A Washington Post report has today said that in the Bhima Koregaon case, many activists who were arrested for allegedly plotting the overthrow of the Indian government were actually framed. The report says their computers were hacked into and fake evidence was planted in them.

Here is the report https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-bhima-koregaon-activists-jailed/2021/02/10/8087f172-61e0-11eb-a177-7765f29a9524_story.html

There have been quarters in India which have insisted on this for a long time and quarters who have decided to go with the police's version of things despite the arrested activists insisting that they are not guilty of that which they are being accused of. There is a message...

...here however that is of greater import. And that is that if such allegations had been brought against people who were not working towards the betterment of underprivileged communities, we would have been more likely to listen to their defence of themselves. The system only...

...takes advantage of biases that are already existing in a society. It hardly ever creates new ones. And the bias I am talking about in this case is a bias against social workers. Think about it - how many upper caste, upper class, middle class families want their children to...

...go work for the upliftment of the underprivileged and for minority rights? How many times have you heard of social workers being referred to as jholawalas and useless parasites? How many stereotypes about "activists" can you think of off the top of your head? On one level...

...this is that same old contempt for Humanities subjects that I have written about 50,000 times now. On another level, it is our passive defence of a social order that favours us. An order where the poor and the Dalit and the minorities should not ever become anything more...

...than what they are. An order where the poor are poor because they are supposed to be poor and the rich are rich because they worked harder than the poor. An order that allows us to not only see the poor as disgusting but also those who help them as "parasites". Jibes such...

...as aandolan-jivi are only a symptom of a deeper and darker malice that ails us as a society. The loosening of its monstrous tentacles will not start until we begin to see compassion as a good thing. And until we do, the jails will be full of the innocent and the virtuous.