The equal citizenship activists arrested in 2020 aren’t the only democratic voices who have been at the receiving end of police crackdowns in the recent past. Hundreds of kilometres from Delhi, human rights defenders started being arrested in 2018 by the Pune police under the same UAPA. This time, the allegations had involved inciting the violence at Koregaon Bhima in January 2018 and having alleged links with Maoist outfits. Of the 16 activists arrested in the case, Fr. Stan Swamy, the oldest among them, died in custody, awaiting bail. Mahesh Raut, who worked with Adivasi self-governance institutions in rural Maharashtra, is the youngest. Even as he completed seven years in Taloja prison, Mumbai this June, Raut continues to keep his work alive through the assistance he offers to fellow prisoners for their legal cases. Drawing on a survey conducted to interrogate the reasons behind the increasing numbers of young inmates in Indian jails in ‘Inside Taloja Prison: A Study’, Raut writes, “The findings show that the law is wielded as a tool of retribution within a society marked by entrenched class, caste, gender and religious inequalities. This practice results in the perpetuation of the same exploitative and regressive structure that the law seeks to combat.”