Compassion, suo motu

It was shortly after the terrible cyclone that had ripped through coastal Odisha in November 1999. Justice Jagdish Sharan Verma had just taken over as the Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). Though he may have been busy acquainting himself with the demands of his new office, he also saw the enormous human calamity caused by that cyclone as a concern that came within his remit. His first public action as NHRC Chairperson was to take suo motu cognisance of the natural disaster.

As he had explained then, “As head of this Commission, I perceive this tragedy in three phases: The first concerns the period before the onset of the cyclone. What was the information which was at hand and what was the time available? Was the information received all that could be had? Once that information was obtained, was it transmitted at every level? What action, if any, was taken by the authorities to protect people? While the cyclone raged, what further measures could have been taken to reduce the extent of damage? After the cyclone, what measures need to be mounted to safeguard human life and provide relief to the people?”

Such framing was characteristic of Justice Verma, who was soft-spoken in the extreme but whose words resounded far beyond the space from which he delivered them. The Constitution of India was for him a moral and juridical compass. Having met him on many occasions, I was always struck by the deliberative manner in which he framed his thoughts, his spontaneous empathy with the disadvantaged and voiceless, and his uncompromising espousal of human rights.

Justice Verma brought these qualities to pretty much everything he did as NHRC chair, which included a hard-hitting analysis of the Gujarat riots of 2002 after visiting the camps of the displaced people. He clearly perceived those riots as a dereliction of duty by the Gujarat government and made no bones about stating it.

His was a mind that refused the comfort of ossification. As NHRC chair, he argued vociferously in favour of “reformative”, not “retributive”, justice. As he put it in an interview with me, “The premise is that every individual is a human being and has certain basic, inalienable rights. These rights do not belong to his/ her station in life or his/ her circumstances.”

A major concern for him was police reform. He saw the police as “first and foremost an important law-enforcing agency — their duty is not just to apprehend criminals but to prevent crime”. This also meant that the impunity displayed by the country’s police system was simply unacceptable. Today, as calls for police accountability get louder, Justice Verma’s words assume great relevance: “They [the police] must be made to realise that they are prosecutors, not persecutors. The brutality they display comes from the fact that they perform their functions as persecutors.”

It was, again, through the framework of human rights that he perceived women’s autonomy and agency. Justice Verma had once revealed that he was , even as a young man, struck by how unfairly society treated women — just by observing life within his own family.

Years later, in 1997, as the Chief Justice of India, when Verma had to pronounce on a case involving Bhanwari Devi, a grassroots worker who was gang-raped because of her efforts to stop child marriage in her village (Vishaka vs. State of Rajasthan), he brought women’s right to work and free movement within the ambit of right to life. As he said in an interview, “Any affront to the dignity of a woman is more than an affront to the divinity of an individual — it is an affront to the dignity of society.”

It was a chord that was struck again in the introductory chapter of the Verma Committee Report of 2013, which read: “We still feel distressed to say that all organs of the State have, in varying degrees, failed to fulfil the promise of equality in favour of women.”

Recognising the right of every woman to bodily integrity, the Verma Committee asked for marital rape to be outlawed. He also wanted the “systematic or isolated sexual violence, in the process of Internal Security duties” legitimised by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), to end. Neither of these two far-reaching recommendations made it to the statute books, but the very fact that they found mention in the report is an important step forward for the women’s movement — an intimation of change.

As if conscious of his responsibility to the future, Justice Verma spared no effort to come up with the report that bore his name within the mandated timeframe, along with his colleagues, Justice Leila Seth and former solicitor general Gopal Subramaniam, even if it meant typing in material himself. When asked during a television interview whether the effort had exhausted him, he replied in the negative. Adding as an afterthought, “If at all you feel tired, it is after it is over, not before that.”

That foundational document will now remain a testimony to the compassion of a wise man with a mind that never ceased to question. Justice Verma’s death has caused widespread grief within his fraternity, but for women activists it is as if they have lost a friend.

— © Women’s Feature Service