Sarah Thankam Mathews at Lux: On June 14 of this year, Delhi Lieutenant Governor V.K. Saxena authorized the prosecution of author Arundhati Roy and Kashmir-based academic Sheikh Showkat Hussain for speeches they made in 2010 about the disputed territory of Kashmir. Put otherwise, the Indian government charged a world-famous author and activist under a stringent antiterrorism law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).
Roy, known for her fearless provocations and truth-telling on a range of socio-political issues, including Kashmir, tribal rights, and government policies, has often been at odds with the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The use of the UAPA, which allows for lengthy pre-trial detention without the possibility of bail, against activists and organizers is particularly concerning to human rights advocates. Roy has not (at least at the time of writing) been jailed, but the charges against her are an alarming example of a broader trend of shrinking space for dissent and the suppression of civil liberties in contemporary India.
Among those who are quite worried is the Mumbai-based journalist and author Raghu Karnad. Karnad wrote the award-winning book Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War. He has worked as a reporter and editor for various publications, including The Wire and The Hindu. This summer we got on Zoom and talked it out.
We discussed Roy, the other people held under uapa, the connections between contemporary Hindutva and Zionist ideologies, press freedom and corporate capture, and Shaheen Bagh. Shaheen Bagh, for the uninitiated, was a prominent site of peaceful protests in New Delhi, led primarily by Muslim women, against India’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in late 2019 and early 2020. It symbolized widespread resistance to these proposed discriminatory policies. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
SARAH THANKAM MATHEWS This June, soon after the Modi government was handed its first and partial electoral loss in a decade, Arundhati Roy was charged with sedition by the Modi government. This all started, arguably, with a police report filed back in 2010 after Roy participated in a conference for Kashmiri independence. But things have really taken a turn of late and they’ve taken a turn because UAPA was invoked. Tell us a little bit about what’s really happening here.
RAGHU KARNAD The first thing to note is that she’s only the most recent in a long string of people who have been prosecuted and jailed (many of whom have been imprisoned for several years) under UAPA, under completely bogus pretexts. The thing about the UAPA is that it allows the state to construct charges that have almost meaningless definitions. It’s right there in the name of the law, the “Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.” Well, yeah — what is any law, if not an Unlawful Activities Prevention Act?
And then the other part of it is that it essentially protects police from having to make a case with actual evidence. It destroys the right that people have to bail. So the police can fail to make any kind of case, they can fail to even bring a case to trial for years after years, and anybody can remain in jail for that entire duration. It’s a terrifying law and a number of people who ought to be regarded as really valuable citizens, national heroes, really, are in jail, have been in jail, or are struggling through UAPA cases. The latest one of these is Arundhati Roy.
STM Tell us about some of the other notable people targeted through UAPA.
RK The most famous cluster of these people is a group called the Bhima Koregaon 16 — now 15, because one of them died in prison because of the conditions that he was subjected to. The interesting thing about the Bhima Koregaon 16, apart from the kind of hallucinatory charges that the state produced against them, none of which are holding up, is that they are all people who are really closely in touch with broad social movements.
While it’s true that the space for dissent is shrinking in India, and that dissent is being generally criminalized, the people who have been most viciously pursued are people who are leading and involved in larger people’s movements. And that’s key to what this government and this regime is afraid of.
STM That’s a really interesting frame that I had not considered. That it’s not only about the current government criminalizing and discouraging dissent, that it’s also about kneecapping potential movement-based threats to them by targeting leaders.
RK What Roy is being prosecuted for is a particular speech that she gave in 2010, but if there’s one way to summarize what Arundhati Roy has been to India and to the world for the last 20 years, it’s that she has been a spokesperson for people’s movements and for people’s justice.
What I found interesting about the actual speech that she gave that is allegedly seditious or allegedly anti-national or dangerous to the integrity of India (in the speech she was not calling for violence or for secession) was that it wasn’t really about freedom for Kashmir at all. What she gets to, if you read the speech, which of course people don’t, is that it’s about freedom for India.
More here.
