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 PUDR stat
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

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 certainty which a c
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime

By Dilip -
NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democratic move
Read more