Supreme Court Seeks Northeast Protection Law Reforms By December 18

The Supreme Court has directed a Centre-appointed monitoring committee to propose legal changes to better protect people from the Northeast living elsewhere in India by December 18. The court also ordered that victims’ statements be recorded soon after any incident so complainants do not become difficult to trace later.

The order was passed on October 14 by a bench of justices Sanjay Kumar and Sanjeev Sachdeva. It comes after the killing last month of 54-year-old Manipur music teacher Vikram Singh Chongtham in Delhi, where he was attacked by a group of men after asking them not to create a commotion outside his house.

In the order passed in a petition filed by advocate Alana Golmei, the bench said, “The committee shall also address the issue of necessary changes being made in the law to ensure protection and make suitable recommendations to the authorities concerned after due consideration.” The order gives an impetus to the long-standing demand for criminal law changes and a stronger institutional mechanism to tackle incidents of violence against people from the Northeast living in other parts of the country.

Law Reform Push

The legal demand goes back to 2014. Following the death of Nido Tania, a student from Arunachal Pradesh, in Delhi, the Centre set up the Bezbaruah committee headed by former IAS officer MK Bezbaruah to examine the problems faced by northeastern people.

That panel proposed changes to the Indian Penal Code, including a new section 153C on hate speech and section 505A on provocation of violence on grounds such as race, caste, place of birth and residence. In 2017, the Law Commission of India made similar recommendations to the Centre on inserting the two provisions.

The monitoring committee was constituted by the Centre in 2016 in a public interest litigation filed by Karma Dorjee. One of its key tasks was to ensure the Bezbaruah committee’s recommendations were implemented, but it has not made any concrete law reform proposals so far.

Committee Shortcomings

The court has now put a date to that exercise. It listed the matter for December 18 after examining an affidavit filed by the Centre on the proceedings of the monitoring committee’s September 8 meeting.

That affidavit showed the committee had dealt with nine cases of violence and harassment against northeastern people reported across the country over the past year, along with action taken by the police in the states concerned. But in some matters, the court was told, follow-up could not proceed because the complainant was untraceable.

The bench responded with a specific direction. “Henceforth, measures shall be put in place to immediately record the full details, including addresses, of the complainants as and when complaints of any harassment are received and necessary further action shall be initiated without fail.”

The judges also criticised the committee’s functioning. Going by the meeting minutes, only three of the 11 members attended physically while the rest joined through video-conferencing, including two under secretaries posted in Delhi. The bench said, “It is distressing to note that out of the committee members, only three attended the meeting physically and even those, who were stationed in Delhi, including two under secretaries to the Government of India, participated in the meeting through video-conferencing.”

Continuing Northeast Violence

The court had already stepped in earlier this year. In February, it directed the committee to meet at least once every three months and added, “It would be advisable to fix the actual date of the next meeting as per the convenience of the committee members,” the order said.

While hearing the case earlier this year, the top court observed that targeting people because of cultural or racial differences is unacceptable, yet incidents of hate crime and racial discrimination against northeastern people continue.

One of the nine cases before the committee concerns Anjel Chakma, an MBA student who was attacked along with his brother in December last year while shopping in the Selaqui area of Dehradun, Uttarakhand. The other cases pertain to Delhi, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.