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Category: Repression

Anatomy of a clampdown and the history of a long oppression

Anatomy of a clampdown and the history of a long oppression

The Leaflet / By Kritika A

The arrests of human rights activists and lawyers on August 28 and earlier on June 6, 2018 are all part of a wider theatre of Hindutva’s state-sponsored repression on those demanding democratic rights and freedoms for the most marginalised of Indian citizens. What began with Bhima-Koregaon had actually begun long back, with the atrocities against Dalits and Adivasis crossing the political threshold, such as those in Una and Saharanpur, as well as the ‘institutional murder’ of Rohith Vemula in January 2016.
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Video: Repeal Sedition – Sudha Bharadwaj comments

Video: Repeal Sedition – Sudha Bharadwaj comments

en | 4:45 min | 2017

Repeal Sedition Campaign

Scores of citizens – students, adivasis, villagers, social and political activists, environmentalists, writers, lawyers, teachers, journalists, singers, cartoonists etc – have been charged under Section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code with spreading disaffection against the government. Repeal Sedition is a record of voices of courage and conviction, of freedom and dissent. It is a campaign to repeal sedition.
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‘If they open their mouths in protest, they are labelled as Maoists’

‘If they open their mouths in protest, they are labelled as Maoists’

Rediff News / Interview with Anand Teltumbde

‘…incarcerated in jails, ruining their entire families.’
‘You would see that Dalits who displayed so much agitation over the Bhima-Koregaon issue are effectively silenced by the arrests of their activists by the police.’
‘What can be a more pitiable state than this for a people who had just seen a ray of hope after darkness of millennia?’
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Jailbird Jabbar

Jailbird Jabbar

First published: Feb 1, 2013

The Caravanne Magazine / By Vernon Gonsalves

In 2007, the Naxal activist Vernon Gonsalves was arrested by the Maharashtra Police and charged on 18 counts, including that of waging guerilla war against the Indian state. Six years on, though now acquitted in many of these cases, Gonsalves continues to languish as an undertrial in Nagpur Central Jail, after a stint in Mumbai’s Arthur Road Jail. If something fruitful has emerged from his long incarceration, it is words. In Gonsalves’s short story “Jailbird Jabbar”, the narrator—an “old class-strugglewalla”—tells us the story of Jabbar, one of the thousands of adolescents in Mumbai who live freestyle on the street, make a living from its many systems of trade, bootlegging, and barter, and sometimes fall foul of the law.
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