KOZHIKODE: Eighteen years ago, sometime in May-June, the German police arrested M.S. Saji, a young lawyer-farmer from Kozhikode, at a railway station in Cologne.
He was part of an intercontinental caravan of Indian farmers, led by scholar-activist M.D. Nanjundaswamy, that toured Europe to protest against the negative impact of free market and its backbone institutions on poor countries.
The protesters picketed the railway station at Cologne, and the German Federal Police took them into custody. “I began to falter and leaned on a heavily-built policeman thinking that it was a wall. Later, we were released with a stern warning. The protest was the beginning of my social activism,” Saji told The Hindu .
Today, he has five books on multiple genres, including a European travelogue and a Malayalam novel, Daivam Visramikkunnu , to his credit. However, his latest book, Globalisation: New Society and Law , is being widely discussed, especially in legal circles. “The collection of articles focuses on the highly complex realm of transnational crimes in the global judicial system, ” he said.
According to him, globalised crimes have had an unimaginable growth, and they include human trafficking, organ trafficking, international drug trafficking, exploitation of natural resources, land and real estate mafia, and counterfeiting of goods. “The most modern crime is the concealment of money earned through unfair means,” said Saji.
The legal expert dwells upon diverse topics such as abandoned parents, sexual harassment of children, misleading judges, witnesses turning hostile, laws unknown to creativity, medical terrorism, boozy laws, and code for a united civilisation.
On denial of justice, Saji said bail may either be delayed or denied based on the gravity of the crime. “A classic example Iranian Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who was held as refugee in Terminal 1 of the Charles De Gaulle Airport on August 26, 1988. He was detained on the grounds of not carrying the required documents while travelling. He was released only in July 2006,” he added.
On intoxication, he said the consumption of alcohol had prevailed in several forms at all times in history and across all cultures. “Different religions have different views about alcohol consumption. However, it increased globally at a dangerous level. The quantity of alcohol consumed in India crossed 19,000 million litres in 2016,” he observed.
According to Saji, the oppression of cultural activists and intellectuals is a common practice. “By branding these activists as anti-national, they are being oppressed by threat and violence. Yet, certain court verdicts are rays of hope like the one issued by a High Court which said that being a Maoist was not a crime,” he pointed out.
