History is still in the present tense in India. Scarcely a day goes by without Narendra Modi, the country’s ruler, taking potshots at Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, who is long dead. In recent decades Hindu nationalists have developed an unhealthy obsession with the Mogul emperor Babur’s 16th-century mosque, which they levelled with pickaxes in 1992. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party rose to power in the mid-Nineties, pledging to build a Hindu temple on the mosque’s ruins. Modi made good on that promise this year, inaugurating the Ram temple in Ayodhya.
Bollywood keeps churning out schlocky pseudohistorical melodramas depicting colonial India. Many Indians understandably hate the Brits for imposing the yoke of foreign rule. But there were those who looked favourably on the British Empire. Take the “Untouchables”, whose story serves as the historical backdrop to The Incarcerations.
Alpa Shah begins her account with the Battle of Bhima Koregaon of 1818, when the Untouchables fought alongside the East India Company to defeat their Peshwa oppressors. To them, British victory held the possibility of social mobility, which duly arrived through schools and jobs. Not long after, an obelisk to the dead, many of them Untouchables, was erected on the battlefield, and the kith and kin of the fallen instituted an annual commemoration of their sacrifice.
Fast-forward 200 years and you can probably guess how this plays out in Modi’s India. The annual jamboree celebrating the British-Untouchable victory is these days seen by the upper-caste Hindu nationalists as an affront to nationalist sensibilities. It is, above all, the new brazenness of the lower orders that annoys them. Ahead of the bicentennial bash in 2018 they planned their revenge.
So it was that the Dalits, as the heirs of the Untouchables now call themselves, were greeted by a cannonade of Molotov cocktails when they arrived at Bhima Koregaon. What followed was a surreal witch-hunt. The government claimed that the violence, in reality provoked by Hindu nationalist mobs, was orchestrated by an imaginary international Maoist conspiracy. Sixteen “urban Naxalites” were thrown in jail. The kind of people who carry tote bags and attend literary festivals were apparently no different from the gun-toting Naxalite revolutionaries in India’s badlands. The “Bhima Koregaon 16” (BK-16) were accused of inciting Dalits to rise up against the government of Modi, in power since 2014.
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Shah, a professor of anthropology at LSE, tells with literary aplomb the Kafkaesque story of these 16 intellectuals and activists falsely accused of conspiring to kill Modi. As it was, most of them had never heard of Bhima Koregaon, let alone visited the village.
If all of this seems absurd, it is because it is meant to be. Modi, like other strongmen, doesn’t exactly take well to do-gooding types, and locking up a few earnest souls is his way of sending a deterrent message: this is no country for dissenters. A decade into his rule, and on the eve of an election, it’s a message that has been received loud and clear. Modi is to be found alone on the hustings, because his government has frozen the bank accounts of the opposition coalition. Meanwhile the chief minister of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, an opposition politician, “rules” his state from behind bars.
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Still, the papers scarcely breathe a word of criticism. Reporters Without Borders ranks India 161st out of 180 countries in its press freedom index, behind even Taliban-run Afghanistan. Civil society organisations likewise tiptoe around the government lest the police or taxman serendipitously unearth some kompromat. Even the slightest sign of student disaffection prompts mass arrests. All in all it’s hard to escape the conclusion that India today is a democracy in name only.
Given the constraints on credible sources on the BK-16, then, it is to Shah’s immense credit that she has been able to piece together these arresting, warm portraits of the would-be assassins. We meet the octogenarian Jesuit priest Father Stan Swamy, suffering from an alphabet soup of ailments, including Parkinson’s, whose only sin seems to have been that he had the chutzpah to stand up for dispossessed tribal primitives and the Untouchable Paraiyars — to whom we owe the word “pariah” — which provoked the ire of mining companies in India’s rust belt. The stitch-up involved using malware to plant hidden files on his computer. Swamy died in prison aged 84.
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Then we meet Anand Teltumbde, an oil and gas executive turned anti-caste activist, who was locked up for having the temerity to attend an academic conference in Paris. It appears he had been conniving with a sinister French radical, Étienne Balibar — in fact a harmless philosopher. The two, it transpires, had no more than “shaken hands” at the symposium. The trade unionist Sudha Bharadwaj, for her part, fell foul of the authorities when she had a judge look into the gunning of 17 “Maoist guerrillas” by the Indian army; seven turned out to be children, all of whom had been killed in cold blood. She spent three years in prison. Nine of the BK-16 remain incarcerated, some of them for more than five years.
“The BK case is a bellwether for the collapse of democracy,” Shah concludes. If her tone is breathless — she waxes eloquent, for instance, on “the soft kindness and bright intelligence of Swamy’s eyes” — it is nevertheless a gripping and uplifting book. The BK-16 are evidently as tough as nails. Bharadwaj, for one, grew up in two leafy Cambridges — in Massachusetts and Cambridgeshire — but elected to give up her US passport and her penchant for PG Wodehouse, throwing in her lot with Chhattisgarh’s barefoot miners.
In her bid to “declass” herself, as she put it, Bharadwaj made peace with the ubiquitous manure patties that the miners used as kitchen fuel, as well as with the toiletless wilderness. “Going to the fields was a challenge, especially when the pigs were around.” The one sitting in the prime minister’s residence is very likely to win the upcoming election, but he has nothing on these indomitable spirits.
The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah (William Collins, 672pp; £30). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
