Property
fractures the human world
into custodians and criminals
But when I assert and declare
banishment of the very thing
Property’s cage turns me a defendant, all right,
but,
for the overlord’s eyes
I am a Communist
and
as if nothing can surpass it
he arraigns me as a
naxalite
-P Varavara Rao
On April 14th, 2020, I opened the newspaper to find a page that had an advertisement issued by the Government of India. It had a picture of Babasaheb Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, and next to it was a picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with the text “Babasaheb’s vision, our resolution”.
That very day, Babasaheb’s grandson in-law, Anand Teltumbde - a Dalit activist, writer, and professor- was arrested, with very little proof. The police and the party in power claim that Anand Teltumbde was a part of a Maoist conspiracy that was behind the Elgar Parishad, which the police claim led to caste violence in Bhima Koregaon on January 2, 2018.
The story of his arrest predates him by more than a century. It starts with the Bhima Koregaon battle of 1818, fought between Peshwa Baji Rao II and the East India Company. Having signed the Treaty of Bassein after the second Anglo-Maratha war, the Peshwa had lost almost all autonomy over his empire.
He fled Pune, and in a desperate, last attempt to get back his empire, he decided to attack Pune from the outside. This attack became the final Anglo-Maratha war, and what led to East India Company’s rule in the state of Maharashtra.
The Peshwa gathered a large army by paying farmers and peasants a handsome amount. As for the East India Company, their force, though small, comprised well-trained soldiers. At that time, the Company recruited their soldiers mainly from the Mahar community, or the Dalit community in Maharashtra. Accounts of the battle state that of the 834 men, 500 were recruited from the Bombay Infantry, which was dominated by the Mahar Dalit community.
As the story goes, the East India Company won the battle and now were the rulers of the kingdom. However, ungrateful as they were, the colonisers stopped recruiting the Mahar community into the army soon after.
As the anti-caste movement began, Dalit leaders began invoking the memory of this battle in hopes of uniting their people against the oppressive forces. They recalled this memory in hopes that the community would realise that their forefathers had fought their oppressors and forced them to retract, and that they could do it again.
However, they left out the fact that there wasn’t any anti-caste or anti-religious sentiment behind the battle; rather just soldiers doing what they were paid to do by their masters.
This redaction of information, however, actually worked in the favour of the community, as the British now allowed them to be a part of the Army again - giving them a source of income, other than the derogatory jobs they typically had access to.
For years, this omission of fact, or the battle itself wasn’t discussed.
This changed in 1927, when Babasaheb Bhim Rao Ambedkar visited an obelisk that the British had erected in the honour of those who lost their lives in the Koregaon Battle. On this obelisk were names of 59 individuals, of whom 27 were a part of the Dalit community.
Ever since, people from the community and some retired Mahar Regiment officers started to visit the obelisk annually, to pay their respects. Though this practice started with only a few thousand people, today almost a million visitors make their way to Bhima Koregaon every year on January 1st.
In Anand Teltumbde’s own words, “When Babasaheb Ambedkar painted the Battle of Bhima Koregaon as the battle of Mahar soldiers against their caste oppression in Peshwa rule, he was creating a pure myth. As myths are required to build movements, he perhaps saw its necessity then. But after a century, when it solidifies into a quasi-history and tends to push Dalits deeper into an identitarian marshland, it should become a worrisome matter.”
Given the significant place of the event in Dalit history, on the eve of the 200th anniversary of this battle, 260 NGOs working with the Dalit community came together to organise an event called the Elgaar Parishad. Literally meaning a declaration, the event was focused on the need to fight against the neo-Peshwai forces that persist in society. Present at the event were Prakash Ambedkar (the grandson of Babasaheb B.R. Ambedkar), Radhika Vemula (the mother of late Rohith Vemula), Jignesh Mevani (an MLA from Gujarat and a Dalit activist), Umar Khalid (a student activist from JNU, pursuing a PhD in tribal studies).
The event featured speeches that spoke out against the neo-Peshwai, which the organisers of the event (Justice PB Sawant, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, and Justice BG Kolshe Patil, a former judge of the Bombay High Court) call the casteist and communal policies of the present BJP government.
The police were present at the Elgaar Parishad, and the entire event was recorded on video by the police and the organisers.
And then, eight days later, some armed men attacked those making their way to the memorial. While several people were injured, one person lost his life. The visitors filed an FIR against Sambhaji Bhide and Milind Ekbote, allegedly members of right-wing Hindu organisations.
The speeches at Elgaar Parishad were now marked inflammatory by the police; the FIRs against Milind and Sambhaji brushed under the carpet; and supposed links to a Maoist conspiracy were soon revealed.
If the speeches were as inflammatory as claimed, the police could have pursued the line of investigation themselves. But instead, they waited till an FIR was lodged by some members of right-wing organisations, who make the amusing claim that those who caused this violence were from the Dalit community itself!
Then, in two rounds of raids, the police arrested 10 left-leaning activists, poets, and writers. Those arrested include Rona Wilson, Arun Ferreira, Surendra Gadling, Sudha Bharadwaj, Gautam Navlakha, Vernon Gonsalves, Varavara Rao, Shoma Sen, Sudhir Dhawale, and Mahesh Raut.
On August 28, 2018, Mr. Anand Teltumbde’s residence in the Goa Institute of Management, where he is a professor, was raided by the police, but in his absence.
According to Section 100 under Chapter VII of The Code of Criminal Procedure, the occupant of the place searched or someone on their behalf has to be allowed to attend the search. However, in this case, the activists whose houses were raided were not allowed to do so. The police, they claim, did not allow them to be in the same room where the investigation was going on.
In fact, in the case of Mr. Anand Teltumbde, he wasn’t even in the same city when the raid happened. The police forcibly took keys for his on-campus residence from the security guard, disconnected all landlines so that the guard could not inform Teltumbde, and raided his house without any proof of any wrongdoing.
This is merely the beginning of what was to become a highly controversial investigation and court proceeding.
When this fact was brought up before the court, the police defended it by saying that they had a video recording of the entire raid, which true as it may be, does not absolve them of their inability to follow the procedure. Moreover, this evidence could easily be tampered with and edited, thus there is much to be said about whether or not this evidence can be believed completely.
The law also states that the search must have witnesses, and that these witnesses must either be a family member of the person whose house is being searched, or a respected member from their locality. This is to ensure that if the police does not follow procedure, then the witness shall hold them accountable, because someone from the family of the accused or their locality is not likely to be influenced by the police.
In this investigation, however, the search punchnama were signed by witnesses from Pune, even when the arrests were made in Delhi, Nagpur and Mumbai, and had no connection to those arrested. These witnesses had travelled from Pune to these cities (sometimes with the police). While there is no law per se against the use of such witnesses (often called stock witnesses), it is judicial precedent that the court has a duty to disregard their testimony, if they are proven to be stock witnesses - which again the court did not do in this case.
What is especially amusing, though, is the way in which the police have cooked up stories of the Maoist link of these individuals. They claim that there was a Maoist conspiracy behind the Elgaar Parishad; that the funding for the event came from the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist); and that these individuals supplied weapons to Naxalites and are responsible for furthering the Maoist propaganda.
Thus, they have been booked under the draconian UAPA or the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. They have been slapped with charges that state that they were “a part of a terrorist organisation”, “supplied weapons and funds to a terrorist organisation”, and “have executed a terrorist attack”.
The basis of all these allegations are 13 letters that the police claim to have found, which link these activists to the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), which mention the activists by their first name. Of these 13 letters, 5 are addressed to “Comrade Anand”, or “Anand T.”, considered a possible reference to Anand Teltumbde.
These letters contain information which is openly discussed about how weapons are sourced, what the next step of the Party will be, and numbers and names of leaders from the Congress party like Rahul Gandhi and Digvijay Singh, mentioned as “friends of the [Communist] party”.
These letters also show that there is an international conspiracy at play, and connect it to Anand Teltumbde’s lectures abroad in universities in the USA and Paris.
As all leftists and people who are anti-establishment in the country are, Teltumbde (and others arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case) have been arraigned as ‘Urban Naxals’, and all the advocacy, academic work, and activism has been disregarded by simple using this small phrase.
These letters have been publicly dismissed by experts time and again. The gist of it all is that no one, especially not individuals who could mastermind such a huge international conspiracy, would be foolish enough to use full names, disclose sources and locations, and discuss plans over email so openly, and even more foolish to not even destroy the evidence.
The most mind-boggling fact in all of this chaos is that the event in question was not even attended by Anand Teltumbde. He was merely a convener for the event, and couldn’t attend it because he had some other personal engagement at the time.
In fact, he was very vocal about how uncomfortable he is with the interpretation of the history of the battle, which is shown to be anti-caste, when it really wasn’t.
The letters in question (which very well could be planted) were not even from his computer or his house at all; rather from another activist’s.
The question now is, why was Mr. Teltumbde arrested, if most things that he is accused of are prima facie false.
The answer lies in the nature of Mr. Teltumbde’s advocacy, and its contrast with BJP’s politics.
Mr. Anand Teltumbde has been at the forefront of the anti-caste movement for years now. He is a critic of the Dalit-Bahujan identity politics, because he claims that it imposes the very identity that Dalit politics should ideally be transceding - which is to say, his work involves advocating a society with no caste or class.
On the contrary, BJP’s politics has always involved identity - may it be religion, caste, or class. Let us momentarily look at the Triple Talaq decision. On the surface there is nothing wrong with the decision, but when you look into it, the decision and the approach of the government to the issue is largely controversial. The government, by way of fighting against the Triple Talaq, projected the Muslim community as being somewhat backward and primitive, while projecting itself as the saviour of women from this heinous practice. They criminalised their husbands, and mobilised these women as a completely different constituency, thus creating an internal fissure.
These internal fissures are what the BJP’s policies exploit. They work to project themselves as saviours of a community, while also simultaneously dividing the community on some fault line. This is why Anand Teltumbde’s work threatens the BJP, because his work stands to destroy these fault lines altogether. And without these faultlines, what will they destroy?
To paraphrase what Umar Khalid, a speaker at the Elgar Parishad said, this government and pretty much none before it, has done nothing to remove the evil of caste from our society, but have time and again used the legacy of Babasaheb Ambedkar and his vision to their advantage.
For a government to claim that Ambedkar’s vision of a casteless society is their resolution, and simultaneously, work against a scholar who advocates for the same is plain hypocrisy.
His arrest (and that of the other activists) may also be what has been described as “punishment by trial”, which is to say that a rather weak case has been filed against him deliberately to ensure that a long-drawn legal battle wears him out, and to muffle his voice.
As Anand Teltumbde completes a month in prison, the crackdown on dissent continues. From Safoora Zargar (a research fellow at Jamia Millia Islamia), to Umar Khalid (a student activist from Jawaharlal Nehru University), activists, scholars, and academicians have been arrested and slapped with useless charges.
The mainstream media is largely silent on the issue. Those media houses who are speaking on it are those who support the government’s actions; who make a theatre out of all political and social events by organising ‘debates’ between those who claim to be representatives of communities, without any proper clarity of their needs.
So, here is to you and to them:
Speak out before your turn comes.
References:
2018 Bhima Koregaon Case:
Anand Teltumbde