Voices From Prison: What Happened In Bhima Koregaon Could Happen To You

There are things in life that somehow wrap themselves around us. Things we never would have dreamed of doing—ideas that once seemed dangerous, crazy, or simply foolish. They arrive quietly, almost by accident, and before we know it, they surround us, occupy our thoughts, and slowly take over. Until one day, there is no turning back, and we can’t imagine thinking about anything else.

Writing The Incarcerations was a bit like that. It was the middle of the COVID pandemic—a time when friends and family were dying. I had asked my editor an almost rhetorical question: how were we supposed to keep hope alive? His reply stopped me in my tracks.

“I’m thinking aloud, but I’ve been mulling it over for some time. One way to keep hope alive is to try and do what’s in my hands, which is to facilitate a book and hope it helps draw attention to the subject. And I was wondering if you could be the one to write it?”

“Would be keen to know what you think.”

I ran out of the house, through the meadow and into the woods, hoping the movement would clear my head.

The lawyer Susan Abraham’s words echoed through the cathedral of oak, birch, and alder:

“So whoever challenged it [the Bhima Koregaon arrests] found their name in the next round of arrests.”

She had been calmly explaining the case to a journalist in a YouTube video released two years before:

“Take the arrests of August 28, 2018. Sudha Bharadwaj was the first to hold a press conference in Delhi as the Vice President of the Indian Association of People’s Lawyers (IAPL) condemning the June 7 arrest of Surendra Gadling, the General Secretary of IAPL. On the next remand date, the letter found by the police targets Sudha Bharadwaj. The People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) also issued a condemnation, so Gautam Navlakha, an active PUDR member, is targeted. Arun Ferreira and Vernon Gonsalves, co-columnists, exposed the fabrication of the letters and the modus operandi in two articles—one in Daily-O, one in Rediff. They were targeted too…”

The trees around me seemed to repeat the question I could not shake: “What would be the cost of taking this on, Alpa?”

Moreover, how could I possibly find the time? University workloads in England had tripled overnight because of the pandemic and my daughter was at home indefinitely—two-year-olds need constant attention.

How could I say yes? How could I say no?

Those who were incarcerated were not shadowy figures on the margins. They were well-known, well-regarded, intellectual activists—professors, lawyers, journalists, writers, poets—whose lives had been devoted to critically thinking about inequality, power and injustice and the lives of those pushed to the edges of the nation. They lived simply, most often in the cities, but their reach was deep—they worked in far corners of the country to protect democratic rights in fact finding missions that revealed human rights abuses against some of the most vulnerable Indians, held perpetrators to account and supported grassroots social movements. Their work spoke to the same questions that had shaped my own life as an anthropologist: the dispossession, exclusion, and everyday violence endured by India’s Adivasi and Dalit communities. Some—like the Dalit scholar Anand Teltumbde—had spoken at the London School of Economics when I was a professor there, and later at the University of Oxford, where I now work, offering their research and wisdom to students and colleagues.

Now these same people were in prison. They were renamed enemies of the nation, branded ‘anti-national’ Maoist or Naxalite terrorists. The evidence, we were told, lay in letters and documents discovered on their computers by the Pune Police. That alone made the story important to tell.

Then, a month later, in the midst of the pandemic, Stan Swamy was arrested. He became the sixteenth name—the final name—of what would come to be known as the BK-16.

I had known Stan since my years living as an anthropologist in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. He was a gentle giant, a man whose life had been given over, quietly and without spectacle, to the struggle for the rights of indigenous peoples. He stood with Adivasis communities as corporate and state interests closed in on the coal, bauxite, and iron ore beneath their land. He fought land grabs and forest destruction, environmental poisoning and the brutalities of counter-insurgency. He nurtured many local youths to understand the issues at stake, to unite in grassroots social movements to fight for their rights. One of his last acts was to challenge the Jharkhand State for holding hundreds of Adivasis in prisons across the country without trial, accused under anti-terror laws. And then, with a cruelty that can only be called historical irony, those same laws were turned against him.

Like the revolutionary poet Varavara Rao, arrested in the same case two years earlier, Stan was already in his eighties. When Stan was taken to prison, his Parkinson’s disease was so advanced that his hands shook too violently to lift a cup to his mouth. Six months later, he contracted COVID in prison. He died soon after.

It was Stan’s arrest, and the fatal chain of events that followed, that finally stripped away my hesitation. From the Midlands of England, confined by lockdown, the task ahead seemed impossible. And yet it was then that I knew my editor was right. This was a story that could not remain untold. To follow the lives of those imprisoned in the Bhima Koregaon case, to trace the reasons for their targeting, and to ask what this reveals about the world’s largest democracy, became a way not only through the darkness of my own confinement, but toward a reckoning we all must face.

For the next three years, in the margins of my academic life, I immersed myself in the life and worlds of the BK-16. For Stan Swamy’s life alone, I spoke to more than 40 people who had known him—friends, comrades, colleagues—sometimes for hours, sometimes across days. I read everything he had written, and everything written about him. I wrote late into the night, after my daughter had fallen asleep. It helped that I had known Stan in Ranchi, that I understood the terrain—physical, political, moral—through which he had moved, and that our lives had crossed over many years.

Through Stan’s life unfolded a different history of India: a history from below. A history of Adivasi struggle stretching across more than a century, largely erased from the official record. At first, I believed this might be the book’s central contribution—that through the lives of the BK-16, The Incarcerations would tell the intertwined histories of Adivasis, Dalits, and Muslims, and their unfinished struggles for democracy. But the deeper I went, the clearer it became that Bhima Koregaon was not only about those who were imprisoned. It was about the fate of democracy itself.

A close examination of the case led back to the Hindutva-backed violence at Bhima Koregaon on January 1, 2018, and to the chilling ease with which vigilante groups could seize the streets and unleash communal violence—against Dalits in this instance—with near-total impunity. It showed how one arm of the state might attempt justice, while another—more powerful—would undo it. How perpetrators could walk free, while sixteen others, scattered across the country, some with no connection to the place at all, were taken instead. It revealed how a state government’s efforts to seek accountability could be overruled by the centre, as the National Investigation Agency took control of the case. Procedure after procedure was violated. Nothing followed.

It also exposed the complicity of much of the national media. When the Pune Police held press conferences, displaying letters they claimed to have found on the accused’s computers, few mainstream journalists questioned their authenticity. Instead, the story was sensationalised: Maoist terrorists were no longer in distant forests, but hidden in cities, perhaps even next door. The BK-16 were declared guilty before the matter even reached the courts. Once arrests were made, the judiciary revealed its frailty—endless incarceration without trial, judges stepping aside again and again, bail endlessly denied. An impartial judiciary and an independent media are meant to be the last bastions of democracy. The book grew accordingly, becoming not only a portrait of these custodians of democracy, but a record and analysis of its collapse.

Still, I could not have anticipated the depths to which the story would sink. From the beginning, the letters rang false. Years of research in Maoist regions had taught me that real names and explicit references are never used. Codes, aliases, erasures—these are the grammar of underground movements. Some of India’s leading security experts voiced similar doubts.

Then came Caravan’s revelations: malware on Rona Wilson’s computer that could both extract data and plant files—a digital Trojan horse. Arsenal Consulting, a US-based digital forensics firm, became involved. What they expected to be a brief investigation stretched into six months, as they uncovered what its director Mark Thompson described to me as “a massive cesspool of attack infrastructure, aggressive surveillance, and electronic evidence tampering”. Files had been deposited in hidden folders, unseen and unopened by the accused. In Stan Swamy’s case, the hacking spanned half a decade.

As I followed the trail, it led me to other cyberforensic experts in the US, drawn to the case by the sheer magnitude of what had been done. From them, I learned of direct links between the Pune Police and the hackers, and I pieced together the jigsaw to reveal the likely involvement of mercenary hacking groups. Meanwhile, Amnesty International and Citizen Lab confirmed that nine of the accused had also been targeted by spyware. The Bhima Koregaon case became one of the most notorious examples in the world of fabricated electronic evidence being used to destroy lives—so much so that it was the focus of the keynote lecture at the 2025 Digital Forensics Research Workshop in Seoul. And yet the state has never answered these findings. No inquiry has followed. The silence itself is telling.

Seven years on since the first arrests—soon to be eight—there is still no trial. Three of the BK-16 remain behind bars—two poets, Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor, and Surendra Gadling, a lawyer. Those released on bail live under severe constraints and under the constant threat of re-arrest. Beyond them, Bhima Koregaon proved a bellwether: the Delhi riots cases and the imprisonment of student; environmental defenders silence; journalists harassed; academics dismissed. The pattern repeats.

Looking back, it is hard to escape the conclusion that these incarcerations were meant to teach fear. To say: this could happen to you. Age and illness offered no protection. Wealth and status offered none. Caste, gender, region—none of it mattered. The most devastating outcome was not only imprisonment, but self-silencing of wide sections of the population who were likely to dissent with the regime in power. And when people learn to silence themselves, freedom begins to die quietly, long before it is extinguished by force. When neighbours stop defending one another, power no longer needs to shout. Self-censorship is the quiet ground on which authoritarianism flourishes.

That is why it matters—urgently—to keep speaking. To keep forming alliances. To keep opening, and holding open, whatever fragile spaces of freedom and democracy we can, wherever we are, however small they may be.

(Views expressed are personal)

Alpa Shah is professor of social anthropology and fellow of all souls college and author of the award-winning The Incarcerations: Bk-16 And The Search For Democracy In India

(This article is part of the Magazine issue titled Thou Shalt Not Dissent dated February 1, 2026, on political prisoners facing long trials and the curbing of their rights under anti-terrorism laws for voicing their dissent)