India

Imprisoned BK16 activists release statement from prison as arrest completes 6 years

It has been six years since Pune Police began a string of arrests that led to the arrests of 16 intellectuals.

Credit : Indie Journal

 

Pune | Releasing a statement from prison, on the completion of 6 years since their arrest on Thursday, the four accused in the Bhima-Koregaon Maoist links case, said that their case, 'has become a living testimony of the fascist surveillant state that India is becoming. Activist Sudhir Dhawale, Rona Wilson, Advocate Surendra Gadling and Mahesh Raut, were arrested on June 6, 2018. All four of them continue to be incarcerated. Activist Shoma Sen, who was also arrested along with them, was just recently given bail.

It has been six years since Pune Police began a string of arrests that led to the arrests of 16 intellectuals and activists from across the country, who began to be known as the 'BK 16', for allegedly being involved in instigating the violence that took place at Bhima-Koregaon on January 1, 2018. All of them have been booked under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

While a few of them are finally out on bail since last year, many still languish in jail, without a trial.

The statement says, "“We, the BK 16, known after the eponymous Bhima Koregaon case, complete six years of incarceration on 6 June 2024 under the stringent anti-terror law, UAPA, 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."

On June 1, 2018, violence broke out at Bhima Koregaon village in Pune district, that houses a victory pillar commemorating the victory of predominantly Mahar soldiers that won a war for the British against Peshwas in the 1800s. Every year, thousands of Dalits gather at the memorial. In 2018, the centenary year of the celebration, violence broke out  as the Dalits who had gathered in large numbers began facing attacks from the surrounding villages. Hundreds were injured. While initial investigations pointed the blame at BJP Corporator Milind Ekbote and right wing leader Sambhaji Bhide, the police put the onus on the Elgar Parishad that was organised in Pune on December 31, 2017 and began a series of arrests from June 6, 2018.

Subsequently, over the next two years, activists Varavara Rao, Sudha Bharadwaj, Arun Ferreira, Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves, Anand Teltumbde, Fr. Stan Swamy, Jyoti Jagtap, Professor Hany Babu, Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor were arrested by the Pune Police and the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which took over the case. The police alleged that these activists had connections with the Maoists and that they were responsible for instigating the Bhima-Koregaon violence. Some of them were also accused of conspiring to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Seven of them - Sudhir Dhawale, Surendra Gadling, Rona Wilson, Jyoti Jagtap, Professor Hany Babu, Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor - continue to remain in jail. Fr Stan Swamy, who was arrested in 2020, passed away while in jail, waiting for bail. While in jail, the NIA denied giving him a cup with a straw that he needed due to Parkinson's disease. Several older activists, who were also ailing, had to fight a long battle to get bail.

 

 

Several investigative reports that have come forward in the last six years have shown that the police fabricated the evidence that they used to incarcerate the activists. In 2021, Arsenal, a US-based consultancy, upon inspecting the computers of Rona Wilson and Surendra Gadling (on demand from their lawyers), said that the allegedly ‘incriminating’ letters that the police found were planted in their computers. Around 22 months before his arrest, police had raided Wilson’s residence.

"The ten years of Modi Government has witnessed Brahmanical Hindutva trying to violently appropriate, monopolize 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 hegemonize the fascist ideology and politics of Brahmanical Hindutva," the statment says.

In 2022, Sentinel One, an organisation that works in the field of cyber security, along with Amnesty International and Citizen Lab revealed that a global hacking group that goes by the name of Modified Elephant targetted the activists who were arrested in relation to Bhima Koregaon violence. The report also found connections between the hacking group and Pune police just around the time these arrests took place.

Several civil society and human rights organisations across the world have called out the arrests of the BK 16. The Supreme Court, while granting bails to few of the activists, called the cases against them prima facie and the evidence speculative. The apex court has also called out the delay in trials and prolonged incarcerations of these activists.

The Maharashtra Government, in February 2018, appointed a two-member judicial commission to probe the case. The presentation of evidence before the commission is now complete and the commission has given time till the end of this month to file written arguments. Between July 7 and 12, there will be oral arguments before the commission.

The statement further decries, "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."

Read the full statement here:

 

In what language, under total surveillance, does truth speak to a tormented people 

Intimations on the sixth year of continuing incarceration of the BK-16

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 criminalized, neutralized, 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 6 June 2024 under the stringent ani-terror law, UAPA, 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 Modi Government has witnessed Brahmanical Hindutva trying to violently appropriate, monopolize 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 hegemonize 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 militarization and polarization 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 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 unliveable 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 surveillant 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. 

Sudhir

Rona

Surendra

Mahesh

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