Activists arrests: What’s Left is not Right? 

When Pune police arrested five activists in June this year, they came up with the claim that the actvists, who included professors and lawyers, were plotting the assassination of Narendra Modi in a “Rajiv Gandhi type of killing”.

They would have the court believe that this plot was hatched through letters to each other and those letters - uncoded, without encrypting them, easy to read by even a barely literate person – was left sitting in their computers for the police to conveniently lay their hands upon!

Yet, when these activists were produced in court, this awful letter of conspiracy was not part of the charge sheet and the Pune police would again have us believe that “not every bit of evidence needs to be part of the charge sheet every time”. So, what really was their crime?

The activists were not even part of the Bhima Koregaon violence on January 1 this year; nor were they provocateurs. Yet that is what they were actually arrested for while Sambhaji Bhide of the Shiv Pratishthan Hindustan, who is implicated in videos as a provocateur, is roaming free and another - Milind Ekbote, a former BJP corporator - is out on bail.

All activists arrested on June 9 are in judicial custody, so it is obvious that the police investigation against them is complete without any further concrete evidence unearthed against them and their alleged conspiratorial letter - the most incriminating piece of evidence against them - not part of the charge sheet.

Pune police raided several others across the country this week on the basis of an FIR filed by one Tushar Damgude, an admirer of Sambhaji Bhide and, as apparent from his Facebook posts in Marathi, a known baiter of people following Leftist ideology. It is perhaps one of his Facebook posts that inspired the conspiracy theory, for Damgude wrote in May this year, a full month before the first arrests, that Maoists had sanctioned Rs 8 crore to buy M4 guns and four lakh rounds “to carry out a Rajiv Gandhi type of killing”.

Where did Damgude get that information from? Police have neither investigated the Maoists on this score, nor questioned him yet.

Who is this Tushar Damgude? Nothing is known from his public profile except that he went to Pune university and has 13,000 odd followers on Facebook. He appears frequently on several Marathi television channels since he lodged the FIR and uses social media to taunt people he considers are on the left side of the ideological divide – he frequently refers to Bharip-Bahujan Mahasangh president Prakash Ambedkar disrespectfully as ‘Bala’ as his followers refer to him as ‘Balasaheb’. “What will you do if I declare you as a Naxal?” he taunted Ambedkar in one post.

Obviously, Damgude believes his word counts for something, for the police have taken no action against him even for referring to Justice B G Kolse-Patil, who is one of the persons revealed to be on the Sanatan Sanstha’s hit list, as a “terrorist” ostensibly because the judge is perceived by him to be a leftist.

Moreover, he brazenly calls the judge as “kolsha” which means black or coal in Marathi. Obviously, he believes he can get away with such insults and insinuations because he is too insignificant for people of the stature of Ambedkar and Kolse-Patil to file suits against him.

But the police clearly seem to be on his side – acting on the complaint of a nondescript bigot against established professors, lawyers and activists who have a reputation to defend while Damgude has none, his only claim to fame being the FIR against people whose ideology he hates and as a rabble rouser on social media.

So, while the word of a non-entity is good enough for the Pune police to arrest people with impeccable reputation (it is believed no action was possible without a tacit government nod), there is also the view that raids on journalists, writers, lawyers, professors and activists with flimsy links at best to the Bhima Koregaon incident, is to divert attention from two issues - the failure of the police to produce an iron-clad case against people arrested earlier and a cover-up for the exposure of saffron terrorists from the Sanatan Sanstha, under pressure from the Karnataka Police (left to themselves the Maharashtra ATS would have done nothing) who have been revealed to have been plotting a massive mayhem with blasts at temples and Ganpati Pandals.

According to information released piecemeal by the police, the identified targets on the fringes of Muslim ghettoes - the aim was to blame the minorities for the blasts – were mostly settlements of economically poor Hindus. This has now led to a lot of anger against not just the Sanatan Sanstha but also the RSS, which is rattled by the speedy alienation of many sections of Hindus from the BJP and the RSS.

However, among those raided is one person, an unlikely fit for implIcation in the Bhima Koregaon violence – Anand Teltumbde. He is no activist but a former government servant, and a visiting professor at many American and British universities after retirement from Bharat Petroleum. Author of the recently released ‘The Republic of Caste’, Teltumbde had written a fine piece for a digital newspaper disapproving of the celebration of the Bhima Koregaon victory of Dalits over Marathas, saying such commemorations only reinforce the identities they seek to transcend. He had also been mildly disapproving of the bandh later called against that violence.

But there is one connection he has that probably persuaded the police to raid this retired public servant, author and lecturer. He is Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar’s brother-in-law, married to Ambedkar’s own sister.

Prakash Ambedkar, acknowledging the relationship, told National Herald, “He has done nothing wrong. Even his lectures at prestigious universities abroad were undertaken after due permission from the company he loyally served all his life, for it made them look good too to have had such an erudite employee on their rolls.” Ambedkar, however, has taken on the RSS in no uncertain terms. He was very vocal after the Bhima Koregaon violence and has been loudly seeking the arrest of Sambhaji Bhide. In fact, apart from Congress president Rahul Gandhi, he is the only other leader who is consistent in his views about the RSS and does not mince his words about the damage RSS are doing to the fabric of the country. He now acknowledges the common perception that his brother-in-law is being targetted as a message to him – shut up or put up.

However, Ambedkar and other Dalits - leaders and activists - have long been used to being equated with Naxalites. “Urban Naxals” is a new term for sympathisers of Dalits, tribals or other oppressed classes. For long, the Maharashtra police, particularly in Vidarbha, which has a large concentration of both Maoists in the jungles of Chandrapur and Gadchiroli, and Dalits who are a substantial 24 per cent of the voting population, have seen police pin cases of Naxalite activities on Dalit youth.

Why they did not succeed in these attempts is because there is a fundamental difference between Dalits and Maoists – the latter want to destroy the Constitution while followers of Dr BR Ambedkar, on the other hand, are fierce defenders of the Constitution.

Barring a handful of Dalits who were impressed by the Black Panthers movement in the United States in the 1960s, and formed the Dalit Panthers, whose rusty guns took them not very far in life, most Dalits tread the path of peace and choose education rather than ammunition to emancipate themselves.

When authorities could not find these sympathisers in the jungles with guns, they gave those with powerful pens the tag of “urban naxals” which now has become a euphemism for anybody on the left side of the ideologiccal divide. It now appears to be a declaration of a full-scale class war against the weaker sections and another step towards a Hindu Rashtra.