NEW DELHI (AP) – To her friends, Disha Ravi, a 22-year-old Indian climate activist, was most concerned about her future in a world of rising temperatures. She was attracted to veganism, loved to watch Netflix, and spent time on social media.
But her life changed last month when she became a household name in India, dominating the headlines after police charged her with sedition, a colonial-era law imposing imprisonment for up to life.
Her alleged crime: Sharing an online handbook intended to mobilize support for months of peasant protests on Twitter.
“If bringing the farmers’ protest to global attention is incitement, I’m better off in prison,” she said in court two weeks ago.
She was released after 10 days in custody. Her mother told reporters in Ravi’s hometown of Bengaluru that the case “strengthened our belief in the system,” calling her daughter strong and brave.
Chasing activists is not new in India, but Ravi’s story has sparked fear and anxiety. Observers say what happened to Ravi – a young, urban, middle-class woman – for many Indians, who suddenly feared they would face jail time for sharing something on social media. Criminal defense lawyers also point to a troubling frequency in the way incitement is invoked. Many say that checks and balances of lower courts, which are often overrun with cases, are fading.
The incident has raised questions about democracy in India, with critics viewing it as the latest attempt by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government to muffle dissent and criminalize it.
“They were targeting someone who is not normally targeted by the Hindu right wing – a young girl from South India, who has no Muslim name and no ties to leftist student politics,” said prominent historian Ramachandra Guha. “The message they wanted to send is that they can go after anyone.”
Earlier in February, Ravi, part of the Indian wing of Fridays for Future, a global climate change movement founded by Greta Thunberg, was accused of sedition for allegedly compiling and editing a Google doc explaining how to run a social media campaign. It was intended to help farmers, who have been camping outside New Delhi since November, to reinforce protests that have stirred India and poses one of Modi’s greatest challenges.
The farmers, the majority of whom are from the northern states of Punjab and Haryana, want laws passed last year to be repealed that they say favor big businesses and destroy their incomes. The government says the laws are necessary to modernize Indian agriculture.
Many of the protesters are from the Indian Sikh religion, but their grievances are rooted in economic issues, not religious ones.
Police say the document shared by Ravi spread misinformation, “tarnished India’s image” and may have incited farmers to turn violent on January 26, when clashes with police killed hundreds of people and one protester. .
Modi’s government has been increasingly inciting incitement against critics, intellectuals, activists, filmmakers, students and journalists, with police alleging that they pose a threat to national security. While convictions remain rare, the police don’t need an arrest warrant, making it an easy law to appeal, said Chitranshul Sinha, a lawyer who has written a book on the history of sedition law.
A defendant is often in custody until the case is heard by a high court, as many lower courts have no jurisdiction to dismiss such cases, he said.
The case has left a chilling effect on activists, with some highlighting a culture of intimidation that runs deep, sometimes even before an arrest takes place.
Mukund Gowda, a 25-year-old public works activist and youth leader of the Aam Aadmi opposition party in Bengaluru, was questioned by local police for almost a full day last year after writing a letter to the Prime Minister’s office calling attention on a broken road in his neighborhood and called his local representatives for taking no action. He shared the letter on his social media, which quickly went viral and landed him in a police station, he said.
“They (the police) tried to scare me and said they could charge me with sedition,” Gowda said.
He was released. Police said his actions were “politically motivated” but denied threatening him. The experience worried him and his family. He stopped posting on social media and renounced activism for a few months.
Another activist, Tara Krishnaswamy, said that peaceful protesters are sometimes questioned by police, even when they participate in small-scale civilian protests in Bengaluru.
“The intimidation comes in many forms. The data from the arrested activists doesn’t show the full picture – it’s much more pervasive, ”she said.
Washington-based Freedom House lowered India from “free” to “partially free” last week in its annual democracy survey. The decline reflects “a multi-year pattern in which the Hindu nationalist government and its allies have spearheaded increasing violence and discriminatory policies against the Muslim population and cracked down on expressions of dissent by the media, academics, social groups and protesters” . it says in a report.
The report also underlined how colonial-era laws are constantly being invoked to punish criticism from ordinary citizens.
The government called the report “misleading, inaccurate and misplaced”.
The use of sedition is the responsibility of state governments and their authorities trying to maintain “law and order,” he said. The government “attaches the utmost importance to the safety and security of all residents of the country, including journalists.”
According to Guha, the historian, democracy in India is in its worst state since the state of emergency in the 1970s, when then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended elections, curbed civil rights, imprisoned political opponents and censored the press.
He said previous governments have also tried to control independent institutions, but there has always been “a recovery, even a partial recovery.”
“I fear our democratic traditions will not be able to recover from this attack this time,” said Guha.