The arrests putting Narendra Modi’s ‘fascist’ India on trial
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Stan Swamy, a Jesuit priest, died in custody in India in July 2021. He was 84. He had spent nine months in detention and had been repeatedly denied bail; yet he had not been convicted of any offence. Swamy had Parkinson’s disease, but for several months the prison authorities denied him the sipper-cup he needed to be able to drink without spilling.
In poor health, Father Swamy was moved from jail to hospital a few weeks before his death. He was diagnosed with Covid-19, and died after a heart attack. This was – according to the historian Ramachandra Guha, one of India’s leading public intellectuals – “judicial murder”. Mary Lawlor, a UN Special Rapporteur, said the death was “a stain on India’s human rights record”.
Swamy had been detained under India’s catch-all anti-terrorist legislation, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which dates back to 1967. He was accused of inciting clashes between rival groups at a place called Bhima Koregaon (or BK) on New Year’s Day 2018 – though there is no suggestion that he was present – and of being a sympathiser of armed Maoist insurgents.
Although of gentle disposition, Swamy was certainly a turbulent priest. He devoted his life to the most marginalised in India, and particularly to the indigenous peoples known as Adivasis, members of what are regarded as tribal communities who total more than 100 million. Swamy defended their interests, encouraged their self-organisation and stood against attempts to turn their forest, so essential to their life and values, into open-cast mines. He was a thorn in the side of the Indian authorities and corporate interests – and at times of the Church, too. You could say he was a rebel, but he was not an insurgent.
Alpa Shah, an anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, argues in The Incarcerations that the arrest of Swamy and 15 others – lawyers, academics, poets, activists – in what has become known as the “BK case” reveals India’s authoritarian creep. The action against the BK-16, she says, is an attempt to intimidate and muzzle critics of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose party, the Hindu nationalist BJP, is expected to win a third successive general election in the coming weeks.
At BK in 2018, a well-organised mob attacked a rally attended by tens of thousands of Dalits, those at the bottom of India’s caste-hierarchy once known as “untouchables”. The violence was alleged to have been orchestrated by two prominent Hindu hardliners, and conducted by those who saw themselves as cheerleaders for Modi and his assertive style of Hindu cultural identity.
Yet the police had no appetite for pursuing politically well-connected local figures, and so – Shah suggests – they turned the case around. Over the course of several months, they rounded up high-profile intellectuals and activists who had been outspoken in championing the interests of the dispossessed, of Dalits and Adivasis and India’s large but increasingly beleaguered Muslim minority. The allegations extended to waging war against the state and plotting the prime minister’s assassination.
Shah knows several of those detained from her work as an anthropologist; her previous book was a well-regarded account of accompanying armed Maoists who remain a formidable force in some Adivasi areas. She’s convinced that the 16 were neither assisting armed insurgency nor plotting assassinations, and had no role in fomenting the clashes in BK.
This book, dedicated to those “unjustly incarcerated”, is thus an expression of solidarity. Shah describes those imprisoned as the “last bastions of democracy” as the country slides into – in her words – “an Indian form of fascism”. The use of that incendiary term is justified more by reciting those Indian commentators who have also expressed concerns about totalitarianism, rather than by detailed argument. While Shah is convincing on the degradation of civil society and of secular values in India, the haphazard organisation of her book and a rather pedestrian prose-style don’t help her argument.
Much of Shah’s account is given over to the life stories of the men and women caught up in the case. It’s easy to get lost in the thicket of names and details, but she presents striking evidence, drawing on expert forensic analysis, of the alleged planting of incriminating documents in the laptops of those detained – with cyber trails apparently pointing both to police officers and to Indian hackers-for-hire happy to do this sophisticated dirty work. Astonishingly, Shah even managed to get through on the phone to two of the investigating police officers. One spoke to her at length, insisting that “every mandatory procedure was meticulously followed” in making arrests and that the police had always operated within the law.
But the evidence the police and India’s National Investigation Agency have amassed has not yet been tested in court, and it’s not clear when it will be. As The Incarcerations went to press, no date had been set for a trial. Indian civil-liberties organisations report that fewer than 3 per cent of arrests under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act lead to conviction. Shah suggests that the protracted legal process and pre-trial detention is as much the punishment as any guilty verdict would be.
Andrew Whitehead’s books include A Mission in Kashmir. The Incarcerations is published by William Collins at £30. To order your copy for £25, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
