Blindfolded Justice

At a moment when Pakistan led by the sinister Asim Munir is stoking militancy in Kashmir and trying to destabilize India, the country expects a judiciary that treats ideological subversion with insouciance. A vacation bench of the Bombay High Court chose precisely a path of condescension over caution. In reserving its harshest remarks for the police while granting bail to a 19-year-old engineering student from Pune who vitriolically declared “Pakistan Zindabad” in an Instagram post (since deleted), the court bench displayed an astonishing blindness to the nature of modern asymmetric warfare.

The student was no naïve child. She was a conscious adult, fully aware of the consequences of her words. Her long post, dripping with invective, went far beyond dissent. She accused India of “fascism” and “fanatic Islamophobic terrorism.” She likened India’s measured retaliatory strikes to Israeli aggression and justified Pakistan’s position amid a national security crisis. She ended her screed with the rallying cry of a hostile nation: “Pakistan Zindabad.”

This should be seen for what it is: not protest but dangerous propaganda. Yet the Bombay HC bench reserved their harshest words not for the student, but for the Pune police, deeming her arrest “absolutely shocking” while criticising the college for rusticating her. The court went as far as to demand her reinstatement for exams, as if academic calendars should triumph over national integrity.

Is this ‘woke’ jurisprudence masquerading as compassion? The girl should have been granted corrective counselling at the very least. She should have been confronted with the ramifications of her words, taught the difference between dissent and sedition, and made to reckon with the privilege of citizenship in a liberal democracy.

Modern terror does not always arrive in the form of bombs or bullets. It spreads through memes, posts and reels that seek to delegitimize the state, radicalise the gullible and embolden the enemy. To condone such behaviour under the guise of youthful indiscretion may result in playing directly into Pakistan’s playbook.

The court’s alarming observation that the police were ‘ruining’ the girl’s life needs to be viewed in the context of the police doing their job by upholding laws crafted specifically to address threats to our sovereignty and unity. Were they heavy-handed? Perhaps. But in a nation under siege, can one truly fault them for erring on the side of vigilance?

To argue, as the bench did, that remorse, deletion, and an apology suffice as absolution is a dangerous precedent. Ideological indoctrination does not vanish with a deleted post. In 2015, Pune’s Anti-Terror Squad had uncovered a chilling case of a 16-year-old girl groomed by ISIS operatives, ready to abandon her life for jihad. The spiral begins with online flirtations with extremism. It ends in blood.

The verdict of the court can easily be misconstrued as a message to India’s enemies - foreign and domestic - that even the most inflammatory speech, if cloaked in academic youthfulness, will find sympathy in Indian courts. Worse, that young radicals have little to fear, that expression of remorse is enough, and that consequences of behaving irresponsibly and recklessly during a national crisis are optional.