Excerpted with permission from Alpa Shah’s The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India, HarperCollins 2024.
In the ‘mother of democracy’, sixteen largely unconnected people from different parts of India – from Delhi in the north to Hyderabad in the south – found themselves thrown into jail between 2018– 2020, accused of being Maoist terrorists, ‘Urban Naxals’. As this book has shown, they were all ‘custodians of democracy’, people who had persistently supported grassroots social movements against rising inequality, land grabs and state atrocities, and protecting environmental, land and forest rights. They had fought for the social justice of India’s most vulnerable sections of society, and they had done so no matter what regime was in power. While some of them knew each other and had worked together, many found themselves standing in solidarity with one another only after the Pune City Police tied them together in the Bhima Koregaon case as the BK-16.
After three years of digging deep into the BK case, a few things are clear. The first is that this was a targeted state-driven attempt to silence the BK-16. Exactly when different sections of the state got involved, it is difficult to know. But by the time the case was moved into the hands of the central anti-terror task force, the NIA, in 2020, it was backed by the highest levels of the government. How and why particular individuals within the state acted as they did is also hard to know. But my interview with one of the police officers closely involved in the first two rounds of arrests, Shivaji Bodkhe, revealed that at least some of them were driven by a moral conviction that they were doing the right thing for the public good. Bodkhe was certain that the BK-16 were left-wing extremists responsible for violence and loss of life and that their incarcerations was a high point of his career.
Alpa Shah
The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India
HarperCollins, 2024
A second thing that is clear is that the evidence used to turn the public against the BK-16, incriminate and incarcerate them, was fabricated and planted on some of their computers. Such is the extent of evidence tampering, that the BK case has become a landmark for research into cyber espionage, attracting those at its global frontiers. Cyber warfare is a field about which many of us know little, yet is now considered the fifth domain of warfare – alongside the land, sea, air and space – and, as this book shows, it will need to be at the centre of future global concerns for protecting democratic rights.
The US-based experts who took an interest in the cyber-data of the BK case have shown that there is a link between the police who made the arrests and those who hacked the computers. Part of the reason why they have been able to trace these links and unveil the extent of hacking, snooping, and evidence tampering, is because it was a shoddy job. Indeed, so poorly fabricated was some of the evidence that it seems that the most incriminating parts of it – the letter used by the police to claim that the BK-16 were plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Modi – did not actually appear in the draft charges filed by the NIA against those arrested.
The cyber espionage research also leads to a third revelation. This is that the evidence used to incarcerate the BK-16 was likely to have been implanted remotely through a hacker-for-hire mercenary gang infrastructure that has clients all over the world, but whose epicentre is in India.
A fourth revelation is that the BK-16 arrests were used to divert attention away from the Hindutva instigators of a communal riot targeting Dalits which took place on 1 January 2018 at Bhima Koregaon. Hindutva leaders Milind Ekbote and Sambhaji Bhide were reported to be mobilising local Marathas against the Dalits and inciting communal tension, including in the days just before the violence. Although one of them – Milind Ekbote – was initially imprisoned by the Pune Rural Police for inciting the riots, within a month he was let out of jail. A whole new narrative of the violence emerged from the Pune City Police, which led them to conduct raids on some of the BK-16 and allege that they had incited the Bhima Koregaon violence, which eventually led to the incarceration of the BK-16.
Fifth, the BK case provides a window into how many state institutions, including the judiciary, have come to be dominated. And how vigilante organisations across the country have nurtured militant youth to carry out a moral policing of society, as seen in the mobs who attacked Dalits on 1 January 2018. The police force appears to be ready to stand back and grant a long leash to offenders, even protect them, for instance by overlooking the alleged crimes of Milind Ekbote and Sambhaji Bhide, while at the same time incarcerating those it wants to silence, like the BK-16. The regime also has at its disposal a set of draconian anti-terror laws like the UAPA, which allow it to put dissenters behind bars without any trial. Entire parts of the judiciary have largely buckled to the regime’s demands – as we see in the number of recusals in this case, the multiple bail rejections, and the refusal even to look at the Arsenal reports, which show that the main evidence used to incarcerate the BK-16 was fabricated.
Related to this, is a sixth revelation about the ability of the Modi regime to dominate narratives and communications networks. Mainstream media is increasingly ready to propagate the government’s version of events. This was clear in the media trials that dramatically flashed the fabricated Modi assassination plot letter across the country and declared the BK activists to be guilty before the matter even reached the courts. Those media outlets which challenged the regime’s version of events were targeted in order to be silenced, as is evident with the raids on independent news outlets, cases filed against journalists, and their arrest. Any critics of the government risk being labelled ‘anti-national’. And anyone speaking out for or raising their voice in support of those already persecuted, like the BK-16, risk being targeted as ‘Urban Naxal’, with threat of incarceration under anti-terror laws. In fact, after the BK-16 incarcerations, ‘Urban Naxal’ has become a common term to brand any form of dissent against the government, used by both the media and the BJP. Although a right to information query filed in 2020 by India Today TV revealed that the Left Wing Extremism Division in the Union Home Ministry had no information on who the ‘Urban Naxals’ are and where they operate, ‘Urban Naxal’ is one of Modi’s favoured terms to delegitimise any opposition including the main opposition party, the Congress Party.
And finally, what is also revealed through the BK case is how international economic and financial institutions can be complicit in not only propping up but also weaponising a regime that wants to target democratic rights activists. Events like the G20 Summit, bringing together the world’s most significant economies, or the Summit for Democracy hosted by the US to renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad, give legitimacy to authoritarian leaders and regimes – like Prime Minister Modi and the RSS – and even allow them to co-opt and subvert the meaning of democracy. These are in some ways an extension of the welcome, and therefore legitimacy, that Modi has received from the US and UK governments once he came into power as prime minister, and with which this book began.
Alpa Shah is Professor of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics.