NEW DELHI (TOI), Nov 12: A CPI(ML) member, a human rights activist and a web journalist moved the Supreme Court challenging the Tripura government's action of slapping the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act against lawyers who posted "Tripura is burning" and said the SC must give a restrictive meaning to "unlawful activities" under the UAPA to curb its rampant misuse.

A bench headed by Chief Justice N V Ramana initially asked petitioner's advocate, Prashant Bhushan, as to why they did not move the Tripura high court but agreed to fix a date for listing the petition for hearing. In general, the SC does not entertain petitions relating to state incidents and normally asks the petitioners to move the jurisdictional HC before approaching the apex court. First petitioner Mukesh Mukesh is an advocate registered with the Bar Council of Delhi and has been associated with the All-India Central Council of Trade Unions, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and the People's Union for Civil Liberties. The second petitioner is Ansarul Haq Ansari, who said he is a human rights activist from Rajasthan. And the third petitioner is Shyam Meera Singh, a journalist with web portal Newsclick who often highlights grievances of marginalised and minority communities.

The petitioners said their grievance is against "the targeted political violence against the Muslim minorities in Tripura during the second half of October 2021, and the subsequent efforts by the state to monopolise the flow of information and facts emanating from the affected areas by invoking provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act against members of civil society including advocates and journalists who have made the effort to bring facts in relation to the targeted violence in the public domain". "If the state is allowed to criminalise the very act of fact-finding and reporting, and that too under the stringent provisions of the UAPA in which anticipatory bail is barred and the idea of bail is a remote possibility, then the only facts that will come in the public domain are those that are convenient to the state due to the ‘chilling effect’ on freedom of speech and expression of members of civil society.

If the quest for truth and reporting thereof itself is criminalised then the victim in the process is the idea of justice," they said. The alleged communal violence had erupted in Tripura after Durga Puja pandals were targeted in Bangladesh. Two petitioners, Mukesh and Ansarul, had visited Tripura as members of a fact-finding team and had "put in the public domain a report titled 'Humanity Under Attack in Tripura', 'Muslim Lives Matter', published by Lawyers for Democracy, in a press release at the Press Club of India" leading to the invocation of UAPA against them by the Tripura government. Interestingly, the UAPA was enacted in 1967 to counter the threat of left-wing extremism to India and its sovereignty.