SANSAD news release August 31, 2018
Stand Up for the Human Rights Defenders
South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD), an organization of South Asian diaspora in Canada affirming the unity of people in South Asia across synthetic national boundaries, joins its voice to the chorus of outrage in India and in the Indian diaspora against the latest episode in the determined march of India toward Hindutva fascism, the construction of an authoritarian-populist state identified as a Hindu nation.
On August 28 the Maharashtra police simultaneously raided the homes of human rights and civil liberty activists, including journalists, writers, poets, academics, lawyers, and priests in Bombay, Delhi, Hyderabad, Goa, and Ranchi. They arrested under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention)Act and other provisions of the Indian Penal Code Gautam Navlakha, journalist, writer, and former president for People’s Union for Democratic Reforms; Sudha Bhardwaj, a civil liberties activist who had renounced her US citizenship acquired by birth 30 years ago to work among the oppressed Dalits and unorganized workers in the mines near the steel plant at Bhilai and has worked tirelessly for three decades to organize labor and, as a lawyer to defend the Adivasis against illegal land acquisition and denial of their forest rights, and who currently teaches at the National Law University in Delhi; Varvara Rao, a renowned poet and activist; Arun Fereira, a civil rights activist and lawyer based in Bombay, who has already spent five years in jail on false charges that were dismissed in court; and Vernon Gonsalves, a human rights activist.
The police also raided the homes of management and data analysis specialist, academic, prolific writer, and public intellectual Anand Teltumbde, who delivered the Dr. Ambedkar Memorial Lecture at Simon Fraser University (Surrey) and University of British Columbia (Vancouver) in 2016; Susan Abraham, civil liberties lawyer and member of the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights; Father Stan Swami, priest, teacher, and Adivasi rights activist; K. Satyanarayana, Head of the Department of Cultural Studies and Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies at the English and Foreign Language University in Hyderabad; and Kranti Tekula, human rights activist.
These arrests and raids come on the heels of similar arrests after violence broke out following a rally in Pune held by Dalits on December 31, 2017 to celebrate the victory of Dalit soldiers of the British colonial army over the upper caste Marathas in the Battle of Bhima Koregaon. A day after the rally upper caste Hindutva forces attacked the Dalits and a Dalit was killed. Two Hindutva leaders were identified by eye witnesses. Miland Ekbote and Shambhaji Rao Bhide, were arrested but released. Instead, Shoma Sen, professor, Nagpur University, Surendra Gadling, human rights lawyer who has been defending the paraplegic professor G. N. Saibaba, Sudhir Dhawale, editor of a magazine, Rona Wilson, member of the Committee for the Protection of Political Prisoners, and Mahesh Raut, prominent anti-displacement activist were arrested under various sections of the IPC and the blanket Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
These events show a clear pattern. While lynch mobs and assassins freely go about their business, with those who are arrested for murders being not only released but garlanded by government ministers, policemen who rape, torture, and engage in custodial murders, code named “encounters,” enjoy impunity and are often rewarded, those who stand up for the oppressed and downtrodden and defend the rights granted to citizens by the Indian Constitution are thrown into jail to prevent their “unlawful activities” or harassed to intimidate them and others against speaking up.
The arrests and raids of Aug 28 are no doubt immediately motivated by the need of the BJP Hindutva nationalist government to counter the social disaffection that has been generated by its organized mobs in their killing of Muslims and the recent assaults on a revered secular Hindu scholar like Swami Agnivesh of the reformist Arya Samaj. It is also motivated by the need to deflect attention from the economic failures of the government, and most immediately by the need to distract from the exposure that Hindu terrorist group Sanatana Sanstha and its affiliate Janajagruti Samiti had prepared plots and collected arms and explosives for attacks on crowds in festivals and that they were linked to the murder of journalist and editor, Gauri Lankesh in 2017 and to the earlier murders of scholars, rationalists, and activists Govind Pansare, Narendra Dhabolkar, and Prof. Kulbargi. Seeking fascist powers through electoral means, the BJP government needs to both distract from the fallout of the acts of its non-state agents and to create an enemy to unify people. Hence the creation of the labels, “anti-national” and “urban Naxal”.
The oppression of Adivasis, Dalits, peasant, and workers in India is not new. But this has taken on an unprecedented intensity under the neo-liberal agenda that was initiated by the Congress and has been taken up with extreme vigor by the current BJP government, who have added to it the toxic fervor of religious nationalism. The defenders of human rights expose the resulting oppression and enable resistance to the illegal operations of the state. As such they are a roadblock to the neo-liberal agenda allied to and powered by the drive to recreate a glorious Hindu Rashtra of a mythic past. The defenders of human rights and civil liberties are named “anti-national” and “urban Naxals” because by such naming the party, with its Hinduva ideology, its government, and its corporate allies are made to stand for the nation that must be defended. “Naxal/Maoist” is the most powerful label for the enemy that the previous prime minister, Manmohan Singh declared to be the greatest internal threat to Indian security when initiating counter-insurgency in the forests of Chhatisgarh and other areas where Maoists were leading the Adivasis to fight back.
While the Muslim as enemy, potentially uniting Hindus, is the domain of violence by the non-state brigade, the “Naxal/Maoist” whether in the jungles of Chhatisgarh or as a bogey in its urban form, whether Adivasis defending their lands, waters, and forest rights or middle- class activists speaking on their behalf in civil society and the courts is the domain of state repression. It is a most convenient label for the suppression of democracy and freedom in the interest of predatory capital. It is not surprising that the corporate media, owned by big business houses act as the mouthpiece of the government in propagating this anti-democratic rhetoric. Such combined use of propaganda, mob action, and the state machinery for the realization of its ideological goal of Hindu Rashtra by the BJP puts India well on its way to Hinduva fascism.
We demand that all these human rights defenders arrested on false charges and under colonial era repressive legislation be immediately and unconditionally freed and all material confiscated in various related raids be returned to the owners. We urge all democratic people to write to their elected representatives to oppose the development of fascism in India.