Hurtful Realities
Covid 19, they say, has made the planet nicer for birds and fishes, cleaned our air and rivers, and, in India, pulled the Himalayas closer to watchers on the northern plains. However, Covid 19’s greatest blessing will be our acceptance of the horror’s lesson of equality -- its utter impartiality while attacking human beings of all kinds.
Rulers seem slower than their people in grasping the need for equal or impartial treatment, though with luck November might bring about a new U.S. administration. With additional luck, that administration might be more mindful of human rights violations in countries like India.
There, as elsewhere, Covid continues to oblige privileged ones to experience well-provisioned house-arrest. The less fortunate attract the virus as they continue to toil far from their crammed lodgings for daily food and monthly rent.
Meanwhile tens of thousands of Indians battle for survival in India’s actual prisons. Huge numbers are inside not because they were found guilty of crime, but because of accusations and suspicion. In common Indian parlance, these tens of thousands are “undertrial” prisoners and have remained so, in many cases, for than a decade. The phrase is misleading because with most of them trial hasn’t even begun. It’s prison without trial.
While Kashmir’s prisons contain a large number of persons picked up under special provisions related to “national security”, and many Kashmiris have been sent to jails in other states, people from all parts of India are “prisoners without trial”. These include numerous activists seized under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, or UAPA.
One of these UAPA detainees is the well-known Telugu poet Varavara Rao, now 80. Ill for weeks in Taloja Jail in Navi (or New) Mumbai, Varavara Rao has now been moved to a hospital. According to the Hindu, he has tested positive for Covid.
Taloja contains numerous Covid patients, and Varavara Rao’s situation is clearly precarious. Jail reflections he penned some ten months ago (in September 2019) may be found at
https://thewire.in/rights/chained-muse-notes-from-prison-varavara-rao-bhima-koregaon
Varavara Rao is one of eleven activists from various states of India who were picked up under UAPA following a 2018 victory ceremony of the kind that Maharashtra’s Dalits observe on January 1 every year in Bhima Koregaon, about 10 miles northeast of Pune.
Known as “the Bhima Koregaon eleven”, these detained activists are, in alphabetical order, Sudha Bharadwaj, Sudhir Dhawale, Arun Ferreira, Surendra Gadling, Vernon Gonsalves, Gautam Navlakha, Varavara Rao, Mahesh Raut, Shoma Sen, Anand Teltumbde and Rona Wilson.
All were arrested in the wake of disturbances in the Pune area following the January 2018 ceremony, but none has received an open trial, and the public has not been clearly told of their alleged offences. Each of the eleven possesses a reputation of dedicated work for human rights and solidarity among the oppressed.
These eleven have simply been put away. No consideration of due process, transparency, or -- following Covid 19 -- prisoner safety, has troubled the authorities. All have been denied bail.
Reminding us that, going beyond identity politics, one of them, Anand Teltumbde, a brilliant Dalit intellectual, has forged doctrines beyond caste, the commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out that the Indian state has been able to “inflict punishment without guilt” on Teltumbde and others of the Bhima Koregaon Eleven.
“The idea that people like Teltumbde or the exemplary Bharadwaj cannot even get bail underscores this point,” Mehta adds. Published in the courageous Indian Express, Mehta’s article can be read in full at
A vivid understanding of the procedure-flouting punishment being given to the Koregaon Eleven can be gained from Arundhati Roy’s article in the online journal, Scroll.in. Roy writes her piece in the form of a letter to G. N. Saibaba, a wheel-chaired activist imprisoned much earlier, in 2014, also under UAPA. Saibaba remains behind bars.
Roy too writes of “our judicial system which makes the process the punishment”. Evidence, trials, judges and convictions are unnecessary. Prisons suffice.
Amnesty International has taken up the incarceration without due process of the Koregaon Eleven, but the people of the U.S., their elected representatives, and counterparts in other democratic countries should be urged to join in the call for their immediate release.
