Dr Nishant A.Irudayadason
Professor of Philosophy and Ethics, Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune.

Civic space in India has been gradually deteriorating under the present government. Ninety per cent of hate crimes committed in the last decade occurred after 2014. According to the Article 14 sedition database, 11,000 people have been accused of sedition in India since 2010. Ninety-six percent of the sedition cases filed since 2010 for criticizing the national government and its leaders have been under the NDA government. India is no stranger to the trend of deliberately blocking internet access and holds the record for the highest number of internet blockages in the world. According to the Software Freedom Legal Centre’s web block tracking, the number of internet blockages has been steadily increasing since 2014. These peaked in 2019, which explains the prolonged blackout of communications imposed by the Indian government in Jammu and Kashmir. Moreover, between 2012 and 2020, 148 of the 385 internet blockades were imposed to contain “policing situations,” a euphemism often used in reference to peaceful protests. These data indicate the extent of restrictions on the freedoms of association, peaceful assembly and expression in India.

The pandemic has been used to trigger draconian “emergency” laws. These laws give the government broad powers to arrest and detain anyone who violates punitive lockdown measures imposed to stop the spread of the virus. These laws have been arbitrarily applied against journalists, essential workers and persons belonging to excluded groups. In addition, the use of restrictive laws such as the Prevention of Illegal Activities Act (UAPA), the National Security Act, the Public Security Act and other pre-trial detention laws to curb protests against discriminatory government policies has also become common. Even this virulent pandemic has not deterred the Indian government from arresting or detaining elderly or precarious human rights defenders, despite prison overcrowding. Safoora Zargar, a university researcher who was three months pregnant, was charged under the UAPA and detained in another overcrowded prison in Delhi for peacefully protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). It took an intense international, national and local public campaign for her to be released on bail. Many students remain in detention

In July 2020, Varavara Rao, an 81-year-old poet and activist who was charged under the UAPA for his alleged involvement in violence during the 2018 Bhima Koregaon celebrations, tested positive for COVID-19 while being held in an overcrowded prison in Maharashtra. After spending more than two and a half years in detention awaiting trial and making multiple unsuccessful attempts at bail, he was recently released for six months due to his precarious state of health. The fifteenth arrest on 08 October 2020, in this series of 16 arrests, falsely alleging their connection to the violence during the Bhima Koregaon celebrations, was that of Fr. Stan Swamy, an ardent defender of human rights who stood by the Adivasis in their efforts to protect their land ensured by the Constituting of India against the mining mafia. He was not even given a straw sipper in the prison to drink water as he suffered from Parkinson. His repeated plea was granted after several weeks, only after the delayed intervention of the court.

Fr Stan Swamy was one of those people around the world who bears a testimony of invigorating faith despite trials. He died of cardiac arrest on Monday 05 July at the age of 84, in a hospital where he had been transported in May after testing positive for Covid. Imprisoned for nine months in Tajola prison in Mumbai, he continued to be a witness of the Gospel to other detainees despite extremely difficult living conditions. He conversed with another priest over telephone during which he said that he saw God in the tears and smiles of his fellow prisoners. Such was his deep love for humanity. Some journalists have aptly described his death as effectively delivered by the government. He may have been silenced, but the human rights cause for which he stood firm despite false allegations and imprisonment will continue to spark in the minds of many more committed people.