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Tag: BK16

Thought Police: Is Penalising Dissent The New Normal In Indian Universities?

Thought Police: Is Penalising Dissent The New Normal In Indian Universities?

Outlook / by Apeksha Priyadarshini

Are Indian universities turning into suffocating spaces where constant censorship and surveillance is leaving no room for protests or dissenting voices?
… Academics and intellectuals, having anything to say that is remotely critical of the current regime, are wilfully thrown under the bus by their own institutions. Worse, institutions now lead the mob hounding individuals who exercise their right to free expression—a fundamental right enshrined in the constitution.
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Democracy-in-waiting: Voices Of An Imprisoned Conscience

Democracy-in-waiting: Voices Of An Imprisoned Conscience

Outlook / by Apeksha Priyadarshini

The continuing imprisonment of some of the country’s brightest minds will persist as an indelible taint on the history of a nation state that prides itself as a democracy.
… The same dissent that was criminalised by the British to suppress the anti-colonial struggle nearly a century ago, continues to be treated as a threat even today. Umar Khalid, an ex-student activist from JNU, has been in Tihar jail, New Delhi, since September 2020, on charges of partaking in a “conspiracy” that led to the communal violence in Northeast Delhi in February that year.
… Hundreds of kilometres from Delhi, human rights defenders started being arrested in 2018 by the Pune police under the same UAPA. This time, the allegations had involved inciting the violence at Koregaon Bhima in January 2018 and having alleged links with Maoist outfits.
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Also read:
▪ Meeting My Son Umar Khalid In Jail (Outlook / Jul 2025)
▪ Notes From Inside Taloja Prison (Outlook | by Mahesh Raut | Jun 2025)
▪ Inside Taloja Prison: A Study | By Mahesh Raut (Outlook / May 2025)
▪ ‘The Message Is Loud & Clear.’ Author Of New Book On 11 Indian ‘Prisoners Of Conscience’ & The Costs Of Defiance (article 14 / Mar 2025)
▪ Many Prisoners at Taloja Jail Not Produced Before Court For Years, Reveals Survey by Surendra Gadling and Sagar Gorkhe (The Wire / Feb 2025)

The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India – book review

The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India – book review

Counterfire / by Nandita Lal

The case of a group of writers and activists unjustly imprisoned in India starkly reveals the exploitative nature of Indian capitalism and its international connections, finds Nandita Lal
Alpa Shah’s The Incarcerations is an investigation into the imprisonment of the BK-16, a group of poets, lawyers, professors, and activists wrongfully incarcerated on the pretext of conspiring against the Indian state. Their stories unravel a vast web of transnational surveillance (including the Israeli spyware Pegasus), neoliberal repression through Financial Action Task Force mandates, the rise of Modi’s crony capitalism epitomised by the Adani empire, and ‘internal’ colonialism in Kashmir.
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▪ The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon And The Search For Democracy In India

Author: Alpa Shah
Publishing Date: March 2024
Publisher: Harper Collins Publisher
Pages: 672
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Also read:
▪ Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste. Brahminism’s wrath against dreamers of equality

Author: Ajaz Ashraf  
Publisher: AuthorsUpFront
Publishing Date: June 2024
Pages: 496
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▪ How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners

Authors: Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia
Publishing Date: Aug 2023
Publisher: Pluto Press
Pages: 247
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Today, Emergency Rules! / Police torture, ill-treatment make India ‘high risk’: Report

Today, Emergency Rules! / Police torture, ill-treatment make India ‘high risk’: Report

Fifty Years Later… Today, Emergency Rules!

27/06/2025

Countercurrents / by Frederic Prakash

It was fifty years ago! The nation will and should never forget that dark, infamous night of 25/26 June 1975, when, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency all over the country, citing internal and external disturbances! That terrible chapter of the country’s history lasted for a full twenty-one-month period till 21 March 1977. … Ironically and tragically, fifty years later…today, emergency still rules!
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India’s Social Regression Under Modi’s Eleven Years May Not Be Mendable

26/06/2025

The Wire / by Anand Teltumbde

While much has been written about the Modi regime’s economic failures and diplomatic missteps, the most insidious damage lies elsewhere – in the corrosion of India’s socio-cultural fabric.
… This damage is evident in the erosion of the country’s pluralistic ethos and the hardening of its deepest societal fault lines. A comparative glance at key social indicators from the pre-2014 era to the present reveals a sharp regression into communal majoritarianism, anti-intellectualism and institutionalised discrimination.
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Police torture, ill-treatment make India ‘high risk’: Report

25/06/2025

Newslaundry / by NL Team

India was among the 26 countries assessed by the World Organization.
India has been ranked a “high-risk” country for torture and ill-treatment in the World Organization Against Torture’s first Global Torture Index 2025 that was released on Wednesday.
… Prominent cases include the Bhima Koregaon trial and the continued incarceration of Kashmiri activist Khurram Parvez. The report also raises concern over reprisals against activists monitoring public protests, from anti-Sterlite demonstrators to farmers’ agitations.
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Read India report: INDIA – COUNTRY FACTSHEET 2025 (World Organization Against Torture / Jun 2025)

India among the eight worst countries in the world for torture

26/06/2025

Asia News / by Nirmala Carvalho

The report was presented in Geneva by the World Organisation Against Torture. There were 2,739 deaths in prison in 2024, an increase on the previous year.
… The report also highlights the persecution of human rights defenders as a major concern in India. ‘Torture is used as a weapon to silence them,’ Tiphagne said. He cited the case of Khurram Parvez, who has been in prison for over four years, and the defendants in the Bhima Koregaon case, who are still being held without trial.
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Podcast: Alpa Shah on the Bima Koregaon case and India’s democratic decline

Podcast: Alpa Shah on the Bima Koregaon case and India’s democratic decline

Himal Southasian / by The Editors

The BK-16 case links India’s harmful neoliberal policies, state authorities abuse of laws, and the collapse of institutions, says the social anthropologist
… In this episode of State of Southasia, Shah speaks to Nayantara Narayanan about the work of the BK16 with indigenous communities and other minorities, their pushback against neoliberal policies and why they were seen as threats by the Indian state, and how and why they were implicated in the Bhima Koregaon case. The case shows a “very direct link between the kinds of interests of the state and corporate powers in accessing resources that lie under [Adivasi] lands and the fight for justice of those people who those lands belong to,” she says.


en | 47:09 min | 2025
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▪ The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon And The Search For Democracy In India
Author: Alpa Shah
Publishing Date: March 2024
Publisher: Harper Collins Publisher
Pages: 672
Read more / order

Also read:
▪ The Feared – Conversations with Eleven Political Prisoners

Author: Neeta Kolhatkar
Publishing Date: Dec 2024
Publisher: S&S India
Pages: 272
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▪ Process as Punishment – Recent books that bear witness to the BK-16’s incarceration (The Caravan / Jul 2024)

A caged bird can still sing – clearing Fr Stan’s name

A caged bird can still sing – clearing Fr Stan’s name

Illustration by #bakeryprasad

The Tablet / by Joseph Xavier SJ

The Indian Jesuit and human rights defender Fr Stan Swamy, who was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, died in custody, aged 84, in 2021. He would have been 88 on 26 April this year. Jesuits around the world are calling on the Government of India to declare him innocent of the crimes of which he was accused.
Fr Stan Swamy died as an “undertrial” at Holy Family Hospital, Mumbai on July 5, 2021. In 2023, I met Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gonsalves and Anand Teltumbde in Mumbai after they were released on bail. All three were implicated in the Bhima Koregaon case, popularly known as the BK16 or Elgar Parishad case, as there were 16 accused.
Arun Ferreira lived with Stan in the same prison cell and took care of Stan like a mother. Vernon and Anand became good friends discussing various socio-political issues. 
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Also read/watch:
▪ Caged birds and prison songs: In chorus, Stan Swamy and the Bhima Koregaon accused kept hope alive (Scroll.in | by Vernon Gonsalves | Jul 2023)
▪ How the system broke Stan Swamy: A cell mate recalls the activist’s last days in prison (Scroll.in | by Arun Ferreira | Aug 2021)

▪ Video: Testimony of Stan Swamy, two days before his arrest on 8 October 2020.


en | 7:48 min | Oct 6, 2020
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How an unsophisticated malware attack became India’s biggest state-sponsored cybercrime / Online Conversation

How an unsophisticated malware attack became India’s biggest state-sponsored cybercrime / Online Conversation

The Polis Project / by Mouli Sharma and Prashant Rahi

This is the third report in a three-part investigative series on the Elgar Parishad/Bhima Koregaon case. Read part one here and part two here.

In October 2014, five months after the arrest of the professor GN Saibaba, Stan Swamy’s computer was hacked. Unbeknown to the world, the nascent stages of investigation against the prime accused in the Elgar Parishad case, who came to be monikered the BK-16, had already begun in 2014 – four years before any of the arrests even took place.
The unknown attacker used a Remote Access Trojan – or RAT – sent through targeted phishing emails to compromise Swamy’s computer.
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Dispatches: A Conversation on unravelling the Elgar Parishad / Bhima Koregaon case

With Prashant Rahi, Mouli Sharma and Arshu John
By The Polis Project / @project_polis
en | 49min | 2025
Listen to the recording on X Spaces Live

Also read:
▪ Incriminating evidence planted in computers: The Trojan solved the Bhima Koregaon case! (Anchored Narratives / Jan 2023)
▪ Hackers Planted Files to Frame an Indian Priest Who Died in Custody (Wired / Dec 2022)
▪ Police Linked to Hacking Campaign to Frame Indian Activists (Wired / June 2022)
▪ Leaked Data Shows Surveillance Net in Elgar Parishad Case May Have Crossed a Line (The Wire / July 2021)
▪ They were Accused of plotting to overthrow the Modi government – The evidence was planted, a new report says (Washington Post / Feb 2021)
▪ Why the letter about a ‘Rajiv Gandhi-type’ assassination plot to kill Modi is fake (Dailyo.in │ by Arun Ferreira and Vernon Gonsalves │ Jun 11, 2018)

Conjuring the BK16 Myth: How the Elgar Parishad case rests on fiction and deception

Conjuring the BK16 Myth: How the Elgar Parishad case rests on fiction and deception

Dispatches: A Conversation on unravelling the Elgar Parishad / Bhima Koregaon case with Prashant Rahi, Mouli Sharma and Arshu John

By The Polis Project / @project_polis

With Prashant Rahi, Mouli Sharma and Arshu John
By The Polis Project / @project_polis
en | 49min | 2025
Listen to the recording on X Spaces Live

Conjuring the BK16 Myth: How the Elgar Parishad case rests on fiction and deception

21/03/2025

The Polis Project / by Prashant Rahi and Mouli Sharma

This is the second report in a three-part investigative series on the Elgar Parishad/Bhima Koregaon case. Read part one here.
Three months after a Hindutva mob attacked a peaceful gathering of Dalit-Bahujan men, women, and children, a cabal from the Pune Urban Police mounted a bizarre prosecution, holding 16 eminent human rights defenders (HRDs) responsible for the Elgar Parishad, an anti-caste event held in the city, a day before. The infamous case has, however, come to draw its name less from the event, and more from the calamitous gathering that assembled on both sides of the river Bhima, on 1st January 2018, to pay homage to an obelisk-shaped martyrs’ column, at Perne Phata, opposite the village of Koregaon. In the months that followed, the HRDs were imprisoned in waves of arrests across the country, with no evidence so far linking them to the mob violence.
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Also read:
▪ Why caste Hindutva, not an Elgar conspiracy, is at the root of the Bhima Koregaon violence (The Polis Project / Feb 2025)
▪ THE BK-16 PRISON DIARIES SERIES (THE POLIS PROJECT / JUNE 2024-March 2025)
▪ My 7 years in Anda cell were the most inhuman form of solitary confinement: Prashant Rahi (rediff.com / Mar 2024)
▪ The Bhima Koregaon Arrests and the Resistance in India (Monthly Review / Apr 2022)

Why Double Standards of Justice in India?

Why Double Standards of Justice in India?

Drawing by Arun Fereirra

Mainstream Weekly / by Sumeet Singh

According to the Indian Constitution, both Central and State governments have a constitutional duty to guarantee the democratic rights of citizens, including their Freedom, Equality, Security, Prosperity, Development, Social justice, and Social protection. Although India claims to be the world’s largest democracy, recent actions by the Central government have raised concerns. 
… Numerous Intellectuals, Lawyers, and Social activists have been detained for years on unproven charges of sedition, often without trial, indicating a failure to uphold constitutional rights to liberty. For the past six years, many prominent Intellectuals, Lawyers, and Social activists in the country have been languishing in jail without trial, under false charges of sedition in the alleged Bhima Koregaon violence case. No charges of sedition have been proven against them to date, yet the Judiciary, under pressure from the Central government, has repeatedly denied them bail. 
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Also read:
▪ ‘Provincial Convention against Repression’ in Barnala, Punjab (Countercurrents / Jan 2025)
▪ Fadnavis’ obsession with ‘urban naxals’, and a lawless Beed (National Herald / Dec 2024)
▪ The SC Is Making Bail Easier In Terrorism, Money Laundering Cases – Except When It Ignores Itself (article 14 / Sep 2024)
▪ Maharashtra: Activists, Lawyers Added to ‘Union War Book’, Listed as ‘Enemies of the State’ (The Wire / Jul 2021)

After six years in jail, Rona Wilson and Sudhir Dhawale have been released on bail

After six years in jail, Rona Wilson and Sudhir Dhawale have been released on bail

Poster by #bakeryprasad

Peoples Dispatch / by Abdul Rahman

After spending six years in jail without trial, Indian activists Rona Wilson and Sudhir Dhawle were finally granted bail.
Rona Wilson and Sudhir Dhawle, two of the 16 human rights activists arrested in the Bhima Koreagaon case under India’s draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), were released on bail on January 24 after spending nearly six and half years in prison waiting for trial.
… Nevertheless, they were released on stringent bail conditions including regular visits to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) headquarters, surrender of their passports, restrictions on travel outside Mumbai and a surety of 100,000 rupees (USD 1,142).
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Also read:
▪ Sudhir Dhawale interview: ‘The law remains blind to injustice even with the blindfold gone’ (Scroll.in / Feb 2025)
▪ Interview | Sudhir Dhawale’s Work Will Go on (The Wire / Feb 2025)
▪ Rona Wilson interview: ‘My arrest was a warning to others who stand against the abuse of power’ (Scroll.in / Feb 2025)
▪ Rona Wilson and Sudhir Dhawale released: Seven years of injustice by a state that punishes dissent [read order] (Sabrangindia / Jan 2025)