Sometimes newspapers make you rub your eyes. On Wednesday, August 6, the headline in my paper read: “Ban on Islamic student body lifted”. What this meant was that the proscription of the Students’ Islamic Movement of India, outlawed by the Government of India for “indulging in activities prejudicial to the security of the country” in 2001, was struck down by the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Tribunal headed by a high court judge. Justice Gita Mittal of the Delhi High Court ruled that the government had failed to produce enough evidence to justify the extension of the ban.

This wouldn’t be remarkable in itself — tribunals do, after all, occasionally find against the State —were it not for the timing of the judge’s order. On March 27 this year, the police arrested Safdar Nagori, the secretary-general of Simi and twelve others in Bhopal on the grounds that they were waging war against the Indian State and promoting enmity between classes. In the past fortnight, we have seen serial bomb blasts in Bangalore and Ahmedabad as well as a bomb scare in Surat that have set newspapers, security analysts and ordinary citizens speculating about ‘home-grown’ terrorists: i.e. the involvement of Indian Muslim groups in highly coordinated atrocities.

We are all so used to the State’s use of special laws like the Prevention of Terrorism Act and its successors to suspend habeas corpus, deny bail and allow security forces to seize and hold men like Safdar Nagori on suspicion for near indefinite periods, that it comes as a surprise when a judge like Gita Mittal asks the executive to account for its actions. When Pota was scrapped by the United Progressive Alliance government, the State’s power to detain people for long periods on suspicion of terrorist activity was retained by amending the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in 2004. The outlawing of Simi had to be re-notified every two years by the home ministry. This had been done several times, most recently in February 2008.

When this last notification was challenged by Simi’s lawyers, Justice Mittal asked the government to produce recent evidence of illegal activity by Simi. According to a newspaper, she asked, “You are saying Simi was involved in communal riots, bomb blasts... Tell me, which riots after February 2006 were engineered by Simi?” Consider for a moment the context in which Justice Mittal is asking this question. Newspapers and television news channels are alive with reports and rumours that the country’s capital, New Delhi, is next on the terrorists’ list of places to be bombed. Schools in Delhi, like the one my children go to, have begun reviewing their security arrangements in the light of this possible threat. Taxi drivers have begun to refuse to go to places like Sarojini Nagar in Delhi because it was bombed once before and could be again. It is in this circumstance that Justice Mittal dismissed the government’s invocation of the Malegaon blasts in 2006 and asked for fresh evidence linking Simi to terrorist violence.

The tribunal over which she presides is meant precisely for this purpose: i.e. to listen to appeals against the government’s misuse of the summary powers given it by laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The government’s decision to notify organizations as unlawful under this act has to be periodically reviewed. Justice Mittal refused to accept the government’s contention that Simi’s implication in the 2006 atrocity in Malegaon and the 53 criminal cases lodged by the police against the organization’s members since then, constituted sufficient grounds for its continued proscription.

Liberals and human rights activists have long been cynical (with some cause) about the judiciary’s willingness to challenge the executive in matters where national security is invoked to justify summary arrest and detention. Justice Mittal’s judgment reminds us of what is possible when the judiciary insists that the executive meets the standards of evidence mandated by even ‘draconian’ laws. I knew nothing about Justice Mittal till this morning. I googled her name out of curiosity and found an official profile of her on the website of the Delhi High Court. I learnt from this that she had been an undergraduate in Delhi University around the same time that I was there, the mid-Seventies, that she studied economics at Lady Shri Ram College, had played volleyball, had been an enthusiastic Girl Guide and, before her elevation to the Bench, had been a successful lawyer.

Nothing in that brief resume suggests civil rights activism or radical politics. It is, in fact, a solidly bourgeois profile. There is something reassuring about a mainstream judge, not famous for her radical beliefs or activist practice, resisting the anxieties of the time, to insist that the government meets the standards of evidence set out in the law. The reason this is important is because it allows us to re-invest our faith in the system. If judges insist on due process and allow the government no quarter in this matter, no special consideration, then it becomes possible to argue that the pluralist democracy established after the end of colonial rule is made of something more than thwarted good intentions.

There’s a temptation to cast Justice Gita Mittal as a civil rights heroine, but I’d rather believe that she was acting in her capacity as a professional who felt obliged to act according to the standards she had been raised to respect as a lawyer and judge. The government has declared that it will challenge her verdict in the high court and it’s possible that it might be set aside on appeal. But even that process will be salutary. We have seen the process of trial and appeal work in the past. S.A.R. Geelani’s acquittal despite the near-hysterical pressure applied by the mass media for his execution is a good example of how the law, despite the battering it regularly receives from the State, is capable of producing justice.

All too often liberals, activists and citizens dismiss the institutions of the republic as corrupt or authoritarian or as instruments of privilege. It’s useful to be reminded that this is not necessarily or inevitably the case. To be sceptical of the State is an important part of democratic culture; to be cynical about it corrodes that same culture. The importance of Justice Gita Mittal’s judgment is that it allows us, if only briefly, to believe in the law.