A Review of The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India

In the Introduction to Freedom A Disease Without Cure, Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, makes a poignant observation even though at the cost of sounding paradoxical, “…the most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom that we experience as freedom.” (Žižek, 2023, p. 3) And logically this leads to asking a question as to what does it mean to be (un)free? No straightforward answer would suffice the exhaustive existential value that this question holds. So therefore, an honest attempt to approach this question would be as Žižek puts it, “to take a step back and reflect upon what we mean by freedom.” (ibid)

Alpa Shah’s The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India is coming at a time, when India as a nation is standing on a catastrophic crossroad that precisely reiterates the emphasis of self-reflexivity as a way to grasp the processes of freedom currently facing an existential threat.

As the citizens of India oscillate between the 2024 electoral ‘farce’ and fatigue, The Incarcerations is a reminder of the ‘symptoms’ of a disease popularly known as ‘neo-fascism’ plaguing the nation today.

Written against the backdrop of the events that took place under the second term of the current ruling regime in India, Shah has made the Bhima Koregaon 16 (BK) arrests as her central motif; stating, “The BK case is a bellwether for the collapse of democracy because, for the first time in post-1947 Indian history, there is a multi-pronged coordinated nationwide persecution of these custodians of democracy.” (Shah, 2024, p. 50)

Although the central premise of the work revolves around the BK case, what is interesting is the delineation of the background of these arrests that are inextricably intertwined with the struggles of the Adivasis, Dalits and India’s minorities who even now, continue to languish in Indian prisons.

Through the descriptions of the life-stories of these “custodians,” these people include: human rights activist and lawyer, Sudha Bharadwaj, human rights defender, Gautam Navlakha, Jesuit priest and indigenous rights activist, Stan Swamy, Telegu revolutionary poet, writer, literary critic, Varavara Rao, human rights lawyer, artist and political commentator, Arun Ferreira, political commentator, writer and activist, Vernon Gonsalves, Dalit human rights lawyer, Surendra Gadling, English literature professor, Shoma Sen, prisoner’s rights activist, Rona Wilson, Dalit rights activist, writer, publisher, Sudhir Dhawale, Dalit intellectual, Anand Teltumbde, forest rights grassroots democracy activist, Mahesh Raut, Delhi University Professor, Hany Babu, and Kabir Kala Manch artists (1), Jyoti Jagtap, Sagar Gorkhe, and Ramesh Gaichor. The author has attempted to delve into their Weltanschauung (2) to not just understand their raison d’etre but also hold a mirror reflecting the anabasis of the McCarthyism soaked Lovecraftian reality in a nation tom-tommed as “mother of democracy.”

The juxtaposition is narrated in a way that chalks out a hermeneutical understanding of the title The Incarcerations. The title does not just elucidate the ‘lived experience’ but through its narration subverts the dominant logic of freedom and democracy forcing the readers to question their own positionality by critically dissecting the ‘everyday’ facets governing the individuals living in gated communities.

“On 1st January 2018, hundreds of thousands of Dalits-India’s ex-untouchables communities- were to gather at a six-storey-high monument, an obelisk that they called the ‘Victory Pillar’, to commemorate the bicentenary of the Battle of Koregaon. Instead, mobs of men waving batons, sticks and saffron flags- colours of the ruling party and ideology of Hindutva or Hindu supremacism-threw stones and Molotov cocktails at the arriving Dalits, burnt cars and vehicles, vandalised restaurants, and houses. Many people were injured and one person died at the Bhima Koregaon, as the place came to be known.” (Shah, 2024, p. 7)

Illiberal Democracy

After describing the event, there were a series of arrests of the sixteen human right defenders falsely implicated under the charges of “waging a war against the Indian state, overthrowing democracy and plotting to assassinate Prime Minister…”(ibid) The demonstrations and events transpired at Bhima Koregaon and its aftermath serves as an allegory to the rise of illiberal democracy in India.

Being an anthropologist, Alpa Shah mines the interviews and archives starting from the life histories to legal court documents and news coverage to trace the agony of those standing up for the rights of the marginalised people and attempts to unveil the edifying and contingent causes in words of philosopher, Robert Brandom, “causes masquerading as reasons.” (3) She has used descriptions to demonstrate the modus operandi of this illiberal democracy. By walking the reader through the everyday routines of the protagonists of the book, she presents the contrasting lopsided reportage of the trials by the corporate media.

The narrative highlighting the contradictions chillingly reveals the misuse of the ambiguities and legal lacunae often saturated with logical fallacies by the ruling regime. Shah has not only documented the corporate media drumbeating but at same time faithfully used alternative sources ranging from online forums, petitions filed by India’s foremost academics, and testaments from other human right advocates, while dissecting the anatomy of Bhima Koregaon incarcerations which today has become a metonym for an illiberal democracy.

Whether there were arbitrary arrests or the manner in which the cases were tried by the State in the court of law reveals the workings of neo-fascist regime. A case in point is the “judicial death” of an octogenarian indigenous rights activist, Stan Swamy, who suffered from Parkinsons disease, but was denied a sippy cup to drink water in the prison illustrates the miasma of a neo-fascist regime.

Traversing the lives of the BK-16, The Incarcerations is an exegesis of the political process of the social movements in India. It exemplifies the causative factors engendering dissent and highlights the importance of “epistemic solidarity.”

Corporatisation: a face of neo-fascism

Many topics are often glossed over or if they are raised at all, then the coverage is lopsided including land acquisition, stripping the Adivasis of their rights, routinisation of caste-based atrocities, religious polarisation, and “surveillance capitalism.” (Žižek, 2023, p. 186) These topics are some of the facets of neo-fascist regime that The Incarcerations tries to contextualise not just through evidence unearthed during fieldwork, but also while trying to connect the dots between the events ranging from ‘judicial’ murders to constitutional breaches by the State. In doing so The Incarcerations reiterates its raison d’etre which is to search for democracy. The events depicted in The Incarcerations if they were not grounded in the landscape of reality, then the book could have been easily considered as a political noir fiction. The book has made a bold attempt to unmask the multi-billon dollar loot by the nation’s oligarchs.

(Method)ological Leverage

The “Bhima Koregaon obelisk,” which was initially erected by the British East India Company to commemorate their victory over the upper-caste Peshwa empire had come to hold a significant meaning to the Dalit community as they formed the Mahar regiment. Subversions of this colonial war memorial and exemplifying the tradition of the oral history, The Incarcerations incorporates traces of psychogeography to study the semiotics of the present social movements in India. It adds to the existing “resistance archive” by not just being an index but by employing the use of prison memoirs of the incarcerated, thereby reinstating the importance of personal narratives in research.

The Incarcerations is not paradigmatic of academic work, but it subverts the compartmentalised dichotomies and weaves together seamlessly anthropological methodologies with different strands of political ideologies. The book, while being written for a lay reader living outside the Indian subcontinent, is written in a style reminiscent of thriller novels. The work would be of immense value to international scholars and researchers including serious journalists as it archives the files that sit muted in the dark dusty cupboards of court room records and would have probably never seen the light of the day if Shah had not dusted off their jackets.

The book is meant to shake off the complacency of the urban Indian elite who are still trapped in their echo-chambers. It makes you question as to who are the real “custodians” of this “mother of democracy.”

footnotes

(1) A cultural troupe based in the city of Pune, Maharashtra comprising of artists hailing from Dalit, Adivasi, Marathas predominantly from working-class families.

(2) Weltanschauung- a term which means the worldview of an individual or a group.

(3) R, Brandom (2012). Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity. Also cited in Moynihan T.(2019). Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History. Urbanomic

references

Shah, A. (2024). The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India . Gurugram, Haryana : HarperCollins.

Žižek, S. (2023). Freedom: A Disease Without Cure. London: Bloomsbury Academic.