The violence that broke out at Bhima Koregaon in Maharashtra on January 1, 2018, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon, has largely been forgotten. It makes news only when bail is rejected or, more uncommonly, granted to any of the 16 accused human rights defenders who were arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, on the charge of instigating caste violence. Alpa Shah’s book The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India is a welcome jolt to the public memory, reminding us of the fact that 16 intellectuals from across India were targeted in an unprecedented manner and charged under an anti-terror law designed to keep them behind bars without bail. So far, only seven of them are out on bail, the most recent being the 72-year-old writer Gautam Navlakha and the 66-year-old professor Shoma Sen.
One of the accused, Father Stan Swamy, died in custody less than a year after his arrest on October 8, 2020. Shah’s book explains why the 84-year-old Jesuit priest and his 15 co-accused were considered such a grave threat to the state. The book also sheds light on the methods employed in cyberwarfare and cyber espionage: international experts have concluded that “evidence’’ was planted on the computers of some of the accused.
Alpa Shah, who is a Professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, discussed her book in this interview with Frontline.
Excerpts:
What convinced you to write this book?
The Bhima Koregaon case is a bellwether for the collapse of democracy in India. I was moved by the incarceration of brilliant and diverse intellectuals, lawyers, journalists, poets, activists, who had devoted their lives to fighting for justice for some of the most marginalised people in the hidden corners of the country. To me their fight was for the essence of democracy: the sharing of economic, political, and cultural power. The chilling and shocking story of their incarcerations seemed to be a way to frighten, silence, and curtail the actions of all dissenters anywhere in the country with the message, “It could be you next.” Importantly, this case was a window into the wider capture of the various important pillars of democracy, including the mainstream media; the compromises of the judiciary; and the excesses of the police force with the rise of new weapons of policing, including vigilante street mobs and cyberwarfare used to attack dissenters. It was an important story to tell not only for justice for the Bhima Koregaon-16 (BK-16) but also for the protection of democratic rights anywhere in the world.
Did you hear of the Bhima Koregaon case before you started writing the book?
Many scholars of India, like me, who work in universities across the world, knew about the case from the time of the first police raids on the homes of the BK-16 back in 2018, which led to their eventual incarceration. This is because several of the BK-16 were intellectuals whose work we had either read, heard of, or whom we had even met. In my case, I had met several of the BK-16 and had followed the work of almost all of them over the course of the last 15 years or so.
Cover of The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement
How did you go about researching the material? What was the most essential aspect, and what was the most difficult data to access?
The research for this book took place across many different temporal and spatial scales. First, it was dependent on my long-term research over the last 25 years on Adivasi and Dalit rights and resistance, on democracy and the state, inequalities and capitalism in India. I drew on my deep, immersive field-based research, living for many years in the Adivasi areas of India. I also drew on my long-term acquaintance with many of the BK-16 and their work. I conducted more than a hundred interviews across three continents, lasting from a few hours to a few days, including one which was over two weeks. Interviews with the BK-16 [those it was possible to interview], their family, friends, and colleagues, and the lawyers were, of course, crucial.
I also conducted interviews with many others who were wrapped up in this case in some way: whether it was those who found themselves in the middle of the Bhima Koregaon riots, like Anita Sawale (the Dalit activist who filed the first FIR against the rioters), those who conducted digital forensics of the clone copies of the electronic devices the Pune Police seized from some of the BK-16, or the Pune Police itself.
In the book I show exactly how I did my research in 83 pages of extensive endnotes. In these endnotes, I also credit the work of the courageous journalists who covered many aspects of the case and who provided an essential infrastructure of knowledge which I drew on and which I helped synthesise, deepen, and widen for others through my own research and writing. In the first print run in India, the endnotes were available via a QR code, but they were printed in full in the book itself in the new edition released in June.
I can’t single out any one aspect of the research as being more essential or important than another. It’s the whole array of people, issues, and events put together that makes this such an extraordinary story. Perhaps the most unexpected interview I got was with the Pune Police. I thought that they would ignore or decline my requests for interviews, as they had done to most Indian journalists reporting on the case.
I had almost given up trying when I made one final call. It was to Shivaji Bodkhe, who was supervising the investigation in the Pune City Police. Bodkhe pleasantly surprised me by talking for an hour and a half about the arrests. Although I deeply disagreed with Bodkhe and told him he might not like my book as it gave a very different perspective to the case, it helped me understand how he thought the way he did.
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Did you have a specific readership in mind?
I was interested in capturing the hearts and minds of a general reader anywhere in the world. I wanted them to care about these extraordinary intellectuals and activists, from whom we have so much to learn, who found themselves framed in this case, and to see the tragedy that faces the world’s largest democracy. Specifically, I wanted to attract an international readership that is concerned about democratic rights and inequalities as well as readers who care about India but think it is shining, and may know nothing about this case and the people imprisoned. Of course, I was also hoping that all those concerned for the BK-16, including their amazing lawyers, and family and friends, and the BK-16 themselves would one day read the book.
The most difficult part to read was the section about the hacking of the computers. How did you make sense of it?
I knew almost nothing about digital technology before I began working on the book except how to send emails, type in a Word document, and create a rudimentary PowerPoint presentation for my students. But sometimes knowing nothing about a complex field can be an advantage as it allows you to ask a lot of stupid questions to try to get to the bottom of things in simple terms, which, in this case for me, was the activity of the human actors behind all the technological interventions.
I was lucky to interview some of the world’s top cyber researchers based in the US who took an interest in the case and who worked on it, including those who had not talked to any Indian journalist. They were very patient with what must have seemed to them my naive questions about their rather technical digital forensic reports on this case. Between interviews, I did my own digging around on cyber espionage, which enabled me to present better questions to the experts.
Crucially, I also drew on my years of researching India and knowing how things worked; for instance, on the one hand, the everyday pressures on the police and their own likely limited digital capacity, and on the other hand, the young savvy IT [information technology] graduates coming out of colleges and universities for whom earning a big quick buck might be quite attractive despite the fact it was a risky industry. All these issues, which are ultimately tied to my quest to understand the people behind the digital interventions and their actions and logic, helped me craft what others have told me is a gripping and chilling story that anyone can understand.
You have concluded that the hacking was done by professionals hired for the purpose. Would this have been possible without clearance from the very top?
A special independent investigation should be done to find out how this took place. In the book, I trace all the events that I think took place, as I reconstructed them through my interviews with US-based cyber forensic experts, which led me to conclude that a hacker-for-hire mercenary gang was likely to be central to how and why the BK-16 were incarcerated.
I also explicitly suggest, for a range of different reasons, that the highest levels of the state were involved in these incarcerations. This includes the fact that the NSO Israeli spyware with which the BK-16 were targeted is for the exclusive use of government intelligence and law enforcement agencies [pages 375-380]. It also includes the fact that when an individual in the Maharashtra government questioned the Pune City Police’s action in the case after reports in the media raised questions about the implantation of electronic evidence, the investigation was taken out of their hands and put under the control of the National Investigation Agency, the anti-terror task force directly under the Home Minister. Indeed, one section of the book in Part Six is titled “Cyber warfare backed by the highest levels of the state?”
The shocking details about this hacking have not created much of a ripple in India. Do you find that strange?
To me everything about this case is strange!
Police personal trying to disrupt the crowd which gathered at IIT Market, Mumbai, during a bandh following the attack at the Bhima Koregaon memorial near Pune on January 3, 2018. | Photo Credit: PRASHANT WAYDANDE
You have researched naxalism and even lived in an Adivasi village in Jharkhand. At that time, how did you visualise the movement progressing? The Bhima Koregaon case is linked with the movement to some extent, and to the state’s perception of Maoists. Did you make any discoveries about the movement and the Indian government’s handling of it while working on the book?
I think some background is important: I lived in two different Adivasi villages over four and a half years as a social anthropologist. I became interested in the naxalite movement when a branch of it was trying to recruit my village friends into its guerrilla armies. At first, I thought they were just protection racketeers like the Sicilian mafia. However, after I got to know many of those who had joined the movement at all levels, from foot soldiers to leaders, and I had lived in their guerrilla zones for a year and a half, I saw the naxalite movement as a revolutionary struggle trying to create a more equal world for everyone even if I didn’t agree with the methods or the analysis chosen by their leaders on many different issues.
I wrote my last book, Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas (2018), on this movement, and how it attracted people from very different backgrounds to come together to change the world but who fell apart from within (and not just because of the intense state counter-insurgency operations against them). The Indian state has painted this movement as a terrorist one and used brutal methods of repression, including killing and mass incarcerations under draconian anti-terror laws. Poor Adivasis and other minorities have been imprisoned as naxalites without trial for years. The jails of central and eastern India are overfull with thousands of such “undertrial” prisoners who have very little recourse to any legal representation and will languish in jail. What’s striking about the BK-16 is how, amidst all their various democratic rights initiatives, many of them were trying to bring justice to these poor folk. In other words, they were fighting the same anti-terror laws under which they find themselves incarcerated. The BK-16 were not the hidden poor in the forests but mainly middle-class activists working from cities, some of whom came from quite elite backgrounds. The police created a media frenzy that they had arrested a gang of “urban naxals”: since then, “urban naxals” has become a common label to use against anyone dissenting against the regime in power. But in an interesting twist to the events, after the BK-16 incarcerations, so many people from across the country proudly said #MeTooUrbanNaxal that it seemed that even though the guerrillas have virtually been extinguished in the forests, ironically the police action and media complicity in the BK case had given new life to the very idea of the naxalites!
People shout slogans during the “Elgar against Fascism” protest near the Pune Collector’s office in August 2018. They were agitating against the arrest of five activists from different States. | Photo Credit: JIGNESH MISTRY
You have given a lot of space to Sudha Bhardwaj and Stan Swamy. Was there any reason behind this?
Every single member of the BK-16 is covered in some depth and as and when it made the most sense in the narrative structure of the book. As I say there, some of the BK-16 appear more than others not because they are more important but because their life histories and work, and my access to them, allowed me to cover the wider story of the issues they dealt with. In other words, I use the more biographical chapters to tell the larger story of the grassroots struggles of many of the BK-16.
Specifically, this is the fight for Adivasi and labour rights against mining corporations (which is told mainly through the story of Bhardwaj in Part One and Stan Swamy in Part Two, but also through others, including Mahesh Raut, in Part Five). It is also the significance of the Dalit-Left alliance against caste oppression and capitalism and in opposition to the co-option of Dalits by the Hindu right (which is told mainly through the story of Anand Teltumbde in Part Three but also Sudhir Dhawale, Surendra Gadling and the Kabir Kala Manch artists—Ramesh Gaichor, Sagar Gorkhe and Jyoti Jagtap—in Part Five). And, it is the significance of the fight against the explicit ostracisation of Muslims (told via the story of Gautam Navlakha but also others in Part Seven). I hope readers can dip in and out of these more substantive biographical chapters, but reading the book in its entirety will help [readers] understand the case itself and how and why some of the other BK-16 may have got caught up in it and what they have suffered.
Highlights
- Alpa Shah’s latest book, The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India, is about the 16 accused human rights defenders who were arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, on the charge of instigating caste violence in Bhima Koregaon.
- So far, only seven of them are out on bail, the most recent being the 72-year-old writer Gautam Navlakha and the 66-year-old professor Shoma Sen.
- Shah’s book explains why the 16 accused were considered such a grave threat to the state.
Do you believe that India is a democracy?
As charted in my book, even though India conducts democratic elections, I feel it is not a democratic country. Democracy is about the sharing of economic, political, and cultural power. One cannot call a country democratic when defenders of democracy are incarcerated across the nation; when anti-democratic measures, including street mobs and cyberwarfare are used to silence dissenters; and when the police, the media, and the courts not only allow this to happen but are even complicit.
India is also one of the most unequal countries in the world. Any attempt for real democracy will have to challenge these growing inequalities where 10 per cent of the population holds more than 70 per cent of the national wealth. This involves challenging the state-capital nexus and how, as I say in the book, the regime in power has given rise to oligarchs.
You say that it is important to call the Indian government “fascist”. Will such a description be taken seriously by Western governments? And will they become more circumspect in their enthusiasm for the Narendra Modi government?
As I say in the book, Western governments have a trade interest in India as a potential superpower with the world’s largest population. They see it as an important alternative to China. No change in perception, policy, and politics has come about without a struggle. My book joins other important critics situated in the West, including powerful voices such as the V-Dem Institute in Sweden that charted India’s collapse into electoral autocracy; The Economist, which has said India is “sleepwalking into authoritarianism”; and Financial Times that has done important reporting showing India’s democratic decline. None of these critiques are voices of the Left (who have long been critiquing the regime in power), but they come from positions which are generally considered moderate, even centrist.
Maoist rebels exercise at a temporary base in the Abujmarh forests of Chhattisgarh on April 13, 2007. | Photo Credit: MUSTAFA QURAISHI/ AP
What did you learn in the process of writing the book, something that was a revelation?
The cyber espionage bit is a total revelation. I was not even aware that it is possible to implant evidence in this way, forget about tracing it. But there were so many other minor and major revelations at every turn, in every chapter, even on issues that I had spent 25 years working on.
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Many of the Bhima Koregaon accused have been fighting for the human rights of tribals, workers, Kashmiris, and Dalits, and against corporates for a long time. Given that, is not your description of pre-2014 India as a secular democracy celebrating diversity a bit too rosy?
I never romanticise the period before Modi. In fact, the explicit claim of the book is that all of the BK-16 were fighting against the abuse of state and corporate power and arguing for democratic rights no matter what regime was ruling the country. The book charts the continuities in repression of democratic rights before 2014 in every chapter: whether it is the repression of Adivasis, oppression of Dalits, or human rights atrocities in Kashmir. It even shows how the hacking of Rona Wilson’s computer began in 2012, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was in power.
The book also discusses the similarities and differences between the Emergency and what is happening now. The repression of democratic rights was explicitly declared during Emergency, whereas what is happening in India now is not declared—which somehow makes it more powerful and more difficult to challenge. Also, now abuses of democratic rights are taking place against not just people who have long been marginalised but anyone anywhere in the country, including the urban middle classes who may dissent in any way with the regime in power.
This also shows why it is imperative for everyone in India and abroad, no matter what our differences, to unite in solidarity at this moment in time, to call the regime(s) in India to account and fight for democratic rights. As the world’s most populous nation and an emerging global superpower, the protection of democratic rights in India matters for democracy in the world at large.
Jyoti Punwani is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist.
