The Internationalist Archive
In Indian and international media, BK16 has become the shorthand for the 16 individuals who have been implicated for abetting the violence that broke out in the Bhima Koregaon village in the state of Maharashtra on 1 January 2018 between Dalit activists and right-wing militants. They were then successively accused of being part of a conspiracy to kill the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The BK16 are Sudha Bharadwaj, Arun Ferreira, Surendra Gadling, Mahesh Raut, Shoma Sen, Rona Wilson, Sudhir Dhawale, Vernon Gonsalves, Varavara Rao, Gautam Navlakha, Anand Teltumbde, Hany Babu, Stan Swamy, Sagar Gorkhe, Ramesh Gaichor and Jyoti Jagtap. These people are artists, lawyers, poets, activists, public intellectuals and human rights defenders; some of them were personally connected, most knew about each other because of the relevance of their work, some only met each other in person for the first time in court during the hearings of the case.
In March 2020, sub-inspector Arvind Kumar of the Delhi Crime Branch filed the infamous First Information Report (FIR) 59 claiming that there was a conspiracy whereby the February 2020 Delhi pogrom was planned by people who used the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests to mobilise the masses against the government. On 18 February 2020, ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politician Kapil Mishra had declared in front of a crowd that he and his supporters would be ‘forced to hit the streets’ if the police would not clear the sites of the anti-CAA protests. This incendiary speech triggered mass violence across predominantly Muslim Northeast Delhi that raged on for four days. Multiple testimonies, corroborated by independent investigations, have shown that the fury of right-wing mobs was uncontrollable and that police forces stood by and did nothing to restrain them. As a result of the pogrom, 53 people were murdered, the majority of them Muslim, and hundreds of Muslim families lost homes and property and, at the time of writing, are still displaced.
Following these events, Kapil Mishra walked away untouched and Arvind Kumar filed the FIR 59 against 19 people, mostly Muslim community leaders and student activists: Faizan Khan, Sharjeel Imam, Umar Khalid, Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita, Ishrat Jahan, Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Safoora Zargar, Asif Iqbal Tanha, Taahir Hussain, Mohd Parvez Ahmed, Mohd Illyas, Khalid Saifi, Shahdab Ahmed, Tasleem Ahmed, Saleem Malik, Mohd Saleem Khan and Athar Khan. The accusations against them are based on the revelations made to the police sub-inspector by an anonymous informer, who claimed to know that Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student Umar Khalid was hatching a conspiracy to cause communal violence and that the upheaval intentionally coincided with US President Donald Trump’s visit to India to discredit the image of the government in front of the world.
Fast forward to June 2022: Nupur Sharma and Naveen Jindal – respectively, the former BJP spokesperson and the former head of the Delhi BJP’s media unit – made derogatory remarks about Prophet Mohammad that triggered a massive wave of protests across the country with thousands of Muslims taking to the streets. A week after the incident, the police in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) – one of the main epicentres of the agitation – reported to have arrested 415 people and to have registered 20 FIRs in connection to the violence. In yet another conspiracy case, activist and Welfare Party leader Javed Mohammad was named as one of the ‘key conspirators’ in the protests, arrested and later charged also under the National Security Act, 1980 (NSA), which allows for up to a year of detention without charge or trial. It is worth noting that Javed Mohammad did not take part in any of the protests.
These three events represent key moments in the recent history of India, in which the state has moved with all its might to silence and criminalise dissent. In none of these instances, however, have the actual perpetrators been prosecuted or convicted whereas in all of them, the state, the police, the judiciary and the media have worked together to fabricate and amplify the hatching of conspiracies.
We saw this pattern emerge over and over again: the police, with the tacit approval of the judiciary, let the perpetrators of heinous acts of violence and hate speech walk away while targeting individuals or entire communities affected by the violence as criminals. Key witnesses died in mysterious ways and manufactured evidence was used as the basis to arrest people. The media, in all these instances, played a crucial role in justifying the state’s version of the story.
Conspiracies are by their very nature murky businesses: they are secretive, whispered and, ultimately, hard to prove. As Narendra Modi grows more hieratic in tone, vision and appearance so is the language of conspiracy growing wilder and more widespread in his management of political opponents. Both trends bank exclusively on faith and belief so much so that, spun by an incredibly powerful propaganda machine, they make for the perfect recipe for success in the current post-truth regime. This deadly combination, on the one hand, nurtures an atmosphere of tension and a climate of constant suspicion if not utter terror; on the other, it gives a freehand to Modi’s followers who perpetrate violence in order to defend their leader and his ideology by any means possible. This is how vigilante squads, lynching and communal violence have become the norm and how those who dare to contest the status quo are indicted as criminals and treated with unrestrained cruelty and brutality.
Facts and evidence have thus become accessories for a state that manufactures its enemies. This kind of fabrication, however, does not happen overnight nor does it happen in a vacuum: it needs planning, obedience and complicity as well as money for its stealth implementation. Combing operations, ‘bulldozer justice’, the use and misuse of laws and regulations, internet trolls and cyber surveillance are all activities that require complex logistics and vast concerted efforts. They need a complacent judiciary, complicit army and police forces, obedient local authorities and subservient media.
****
12 October 2020
Hany Babu
For Sachidanandan
Dear Sachidanandan,
Not as beautiful as it is when outside
This rain seen through the windows of a jail
And It’s not like you described
The rain does not rain through glass pipes
The scars on these terraces
It’s more than what your ‘little angels’ can ever wipe
There is not even a single tree here
Even then
They have not been able to take from me the music of this rain
Or silence the deafening sounds of thunder drums
So I lie here listening to its rhythm
On this floor where bandicoots and centipedes crawl
I lie in the warmth of these rough sheets
Not worrying about fundamental rights and basic freedom
Thinking of my little daughter
Who used to wait for me to come home, every night
And my wife
Who is now bearing the burden of the house
Thinking that I am not alone in this iron barred-prison
I go to sleep in this prison now
Dreaming of a country
Where our fundamental rights and freedoms
Are not snatched from us
And where we can sit watching the glass pipes of the rain
--end--
Translated from Malayalam with permission
Excerpted with permission of the authors, Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia. How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners is published by Pluto Press.
The Internationalist Archive
Input your text in this area
Internationalism
in your inbox
Each week, the Progressive International brings you essays, analysis, interviews, and artwork from across our global network:
Monthly Subscription: $5 per month.
Solidarity Subscription: $10 per month, for those of you who can contribute to the construction of our International.
All subscribers will also receive a 10% discount to the Progressive International Workshop, which features artworks and designs made in support of our Members' campaigns.