What the voices of India’s political prisoners say about freedom. An extract
Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia
In a statement of unusual candour, retired Major General Rajan Kochhar said, ‘It would be premature right now to equate a civil society in the same category as terror groups and insurgents. We should all be alarmed by Kochhar’s argument that the equation between civil society and terror groups is only ‘premature’ now not inconceivable.
This statement is not the isolated musing of an ultraconservative retired army officer. Rather, it follows quite closely the path marked by no less than the National Security Advisor (NSA) of India, Ajit Doval.
In a November 2021 address to the probationary officers at the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy in Hyderabad, Doval had declared: ‘People are most important. The new frontiers of war—what we call the fourth-generation warfare—is the civil society.’ As military wars are too uncertain and costly or no longer effective, civil society is the new battleground as it ‘can be subverted, divided, and can be manipulated, to hurt the interest of the nation.’
Fourth-generation warfare is defined as a kind of conflict where the lines between war and politics, civilians and combatants blur and where non-state actors are no longer proxies, but the main threat to the very existence of a country. In Doval’s speech, the language of war openly enters the public domain and defines the terms of the debate about political opposition and critical dissent. Civil society—which is meant to be the very soul of a functioning democracy—thus turns into a potential enemy the state, into a threatening entity ready to hurt its interests, into a menace that needs to be eradicated.
As words make worlds, the gap between intentions and deeds shrinks. The state is no longer culpable of killing dissent; it is, on the contrary, applauded for giving utmost priority to national security. As we mentioned in the introduction, the Supreme Court in 2016 refused to admit a public interest litigation that called for greater scrutiny of the activities of India’s intelligence agencies and the manner in which they were using the funding granted to them. This decision provided sanction to the fact that India is the only democracy in the world where intelligence agencies whose task is supposedly the preservation of national security, hence something that is of public interest—are not accountable to anyone, neither to the Parliament nor to the people, de facto allowing them to exist beyond the pale of law, and thus to act with total impunity.
In this climate, one no longer needs to commit a crime to be treated like a criminal. The words used by the special two-judge bench convened early morning on a Saturday in October 2022 to re-examine the acquittal of Saibaba and five others and stay a release order issued less than twenty-four hours earlier are a monument to this new India. The bench noted that, for terrorist and Maoist activities, ‘the brain is more dangerous. Direct involvement is not necessary.’
The consequences of this statement are enormous. It undermines the Indian justice system from its foundations, it removes the evidence of a crime from the equation, and it allows for the construction of guilt to be entirely based on suspicion, speculation and, basically, antipathy. Intellectual, religious, caste and political dislikes thus become sufficient reasons to frame opponents or dissenters as criminals and lock them up in jail for years on end.
This declaration of the special two-judge bench is neither an isolated voice nor is it an exception. In October 2022, a series of judgements were in the same tenor. The hijab ban reached a split verdict, with one of the judges upholding the ban, reasoning that the prohibition ensures secularity in education.
After several months of hearings, the Delhi HC dismissed activist Umar Khalid’s bail plea. Umar Khalid had appealed for bail in the case filed against him under the infamous FIR 59 where he was charged under various provisions of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, including rioting (sections 147 and 148), murder (section 302) and unlawful assembly (section 149). He was also charged under the UAPA for unlawful and terrorist activities as well as for conspiracy; and under the Arms Act of 1959, for use of weapons. Advocate Trideep Pais, Umar Khalid’s legal counsel, argued that there was no evidence to substantiate the charges against his client. The Delhi High Court, however, rejected the plea stating that there was a legitimate prima facie case made out by the prosecution.
It is important to note that the reason for denying bail is that the judges found a speech that Umar Khalid gave during the anti-CAA protests ‘hateful, inciteful, offensive & obnoxious’. To this, trying to bring back the discussion to legal grounds rather than personal taste, Pais replied: ‘We are here for conspiracy to commit terror on the basis of this speech. It is one thing for your lordships to find the speech obnoxious and ridiculous, but quite another for the UAPA to be levied on this basis.’
In a later hearing of the case, Justices Siddharth Mridul and Rajnish Bhatnagar stated that, under the UAPA, ‘it is not just the intent to threaten the unity and integrity but the likelihood to threaten the unity and integrity’ of the nation that is at stake. It is, therefore, not necessary to have evidence that a threatening act has been committed or intended, it is sufficient to venture in the abstract realm of suspicions and maybes, and perhaps to lock someone up.
As far as we know today—especially after Ganesh More’s stunning declaration—the BK16, Umar Khalid and many other political prisoners have been arrested and kept in jail based on the likelihood that they may have meant something harmful, a likelihood that has no solid anchor whatsoever in reality.
In proceedings that Pais described as more like the script of the TV series Family Man than worthy of a courtroom, the bench hearing the case added:
The call to revolution may affect many beyond those who were visibly present, which is why this court finds it apt to mention Robespierre, who was at the vanguard of the French revolution. This court is of the view that possibly, if the appellant had referred to Maximilien Robespierre for what he meant by revolution, he must have also known what revolution meant for our freedom fighter & first prime minister. The very fact that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru believed that democracy has made revolution superfluous after independence and how it meant the complete opposite of a bloodless change. Revolution by itself isn’t always bloodless, which is why it is contradistinctly used with the prefix-a ‘bloodless’ revolution. So, when we use the expression ‘revolution’, it is not necessarily bloodless.
The supposed incriminating ‘call to revolution’ refers to the use of the expression ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ (long live the revolution) that has been a core feature of democratic struggle in India even before its inception as an independent nation state. The slogan, coined by Urdu poet and freedom fighter Maulana Hasrat Mohani in 1921, made popular by Bhagat Singh, became a unifying cry of the Indian independence movement and has been part of the Indian rights movements’ lexicon since.
As is sadly typical, authoritarianism and historical revisionism go hand in hand. In India, all state apparatuses have put together a concerted effort to rewrite Indian history; an effort that begins with the silencing of all those who reclaim a factual anchoring of the country’s complex history. And so, divorced from its historical meaning and taken out of context, ‘Inquilab Zindabad’ becomes an incitement to violence rather than an expression of critical citizenship.
Authoritarian regimes distort language and kill ideas, arguments, institutions and dissenting voices—all in the name of ideology masquerading as history, reality and truth. Lies are now proof of a non-existent crime even when they are countered and revealed as such. It is as if truth is no longer permissible evidence before the law.
HOW LONG CAN THE MOON BE CAGED: VOICES OF INDIAN POLITICAL PRISONERS
Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia
Context, Pg 282, Rs 599