ACTIVISTS SUCKED INTO MAOIST MIRE

The sense of outrage has been overwhelming at the arrest and subsequent incarceration at home as ordered by the Supreme Court on five well- known human rights activists. The manner in which the police have acted in serial raids would suggest this is more of a fishing expedition, the motive probably being to pile pressure on activists and intellectuals who are not in sync with the ruling forces.

The fact that some of them had been arrested before by previous regimes years ago for sympathising with Maoists does not alter the scenario of persecution against those with leftist leanings. The conspiracy angle has always been a hard one to prove in court though that does not absolve the highest sounding intellectuals from taking u the cause of those wage war against the nation as the Maoists do.

Close to 7,000 civilians and over 2,500 security forces have been killed in cold blood by Maoist guerrillas since 2001. The point is would sympathy for their cause on the grounds that they are underserved in society amount to condoning their murderous activities?

The State has to protect itself against anarchists but it cannot extend the battle to cover all those who publicly express themselves as sympathisers. Such hamhanded police action against civilians only spoils the image of government in its fight against the real guerrillas.

The hashtag # Urban Naxal is an interesting spinoff from this ugly episode of arrests of activists and writer- poet Varavara Rao.

The simultaneous state- wide arrests are a dangerous sign of a government that fears it is losing its mandate and is falling into panic. That lawyers, poets, writers, Dalit rights activists and intellectuals are being arrested on ludicrous charges while those who make up lynch mobs and threaten and murder people in broad daylight roam free, tells us very clearly where India is headed. Murderers are being honoured and protected. Anybody who speaks up for justice or against Hindu majoritarianism is being made into a criminal. What is happening is absolutely perilous. In the run up to elections, this is an attempted coup against the Indian Constitution and all the freedoms that we cherish — Arundhati Roy, writer and activist