June 4 was a significant day for India. After ten years of unfettered access to power, the Bharatiya Janata Party lost its majority mandate, leading to another era of coalition politics. Liberal critics of the party published long articles on the scent of the renewed hope wafting over the country. The voters have spoken – they will not hand over custody of our nation’s values to one person or party.
However, this election was also a stark reminder for critics that their battle is far from over. The BJP was still able to win a third term with 240 seats in the Lok Sabha. Almost as soon as the results were announced, the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi approved orders to prosecute writer Arundhati Roy and Kashmiri academic Sheikh Showkat Hussain under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for comments made in 2010. It will be long before India can restore its democratic credentials fully, as India’s persecution of academics and dissenters continues unabated.
Alpa Shah’s book, The Incarcerations reminds us of this and more. She traces the lives of the Bhima Koregaon-16 – a group of poets, lawyers writers, Jesuit priests, grassroots activists and English educators arrested under the anti-terror law. Shah is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and also teaches at the University of Oxford. She is the author of the widely acclaimed book Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerillas, which looks at the decades-long battle between the Naxalites and the Indian state.
Her research spans a broad range of topics including environmentalism, gender issues, insurgency and poverty. Shah’s rich body of work only provides more robustness to this book, which is deeply researched and covers immense ground.
It started with a riot
The story of the BK-16 begins with a riot that broke out on January 1, 2018, at the annual commemoration of the Battle of Koregaon. Every year, Dalit groups gather at a victory pillar near Pune in Maharashtra to celebrate the defeat of the casteist Peshwas by the British army in 1818; lower-caste Mahar soldiers played a crucial role in that battle. However, this time, Hindu nationalists and Hindutva groups incited violence at the event and threw stones and Molotov cocktails at the visitors, leading to several injuries and one death. Initially, the police arrested one of the Hindutva-aligned instigators, but he was released within one month and the Pune police started a fresh round of investigations. This led to the incarceration of lawyer Sudha Bhardwaj and 15 others who came to be known as the Bhima Koregaon-16.
The riot became an entryway through which the state started a systematic attack on people who had been writing and advocating against the Hindutva regime. In her book, Shah makes a reference to Paul Brass’s scholarship on institutionalised riot systems. In his work, Brass investigates the occurrence of riots in Aligarh, focusing on why some instances of communal violence become full-scale riots but others don’t. His answer lies in “political will”.
Sifting through events preceding, during, and after riots, Brass argues that it is not a useful exercise in a communally charged country like India to study violence as a “disease-diagnosis” problem, as if there is something especially symptomatic about a riot What is more illuminating is how actors involved in the riots contribute to the violence and how the violence is then reported and conceptualised by the public, the police and even the judiciary.
In the BK-16 incident, this is important because the people who were ultimately jailed were not perpetrators of the violence. The decision to jail certain people was not related to the riot itself – instead, the state pushed out its own narratives to ensure that dissenting voices were suppressed. In later proceedings, the case would begin to hinge on facts and events that could only be called creative non-fiction, and in some cases fiction.
Subjugating democratic dissent
Of course, the individuals arrested in this case (including the recently released Gautam Navlakha), had all been writing, agitating, and organising against the Hindutva regime. But as you read through the book (and if you have been following the case), it becomes significantly clear that the state’s version does not make sense. Investigation agencies were accused (with considerable evidence) of planting fake evidence on the laptops of those who were arrested. This was then used by the police as grounds for arrest.
As Shah shows, the state had already begun to create a version of events that may or may not have existed. What really happened and what was said to have happened appeared to be two distinct stories. This was a direct result of the state subjugating democratic dissent. Several baseless arrests were made and there was direct manipulation by the executive that were all supported by the rising noise of nationalist jingoism obfuscating whatever the “truth” was.
This makes Shah’s book important, primarily because it works through the several murky tensions in this case to shed light on how this story has played out. She thoroughly maps the lives of the BK-16 to show how the meddling and the related sociological backgrounds of those arrested were enough to poke holes in the state’s version of events.
This case, and many others, are testaments that living under a regime that is compromised and harbours autocratic tendencies can in some cases create versions of a “truth”. You read the book and think, surely the state could not have done that, and yet there are living, documented examples of the state doing exactly that.
Another instance of this, apart from the BK-16, was the use of Pegasus spyware – the Israeli surveillance software that was used to spy on opposition ministers, journalists, and activists. The use of spyware, the planting of evidence, in some ways feels like a conspiracy theory. It is hard to prove and even harder to justify when the State is doing everything it can to control its version of the story. However, the consistent use of this kind of surveillance can be, and is, used to mould and shift public behaviour.
It creates publics that are pliable – in a Foucauldian sense, we are beholden to an invisible guard that may or may not police us. We are scared to document, to resist, to write when the costs are so high, and when the reach of the state is everywhere – monitoring our travel, recording our phone calls, reading our WhatsApp messages.
Shah’s work is thus a work of resistance at a time when documenting the excesses of power can have harsh, even violent consequences. Even while the NCERT deletes the Babri Masjid demolition or a chapter on the riots, it is important that we remember the history of destruction and subjugation, and of the people who bravely fought for our democratic rights.
The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India, Alpa Shah, HarperCollins India.
