A Father Imprisoned

Late evening on October 8, NIA sleuths knocked on the door of Father Stan Swamy. Their unannounced arrival at his Ranchi home would not have shocked the 84-year-old Adivasi rights activist and Jesuit priest. In July and August too, he had been interrogated for 15 hours about alleged links with the outlawed CPI(Maoist) and role in the commemoration of the 1818 Battle of Bhima-­Koregaon on January 1, 2018, which led to violent incidents. On August 28, 2018, a police team from Pune had barged into his residence at 6 am and seized his laptop and mobile phone. “The nature of the present NIA investigation has nothing to do about the Bhima-Koregaon case, in which I have been booked as a ‘suspected-­accused’,” Swamy said in a video message and statement he had prepared on October 6. “It had everything to do to somehow establish (i) that I am personally linked to extremist leftist forces and (ii) that through me, Bagaicha [the social centre where he lives and works], is also related to some Maoists. I denied both these allegations in the strongest terms.”

He had also prepared a note titled ‘What is the crime I am supposed to have committed’, in which he detailed the various causes he had fought for. These include raising questions over “non-implementation of the 5th Schedule of the Constitution”, asking why the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act mandating rights of tribals for self-governance through Gram Sabhas was being ignored, and why the Supreme Court’s Samatha judgment of 1997 granting Adivasis control over “excavation of minerals in their lands and to help develop themselves economically” was not implemented in letter and spirit by successive governments.

The activist’s close aides say Swamy was taken away without a warrant to an NIA camp office in Ranchi. Some of his associates went there too. “At about 10 pm, an NIA officer informed us that he had been placed under arrest, and that we should bring him his clothes, medicines and other essentials,” says one of them. Early next morning, Swamy was flown to Mumbai and ­produced before a special NIA court, which sent him to judicial custody till October 23. He is the 16th person to be arrested in the Bhima-Koregaon case since June 2018. The others are lawyer Surendra Gad­ling, professors Shoma Sen and Hany Babu, Dalit activist Sudhir Dha­wale, Dalit scholar Anand Teltu­mbde, forest rights activist Mahesh Raut, prisoners’ rights activist Rona Wilson, poet Varavara Rao, trade unionist Sudha Bharadwaj, democratic rights activists Arun Ferreira, Vernon Gon­sal­ves and Gautam Navlakha, and cultural activists Sagar Gorkhe, Ram­esh Gaic­hor and Jyoti Jagtap. Several sections under the IPC and the UAPA have been slapped against all of them.

In a statement expressing solidarity with Swamy, over 2,000 civil society members said: “The inhuman and insincere act of the NIA authorities in arresting Stan Swamy stands out for its sheer vindictiveness…. We firmly believe that the Bhima-Koregaon case, being driven by the Modi government, is a baseless fabrication.... The main objective of the case is to target and harass activists who work for the rights of Adivasis, Dalits and the marginalised and raise questions against the anti-people policies of the government.” Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan and several Congress leaders have also condemned Swamy’s arrest.