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How 'BK-16' puts democracy on trial

The Incarcerations is the biography of 16 disparate prisoners of conscience - poets, professors, lawyers and journalists

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Vipul Mudgal
5 min read Last Updated : Apr 24 2024 | 11:17 PM IST
The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India
Author: Alpa Shah
Publisher: Harper Collins 
Pages: 561
Price:  Rs 699

Academics have an adversarial equation with journalism. If a journalist writes pompously, her editor may accuse her of being dense or academic. And if a scholar is too eloquent, her peers might call her flippant or journalistic. Having been in both camps, my all-time favourite is an academic who can write movingly without losing the rigour. Scholar-storyteller Alpa Shah has that rare quality. Her book is a lucid account of the struggles, life histories, and peculiar circumstances of victims of the state’s crackdown on dissent.
 
The Incarcerations is the biography of 16 disparate prisoners of conscience — poets, professors, lawyers and journalists — called the BK-16 and the chronology of key events surrounding their arrests and prosecution. The array of inventive charges against them ranges from inciting violence to terrorism to waging a war against the state to plotting to kill the Prime Minister of India, and the list goes on. The book shows how the prosecutors seem more interested in prolonging the trials, and the incarcerations, rather than in proving the charges.
 
The author is convinced that the prosecution has no case. She paints the predicament of the BK-16 who variously come to the aid of the forest dwellers whose lands happen to bear coal, bauxite, iron ore and a wealth of other minerals. The industry wants the forests to be cleared of human inhabitation, biodiversity, or legal interruptions, to be able to mine without remorse or ecological alarms. This is also where the armed, underground Maoists are at war against the state, represented by the garrisons of paramilitary forces. The tribals seem to be at the receiving end from both sides.
 
Set against this backdrop, the book does not attempt to illuminate the state’s anxieties or its rationale for militarising the region. She calls murders, incarcerations and dispossessions “the stuff of the daily life”. For years, the London School of Economics professor has combed this area for ethnographic research. One of her earlier books, In the Shadow of the State (2010), documents insurgency, environmentalism, and indigenous politics in Jharkhand.
 
This book narrates the stories of the BK-16 and a chronology of what transpired on that fateful January day in 2018. Her portrayal of Jesuit priest, Father Stan Swami, and the lawyer and trade unionist, Sudha Bharadwaj, are soul-stirring. She has quoted from diverse sources and conducted interviews to portray the characters of not only renowned writer-intellectuals like Gautam Navlakha, Shoma Sen, Anand Teltumbde, Varavara Rao, and many others, but also lesser-known Dalit singers, Jyoti Jagtap, Sagar Gorkhe, and Ramesh Gaichor of the Kabir Kala Manch whose part in the conspiracy was to sing soulful sufi songs.
 
The author documents the trials of the BK-16 and the investigations around the “recoveries” of malware and self-incriminating letters in the laptops seized from them. Curiously, the (dangerous!) accused went about using, rather nonchalantly, the actual names of one another and their real intentions (such as plotting to kill Prime Minister Narendra Modi, provisioning ammunition and so on). She quotes Ajai Sahni, one of India’s finest terrorism experts, to say that the letters have “…all the hallmarks of mischievous fabrication…”
 
The digital evidence of the Pune Police makes for spine-chilling reading. The author follows the malware through multiple investigations by the media and cyber experts who establish that the “evidence” was likely to have been planted in the seized laptops, perhaps both before and after the arrests. These are independent specialists from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, a California-based cyber security company, SentinelOne, and a leading forensic outfit Arsenal, based in Massachusetts, USA. The defence lawyer Mihir Desai said such cyber-forensic examinations became possible only after the court allowed them to have cloned copies of the hard drives seized by the police.
 
Alpa Shah cites eyewitness accounts to describe the violent incident at Bhima Koregaon in Pune. The victory pillar that towers over the river Bhima marks the sacrifices of the Dalits who had died in 1818 in a battle against an overpowering upper-caste army. The incident has a special significance for the region’s Dalits. The annual commemoration of the Dalit victory, a la Black Lives Matter, was initiated by Bhimrao Ambedkar as far back as 1927 to “revive the valour of their forefathers”. It is here that the upper-caste Hindu mobs waving saffron flags assaulted Dalits.
 
Alpa Shah views that day’s event from the eyes of a 39-year-old Dalit activist, Anita Sawale, a victim of violence and an eye-witness of the attacks in which a youth died and several civilians and policemen were injured. In her first information report, she named right-wing upper-caste leaders Sambhaji Bhide and Milind Ekbote, who had faced cases of rioting earlier and were denied bail after their complicity was confirmed by a citizens’ fact-finding committee appointed by the Pune Rural Police.
 
One section of the book is devoted to how the case was taken over from the rural police and turned on its head by an assistant commissioner of Pune Police. The instigators of violence changed from the Hindutva groups to activists and government critics, many of whom had never visited Bhima Koregaon, and a new narrative of the riots developed. Five and a half years after the first arrests, about half of the BK-16 have come out on bail recently but there is still no sign of a trial. Is this not a marker of India’s democratic backsliding? The author calls it the country’s greatest challenge since the end of colonial rule.

The reviewer heads Common Cause, known for its work on police reforms and high-impact PILs

Topics :BS ReadsBOOK REVIEWBhima Koregaon violenceIndian democracy

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