New Delhi: Two human rights activists who were arrested in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic – scholar Anand Teltumbde and journalist Gautam Navlakha – have been jointly awarded the 2020 Shakti Bhatt Book Prize. The two are among 11 rights activists arrested in connection with the Elgar Parishad case, which is being probed by the National Investigation Agency.
Teltumbde has authored more than two dozen books, including Republic of Caste: Thinking of Equality in the Era of Neoliberalism and Hindutva, Dalits: Past, Present and Future and Mahad: The Making of the First Dalit Revolt. Before his arrest, he was teaching at the Goa Institute of Management. His wife, Rama Teltumbde, will be accepting the prize on his behalf.
Navlakha is one of the founding members of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, and has worked as a journalist and editor for decades. He is the author of Days and Nights in the Heartland of Rebellion, about Maoism in Bastar.
Also read: ‘Your Ideas Have Spread Like Wildfire’: A Letter to Dr Anand Teltumbde on His Birthday
Until last year, the prize was awarded for debut books and was called the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. However, it has been revamped in 2020, dropping the word ‘first’, and will now honour an author’s body of work rather than their first book. The 2019 award had gone to Tony Joseph for his book Early Indians.
“It just seems to us that at this point (in 2020) it does not make sense to have a first book prize. When we started nobody was doing it. In time, first books came up in many shortlists. In fact, there were copycats for just first books prize as well. We just did not see the relevance. So, we wanted to give it to somebody where it will make a difference. It is not so much money but I am sure both these men need some money to fight their court cases,” author Jeet Thayil, a co-curator of the award, told the Indian Express.
Eleven lawyers and rights activists – Varavara Rao, Shoma Sen, Rona Wilson, Surendra Gadling, Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves, Sudha Bharadwaj, Sudhir Dhawale, Mahesh Raut, Gautam Navlakha and Anand Teltumbde – have been accused of instigating violence against Dalits at Bhima Koregaon on January 1, 2018.
As The Wire has reported before, in 2018, under the BJP-ruled government, the local Pune police was assigned the investigation in the case. The police had then claimed different theories and had branded arrested persons as “urban Naxals”. Among several theories floated by the Pune police, those arrested were also accused of plotting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s assassination. This claim was made in a press conference, but strangely never investigated or made a part of the two bulky chargesheets filed in the case.
In December last year, as soon as the coalition government of the Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress took over, the case was swiftly taken away from the local police and handed over to the central agency, NIA.