In mid-February, the Delhi police arrested climate activist Disha Ravi in her home. This was no ordinary arrest. The police traveled 1,740 kilometers from the national capital to the South Indian city of Bangalore and proceeded to apprehend the 22-year-old on serious charges of sedition, criminal conspiracy, provocation of riots, and promoting enmity between two groups.
Ravi is one of the founding members of the Indian chapter of Fridays for Future, a global movement launched by Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg. Ravi found herself in prison and the subject of a particularly vitriolic media trial that pronounced her a traitor and implicated her in a “global conspiracy to defame the nation.” After 10 days in custody in Delhi that followed her detention in Bangalore, she was granted bail on February 23.
Controversial state policies have sparked massive protests in India, where a pervading culture of arrests on trumped-up charges has stoked fear within civil society.
Unfortunately, for civil society in India, Ravi’s arrest is merely the latest in an ongoing onslaught against dissent within the country. Faced with eight successive quarters of slowing economic growth and high unemployment, the government seems to have chosen polarization as its path to political success. This strategy has seen the government passing the highly controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, which discriminates against migrants based on their faith (specifically targeting Muslims); state ordinances targeting inter-faith marriages; and legislation revoking the statehood of erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir.
In all three cases, the government has looked to characterize dissenters as “anti-national,” seditious, and criminal. Several activists, comedians, and journalists have been imprisoned for their activism or their coverage.
On the economic front, the fiscal deficit, which has risen consistently over the past three years — 3.4% in 2018-2019, 4.6% in 2019-2020, and 9.5% in 2020-2021 — was finally pushed over the edge by the onset of the pandemic. In an attempt to restart the economy, the Indian government passed a raft of bills to structurally reform the Indian economy. The bills address key areas, such as labor and agriculture, and have been met with much resistance from labor and farmer unions alike.
On November 26, 2020, in a massive show of force, a nationwide general strike of nearly 250 million people was called. The strike marked the beginning of escalating resistance to the attempted agricultural reforms. The protesting farmers argue that the farming laws were passed in September 2020 without their being consulted. The farmers further claim that the liberalization of the agricultural market will leave them at the mercy of large corporations, who may corner the market and force them to sell their produce at suboptimal prices.
Four days later, more than 300,000 farmers began a march to Delhi. They planned to block certain highways leading into the capital until the government withdrew the bills. This siege of Delhi, at the height of winter and the pandemic, has reportedly claimed the lives of nearly 248 farmers, either through illness or suicide. While the protests have remained largely peaceful, the police have on many occasions used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the farmers.
On January 26, India’s Republic Day, things finally came to a head. A group of farmers, frustrated at the stalled negotiations, deviated from the planned route of a protest march, tore down barricades, and set the stage for a violent confrontation with the police after climbing atop India’s symbolic Red Fort. Delhi police claimed that almost 300 policemen were injured in the clash.
After widespread condemnation of the violence, both from within and outside the movement, the farmer unions chose to retreat to the border of Delhi. There they continue to camp in the tens of thousands, demanding that the government withdraw the three farm bills.
Indian farmers stage a protest at the Delhi-Haryana Tikri border in December 2020 against the country’s controversial new farm laws. The protest movement has drawn international support including from US pop singer Rihanna and Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
In early February, international support for the movement grew when pop star Rihanna tweeted her support for the farmers. Various international social media influencers followed suit and tweeted their support for the farmers. One of them was Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who shared a link to an open “toolkit” to help activists on the ground better mobilize.
Using the January 26 clash and the toolkit as a pretext, the government soon began to crack down on Indian citizens who played a role in creating or editing the toolkit. It is for editing two lines of this toolkit that Ravi currently stands accused of sedition and criminal conspiracy. Immediately after her arrest, police proceeded to arrest lawyer Nikita Jacob and activist Shantanu Muluk. This was then followed by a crackdown on media houses, with the police launching a 113-hour raid on the offices of NewsClick, an independent news portal that covered the protests.
An increasing number of politically motivated arrests of activists may explain India’s decline in The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index. The country’s status has been downgraded from “Free” in 2019 to “Partly Free” in 2020 for the first time since 1997 in the latest Annual Freedom House report.
The activists, professors, and poets arrested in connection with the Elgar Parishad case of 2018 continue to remain behind bars. They have since been joined by activists, students, and ordinary citizens protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act. The arrests of Disha Ravi, Nikita Jacob, and Shantanu Muluk round off the latest list of dissenters imprisoned for protesting government action.
This culture of politically motivated arrests has generated much fear in Indian civil society. Traditionally, differences in matters of policy have been resolved through a process of negotiation and consensus building. At present, though, a culture of strong-arming dissenters has devolved into a perpetually polarized and adversarial polity.
In the consequent stand-off, the executive arm of the state has shown a willingness to engage in overreach. This is reminiscent of India’s Emergency era, a time when democracy was formally suspended. With charges under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (used routinely against terrorism suspects) and sedition boasting an abysmal conviction rate of 2.2% and 3.3%, respectively, arrests under these provisions have become tools to jail dissenters in perpetuity without trial or conviction.
Furthermore, since the principles of natural justice dictate that every accused individual is innocent until proven guilty, the long imprisonment of those awaiting trial represents a grave violation of their basic human rights.
If India is to recover its identity as a functional democracy within the civilized world, it must immediately affirm its faith in its original constitutional ideals. Failure to do so now may set the country on a path of terminal democratic decline from which it may never recover. ●
Vineet John Samuel is a regular commentator on issues of technology, economy, and social policy for a variety of publications in the Indian sub-continent.
