The world's largest democracy is facing
the greatest challenge since the end of
British colonial rule in 1947.
The Incarcerations pulls back the curtain on Indian democracy to
tell the remarkable and chilling story of the Bhima Koregaon
case, in which sixteen human rights defenders
(the BK-16)-professors, lawyers, journalists, poets-have been
imprisoned, without credible evidence and without trial, as
Maoist terrorists.
Alpa Shah unravels how these alleged terrorists were charged
with inciting violence at a commemoration in 2018, accused of
waging a war against the Indian state and plotting to kill Prime
Minister Narendra Modi. Expertly leading us through the case,
Shah exposes some of the world's most shocking revelations of
cyber warfare research, which show not only the hacking of
emails and mobile phones of the BK-16, but also implantation
of the electronic evidence that was used to incarcerate them.
Through the life histories of the BK-16, Shah dives deep into
the issues they fought for and tells the story of India's three
main minorities-Adivasi, Dalits and Muslims-and what the
search for democracy entails for them.
Essential and urgent, The Incarcerations reveals how this case
is a bellwether for the collapse of democracy in India, as for the
first time in the nation's history there is a multipronged,
coordinated attack on key defenders of various pillars of
democracy. In so doing, Shah shows that democracy today
must be not only about protecting the freedom of
expression and democratic institutions, but also about
supporting and safeguarding the social movements that
question our global inequalities.
