The Incarcerations: Bk16 and the Search for Democracy in India

India, the world’s largest democracy, is facing its greatest challenge since the end of British colonial rule in 1947.

The Incarcerations tells the remarkable and chilling story of the Bhima Koregaon case, in which 16 human rights defenders (the BK-16) -- professors, lawyers, journalists, poets -- have been imprisoned, without credible evidence and without trial, as Maoist terrorists.

Expertly leading us through the case, Shah exposes some of the world’s most shocking revelations of cyber warfare research, which show not only hacking of emails and mobile phones of the BK-16, but also implantation of the electronic evidence that was used to incarcerate them. Through the life histories of the BK-16, Shah dives deep into the issues they fought for and tells the story of India’s three main minorities -- Adivasi, Dalits and Muslims -- and what the search for democracy entails for them.

Essential and urgent, The Incarcerations reveals how this case is a bellwether for the collapse of democracy in India, as for the first time in the nation’s history there is a multi-pronged, coordinated attack on key defenders of various pillars of democracy.

Alpa Shah is the award-winning author of Nightmarch. She has written and presented for BBC Radio 4. She was raised in Nairobi and studied at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics, where she is now Professor of Anthropology. She will be the next Professor of Social Anthropology at All Souls College, Oxford from October 2024.