Farrukh Dhondy

Feb 06 : "Examine the lives of those who tell us how to live, Survey the desert for flowers…" From Bachchoo Agonistes

The British satirical magazine Private Eye has taken up the case of one Patrick Malluzzo, a Britisher who is rotting in a Rajasthani jail for possession of several kilos of cannabis. He has spent six years there and, the magazine tells us, is now suffering from malaria, chronic urinary tract infection and rat bites. It also lists depression as one of the conditions Indian jail has brought about, but we could perhaps have deduced that. His case and appeal have been adopted by Fair Trials International (FTI) who say that his conviction is fundamentally unsound and, as the appeal has been postponed or adjourned several times, have issued statements containing the evidence of his innocence.

The appeal came to court twice in the last two years but then, in the recognised manner of Indian courts, was adjourned for all manner of technical reasons. It has also been delayed because no court judge was available to hear the appeal owing to "sickness" or "holidays".

The scandals that have recently hit the Punjab judiciary and individual benchers of the Indian high courts and Supreme Court are not matters of interest to the British press or public but the Malluzzo case, with Private Eye having a good investigative and campaigning reputation and a vast circulation, will certainly focus attention on the tardiness of Indian justice.

The case against Malluzzo seems, on the surface, fairly feeble. He was 26 when he set out on a tour of India with a backpack and met up with and befriended a fellow Brit. The two decided that they would travel to Goa and booked their tickets on a train from Delhi. On the day of travel Patrick decided he wanted a few more days in north India and his companion said he would take the train alone and they would meet up in Goa later. Patrick asked his new friend to carry some of his belongings — clothes et cetera in a bag on the train so he could, trudging around Rajasthan, travel light.

When the train left Delhi, it is alleged that three bags were found under the seats booked by Patrick and his companion. One contained Patrick’s belongings, another his friend’s belongings and a third 19 kg of cannabis.

Patrick says that at the time, after Rajasthan, he travelled south and met up with his uncle who took him on a trip to Sri Lanka to watch cricket. His companion had meanwhile been arrested and had implicated Patrick in the drug haul. The police indicted Patrick who, instead of fleeing from Sri Lanka, returned to India to face what he claimed was a completely baseless charge. He had no knowledge of the bag with cannabis. His companion was tried separately after an address at which he had been staying was searched and 8 kg of cannabis found on the premises. Through some labyrinthine logic adduced by the Indian legal process, or perhaps through the mechanism of a rich drug dealer paying off someone, the companion who had been caught with the bags was acquitted. Patrick was arrested, assigned some lawyers who didn’t even ask him for his account of events, was tried in a court whose proceedings were conducted in Hindi and sentenced to 10 years in jail and fined Rs 10,000. No forensic or other evidence connected him to the bag of drugs and no witnesses were called.

While the process of justice for the innocent and the guilty and the reputation of the Indian law are pressing and legitimate concerns, a third aspect, which comes to mind because of the case, should also be examined.

Nineteen kilograms of cannabis? I expect it was charas, the resin extract and not ganja, the dried grass, as the volume of such a weight would itself have occupied two first class bunks in an Indian railway carriage. That’s a lot of dope, man! It could keep a colony of backpackers, students on gap-years and hippy denizens of Goa happy for weeks. If parcelled out in small personal-use quantities and pursued by individual constables, it could keep the state’s whole police force in bribes for months.

And why not?

Has Indian officialdom ever had a public debate on the effects — pathological, psychological, social and economic — of cannabis? Yes, it is an ancient Hindu tradition to mix the ground cannabis leaf into an intoxicating drink at Holi and it is readily admitted that the most pious of judges and the most sanctimonious of politicians will have a swig of this exhilarating soma during the festival.

I suspect that the cultivation of cannabis and its wild growth all over the country, its use by holy men to get to grips with their atmans, its part in Ayurvedic prescriptions, its constant use by our dhobi and his like in Pune, were all ignored by the Indian law before the explosion of interest in it, brought about beatniks and later hippies from the West.

Urban Indian youth began smoking charas in large numbers when Western attention to marijuana made it fashionable. Before that, it was something the dhobi did to while away the blues of a water-logged life.

In Britain recently there has been a renewed debate about the uses and effects of cannabis. The government’s chief medical adviser on the panel and many of the neurological scientists and doctors providing data to it concluded that it was less harmful in every way than alcohol or cigarettes and there was a strong case for controlled decriminalisation of marijuana. The government didn’t buy the argument.

Perhaps if cannabis were grown in large quantities in, say, Essex, and that its use on the sunny beaches of Margate and among the wild palms of Scarborough brought in millions of tourists a year from India, China, America and Europe, the government may reconsider. The fact is that Margate is chilly and Scarborough has no wild palms unlike Goa and Kovallam. Which is, I suppose, where Patrick’s companion was headed with his 19 kg of Rajasthani Rapid or Nepali Napalm, or whatever the "good stuff" is called nowadays.

The recommendation then is that Patrick Malluzzo’s appeal be heard immediately and that an enquiry be convened to make a decision on altering the law against cannabis to bring it into line with the scientifically verifiable facts of its uses and effects.

Like, just do it, man!

By Farrukh Dhondy