THE URBAN CRACKDOWN
The Pune police, in a multi-city series of arrests, attempted to put a number of civil rights activists in prison on August 28, before the Supreme Court intervened and recommended house arrest until further hearings. “Dissent,” said Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, part of the five-judge bench which heard a petition against the arrests filed by the likes of academics Romila Thapar and Prabhat Patnaik, “is the safety valve of democracy.”
Action, the police said, had been taken as part of an ongoing probe into the funding to a conclave called Elgar Parishad, held on December 31, 2017, where inflammatory speeches were allegedly made. The village of Koregaon-Bhima is the site of a 19th century battle celebrated by Dalits for the part played by Mahar soldiers in an East India Company battalion in holding off the upper-caste Peshwa army. The arrested activists—Sudha Bharadwaj in Faridabad, Varavara Rao in Hyderabad, Gautam Navlakha in Delhi, and Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira in Mumbai—were accused of inciting the violence in January.
In June, the Pune police had made a series of arrests of organisers of a conference around the same Battle of Koregaon celebrations. The police say the organisers had also allegedly raised funds and provided logistical support to the so-called Maoists. There was also talk of a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The arrests in June and last week were apparently linked, but the Pune police offered little to substantiate this speculation. Indeed, the reasons for the arrest were largely a mystery, prompting accusations of a government vendetta against its critics, until, apparently stung by the SC’s intervention, the Pune police held a press conference to say that it had evidence, including audio intercepts and incriminating e-mails. Police sources added that the ‘activists’ had links to the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and were involved in a conspiracy against the state.
At the press conference, the Pune