RAIPUR – The wife of a medical doctor sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of helping India’s Maoist insurgents said Tuesday she would like to seek asylum in a “liberal democratic country.”
“I am not feeling secure in this country,” Ilina, wife of jailed doctor Binayak Sen, told AFP in Raipur, the capital of the Maoist insurgency-riven state of Chhattisgarh. “I am feeling threatened and if you are being persecuted for your feelings then why would you stay here,” she said.
“The way my husband was prosecuted I am feeling quite insecure and threatened in India,” Ilina said.
She did not name any country and, when asked where she would like to take her family, replied only to a “liberal democratic country”.
Sen, a paediatrician and activist, was arrested in 2007 on charges of waging war against India in Chhattisgarh. He received a life sentence on December 24.
During his trial, prosecutors argued that Sen was involved in helping Maoist guerrillas create an urban network and had acted as a go-between for a leftwing leader and a businessman.
Sen has insisted he is innocent.
Human rights group Amnesty International has flayed the Christmas eve verdict and said that it considered Sen a “prisoner of conscience.”
Before Sen’s arrest, he had been running health clinics and training health workers in Chhattisgarh’s tribal communities, among India’s poorest people and whose plight the Maoist rebels claim to champion.
The Indian government Tuesday assured Sen’s family that they were safe in their home country.
“I am sorry she entertains such apprehensions (and) I intend to talk to the chief minister of Chhattisgarh or wherever she is now,” Home Minister P. Chidambaram told reporters in New Delhi.
