Lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, Out On Bail After 3 Years In Jail: ‘I Am Ready To Put On My Black Coat’

By Dilip -

 After three years and three months in prison, Bhima-Koregaon accused and undertrial Sudha Bharadwaj was granted bail in December 2021 by the Bombay High Court on a technical ground. The human rights lawyer and law professor talked to us about her time in prison, the state of legal aid for forgotten undertrials, the need for courts to address congested prisons, particularly in the pandemic, and her plans to rebuild her life as a lawyer and a mother, as she grappled with bail conditions which prevent her from leaving Mumbai and Thane.

“I love this country, I love the people of Chhattisgarh, and I have no regrets,” 60-year-old advocate Sudha Bharadwaj told Article 14, weeks after she was granted bail by the Bombay High Court in the Bhima Koregaon conspiracy case. Arrested on 28 August 2018, Bharadwaj is among 16 ‘Bhima-Koregaon accused’ - lawyers, human rights activists, writers and academics - charged under 10 sections of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967, whose legal processes, as a July 2020 Article 14 analysis showed, ensure that proof of innocence or guilt is essentially rendered irrelevant and bail very difficult. 

A human-rights lawyer, teacher and IIT graduate who gave up US citizenship and turned down an offer to be a high court judge, Bharadwaj was arrested from her house in Faridabad, where she had moved in 2017 to teach law at the National Law University Delhi. The arrest came after she spent nearly three decades working in Chhattisgarh as a trade unionist, providing legal aid to blue-collar workers and marginalised rural, often tribal, communities and villagers (see Article 14’s report on Bharadwaj’s work and the National Investigative Agency or NIA’’s charges against her here).

When the first nine arrests took place, the police accused Bharadwaj and others of plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi and delivering speeches, sending emails and circulating pamphlets that sparked violence in January 2018 against Dalits in the town of Bhima-Koregaon, 28 km northeast of Pune city.  Despite the serious nature of the allegations made by the NIA, which unilaterally took over the case from the Maharashtra Police in January 2020, the trial has not yet started. 

Besides the 83-year-old poet, teacher and Maoist ideologue Varavara Rao, who was granted medical bail in February 2021 in view of his failing health in prison, Bharadwaj is the only accused to be granted bail. Most of the accused have spent more than three years in prison; 84-year-old Jesuit priest and sociologist Father Stan Swamy contracted Covid-19 and passed away as an undertrial in July 2021. The NIA special court, which set bail conditions, has barred Bharadwaj from speaking to the media about the case. It also rejected her request to be allowed to return to Chhattisgarh to her law practice, and has restricted her from moving out of Mumbai and Thane. ….

https://www.article-14.com/post/-i-am-ready-to-put-on-my-black-coat-lawyer-sudha-bharadwaj-out-on-bail-after-3-years-in-jail-61e63ae842e4d


Atul Dev - The attack on Soni Sori follows her attempts at holding the police in Bastar accountable


Siddhartha Deb: The unravelling of a conspiracy: were the 16 charged with plotting to kill India’s prime minister framed?


Father Stan Swamy: I’d rather suffer, possibly die if things go on as it is


Pinjra Tod activist Natasha Narwal's father dies of Covid day before her bail hearing // That Monday will not come, Judge Sahib


K.Balagopal: Political violence & human rights: Naxalism in A.P.


Naxalites should lay down their arms and challenge the ruling class to abide by the Constitution


The Judiciary is the Defence of the Innocent. Or so we thought...


A Grateful Nation


ASHUTOSH BHARDWAJ: Latest war cries against Naxals are absurd. Go visit Bastar, a war is already on


Ashutosh Bhardwaj - In the forest, a voice: On Diwali, Ramayana show us the light, warn us against darkness // Pratishtha Pandya: Forgive me (a poem)


Jairus Banaji on the Indian corporate strategy of subordinating farm households and family labor


Chitrangada Choudhury - 50 days after security forces charged with gangrape...


CHITRANGADA CHOUDHURY - Arrested tortured, jailed in south Bastar...


Chitrangada Choudhury, Ajay Dandekar – dealing with Maoists...


Chitrangada Choudhury Aga - Illegal mining's ground zero ...


Dipankar Ghose: In the mining villages of Raniganj, broken roads, homes - and system / Vidya Krishnan: India's moral failure


Supriya Sharma - The story the Chhattisgarh police does not want you to read


Maoism and the philosophy of insurrection


Baldev Singh Mann: ‘My darling daughter!’


Remembering Rabindra


 Dilip Simeon: Closing the Circle: On Revolution (Frontier, 2012)


Permanent spring: Maoism and the Philosophy of Insurrection (Seminar # 607)



Jairus Banaji: Fascism, Maoism and the Democratic Left


Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the ...
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227...
Read more

Albert Camus's lecture 'The Human Crisis', New York, March 1946. 'No cause justifies the murder of innocents'

By Dilip -
The morning after a great historical crisis, you feel as sad and sick as after a heavy night. But there is no aspirin for historical hangovers .. The world is no longer divided into the just or unjust, but into masters and slaves. He who is right is he who enslaves.  Albert Camus     La crise de l'homme : THE HUMAN CRISIS   (Text read by Viggo Mortensen on March 28 2016)   Ladies and Gentlemen: when I was invited to give a series of lectures in the United States of America, I felt some doubt and hesitation. I am really not old enough to give lectures, and I am more at ease with the process of thinking than I am making categorical statements... since I don't feel I have any claim on what is generally called the truth. I shared this reservation and was very politely told that my personal opinion didn't matter. What mattered was that I'd be able to offer some facts about France so that my listeners could form their own opinions. It was then suggested...
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certai...
Read more

Etel Adnan - To Be In A Time Of War

By Dilip -
NB: Etel Adnan, writer, poet, artist and musician was born in 1925 and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother was a Greek from Smyrna, her father, a high ranking Ottoman officer born in Damascus. This prose poem is the final chapter of her book  In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country .  Read more about her here  - DS To Be In A Time Of War To say nothing, do nothing, mark time, to bend, to straighten up, to blame oneself, to stand, to go toward the window, to change one’s mind in the process, to return to one’s chair, to stand again, to go to the bathroom, to close the door, to then open the door, to go to the kitchen, to not eat nor drink, to return to the table, to be bored, to take a few steps on the rug, to come close to the chimney, to look at it, to find it dull, to turn left until the main door, to come back to the room, to hesitate, to go on, just a bit, a trifle, to stop, to pull the right side of the curtain, then the other side, ...
Read more

After the Truth Shower

By Dilip -
Dear Readers Thank you for reading my blog for the past eleven years. (This is a link to the new one) During this time it has had nearly 1.7 million hits; and I have posted over 9500 posts covering a variety of themes. From July 11 to 19, 2022, my blog was withdrawn by the Blogger administration on account of what its machinery suspected to be 'Impersonation'. It took over a week and the efforts of several well-wishers to get it back online I thank them all for their kindness and goodwill  My blog has always been - and remains - non-commercial. I have used it for academic purposes; and to foster a culture of debate and informed commentary in civil society. Because it contains a large amount of material gathered and collated for over a decade, I cannot afford to lose its contents. I hope it will remain undisturbed now and function as an archive. However, I have decided to use a new blog on WordPress as a platform for my newest comments and posts The new blog is titled After the...
Read more

James Gilligan on Shame, Guilt and Violence

By Dilip -
Shame, Guilt, and Violence / James Gilligan During the past 35 years I have used prisons and prison mental hospitals as "laboratories" in which to investigate the causes and prevention of the various forms of violence and the relationships between these forms and to what I will call (with a nod to William James) "the varieties of moral experience." In the course of that work, I have been struck by the frequency with which I received the same answer when I asked prisoners, or mental patients, why they assaulted or even killed someone. Time after time, they would reply "because he disrespected me" or "he disrespected my visitor [or wife, mother, sister, girl-friend, daughter, etc.]." In fact, they used that phrase so often that they abbreviated it into the slang phrase, "He dis'ed me." Whenever people use a word so often that they abbreviate it, it is clearly central to their moral and emotional vocabulary. But even when they did n...
Read more