I WITNESS

(These are happenings in India’s western state of Maharashtra..)

In September, in a village near Nagpur , Surekha
Bhotmange, 44, and her 17-year-old daughter
Priyanka were gangraped and then lynched with her
sons Sudhir and Roshan. After thousands of
outraged citizens demonstrated in Nagpur and
nearby towns against police inaction over the
public rape and murder of this Dalit mother and
her three children, the Maharashtra government
bestirred itself and ordered an inquiry.
Apparently, Surekha had been punished for not
allowing upper caste villagers to build a road
through her field. And after the mob fury,
curfews and lathi-charges, the police woke up and
suggested that the violence in these Dalit
majority areas was instigated by Naxalites. Now
we can expect several Dalits and other activists
to be hounded, arrested and branded as threats to
national security. The less privileged are easy
targets for the police, given their limited
access to lawyers, lack of money for bail and
unfamiliarity with their rights.

But you don’t need to be an activist for the
police in Maharashtra to accuse you of extremism.
Last month, they booked Sunita Narayan, an
independent publisher and distributor, under the
Unlawful Activities Prevention Act for selling
’anti-national’ books in an exhibition
celebrating 50 years of B.R. Ambedkar’s
conversion to Buddhism. These were not banned
books, just progressive literature about
democracy and people’s struggles. Among these
were texts by Bhagat Singh and Che Guevara. The
police harassed Sunita for three days, threatened
her with severe consequences and framed her as a
Naxalite whose husband had been killed in a
police encounter.

In September, the Nagpur police had stopped Ramu
Ramanathan’s Hindi play Cotton 56, Polyester 84,
from being staged. The play about the history of
Mumbai’s mills was directed by Sunil Shanbagh and
had been staged several times with an illustrious
cast. Earlier, the poet Shantanu Kamble had been
arrested and detained for over three months on
similar grounds. And of course, there was the
celebrated 2004 case of the police booking
American scholar James Laine, author of Shivaji:
Hindu King in Islamic India, for ’wantonly giving
provocation with intent to cause a riot’. The
book was banned and Laine evaded arrest only by
staying away from India . As far as I recall, the
right wing goons who vandalised the Bhandarkar
Oriental Research Institute, where Laine had done
his research, and destroyed thousands of rare
manuscripts, books and artifacts were not
arrested.

Maharashtra is not alone in this obsession to
protect citizens from ’bad’ influences. This
week, intelligence officers have been lamenting
about Maoists spreading ’cultural revolution’
across Jharkhand, Bihar and Chhattisgarh through
speeches, plays and songs in local dialects. They
even have biographies of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and
Mao! Horror! And transcripts of speeches by
vintage Naxalites like Kanu Sanyal and Charu
Majumdar! Clearly, the time has come to arrest
everyone with intellectual tendencies.

Which is what various states have been attempting
for a while. Last year, five writers ’linked’ to
Maoists in Andhra Pradesh were arrested,
including Kalyan Rao and the cult poet Varavara
Rao. The latter had been jailed in the 1980s for
anti-state activities, and was later acquitted by
the court. In Jharkhand, revolutionary artistes
have been arrested, including popular balladeer
Jetan Marandi. In 2003, cops in Orissa arrested
Dasuram Mallik, a tribal writer, for allegedly
inciting people through revolutionary songs and
stories. And in Kerala, the state prosecuted
Sreeni Pattathanam for making ’objectionable
references’ to Mata Amritanandamayi in his book
on the spiritual leader, and for ’hurting
religious sentiments’. ?Curious, how easily our
sentiments are hurt by cultural ideas and how
keen our democracy is to protect us from books,
poems, plays, films, art and songs, while letting
free political leaders who massacre thousands in
the name of religion. Roughnecks who vandalise an
M.F. Hussain show or a Mira Nair shoot are bad
enough, but an intolerant state that smothers the
expression of dissent, non-mainstream ideologies
or unorthodox views is terrifying. By allowing
the criminalisation of social activism and the
stifling of independent voices we are eroding our
civil liberties. If we value our democracy, we
must protect our freedom of expression not just
from goons, but also from our government.