The Incarcerations : Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India

By Alpa Shah

About the book

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.