New Delhi: “Arrest a Muslim and call him a terrorist. Arrest a Hindu and call him a Naxalite. That is all this is about,” said Manish Srivastava, responding to the Uttar Pradesh police’s charge of him having Naxalite links. The translator-cum-political activist based in Prayagraj was speaking to The Wire soon after he was released from a jail in Lucknow on bail on January 9, four days after the police’s Anti-Terrorist Squad arrested him from his house in connection with a 2019 case in which he had been out on bail since 2020.
Srivastava, better known as Manish Azad, was arrested by the UP ATS on January 5 and slapped with a fresh charge under India’s notorious anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967. The ATS said it arrested Srivastava based on fresh “evidence” that it had found during investigation of the case it had lodged in July 2019.
“My arrest was totally illegal,” said Srivastava. An NIA/ATS court granted him bail on January 9. The bail order is not yet available, but Srivastava said that he was released because he had been arrested without serving him any summons or without informing the court.
“The case against me is totally baseless. I don’t consider it reasonable by any stretch,” he said to The Wire when asked to respond to the ATS’s allegation of him having Naxal links.
As reported by The Wire, the UP ATS had in 2023 and 2024 arrested two activist couples on similar charges in the same FIR on the basis of examination of and data extraction from electronic devices seized in 2019, when they were booked and questioned for alleged Naxal links.
Srivastava was arrested in 2019 but released on bail in February 2020 by the Allahabad high court, and has been based in Prayagraj ever since. In 2019, when the ATS had apprehended Srivastava and his wife Anita Srivastava, also an academic translator, they accused the couple of living in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh under false identities by using false documents, and charged them with forgery. The ATS said Srivastava had aliases such as Ganesh and Rakesh.
Srivastava says all these claims are fictitious. “I don’t have any fake identity card. I have no such nicknames or aliases. My mother gave me the name Manish and that’s what I am known by,” he said.
In 2019, the UP ATS had lodged an FIR against seven persons, all of them political and social activists. The ATS alleged that suspected Naxalites had been holding meetings in the states of UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and were engaging in a criminal conspiracy to instigate people for an armed rebellion and making a plan for satta parivartan (change in government).
The police had then conducted raids in Bhopal, Kanpur, Deoria and Kushinagar, and also seized several electronic devices and documents from at least six accused persons. While Srivastava and his wife were arrested, the others were questioned and their laptops, pen drives and mobile phone were seized for the purpose of data extraction. Srivastava and his wife Anita have a record of translation and academic work. Anita has penned several poems and stories under the pen name Shireen. She translated ‘Let me Speak’, the testimony of Bolivian labour leader Domitila Barrios, into Hindi, and has a PhD in oral history. Srivastava completed his MA in Hindi from Gorakhpur University after graduating from Allahabad University. In 2023, he published his jail diary, Abbu ki Nazar Mein Jail. He is the founder president of the Inqalabi Chhatr Sabha, a student body.
In August 2023, the NIA had raided his house as it conducted simultaneous searches at the residences and offices of several activists, including his sister and fellow activist Seema Azad and students in various cities of eastern UP, purportedly to look for their alleged connection with the banned CPI (Maoist).
On January 5, while apprehending Srivastava, the ATS said it had arrested him on the basis of new evidence that had emerged during the investigation. The ATS said that in 2019, it had registered an FIR under Sections 121a and 120 B of the Indian Penal Code, and raided spots in four places – Bhopal, Deoria, Kanpur and Kushinagar – and took into possession electronic devices and documents from some accused persons. The two sections deal with waging war against the nation and criminal conspiracy.
The ATS said they had found forged identity cards from Srivastava and his wife and based on that, added Sections 419, 420, 467, 468 and 471 of the IPC to the case. The sections are linked to cheating by impersonation, cheating, forgery of valuable documents, forgery for cheating and fraudulent use of a forged document.
The ATS has accused Manish of working with the “ideology” of the CPI Maoist and said that there was “sufficient evidence” to arrest him under UAPA, according to Srivastava’s arrest document, seen by The Wire.
The ATS document about Srivastava’s arrest said that a chargesheet was filed against him on October 4, 2019 under IPC 120B, 420, 467 and 471. The investigation regarding Section 121a, which deals with waging war against the nation, was still pending and evidence was being collected, the ATS said. Srivastava now faces charges under sections 13, 18 and 38.
“It is a big contempt of justice to arrest him in an old case by adding new sections,” said Seema Azad, his sister and member of the human rights organisation People’s Union for Civil Liberties.
“After five years, I don’t understand what new evidence they have discovered,” Azad told The Wire.
In 2010, Azad and her husband Vishwa Vijay were arrested on charges of being members of the banned CPI (Maoist) and after spending more than two years in jail, were convicted by a lower court and awarded life imprisonment in 2012. A division bench of the Allahabad high court later that year granted them bail.
Srivastava said that during his questioning, officers mostly asked him about his social media posts rather than about the case faced by him. The ATS is yet to issue a statement on Srivastava’s bail.
While arresting him, the ATS said that he had been absconding and was found on the tip-off of an informant. Srivastava was amused by this as he has been living in his house in Prayagraj since being released on bail in February 2020. “There is no logic to all this,” he said.
PUCL UP said Manish’s arrest was “prima facie illegal and dubious” and alleged that it was done to “only harass a political activist”. “Arresting a person by adding new sections in a case where bail has already been granted, without the consent of the court that granted bail, is a total violation of the procedure established by the Hon’ble Supreme Court,” PUCL said, demanding that the high court take cognisance of “such wrongful arrests and misuse of law”.
The Campaign Against State Repression (CASR), a group of several human rights and student organisations, also condemned Srivastava’s arrest, calling it a “witch hunt”. CASR said Srivastava’s arrest was “part of a larger crackdown on activists by Brahmanical Hindutva fascist BJP-RSS government all over India in the name of Over Ground Workers (OGW) of communist party of India (Maoist)”. “It is an attempt to suppress the democratic people’s movement for a just society and an ill conceived scheme to suppress people’s democratic aspirations,” the CASR said in a statement.
In March, 2024, the ATS had arrested an activist couple – Allahabad high court lawyer Kripa Shanker Singh and former teacher Binda – in the same case on charges of alleged Naxal links on the basis of examination and data extraction of electronic devices seized from them 56 months ago in 2019. A few months prior to that, the police had arrested another activist couple in a similar fashion. Anita Aazad and husband and fellow activist Brijesh Kushwaha were arrested in October 2023 based on the material allegedly found from their electronic devices seized in 2019.
