Bhima Koregaon

On October 8th, a day before the deadline for filing the charge-sheet in the Bhima Koregaon-Elgaar Parishad case elapsed, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested the 83-year-old Jesuit priest and veteran tribal rights activist Father Stan Swamy. He was forcibly taken from Ranchi to Mumbai and produced before the Sessions Court on October 9th. Alongside this, the NIA presented a[Read More...]

WSS is appalled at the arrest of Father Stan Swamy, an elderly Jesuit priest working on adivasi issues for the past 5 decades in the infamous Bhima Koregaon – Elgar Parishad conspiracy case on the night of 8 October, 2020.  WSS condemns this most recent arrest of a sterling activist and a reputed authority, and calls out the sheer absurdity[Read More...]

PUCL is shocked by and condemns the detention and arrest by NIA police team of 83 year old Fr. Stan Swamy from his residence in Bagaicha, Ranchi to take him to Mumbai to be remanded in the Bhima Koregaon (BK) case for allegedly being part of the larger conspiracy to cause unrest. The inhuman and insincere act of the NIA[Read More...]

We are going through one of the most dismal times in the history of post-independence India. Anyone who resists, anyone who speaks for the greater common good, for truth and justice, is getting hounded.  Hate campaigns are unleashed against them or they are implicated under fabricated charges and thrown into prison.  At present, it is extremely unfortunate that many academics,[Read More...]

Hany Babu was my M.Phil supervisor from 2017-19 in the Department of English at Delhi University. I was working on conceptions of citizenship, broadly speaking. Whenever my analysis veered off into being too abstract or ahistorical, he always reminded me of the concreteness of the term and it’s efficacy. Yes, its efficacy; for him it was always a concept that[Read More...]

By Atul and Sandeep Pandey Arun Ferreira is a civil rights activist and human rights lawyer. He has been behind bars since June 6, 2018, when he was arrested in connection to the Bhima Koregaon event held earlier that year. Like many other activists, he was slapped with Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, sedition and other anti-terror related offenses allegedly for[Read More...]

‘Secularism’ has now become a bad word and it is quite fashionable to attack, criticize and ridicule it. Just about anyone, regardless of whether s/he has spent even a minute thinking about it, can attack it. A television channel  recently even decided to have a vote on whether we should ‘have’ secularism or not, I … Continue reading Secularism and the Myth of ‘Hindu’ Tolerance →

We, the undersigned academics, journalists and concerned citizens strongly condemn the fresh round of harassment and arrests of academics and activists by the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which is trying to implicate them in the Bhima Koregaon case. After Partho Sarathi Ray, the NIA has now summoned Prof Satyanarayana and senior journalist KV Kurmanath to appear before it on 9[Read More...]

We are members of the scientific and academic community. We are writing to express our deep concern at the actions of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in its investigation of the Bhima-Koregaon violence. Instead of investigating those responsible for the actual violent clashes in Bhima-Koregaon, the NIA (and earlier,  the Pune police) has focused on the Elgaar Parishad event—a large[Read More...]

  After the arrests of leading public intellectuals like poet Varavara Rao, Prof. Soma Sen, Prof. Anand Teltumbde, Mr. Gautam Navlakha, Ms. Sudha Bharadwaj and others, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has trained its gun yet once again on democratic right activists, lawyers and other intellectuals. One of their latest targets is Prof. Parthosarathi Ray, a leading biologist of the country, an Associate[Read More...]