death. The sovereign is law, and the sovereign is the system. Then comes Generalized punishment, where crime gets codified, written. Under generalized punishment, crimes are those actions which bring harm to society, and thus generalized punishment foretells the consequences of an act which is an attack on society, not just a threat to the sovereign’s power. The narrative shifts into an understanding that whoever harms the society is a criminal, and a reason or rationality is given to the punishment, where the punishment should match the crime. This meant those in power were pre-setting the category of criminal, where a criminal is whoever commits a crime. And since crime was codified and punishments generalized, people already know which of their actions would cause what punishment, where ignorance of the law is not an excuse under any circumstance. This development establishes the moment a criminal is defined by precise codification of crime.
Paradoxically, through the justification of prevention of crime, we re-enter a situation not unlike the spectacle of the scaffold. An accusation is enough to warrant punishment stated as a preventive measure. The system has the authority to safeguard the ‘integrity’ of the nation and make arrests before an actual act has been committed. Here is our dystopian Sybil system hiding in plain sight.
In a recent supreme court judgement of May 2024 concerning the arrest of Newsclick Editor in Chief Prabir Purkayastha under Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (the same act Umar Khalid and others were booked under), the supreme court’s verdict established the precedent that the ‘grounds for arrest’ must be made clear and specifically, distinguishing it from ‘reasons for arrest’.[1] This is a positive step indeed, as the supreme court held Purkayastha’s arrest as unconstitutional as the grounds for his arrest were not mentioned and detailed, making the detention arbitrary. Prabir Purkayastha spent 225 days in jail before his name was clear.[2] What might the reader say was prevented during this imprisonment?
Some more numbers and figures-
Under UAPA- “Between 2015 and 2019, 7,050 people were arrested under UAPA. Of these, 30.6% were arrested in Manipur, 19.8% in Uttar Pradesh, 14.22% in Assam, 8.04% in Bihar, 7.31% in Jharkhand, and 7.16% in Jammu & Kashmir. This shows that these six states saw more than 87% of the total arrests in the country in the past six years”[3] The conviction rate for UAPA arrests is embarrassingly low and the pendency of cases equally high.
It is not surprising that in the same states that the Armed forces Special Powers Act operates, the number of UAPA arrest cases are also high- Manipur and Jammu and Kashmir[4]. Our system here, may have taken a step further than the sybil system by declaring an entire region or state as a ‘disturbed area’ and not just individual persons. This act stems from legislations from the colonial era and has found its comfortable home in present India too. Its danger lies in its ambiguity in grounds for declaring an area as ‘disturbed’. “Section 3 defines “disturbed area” by stating how an area can be declared disturbed. It grants the power to declare an area disturbed to the Central Government and the Governor of the State but does not describe the circumstances under which the authority would be justified in making such a declaration. The provision declares the authority of the center, but does not clearly define a disturbed area nor does it state the conditions, circumstances or prudent grounds for the declaration of the part as disturbed”[5] and “the declaration that an area is disturbed is not subject to judicial review”[6]
The obscurity of the reasoning behind the crime coefficient of the sybil system in declaring persons as criminals is replicated through vagueness of reasoning, a reiteration of a power imbalance between the state and the citizens, of a powerful system and those subjected to it.
Not only can the government declare individuals as terrorist after the Central Government amended the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in August 2019, it has held the power to declare states as being states of unlawfulness or lacking peace, a place or region with the propensity of criminality and terrorism.
The anime and our present reality both put forward the question- Is the ‘prevention is better than cure’ doctrine dangerous in legislation? Can there ever be a fair enough prevention? What is our system using to define the peace which it tries to maintain through preventive deterrents? Is the Indian state like the sybil system?
And lastly, I end the piece by asking readers to ruminate on the last four years, and take cognizance of the enormity of carrying an untried accusation for which one is imprisoned for so long, despite the legal system assuring safeguards for this very miscarriage. And to remember there have been many cases like this.
[1] https://lexsaathi.com/prabir-purkayastha-uapa-written-grounds-of-arrest/-
[2] https://article-14.com/post/it-s-not-possible-to-fool-people-forever-newsclick-founder-prabir-purkayastha-after-225-days-in-jail-66626ee353cd9
[3] https://www.factchecker.in/data-dive/seven-years-uapa-cases-arrests-786935
[4] https://www.pib.gov.in/Pressreleaseshare.aspx?PRID=2039655
[5] https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/180712/b5167a3995c057f77ff0ae3a230c2744.pdf
[6] https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/180712/b5167a3995c057f77ff0ae3a230c2744.pdf
[1] https://www.indiacode.nic.in/handle/123456789/20062
