We live in a moment where truth is treason. Under the fascist onslaught of Brahmanical Hindutva, truth has become consumed with fear – the fear of being watched, being surveilled, being criminalised, neutralised, or even eliminated. But the fear, at the end, is itself a whistleblower.
We, the BK 16, known after the eponymous Bhima Koregaon case, complete six years of incarceration on June 6, 2024 under the stringent anti-terror law, UAPA [Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act], where the onus is on the accused to prove their innocence; under heavy odds against the Modi dispensation that dubs speaking truth to power treason, anti-Hindu, an act of terror.
The ten years of the Modi government has witnessed Brahmanical Hindutva trying to violently appropriate, monopolise every possible avenue of deliberation and dissemination of ideas, opinions, decision making; reducing it to a one-way street where you talk down than listen leaving no room for opposition or disagreement. Surveillance capitalism has become a weaponising tool to hegemonise the fascist ideology and politics of Brahmanical Hindutva. At the crosshair of the surveillance machine are human rights defenders, lawyers, activists, writers, intellectuals and leaders of opposition.
The incursions of Brahmanical Hindutva in the two terms of Narendra Modi into the rich and diverse social fabric of India have caused social strife among Muslims, Adivasis and Dalits. Theatres of militarisation and polarisation of the polity spread from Kashmir to Manipur (threatening to spill over to the rest of the North East) and to Central India, where Adivasis are randomly picked up and killed under the garb of fighting the Maoists. The veins of these three regions abundant in natural resources and rare minerals are cut open for Multi National Corporations leaving the land and the forests unlivable and the ecologies irrevocable damaged – the insatiable appetite of big capital feeding on the Jal, Jungle and Jameen with the vigilantes of RSS-BJP taking on anyone who opposes.
Add to this the triple blow of demonetisation, Goods and Services Tax (GST) and the pandemic – all three of which gave a body blow to the Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises (MSMEs), the largest employment provider in the country. On the one hand, government spending is curtailed citing fiscal profligancy, while on the other, lakhs of crores of debts (Non-Performing Assets) of leading industrial houses are written off. The poor got poorer, the rich become insanely rich. Social strife increased with the increase in unemployment among the educated and widening rural-urban divide. Dalits, women and minorities are the worst affected. Lateral entry into services and selling of Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) made the reservation for Dalits and OBCs ineffectual. Depletion of income led to widespread malnutrition especially among women, who bear the brunt of power imbalances between the genders. Cow vigilantism, politics of meat eating, myth of love jihad, bulldozer justice, calls for economic and social boycott, threat of being stripped of citizenship through CAA-NRC – the minorities are unenviably poised like never before.
As we finish our sixth year of incarceration, the Bhima Koregaon case – which is the only case in the world where the state has been caught red-handed in its criminal act of implanting incriminating material on the computers of some of the defendants – has become a living testimony of the fascist surveillance state that India is becoming. That the incontrovertible forensic evidence flushed out by some of the world’s leading experts in the US about the planting of the incriminating material has been ignored is a sad testimony of the free-falling polity that India is, despite being touted as the “mother of democracies” by the Prime Minister. How many more years will it take for the judiciary to finally look at the truth that is dying to be heard? The prosecution having failed to furnish even copies of the electronic evidence after such a long time, the trial court had no option but to call out their approach as “casual”. As evident in many other UAPA cases, the process itself becomes the punishment. How many more people need to be silenced before silence itself becomes deafening?
Bhima Koregaon case has become a bellwether of the state of democracy in India in spite of every effort of the establishment to erase it from public memory. Justice for BK-16 cannot be only a struggle for our immediate release. It is but the struggle for the future of democracy in India – for her peoples.
