The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India - Alpa Shah

Written by Alpa Shah
Format: M4B

The world’s largest democracy is facing the greatest challenge since the end of British colonial rule in 1947.

The Incarcerations tells the remarkable and chilling story of the unravelling of Indian democracy through the Bhima Koregaon case, in which 16 people (the BK-16) – scholars, lawyers, democratic rights activists, artists and poets – have been imprisoned, without credible evidence and without trial, for waging war against the Indian state as Maoist terrorists.

Alpa Shah expertly leads us through the case, telling how the alleged terrorists were charged with inciting violence at a 2018 commemoration, where none of them were present, and then accused of plotting to kill the Indian prime minister. She uncovers some of the world’s most shocking revelations of cyber warfare research, which show not only hacking of emails and mobile phones of the BK-16, but also implantation of the electronic evidence that was used to incarcerate them. Through the life histories of the BK-16, Shah dives deep into the issues they worked on to tell the story of India’s three main minorities – Adivasis, Dalits and Muslims – and what the search for democracy entails for them.

Essential and urgent, The Incarcerations reveals how this case is a bellwether for the collapse of democracy in India, as for the first time in the nation’s history there is a multi-pronged coordinated attack on key defenders of various pillars of democracy. In so doing, Shah shows that democracy today must be not only about protecting freedom of expression and democratic institutions, but also about supporting and safeguarding the social movements that question our global inequalities.