Rona Wilson interview: ‘My arrest was a warning to others who stand against the abuse of power’

At 53, researcher Rona Wilson is trying to pick up the pieces of the life he was forced to leave behind when he was arrested in the contentious Bhima Koregaon case six years and seven months ago.

His hair is greying, perhaps the most visible physical change since he was put in jail. Still intact, though, is his quiet smile. “The sense of time I lost is slowly sinking in,” he said on Friday, four days after he walked out of Navi Mumbai’s Taloja jail after fulfilling the conditions on which he had been granted bail.

“In prison, whether you like it or not, tea and food is coming at a specific time. Everything is in order,” he said. “Now that I am out, I am left on my own.”

To begin with, since his bail conditions do not allow him to leave Mumbai, he is trying to find an affordable home to rent in the expensive city.

Wilson and Dalit rights activist Sudhir Dhawale were granted bail on January 8 after the Bombay High Court acknowledged that they had spent a long time in jail without trial or even the charges against them being framed.

Wilson, the public relations secretary of the Committee for Release of Political Prisoners, had been arrested from his home in Delhi early in the morning of June 6, 2018. He was charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for allegedly being part of a conspiracy to instigate caste violence in the village of Bhima Koregaon near Pune on New Year’s day that year. Wilson was also accused of plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

He was among the five people arrested in the case that day from across the country.

Eventually, 16 academicians, activists, lawyers and writers would be arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case.

The authorities claimed that an incriminating letter written to a Maoist militant about assassinating Modi had been found on Wilson’s laptop. But an independent digital forensics firm in the US called Arsenal Consulting that reviewed the evidence claimed that the letter had been planted on Wilson’s computer using sophisticated Pegasus spware.

At the time of his arrest, Wilson, then 47, had been planning to move to the United Kingdom to pursue a PhD at the University of Surrey. His topic was “The Fiction of the Muslim Other: State, Law and The Politics of Naming in Contemporary India.”

Wilson had the first inkling of the challenges that lay ahead on April 17, 2018, when a posse of armed police officers entered his home at 5.50 am. Some of them held cameras with which to record the proceedings. He handed over his mobile phone, computer, and passwords for all social media and e-mail accounts to the police without hesitation.

“I realised later that was a mistake,” he said.

A little over a month later, the day after returning from a family celebration in Kerala, Wilson was arrested. He had spent the previous two decades working on a campaign to assist political prisoners. Among them was SAR Geelani, the Delhi University professor who had been sentenced to death in the 2001 Parliament attack case, before being acquitted by the Supreme Court.

Wilson was also passionate about Adivisi rights and other human rights causes. This work, he surmises, brought him into the “cross hairs of the state”.

His arrest, he suggests, was “ a warning to everyone who wants to stand up, call out the [abuse of] state power”.

The long incarceration

In June 2018, when Wilson was arrested along with lawyer Surendra Gadling, Dalit rights activist Sudhir Dhawale, university professor Shoma Sen and Adivasi rights activist Mahesh Raut, he hoped that he and the others would be released quickly.

In fact Wilson recollects that when the Pune Police informed court that he was part of an alleged plot to assassinate the prime minister, he laughed at the seeming absurdity of the allegation.

But soon, that hope faded. In 2019, when the coalition government in Maharashtra that included the Bharatiya Janata Party lost power, the BJP central government transferred the case to the National Investigation Agency that was under its control.

“These were clear indicators of how long this would go on for,” Wilson said. “Everywhere politics took precedence, and law and justice were mute spectators.”

He said though the judiciary is supposed to safeguard a prisoner’s rights, “procedures were by-passed and courts were just standing and watching”.

In Pune’s Yerwada prison, he was housed in the high-security egg-shaped “anda” cell. Sudhir Dhawale and lawyer Arun Ferreira, who had also been arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case, were in the same complex. So were gangsters Pappu Kalani and Nilesh Gaiwal and 1993 bomb blast convict Salim Shaikh.

The month before the nation-wide Covid-19 lockdown was declared in March 2020, Wilson was moved to barrack number 3 in Navi Mumbai’s Taloja prison.

The 45 prisoners in his barrack had to share two toilets. There were two others, but they did not work. “According to physical distancing norms, not more than 12 to 13 inmates should be in the barrack,” Wilson said.

The prison hospital was woefully underequipped, with no ventilator or oxygen cylinders.

“How we survived the Covid phase is miraculous,” Wilson said. “Those were extraordinary circumstances.”

“Need Judicial reforms”

Though Wilson had worked for almost two decades on campaigns to highlight the injustice faced by political prisoners, his six years in jail gave him a clearer understanding of how the penal system really works.

“I have seen corruption in black-and-white, up close,” he said.

For instance, to make a hospital visit, prisoners had to bribe the prison staff with amounts ranging from Rs 10,000 to Rs 30,000, he said.

The inadequate medical care took a hard toll on some of the others accused in the Bhima Koregaon case. Wilson said that the prison staff did not change poet Varavara Rao’s catheter as often as required, leading to an infection.

“By the time it went to court and they ordered the prison authority to look into it, there was already a delay,” he said.

English professor Hany Babu had a near-miss when he developed a severe viral infection in his eye. “This was during the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Wilson. “Because of the pressure from outside, he was taken to JJ Hospital where doctors said if it had been delayed for even few hours, the virus would have reached his brain.”

The most tragic example was that of 84-year-old Jesuit priest Stan Swamy, who died in custody in 2021 after the court delayed hearings on granting him medical bail, Wilson said.

While in prison, Wilson helped other inmates write legal applications since many were too poor to afford lawyers. Many were uneducated and had no idea about the status of their cases, he said. Till the day before he was released, inmates were approaching him to write legal applications.

His time in jail also gave Wilson a sense of the stigma attached to people who have been in jail after they are released. Months after some prisoners had been acquitted, he would find them behind bars again.

“In Taloja prison I met one man we had helped get acquitted while we were in Pune prison,” Wilson said. He was back for petty theft. “He said, ‘Koi naukri nahi deta hai,” said Wilson. Nobody will give me a job.

Life after prison

Since his release, relatives and friends, several from other parts of the country, have flocked to see Wilson. But he is yet to meet his elderly mother who lives in Kerala. She is worried about him continuing his work on human rights.

His arrest, Wilson said, has affected her badly. “She looks thin, frail, emaciated,” he said.

During his six years in prison, he received temporary bail just once – in 2021.

Had he not been jailed, Wilson said, he would perhaps have finished his PhD and started teaching, in addition to continuing his work for Adivasi rights and campaigning for justice for political prisoners.

Did he lose hope at any point? “No no, definitely not,” Wilson said with a smile. “Compared to us, there were others who had far greater issues in prison. Nobody to represent them, nobody to meet them, broken families.”

For now, Rona Wilson plans to restart work on enrolling for a PhD.