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Category: Repression

Statement on release of four Reliance workers – First to be falsely implicated in Bhima Koregaon case

Statement on release of four Reliance workers – First to be falsely implicated in Bhima Koregaon case

Sanhati-india / by People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR)

PUDR welcomes the release on bail of four workers of Reliance Energy/ Infrastructure Ltd. (REIL) and trade union activists implicated under numerous sections of the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) for alleged Maoist links. The workers were released on 26 December 2018 on default bail after the 17 December order of the Bombay High Court setting aside the extension of time granted to ATS Mumbai to file the chargesheet in April 2018. Months before 6 June and 28 August, when 10 rights activists were arrested under UAPA on fabricated connections to the Bhima Koregaon violence, workers at RIEL were the first to be targeted for alleged ‘Maoist’ links at Elgaar Parishad.
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Report: Free Speech in India 2018: The State Rolls On

Report: Free Speech in India 2018: The State Rolls On

FreeSpeechCollective / By the FreeSpeechCollective

The range of curbs on free speech, with unreasonable and often illegal clampdowns from various quarters – the State, both at the Centre and respective state governments; non-state actors and vigilante groups; corporations and industrialists, provides a glimpse of the challenges ahead as India heads into a national election that promises to be one of the most fiercely contested amid an increasingly polarised polity.

Table of Contents
I Killings of journalists
II Attacks
III Detention and Arrests
IV Threats
V Censorship
VI Online Media: Arrests, Shutdowns and Regulation
VII Defamation suits
VIII Contempt of court
IX Sedition
X Privacy and Surveillance
XI Government Control, Policy and Regulation XII Judicial orders
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Even prison walls have not been able to stop Varavara Rao from writing

Even prison walls have not been able to stop Varavara Rao from writing

The Leaflet / By N Venugopal

Prison walls cannot stop imagination and expression, however much they try to curb freedom of expression. Varavara Rao, the renowned poet and public intellectual, is again behind bars, this time round as an under-trial prisoner in Pune’s Yerawada Central Prison in the infamous Bhima-Koregaon or Urban Naxal case. In his public life spanning about 60 years, the 78-year-old poet spent more than seven years in various prisons in the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, beginning with his first arrest in 1973.
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UAPA: A frontal attack on democratic rights

UAPA: A frontal attack on democratic rights


Drawing by Arun Ferreira

Sanhati India / By Persecuted Prisoners’ Solidarity Committee

We are going through one of the most repressive times in post-Independent India where the fundamental rights of expression and the right to form any organization or association that can question government policies or fight for rights of the people have been criminalized. The government, armed with acts like Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), is coming down heavily on all those standing up for the rights of economically and socially marginalized sections of people.
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Perpetuation of Unlawful Activities

Perpetuation of Unlawful Activities

Groundxero / By Padmaja Shaw


Foto: Mumbai rises archive

The courts, by not intervening in the abuse of Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, are becoming the legal instruments in the hands of the state to perpetuate unlawful activities. If civil liberties lawyers are targets of such laws, who will fight for the rights of the marginalised that the Chief Justice referred to?
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Trade unionists branded as ‘Urban Naxals’, arrested under UAPA shows State repression of labour activists has peaked

Trade unionists branded as ‘Urban Naxals’, arrested under UAPA shows State repression of labour activists has peaked

The Leaflet / By B Sivaraman

The NDA government in the Centre and the Maharashtra government are trampling upon the entire gamut of rights and not only human rights as understood in the conventional manner. Labour rights, women’s rights and Adivasi rights all are turning into human rights issues because of repression.
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McCarthyism in Modi’s India

McCarthyism in Modi’s India

JACOBIN / By Anand Teltumbde

Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party are carrying out an audacious campaign to arrest left activists and silence dissent in India. The country is on a path toward fascism.
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Convention Against the Politics of Repression of People’s Movements 31st October 2018 / Raipur, Chattisgarh

Convention Against the Politics of Repression of People’s Movements 31st October 2018 / Raipur, Chattisgarh

Call by Organizing Comittee

… The Bhima Koregaon case marks a turning point in the use of state repression. An event to celebrate the valour of Dalits and OBCs is sought to be delegitimized by casting overtones of extraneous Maoist activity. Ten prominent human rights defenders, lawyers, professors, cultural, social and political activists, while homes of ten others have been raided. These arrests represent something more sinister – that the legal work of human rights defenders (trade union activists, anti-displacement activists, lawyers, poets and writers etc.) can be criminalized and deemed as terrorist activities that require the slapping of the draconian UAPA; and that all space for democratic dissent can be usurped by the State in the name of ‘Public and National Security’.

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A study of Undertrials in Jharkhand

A study of Undertrials in Jharkhand

First published: Feb 2, 2016

Sanhati / By Bagaicha Research Team

This is a research study undertaken to document and highlight the problems of impoverished Adivasis and Moolvasis of Jharkhand, who are being accused as Maoists. Maoists are simplistically referred to as Naxalites in the commercial media.
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