THE dismissal of the case of abduction of Hill Women鈥檚 Federation leader Kalpana Chakma 28 years after the event is a travesty of justice. A Rangamati judicial magistrate鈥檚 court on April 23 accepted the final report which established Kalpana鈥檚 abduction in Rangamati in June 1996 but failed to identify the perpetrators. The court also rejected the no-confidence motion against the report filed in October 2016. Kalpana鈥檚 brother Kalindi Kumar Chakma, a witness to the abduction and the plaintiff in the case, has consistently alleged that she had been picked up by a group of armed men, including a junior army officer, and raised concern about the insincerity of law enforcers. He alleged that the police had intentionally dropped the name of the accused off the original first information report and had subjected him and his family to various forms of interrogation and surveillance over the years but left the accused outside their investigation. The fact that the family had to wait for nearly three decades for a credible investigation and the case was dismissed without even properly interrogating the main accused substantiates the claim that the police are out to save the alleged Bengali abductors of Kalpana, not to ensure justice.
Immediately after the abduction, a judicial enquiry commission concluded that Kalpana was 鈥榳illingly or unwillingly鈥� abducted. It was not possible for the commission to identify the abductor for lack of witnesses and evidence. In September 2016, the final report of the Criminal Investigation Department concluded that as she herself had been witness to her abduction, no progress could be made in the case until her return and the prosecution appealed for a case closure. As the brother awaited a full hearing of the no-confidence petition for eight years until it was held in August 2023, he had been subjected to various forms of judicial harassment. In February 2021, a Special Branch officer in Rangamati questioned the brother, asking him whether he had any knowledge of her sister鈥檚 whereabouts and whether they had information of one Kalpana Chakma taking citizenship in Mizoram, India. The fact that the police based their application for the dismissal of the case also shows their insincerity and ethnically majoritarian Bengali bias in the legal system. Law enforcement agencies, as they claim, are equipped with modern surveillance technologies and there are many examples when law enforcers have arrested even minors from remote areas for criticising the government, but they have failed to resolve Kalpana鈥檚 abduction, that too after deploying 38 investigating officers for about three decades.
The dismissal of the Kalpana Chakma abduction case, therefore, lends credence to the public perception that the institutional impunity that the civil and military administration enjoys in the Chittagong Hill Tracts was an impediment to judicious investigation and has been an obstacle to justice delivery in the hill tracts. Justice in this case could have helped the government begin an era of better understanding between the Bengalis and non-Bengalis of the country.