We express our outrage at the
coordinated and simultaneous nation-wide arrests of intellectuals,
poets, lawyers, journalists, and civil rights activists Sudha
Bharadwaj, Gautam Navalakha, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira, and
Varavara Rao on August 28, 2018.
We strongly condemn the coordinated
raids and humiliation of eminent Dalit scholars K. Satyanarayan and
Anand Teltumbde; as well as civil rights activists Father Stan Swamy,
Kranthi Tekula, KV Kumarnath, and Susan Abraham. Simultaneous
raids took place in Mumbai, Delhi, Ranchi, Goa and Hyderabad.
This latest round of arrests and raids
should be understood in the context of a brutal crackdown on
dissenting voices fighting the majoritarian Hindutva politics and the
corporate loot sponsored by the state, in different parts of the
country. The arrests followed weeks of slander on corporate media,
and were a spectacle of unchecked state power. The State’s
justification for the arrests and raids has kept shifting.
This round of arrests is part of an
ongoing trend to create a climate of fear. On June 6th 2018,
leading human rights lawyer Surendra Gadling was jailed along with
the Dalit rights activist and journalist Sudhir Dhawale, Mahesh Raut,
civil rights activist Rona Wilson and Professor of English Shoma Sen.
The police broke into the houses of these activists, ransacked their
houses, confiscated all books, computers and cell phones, and
humiliated the activists and their families.
An increasingly majoritarian Indian
state has unleashed a wave of violence against the religious
minorities, educators, students, writers, journalists, and civil
rights activists. The term ‘urban Naxals’ has been employed
incessantly by media and politicians to smear the legitimate work of
civil rights activists and divert attention away from severe
structural economic concerns and Hindu terror. It is no mere
coincidence that most of these activists have been at the forefront
of fighting upper caste oppression against Dalits, communal hatred
against Muslims, as well as corporate plunder that has rendered the
Adivasi/Moolvasi population of India increasingly destitute.
As corporate capital and Hindutva
forces gain deeper control of the Indian polity, and as the nation
prepares for the general elections of 2019, we are likely to witness
an intensification of intimidation, arrests, murders, lynchings and
repression of Dalit, Muslim and Left political formations. We stand
in solidarity with these people and denounce the state and non-state
regime of terror. We salute the people’s resistance against the
Hindu corporate State.
We demand the immediate release of
those arrested as well as an independent and impartial inquiry by the
National Human Rights Commission into the circumstances of the
arrests.
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