New Delhi: “I never imagined I would write a prison memoir,” scholar Anand Teltumbde said at the launch of his latest book The Cell and the Soul, adding: “I never thought I'd be qualified for arrest.”

Written during his 31-month stint of pre-trial imprisonment between April 2020 and November 2022, The Cell and the Soul is Teltumbde's documentation of “a heartless state that criminalises dissent with political imprisonment, of the relentless grind of injustice and the profound cost of speaking truth to power”, per the website of its publisher Bloomsbury India.

Speaking at the launch of his book in Mumbai on Thursday (October 30), Teltumbde described his imprisonment in the Elgar Parishad-Maoist links case as both a ‘political act’ and ‘an awakening’, according to a press note issued by the event's organisers Innocence Network India and the Mulbhut Adhikar Sangharsh Samiti.

‘Thanking’ the “present dispensation” for the “award” that was his time in jail, Teltumbde said it ‘exposed the inversion of Ambedkar's republic into one of repression’, per the release.

Also present at the event were chief guest and economist Bhalchandra Mungekar as well as Ehtesham Siddiqui and Abdul Wahid Shaikh, both of whom were acquitted in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts case after 19 and nine years of incarceration respectively.

Calling Teltumbde's book as one that “suffocates” its reader, Mungekar said it ‘dismantles illusions about Indian democracy and reveals the coercive apparatus of the state in stark light’. “India today has become a country where nationalism is used to silence dissent,” he was quoted as saying.

Lawyer Mihir Desai said during the function that India, given its current political climate, ‘may soon see a surge of prison memoirs’. He ‘criticised the gap between the judiciary's lofty judgments on prison reform and their near-total non-implementation’.

Senior advocate Gayatri Singh said The Cell is a “mirror to the perversity of the system” and brought up the death in custody – amid alleged medical neglect – of fellow Elgar Parishad accused and priest Stan Swamy, to whom the book pays tribute apart from being dedicated to the memory of the author's brother, the slain Maoist insurgent Milind Teltumbde.

Author Teltumbde was arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case as he turned himself into National Investigation Agency (NIA) officers in April 2020.

Registered by the Pune police in January 2018 and handed over to the NIA in 2020, the controversial Elgar Parishad case accuses 16 persons including Teltumbde of triggering the violence that took place on January 1, 2018 at a gathering in Bhima Koregaon outside Pune between members of the Mahar (a Dalit sub-group) and Maratha castes.

The day prior to the violence, a group under the banner of the Elgar Parishad had convened in Pune.

The police also accused Teltumbde of having links to the banned Communist Party of India (CPI) (Maoist) and for being involved in an alleged plot to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The scholar denies the allegations against him.

He was given bail by the Bombay high court in November 2022.

The government's claims of the accused's alleged association with the CPI (Maoist) is based on purported emails and other evidence allegedly retrieved from their electronic devices.

These claims, however, have been challenged by many independent forensic organisations.

One investigation by The Wire and partner news organisations revealed that at least nine numbers belonging to eight activists, lawyers and academics accused in the case – including Teltumbde – were forensically determined as having been identified for targeting by clients of the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, one of which is the Modi government.

A Massachusetts-based digital forensics firm, Arsenal Consulting later confirmed at least one phone – belonging to prisoners' rights activist Rona Wilson – was infected by the malicious spyware.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.