Although Bollywood keeps churning out pseudohistorical melodramas depicting colonial India, many Indians understandably hate the Brits for imposing the yoke of foreign rule and their policy of divide and rule.  But there are some who looked favourably on the British Empire like the Untouchables whose story is the backdrop to The Incarcerations.

Alpa Shah, professor of anthropology at LSE, beings her account with the Battle of Bhima Koregaon of 1818, when the Untouchables fought alongside the East India Company to defeat their high-caste Peshwa oppressors. To them, British victory held the possibility of social mobility.

Alpa Shah pulls back the curtain on Indian democracy, the greatest Democracy in the world, to tell the remarkable and chilling story of the Bhima Koregaon case, in which 16 human rights defenders (the BK-16) –professors, lawyers, journalists, poets-have all been imprisoned without credible evidence and without trial, as Maoist terrorists. The Incarcerations  unravels how these alleged terrorists were charged with inciting violence at public commemoration in 2018, accused of waging a war against Indian state, and plotting to kill the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.  Shah exposes 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 device that was used to incarcerate them. Shah also dives deep into the issues they fought for and tells the story of India’s three main minorities – Adivasi ( Harijans), Dalits and Muslims – and what the search for democracy entails for them. Shah show 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. Fast forward 200 years and you can probably guess how it pans out in Modi’s India. The Dalits, as the heirs of the Untouchables call themselves,  were greeted by cannonade of Molotov cocktails when they arrived at Bhima Koregaon,  followed by a surreal witch-hunt.  The Government claimed that the violence, in reality started by Hindu nationalist mobs was orchestrated by imaginary international Maoist conspiracy.

Sixteen urban Naxalities were thrown in jail. The Bhima Koregaon BK-16 were accused of inciting Dalits to rise up against the government of Modi.

A decade into Modi’s rule, and on the eve of an election, it is a message that has been received  loud and clear. Modi is found to be alone on the hustings, because his government has frozen the bank accounts of  the opposition coalition. Indian media scarcely breathe a word of criticism. Reporters without Borders  ranks India 161^st out of 189 countries in its press freedom index, behind even Taliban-run Afghanistan.

The Incarcerations BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah, William Collins £30, 672 pages