Dawn raids on Dalit activists citing 'Maoist' links indicate desperate attempt to secure Hindutva vote bank

Dawn raids by Pune Police personnel across seven cities have resulted in the arrest or detention of five rights activists, who have been accused variously of being ‘urban Maoists’ and the ‘overground’ faces of the ultra-Left underground. From Delhi was Gautam Navlakha, a former journalist and one of the most recognisable representatives of the Peoples Union for Democratic Rights; from Faridabad, the police picked up Sudha Bharadwaj, a lawyer and tribal rights activist; from Mumbai they picked up Vernon Gonsalves, an academic, lawyer and activist, who was in jail on suspicion of being a Maoist, but was acquitted in all cases he had been embroiled in; and from Thane was arrested Arun Ferreira, also a lawyer and rights activist, who had been in jail for six years as an undertrial on charges of being a Maoist. Tellingly, the Delhi High Court threw out the Pune Police’s plea for transit remand and ordered Navlakha remain under house arrest until the case is disposed of, while the prayer for transit remand in Bharadwaj’s case was first granted by a Faridabad court despite being stayed by the Punjab and Haryana High Court. Several aspects of these simultaneous raids and arrests suggest that it is part of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s strategy to consolidate upper caste Hindu and ultra-nationalistic vote banks with difficult elections impending in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan this year, followed by Lok Sabha elections next year along with elections to a host of Legislative Assemblies, including, crucially, elections in Maharashtra, where the party is not on a good wicket at all. The police say that they have evidence linking all the five with five people arrested earlier this year – Sudhir Dhawale, Surendra Gadling Mahesh Raut, Shoma Sen and Rona Wilson – in connection with violence in Bhima Koregaon, where Dalit groups celebrated a nineteenth-century battle in which a colonial Mahar regiment had defeated a Maratha army.