The book, How Long Can the Moon Be Caged?: Voices of Indian Political Prisoners by Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia begins with a quote from the book, The Gulag Archipelago by Russian literary great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

‘At no time have governments been moralists.
They never imprisoned people or executed them for having done something.
They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something.’ 

And the authors prove this in chilling, frightening and alarming detail.

As Vijayan and Recchia state, “Political prisoners challenge existing relations of power, question the status quo, confront authoritarianism and injustice; they stand with the disenfranchised. Theirs is a ‘thought’ crime: the crime of thinking, acting, speaking, probing, reporting, questioning, demanding rights, defending their homes, and, ultimately, exercising citizenship.”

Arrests and incarcerations

The state’s response: widespread arrests and incarcerations. Even illegal bulldozing of homes. One of the authors’ research colleagues, student activist Afreen Fatima’s house in Uttar Pradesh, was demolished by the authorities on June 10, 2022.

The first chapter, “A Season of Arrests”, chronicles in a timeline from May 9, 2014, to April 17, 2024, the arrests, temporary releases, and rearrests of many activists, poets, fact-checkers, journalists, lawyers, social workers, intellectuals and members of the Dalit community. It adds up to 41 pages.

It also reports on the judicial fight waged by these individuals and groups, even as the government continued to amend laws to give even more unfettered power to the security agencies. And we are shown how the courts often sided with the government.

The authors take the title of the book title from a sentence that activist Natasha Narwal sent in a letter from jail. Narwal had been incarcerated for protesting against the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA).

In unflinching detail, the book chronicles the arrest of academician GN Saibaba, who was in a car when it took place. “Plainclothes police from Gadchiroli dragged the driver out, then assaulted, blindfolded and kidnapped Saibaba from the [Delhi] university campus in broad daylight,” write the authors. “No warrant was issued, and he wasn’t allowed to call his wife or lawyer.”

Saibaba is 90 per cent physically disabled and needs a wheelchair to move around. And a district judge, despite scant evidence, did not give him bail. During his first 14 months in prison, Saibaba’s health deteriorated, his left hand became paralysed and he had to be taken to hospital 27 times.

“The vast power granted under the UAPA [Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act] and the regimes of impunity it offers have fundamentally remade what it means to disagree with the Indian state,” write Vijayan and Recchia. “The UAPA essentially reversed criminal law by shifting the burden of proof from the prosecution to the defence and making it illegal to hold certain political beliefs, especially those that question the Indian state.”

Saibaba is one in a long list of activists and politicians like Binayak Sen, Soni Sori, Gaur Chakraborty, and Kobad Ghandy, who have been charged under UAPA. But the authors state that for every activist whose name is remembered, and their case reported, hundreds disappear unknown.

Vijayan and Recchia talk at length about the notorious Bhima Koregaon case, where 16 activists, teachers, intellectuals, university professors, writers, and lawyers were arrested and charged with arms smuggling, for allegedly helping Maoists, and for hatching a plan to kill Prime Minister Narendra Modi, apart from waging war against the state – Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj, Varavara Rao, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudhir Dhawale, Mahesh Raut, Anand Teltumbde, Gautam Navlakha, Hany Babu, Sagar Gorkhe, Ramesh Gaichor, Jyoti Jagtap, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Shoma Sen, and Father Stan Swamy (who died tragically while imprisoned).

But the case against them has been flimsy. As the authors write, “First, information asserted without evidence; second, tampered evidence presented as a fact of complicity. A forensic report issued by [US-based] Arsenal Computing found that Rona Wilson’s computer was compromised for over 22 months and the attack was intended for two reasons: surveillance and planting incriminating documents using Netwire, a remote malware infrastructure.”

The authors also focus on the six-day Delhi riots that began on February 23, 2020. BJP leader Kapil Mishra threatened that he would act unless the police cleared the roads of protesters against the CAA within three days. The violence began soon after. “Mobs roamed the streets, unchallenged by the police in the days following the riots: an inferno unleashed in the heart of the nation’s capital,” write the authors. “The perpetrators dumped bodies and severed limbs into open drains, and bloated bodies were fished out of the gutter in the aftermath of the pogrom.” A list of victims’ names is included.

In an extraordinary twist, the police accused many of the victims of having inflicted the violence. “The Delhi police claimed Muslims had targeted their own communities, properties, and people, killed fellow Muslims, and burnt down mosques to protest a discriminatory act directed towards their communities,” write Vijayan and Recchia. “In one instance, the police arrested an imam for burning down the mosque where he used to preach. He had been the one to file a complaint with the police.”

One of the accused was Khalid Saifi. Once, Saifi’s wife, Nargis, took her eldest son to a court hearing. When the boy saw his father, he reached out to touch his father’s arm. But a policeman violently pushed the boy away, citing security reasons. The son broke down. Later, he told his mother, “How can I be a danger to my father?”

Nargis thought, “Who is going to answer this?”

A community in resistance

But there is a streak of sunlight and hope that penetrates this numbing darkness when the authors talk about “a community in resistance”. They write about those who are in a similar struggle to uphold individual and human rights as well as democracy.

Whenever the authors met the families of political prisoners or former prisoners, there was a long discussion on the status of other prisoners and their families and their communities. Inadvertently, Vijayan and Recchia became “carriers of information in this wider network of people, who may or may not have met before, but who are now intimately connected by a shared destiny.”

The prisoners were grateful for the support. From prison, Father Stan Swamy (1937–2021) wrote, “First of all, I deeply appreciate the overwhelming solidarity expressed by many people during these past 100 days behind bars. At times, news of such solidarity has given me immense strength and courage, especially when the only thing certain in prison is uncertainty.”

In the last line of the missive, he said, “A caged bird can still sing.”

Once, when Sahba Husain went to meet her jailed partner, human rights activist Gautam Navlakha, he quoted a line from a song written by Leonard Cohen: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

One of the most moving chapters is titled “Small Things”. The authors had asked the families of prisoners and the prisoners themselves to share objects that were meaningful to them about their experience in jail. These photos are reproduced in the book.

For example, Father Frazer Mascarenhas, who was Father Swamy’s guardian and official next-of-kin, preserved the hearing aid used by the late activist. There were paintings and photographs. A most touching moment came when Khalid Saifi’s daughter Maryam drew a card for her father, but the guards would not allow Khalid’s wife Nargis to show it to him. So Maryam requested Nargis to draw it on her arm, and they took a photo.

In another section, there are poignant letters written by the prisoners to their families, to jail superintendents, and friends.

This is a heartbreaking book. Most people are still unaware of how bad things can turn when the state moves against you when you dissent. But the authors, showing the truth for what it is, have to be commended for an extraordinary achievement. Publisher Westland, through their imprint Context, deserves plaudits for having the courage to publish it.

The authors make a telling statement in the epilogue: “The Indian state, with its immense power and vast resources, was scared of its writers, thinkers, scholars and activists. Its prisoners stood tall, laughed and sang in the face of unrelenting assaults.

How Long Can the Moon Be Caged?: Voices of Indian Political Prisoners, Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia, Context/Westland.