Bhima Koregaon and the search for justice

The book delves into the lives of each of the 16 activists arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case; who they are and what motivated them to keep fighting.

Activist Sudha Bharadwaj at her residence in Mumbai on Sunday. | Photo Credit: EMMANUAL YOGINI

The French philosopher Michel Foucault, rather intriguingly, was enchanted by the Iranian revolution. He saw in the “man” on the streets a rare feat of preparedness for the finality of death over the certainty of submission. He saw in it the making of a pure event marked by a complete break, erasure of memory and liberation from all social constraints and obligations. It is this liberation in the intensity of death that was not available to routinized resistance, or even a revolution. He, however, qualified that such a moment of revolt may have very little with the outcome and the emergence of an Islamic state/government.

Foucault, in any case, stood against all forms of government, adding or qualifying it as being Islamic added very little to its workings or our understanding of its workings. How did the people on the street come to revolt in utter disregard to one’s own life and limb? Foucault has very little to add, except to say “the man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable” but he did think it could be referred to as “political spirituality”. Spirituality here does not refer to religion but an act of self-transformation, self-making and formation- a “will to know”.

The book under review could be read as taking a deep dive into the recesses of what propels people towards intimate commitments, in utter disregard for their own wellbeing, in search of an explanation of the “man in revolt”, it may not be so inexplicable. Stan Swamy, a Jesuit Priest and one of the accused on the Bhima Koregaon case, who lost his life in the prison, said in complete awareness that, “What is happening to me is not something unique; it is the broader process that is taking place all over the country. We are all aware how prominent intellectuals, writers, poets, activists, student leaders have been put into jail because they have expressed their dissent or raised questions on the ruling powers. We are part of this process. In a way, I am happy to be part of this process because I am not a silent spectator; I am part of the game, I am ready to pay the price, whatever it may be.” (Father Stan Swamy, in a video he released a few days before he was arrested on October 8, 2020). Whatever is an oblique reference to death.

What made him so prepared for death? Why did he stake it all for the rights and dignity of the Adivasis? This is the common running thread of Alpa Shah’s meticulously researched book that covers the unsaid stories of 16 accused in the infamous Bhima Koregaon case. The book dedicates individual chapters to each of the BK 16 and offers a detailed account of who they are, what is their background and finally what motivated them. The book is a biographical account of each individual and it manages to remarkably join the dots to explain why they were implicated in what seem to be blatantly false cases and incarcerated for long years.

The Incarcerations

Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India

By Alpa Shah

Harpercollins

Pages: 600

Price: 799

Public protest politics is mostly understood as being exclusively political or public. However, the visible political aspects have a hidden story of aspects that are deeply personal. The personal dimensions make the political simultaneously less heroic but more in-depth. The subtitle of the book is “search for democracy in India” that could easily have been rewritten as the search for justice and meaning. What gave depth to the journeys of these individuals was the way they battled everyday hardships without wavering on their commitments. Is it this forbearance at the heart of what we call democracy?

Sudha Bhardwaj, about whose life and times is the first and the longest chapters of the book, throws light on her uncanny personality and decisions that she took reflecting the inner self. It was not her preparedness to give up a plush life for that of an activist working alongside Shankar Guha Niyogi, which she did with indomitable commitment but also her complete awareness and preparedness to “spending my life being a just a very small cog in that machine” and that “I would feel happy doing that”. To come to think of it, many of the names that hit the front pages of the dailies after the “sensational” revelations of the “plot to assassinate the Prime Minister”, including Rona Wilson, Stan Swamy, Sudhir Dhawale, Surendra Gadling, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira, Hany Babu, were barely known beyond the circles that they were active in. It reminds one of Binayak Sen, with who Sudha Bhardwaj worked closely, became an internationally recognized face but only to walk into ‘oblivion’ once he was cleared of the charges against him.

Unlike the strongman phenomenon of authoritarian regimes, visibility and everyday vindication does not drive these activists, but it is an inspiration of a larger good. But how does one arrive at this point? How does one overcome the “self”? The book does not necessarily answer any of these deeply philosophical and ‘spiritual’ queries but what it does do is allow us to learn our own lessons from these lives carefully peeled open. I remember once asking the civil rights activist, K. Balagopal, as to where does he get such inexhaustible positive energies from, only to be greeted by stoic silence. What comes through clearly in the book is that politics, democracy and justice cannot be comprehended without comprehending the makings of the inner self. How does the collective inspire it-collective here is not something to be seen as a constraint but the essence of meaning.

Cover of The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Bharadwaj gave up her US citizenship, lived among the workers in worker colonies, her personal relation and marriage fell apart, her relation with her daughter suffered on account of her decisions to be a full-time activist. She weathered all of it; she made amendments and course corrected but remained committed to her cause even when she moved back to Delhi and took up teaching and began to practice law.

Her move commands our respect but it also leaves behind difficult and awkward questions of transformation. Did her privileged background help her so seamlessly shift, which is not a choice many have. Does this make protest and resistance a privilege in this nation? Not too long back, at an informal banter in my room with my students on clothes and fashion, I reminded them of how activists do not take their clothing too seriously. To which a Dalit student of mine quipped, that is a choice we do not have, a choice Dr. Ambedkar did not enjoy. If sacrifice is a symbol of protest and privilege, does pragmatism remain the default choice of subaltern politics? If not, what is the in-between space?

Pune Police escort activist Sudha Bharadwaj in Bhima Koregaon Case at Pune Disctrict and Sessions court in 2018. | Photo Credit: JIGNESH MISTRY

Anand Teltumbde’s story in this book will remain, perhaps, one of the most significant because he chose a difficult path. He emerged as a bitter critique of Dalit identity politics but also Left’s caste-blind politics. He eschewed pragmatism as an unworkable, if not unethical, choice for the subaltern. Such simple minded pragmatism could easily be co-opted, when he called out Dalit wheeler-dealers as “black sheep”. He advocated anti-caste politics in more radical registers, which was why he was dubbed an “urban naxal”.

Many a pragmatist Dalit academic and activist are perturbed by Teltumbde’s arrest as it disturbs the equation and equivalence between sacrifice and privilege. Similar is the story of G.N. Sai Baba (not a BK related case), who I happened to meet a few days after his release and asked him what kept him going during his days in prison, and he said the opportunity to teach the unlettered tribals languishing in jails without a trial for years. He was heartened that many could complete their graduation through the distant education mode. Here is a case of a 90 per cent disabled person with severe health related issues and denied a chance to meet his mother or take part in her last rites but who remained unflinchingly committed to a collective cause. Has justice come to replace God? Philosophers have declared “the death of God” and the “death of Man” but have they failed to see not merely constraints in the collective but life itself?

Members of various political parties, human rights organisations and Christian outfits staging demonstration in Palayamkottai condemning the death of Rev Fr. Stan Swamy in judicial custody. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

The book is also a serious reflection on the workings of government and security agencies. It suggests wilful indictment of various officials and the way they are complicit in pursuing the BK case, and mustering evidence and demonstrating unflinching commitment without guilt. Alpa Shah notes that “the Maharashtra police seemed intent to punish the BK incarcerated as convicted criminals, not as political prisoners whose trails had not even began”. When Varavara Rao’s family finally managed to meet at the Nanavati hospital, he was found in a pool of urine, suffering from loss of memory due to “neurological issues he faced because of severe loss of electrolytes”.

Further, “Varavara Rao was forced to live with an unchanged catheter in his body for eighty days, got a urinary infection, and, on 18 November 2020 was forced to return to Nanavati hospital”. Some of those arrested in BK case were Octogenarians, like Stan and Varavara Rao and it looked like a plot to push them to a slow and uneventful death in the prison. Old and disabled became the symbols of the emergent necropolitics of the current regime but what “inspires” the police personnel involved to become so vengeful? To go beyond the call of the duty to demonstrate personal animosity with impunity requires an explanation.

Is it that they are convinced that these are individuals working against the “national interests”, like the young men who carried out an attempt to assassinate Umar Khalid? Or is it a “will to power” flowing out of socialization into unmitigated caste egos and supremacist religiosity that this regime wilfully encouraged. This question has remained unanswered even after the Nuremburg trails. To add to it, one could further ask would many of us if placed in a similar situation of power respond any differently. Does responding differently mean being detached and indifferent or consciously reject power? Would it not be true to say that, in such a context, not exercising power when in position of power is more radical than resisting power? Or are they the same?

A recent must-watch movie in Telugu, Virata Parvam, explores the place of love in revolution. Is revolution an act of love or a rational exercise based on deft calculations? It demonstrates the potential of the questions we face with the State could as well creep and colonise a revolution: the power of instrumentality, as against the intangibility of love. The stories of the activists in this book are testimonies of this ongoing struggle to triumph power within and outside. Neither they nor the book will answer us but it is in the courage, integrity and finally intimacy of their struggles and commitments that throw a powerful searchlight on all of us as individuals, and as a collective. This book should be widely read and debated to see what transcendence might come to look like in times to come.

Ajay Gudavarthy is Associate Professor, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.