The Bhima Koregaon saga of injustice

ALPA Shah, whose family hailed from Gujarat, was raised in Nairobi, where my deceased wife, Melba, was born and lived till the age of 10. The Mau Mau movement in Kenya forced many families of Indian origin to leave that country. The Menezes of Goa — to which my wife belonged — was among the few families that returned to India. They sailed back to Goa, while Alpa emigrated to England.

‘Bail, not jail’ was the principle laid down by Justice VR Krishna Iyer, one of the most respected jurists to have graced the Supreme Court.

She studied at Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, where she is presently a professor of anthropology. She is the author of Nightmarch and In the Shadows of the State. But it is her recent book, The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India, that got me acquainted with this intrepid warrior for human rights.

Incarcerations was published in March. Alpa has delved into the personal history of each of the 16 men and women accused of being members of a banned Maoist organisation that was allegedly plotting to kill Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The accusation of plotting to kill Modi appears to have been added for effect. It was not repeated during the investigations.

Those arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case were a motley crowd of lawyers, academics, writers, poets and even balladeers, some not even known to the others, like Kabir Kala Manch poet Sudhir Dhawale, singers Ramesh Gaichor, Sagar Gorkhe and Jyoti Jagtap.

Each of them spent many years in jail without being convicted, without even being tried! Since they were arrested under the draconian UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act), the process was phased to become the sentence. Bail is almost impossible to obtain in UAPA cases. The charges against the Bhima Koregaon accused have not yet been framed, though the first arrests were made in 2018. A few of them are on bail. Some are still in prison. Their trial is not likely to start anytime in the near future.

‘Bail, not jail’ was the principle laid down by Justice VR Krishna Iyer, one of the most respected jurists to have graced the Supreme Court. His elder brother, VR Laxminarayanan, an IPS colleague of mine, served in the CBI. The UAPA was meant to neutralise the ‘mischief’ of that legal principle in cases where the security of the nation was said to be threatened. But in actual practice, it has been turned into an instrument of injustice, confining citizens arrested under that Act to incarceration without trial for years together.

The 16 incarcerated activists belong to different communities. There are four Christians — Fr Stan Swamy (now deceased), a Jesuit priest born in an affluent landholding family of Tamil Nadu, Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira of Mumbai and Rona Wilson of Kerala. There is one Muslim, Hany Babu, also from Kerala, and seven Dalit rights activists — Anand Teltumbde, married to Rama, granddaughter of Dalit icon BR Ambedkar, Jyoti Jagtap, Sagar Gorkhe, Ramesh Gaichor, Sudhir Dhawale, Surendra Gadling and Shoma Sen.

The rest were upper-caste Hindus — Bharadwaj, Mahesh Raut (a forest rights activist from Gadchiroli), Gautam Navlakha, a human rights activist whose partner Sabha Husain was a women’s rights activist, and Varavara Rao, a left-oriented poet from Hyderabad who had been in prison earlier for his poems and activities.

Bharadwaj and Fr Swamy were fighting for tribal rights. Bharadwaj was born in the US to Indian parents who were academics. She had a US passport, which she surrendered when she decided to spend her life with the tribals fighting for their due by law. She studied at IIT-Kanpur. Bharadwaj spent three years in jail before being released by the Bombay High Court. Her only ‘crime’ was taking up the cause of tribals who were being dispossessed of their land in Chhattisgarh.

Under Fr Swamy’s leadership, tribals were made aware of their rights in accordance with the laws in force. These laws militated against the mining of iron ore and coal in tribal lands. Many corporate groups were hit by the objections raised by the Ho tribals of Jharkhand, prompted by Fr Swamy. He spent a year in jail and died in judicial custody.

Teltumbde was an engineer who worked for two decades at Bharat Petroleum before he was appointed CEO and Managing Director of Petronet India, an oil and gas production company in the public sector. Before he retired, he got a PhD in management from the University of Mumbai. He joined as a professor at the Vinod Gupta School of Management at IIT-Kharagpur; later, he was picked up in Goa by the Pune Police for a crime he said he did not commit.

The only evidence produced by the police and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) against Teltumbde was correspondence extracted from his computer and those of some of the others suspected of Maoist links, which they all have disowned. Teltumbde’s main interest was to analyse nationwide data to show that Dalits and Adivasis were the poorest of all groups in India and had not benefited from neo-liberalisation and globalisation. This stand was contrary to the efforts being made by the Sangh Parivar to include Dalits and Adivasis in the greater Hindu fold, whereas the efforts of activists like Bharadwaj, Fr Swamy, Teltumbde and Sen tended to prove that stigmas of caste and tribe had survived in contemporary India and discrimination against them was the rule.

Alpa’s book is a must-read for all students of contemporary Indian politics. The finding of US-based experts on the hacking of computers suggested the presence of a “hacker for hire”, an expert in the use of malware to insert evidence in victims’ computers. The NIA and the Pune Police refuse to accept the findings of Arsenal Consulting and Sentinel Labs, two globally recognised digital forensics and cybersecurity companies based in the US. The defence will try to submit the findings of these experts during the trial.

But when will the trial commence? There are no signs of even the charges being framed! Is there any democratic country in the world that keeps citizens in jail for years together without hope of a trial, especially when they claim they are not guilty of the offences for which they have been charged? I would like to be enlightened. So would Alpa. And so should all of you who read her meticulously researched book.