COIMBATORE: A wake-up call given by the Madras High Court (HC) in a judgment delivered nearly 10 years ago, which went unheeded in the lower echelons of bureaucracy and police, has helped Union Minister M K Alagiri’s associates escape from detention under the Goondas Act.Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa had crushed Alagiri’s self-propagated fortress and “cleaned up” Madurai by putting behind bars his key aides under the Goondas Act, which entails a year’s preventive detention.However, ‘Attack’ Pandi, ‘Essar’ Gopi, V K Gurusamy, Ochu Babu and Kudamurti T Arumugam have escaped from the Goondas Act in the past fortnight.The HC’s Madurai Bench had quashed their detention solely on the technical ground that the authorities concerned had failed to dispose of representations from them challenging their detention “within the mandatory time frame prescribed by law.”This has sparked a debate on whether this delay was “facilitated” for creating a legal loophole for them to escape.In fact, as early as June 25, 2002, a HC Division Bench comprising Justices R Jayasimha Babu and E Padmanabhan while quashing the detention of notorious Chennai rowdy ‘Ayodhyakuppam’ Veeramani had hinted at such connivance.In Veeramani’s case, the authorities had omitted an innocuous paragraph in English in the Tamil translated copy detailing the grounds for his detention. Mincing no words, Justice Jayasimha Babu said: “Repeated instances of such acts of omission and commission which have come to our notice in numerous cases make us wonder as to whether such omissions are bona fide, or have been made to help the very persons against whom the order of detention is clamped.” Calling for effective remedial measures to prevent such technical lapses, the court had directed that “a copy of this order be sent to the Chief Secretary of the State, the Home Secretary, as also to the Director General of Police and to the Police Commissioners of the metropolitan cities who are empowered to make detention orders, so that they will take necessary steps to prevent a situation like the one that we had to deal with in this case and... take appropriate action immediately after the reasons for which the orders of detention are set aside by the Courts, are made known to them.”Clearly, the bureaucracy and police have ignored this order as the escape of Alagiri’s men show.A senior lawyer says that such a reprieve on technical grounds is the result of a “well-oiled system with wheels inside wheels. There is a lot of give and take between an accused, the police and politicians.”PUCL general secretary V Suresh cautions that “unless executive accountability is brought in while using the Goondas Act, it would merely remain a law to settle scores and neutralise opponents.”“The Goondas Act, which is an exception to the Constitutional rights, is a suspect legislation in itself. All cases where the Goondas Act detenue are released are only on technical points and not on merits,” says senior lawyer K M Vijayan.
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