The Free Saibaba Coalition-US condemns the recent arrest of Varavara Rao and other political activists around India. Rao was arrested in Hyderabad, Telangana by police from Pune, Maharashtra. The journalist K.V. Kurmanath (Rao’s son-in-law) and photographer T. Kranthi were also arrested, as well as Sudha Bharadwaj (prominent human rights lawyer and professor), Gautam Navlakha (former secretary of the People’s Union for Democratic Rights), Arun Ferreira, and Vernon Gonsalves (Executive Member of Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners). These arrests have been justified through the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) by claims that those arrested are members of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), that they are part of an assassination plot aimed at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other government officials, and that some of those arrested abetted caste-related violence at Bhima Koregaon earlier this year, among other things. These arrests are part of a larger crackdown on democratic rights and political dissent in India. The fascist government—with support from various imperialist powers, including the U.S.—is intensifying its war on the people and increasingly it is labeling everyone who opposes this war as a “terrorist.” In fact, the true terror in India is state-sponsored terror and Hindu-fascist saffron terror. This has been true regardless of which party is in power in India. The BJP has more openly supported Hindu-fascist groups and enforced a broad crackdown on democratic rights and dissent. However, the opposition, the Congress Party, has a long history of similar policies, and launched the war on the people known as Operation Green Hunt which continues to this day.

Varavara Rao is a prominent political activist, President of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (RDF), and a founder and executive committee member of the Viplava Rachayitala Sangahm (Revolutionary Writers’ Association). He has been targeted by the Indian state for his political activism and his unflinching criticism of the Indian government and its anti-people policies. Since the 1970s the Indian government has repeatedly arrested Rao on absurd, phony, and trumped-up charges. For example, in the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case, Rao and other writers and poets were arrested on the grounds that their writings and poetry directly led to all of the revolutionary activity in the state of Andhra Pradesh. He was released after almost a year in jail, and the case plodded along in court for fifteen years until the phony charges were finally dismissed in 1989.

In 1975, on the eve of Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party’s “Emergency,” Rao was again arrested, this time under the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). During Emergency, there was broad suppression of all dissent, including a broad forced sterilization campaign—led by Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi—against the poor slum dwellers in the cities. After his arrest, Rao was eventually released at the end of Emergency only to be arrested again. Since this point he has been arrested a number of other times on phony charges and repeatedly had his life threatened by various right-wing groups. Varavara Rao’s latest arrest is another in a long line of phony charges aimed at intimidating him and other political activists into silence. It is nothing but a plot by the Pune police, the Indian Bureau, and the Indian government to crackdown on democratic dissent and those who support the peoples’ struggle for people’s democracy, revolution, and liberation. Many of those who were arrested with Rao have also been arrested before, only to have the phony charges against them dropped when inconsistencies in the police’s fabricated evidence were revealed.

This is particularly evident given the timing of the arrest. In June 2018, Professor Shoma Sen, Surendra Gadling (Dr. G.N. Saibaba’s attorney), Mahesh Raut, Sudhir Dhawale, and Rona Wilson were arrested under UAPA and charged with encouraging violence at Bhima Koregaon and plotting to assassinate Modi and others in the government among other preposterous charges. As we detailed in our previous statement—and as been covered widely in progressive media throughout India—it is actually the government itself and various Hindu fascist groups which are responsible for the violence during dalit protest at Bhima Koregaon earlier this year. After this story fell apart, the police produced a fabricated letter which was meant to be evidence that these five activists were members of CPI (Maoist) and that they were plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Modi. This story too has increasingly fallen apart and been revealed as a fraud.

Those arrested under the draconian UAPA can be held for 90 days before the charge sheets are filed, and the 90 day deadline for these five activists is fast approaching. The state has cooked up a new plot to arrest Varavara Rao and others on the grounds that they are linked to the fabricated letter which was used to justify the earlier arrests. This is an effort to throw up smoke, intimidate progressive activists who support people’s struggles, and claim that anyone and everyone who criticizes the government or speaks positively of CPI (Maoist) is a terrorist. What’s more, the fabricated letter is also being used to justify the continued imprisonment of Dr. G.N. Saibaba, who was accused under UAPA of “waging war against the state.” The fabricated letter, that the government claims is from a member of CPI (Maoist), states that Saibaba is a member of the party.

All of this shows the extreme measures the Indian state is willing to take to suppress the people’s movements and silence dissent. In their crackdowns the Indian state seeks to intimidate everyone into silence. They hope in vain to make the masses cower before the threat of death and imprisonment. They try to convince progressive intellectuals that it is better to live as a subservient lackey of foreign capitalists and domestic tyrants than to risk imprisonment by speaking up in support of the people. But Varavara Rao and others stand as a shining example of those who support the people’s resistance.

We in the Free Saibaba Coalition-US are inspired by the examples of Varavara Rao, G.N. Saibaba, Satnam, Rona Wilson, and so many others. As a symbol of the indomitable spirit of the people’s resistance, Varavara Rao raised his fist in defiance and smiled broadly while being arrested. As American Revolutionary and Black Panther Fred Hampton once said: “You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail a revolution.”

Below is an excerpt from VV Rao’s poem The Other Day which he wrote while in prison in 1986.

In what discourse
Can we converse
With the heartless?

 Bloodhound’s gasping tongue
His neck-strap,
The whip in the prodding master’s hand,
He assumes, from his rank.
What language can translate the utterance
That it’s felony to shackle reflections?

Property
Fractures the human world
Into custodians and criminals
But when I assert and declare
Banishment of the very thing
Property’s cage turns me a defendant, all right,
But,
For the overlord’s eyes
I am a Communist
And
As if nothing can surpass it
He arraigns me as a
Naxalite

 Let us persist to actualize it exactly
Let us perpetuate ‘treason’
For the purpose of the masses