Shashi Tharoor Moves Private Members Bill To Repeal UAPA, Calls Act A 'Tool Of Abuse'

While speaking to reporters outside Parliament, the Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram said that idea of bringing private members' bill is to have an Act that will repeal UAPA.

New Delhi: Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Friday came up in the Lok Sabha with a private members' bill to repeal the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. According to reports, Tharoor moved the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Repeal Bill, 2022, to annul the UAPA.

While speaking to reporters outside Parliament, the Lok Sabha MP from Thiruvananthapuram said that idea of bringing private members' bill is to have an Act that will repeal UAPA.

This Act has become a tool of abuse for the state where 66 per cent of arrests don't involve any kind of violence at all. The conviction rate is a measly 2.4 per cent," news agency ANI quoted Tharoor as saying.

Tharoor also took to his Twitter account and and said: "Today I introduced a Private Member’s Bill to repeal the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. It’s a tool of abuse in which 66% of cases involve no violence, 56% are detained w/no charge-sheet for two years,&conviction rate since 2014 is an abysmal 2.4%. A blot on our democracy."

Furthermore, the Congress leader also stressed that law should be scrapped.

UAPA should deal with real criminals and terrorists but we can't have a blanket law that presumes guilt, Tharoor said adding that the UAPA passed by Centre defines conspiracy loosely, arrests people left and right, doesn't charge them and then discovers they shouldn't be convicted.

The Bill states that following the 2019 amendment to the UAPA, the state now commands the power to designate individuals as 'terrorists', which was previously restricted to naming groups as 'terrorist organisation'. 

According to the Bill, the Act also allows for searches, seizures and arrests based on the 'personal knowledge' of the police without written validation from a superior judicial authority.

UAPA is the primary counter-terror law in India which was originally enacted in 1967 by then-PM Indira Gandhi. The terror law, however, came under sharp scrutiny after the Modi government made over half-a-dozen amendments to the law.

The updated UAPA restricts the right to bail and makes the court depend on police documents to presume guilt of the accused.

On various instances, Tharoor has been a staunch critic of UAPA. In December last year, he claimed that the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh is slapping sedition and UAPA cases on people because its leadership suffers from allodoxaphobia - an irrational fear of opinions. 

The Congress leader was among eminent personalities to condemn the "brazen misuse" of UAPA which was invoked against several people including Jharkhand-based activist and priest Stan Swamy in connection with the 2018 Bhima-Koregaon violence.

Tharoor and other participants had alleged that UAPA is being used to silence voices that believe in democracy and secularism, adding that India’s secular fabric is under threat from the BJP-RSS.

Even the Supreme Court of India had asked the Central government if the country still needs such a law.