Maharashtra stands at a dangerous crossroads. Maharashtra Special Public Security Act, has been passed, its language dripping with the rhetoric of ‘urban naxalism’. Its pages, however, hide a far more serious truth. It is not the security of the people that this Bill safeguards, but the power of the state. Its targets are not insurgents with guns in the forests, but ordinary citizens with books in their hands, songs on their lips, and dissent in their voices. The bill echoes the dark legacies of the Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh security acts and thrives on vagueness. India already has draconian frameworks like UAPA and MCOCA. The Maharashtra Bill borrows their harshest elements, stripping away safeguards while offering the state greater convenience in silencing dissent. It does not fill a gap in the law, it widens the gap between the state and democracy.
It criminalizes not just acts of violence, but even a ‘tendency’ to disturb public order. A protest march, a dharna blocking a road, graffiti on a wall, a student shouting slogans in a campus corridor, each of these can now be considered as ‘unlawful activity’. With this, the government turns civil disobedience into criminal conspiracy. The law does not need to prove violence, a hunch of the state is enough.
The dangers are immense. With this Bill, mere membership, or even suspected sympathy for an organisation deemed unlawful is enough to jail someone. Property can be seized on suspicion, without independent legal scrutiny. Bail is almost impossible. Trials may never begin. The legal process itself becomes the punishment, as years in prison effectively overturn the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty.
History shows us how such laws unfold. The Bhima-Koregaon case remains a painful, unresolved issue, where poets, professors, and lawyers languish in jail branded as ‘urban naxals’, with no evidence of violence. Fr. Stan Swamy, who died in custody, is a haunting reminder of what state power unchecked by accountability can do. With this new Bill, Maharashtra institutionalizes the same injustice.
The Maharashtra Special Public Security Act is a war on democracy. It turns dissent into a crime. As J. William Fulbright said, ‘In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.’ This faith cannot be crushed.
