- 1 Alpa Shah is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford.
1After critically examining the socio-political inequalities that drive marginalized populations to take up arms against the state (2018), Alpa Shah expands her inquiry of state overreach in The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India.1 Turning her ethnographic attention from the forests to the courts and prisons, Shah interrogates the authoritarian turn of the Indian state under the right-wing regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
2The Incarcerations focuses on the Bhima Koregaon case, a watershed moment in India’s legal and political landscape, in order to document the lives of the sixteen human rights defenders accused of conspiring to assassinate the Prime Minister. They were charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), a law widely criticized for its expansive reach and potential for abuse. Shah utilizes an engaged anthropology that is not only ethnographically rich, but also politically invested in exposing the structural injustices faced by those framed as “anti-nationals.” Her narrative documents the lives of these activists both before and after their incarceration, weaving personal histories into a broader critique of how caste, ideology, and state power intersect to criminalize dissent and dismantle democratic safeguards. In doing so, Shah offers a searing indictment of a state apparatus that increasingly blurs the line between national security and political repression.
3The Bhima Koregaon case involves events following a violent clash on January 1, 2018, during the bicentenary celebrations of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon (1818). The annual commemoration of this battle, during which Dalit soldiers fighting for the British East India Company defeated the upper-caste Peshwa army, has become a symbol of Dalit pride and resistance. Dalit activists blamed Hindutva leaders like Milind Ekbote and Sambhaji Bhide for inciting violence, but neither of them was immediately arrested. Instead, the Indian state turned its focus to the Elgar Parishad, an event held in Pune on December 31, 2017, during which activists, lawyers, and cultural performers protested caste-based oppression. The state quickly accused several human rights activists of orchestrating the Bhima Koregaon violence as part of a broader conspiracy against the government. Multiple raids were conducted across India, and 16 activists, lawyers, academics, and poets were arrested under the UAPA for alleged Maoist links and harboring anti-national sentiments.
4The significance of the Bhima Koregaon affair, commonly referred to as “the BK-16,” lies in its representation of an increasing tendency to criminalize dissent in India. Shah’s work carefully narrates the political, social, and legal dimensions of this case to highlight this broader authoritarian trend that has developed since Modi’s ascent to power in 2014. Shah situates the Bhima Koregaon case within the context of contemporary protest movements in India—such as the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019), which fast-tracked citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from neighboring countries, effectively making religion a criterion for citizenship for the first time in India’s history.
5Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews with the families of the accused, personal testimonies, court documents, and independent journalism, Shah alternates fluidly between individual biographies and broader political analysis of the carceral state, showing how the lives of these activists reflect the wider struggle for democracy and justice in India. Her investigation delves into the personal histories of the accused, giving voice to their activism and struggles while also emphasizing the role of the state in fabricating their criminality.
6When this book was published in 2024, most of the accused in this case had spent years in jail without a trial (some have been granted bail or allowed house arrest on medical grounds), despite the overwhelming amount of evidence indicating that the initial accusation of plotting to assassinate the Prime Minister was fabricated. In a striking inversion of justice, the list of the accused in the BK-16 case consisted of people who had spent their lives defending the marginalized and upholding constitutional rights only to end up becoming targets of the state’s most punitive measures. Shoma Sen, an English professor, had long been an outspoken critic of the sexual violence inflicted upon women from indigenous communities in central India. Sudha Bharadwaj, a Massachusetts-born labor organizer who renounced her American citizenship in order to work as a human rights lawyer and trade unionist in India, was among the first to publicly condemn Sen’s arrest, only to be arrested herself a few months later. Ramesh Gaichor, Sagar Gorkhe, and Jyoti Jagtap were members of the cultural troupe Kabir Kala Manch, which used street theater to highlight caste-based injustices. The case of Stan Swamy, an 83-year-old Jesuit priest and lifelong advocate for Adivasi rights, illustrates the dehumanizing nature of the political incarceration faced by the BK-16. He was taken from his modest one-room home in Ranchi and imprisoned despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease. His request for a sipper cup, because he could not hold a regular cup, was delayed for over two months. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged, he was repeatedly denied bail, even as his health rapidly declined. He contracted the virus while in custody and died in July 2021, still awaiting trial. His death exemplifies how the state disciplines dissenting bodies through denial, degradation, and death.
7The book is divided into nine parts, including a prologue, introduction, and an epilogue. The first three parts focus on the lives of Sudha Bharadwaj, Stan Swamy, and Anand Teltumbde and their journeys into activism. Despite their different origins and missions, their paths eventually converged as they each sought to combat the brutalities and injustices the government inflicted upon the poor and the marginalized. While discussing the lives and works of these activists, Shah calls attention to the systematic injustices and brutal repression perpetuated by the state, which frequently go unreported in mainstream media. She highlights the activists’ resilience in the face Adivasi land struggles and anti-caste, Muslim, and Kashmiri rights movements and uncovers many instances of land alienation, deprivation of access to forest resources, and forced displacement of tribals in the name of development projects without corresponding rehabilitation measures.
8In the book’s final chapters, Shah meticulously reconstructs the Bhima Koregaon case and details how something that began as a state investigation quickly devolved into a politically motivated witch hunt. She recounts the incident’s trajectory, from the initial arrests to the mounting legal battles and ensuing forensic inquiries. Her research includes extensive interviews with lawyers like Yug Chaudhury and Surendra Gadling, as well as consultations with forensic and cybersecurity experts. Part six of the book is especially revealing in its examination of cyber warfare’s role in the state’s repressive tactics. Shah examines reports from international cybersecurity firms such as SentinelOne and Arsenal Consulting alongside investigative journalism by outlets like The Sunday Times and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, uncovering how malware was used to infiltrate the devices of several accused individuals. Evidence suggests that fake, incriminating documents were planted on their laptops. These files were later used by the authorities to justify prolonged detention under draconian laws. This chilling manipulation of digital evidence demonstrates how authoritarian regimes increasingly exploit new technologies.
9Shah’s account of Father Stan Swamy’s final months is especially significant when read through Foucault’s carceral logic, in which the state enforces disciplinary surveillance that normalizes obedience and punishes deviation. While Shah does not explicitly draw on Foucault, her detailed narration of Swamy’s incarceration and death invites a reading that foregrounds how authoritarian regimes weaponize the law to suppress dissent and discipline and punish certain bodies. Interpreting Shah’s work alongside Foucault (1975), one might argue that through neglect, surveillance, and the systematic withdrawal of care, the state produces what he terms “docile bodies,” while simultaneously punishing those who refuse conformity (ie., the BK-16) as improper subjects. From this perspective, the denial of basic medical accommodations and bail for Father Swamy during a deadly pandemic was not an incidental event, but a calculated form of punishment meant to make an example of him. The Incarcerations thus reveals how the Indian state mobilizes imprisonment as both a legal tool and a disciplinary technique aimed at breaking the spirit of dissent.
10What does this uncover about the world’s largest democracy? What does it mean to invoke the language of legal rights when the state allows itself the right to kill, with no accountability? If merely raising one’s voice against authoritarianism makes someone a terrorist, then who is truly allowed to live? While Shah documents the legal and bureaucratic infrastructures that enable state violence, I read her account through Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) concept of “bare life,” a life stripped of political value and made killable. Her work evokes the cruel paradox at the heart of modern democracy, whereby democracy, even at its most triumphant, can fail to protect those most in need of protection. Through this lens, The Incarcerations becomes not only a study of legal impunity but a devastating meditation on how certain identities are rendered disposable. Shah’s writing compels us to ask the urgent and uncomfortable question of whose death will finally be enough to pierce through our collective amnesia?
11In the case of the BK-16, the government relied on fabricated evidence and dubious legal claims to present these activists as a threat to national security. This shift toward a more repressive state machinery is directly tied to the growing influence of neoliberal policies and the rise of Hindutva ideology. Shah highlights how neoliberal legal reforms co-opt social movements while systematically targeting marginalized populations. The throughline of how the state weaponizes law to expand its power while erasing those who resist remains central to Shah’s work, exposing the deep fractures within India’s justice system. She reveals the terrifying ease with which the Indian state recasts social workers, unionists, and artists as “anti-nationals.” The ability to criminalize dissent so swiftly speaks not only to the vulnerability of democratic freedoms, but also to a wider pattern of authoritarian drift. While this tactic intensified after the Bhartiya Janata Party’s (BJP) rise to power in 2014, Shah’s work argues that this is part of a broader, long-term democratic decline. Her analysis echoes Dean Spade’s (2015) critique of legal reforms that follow a rights-based approach.
12Shah shows that the state’s violence is not limited to overt repression or legal persecution. It also lies in its ability to create a climate of fear so pervasive that citizens begin to police themselves. In this sense, the panopticon state (Foucault 1975) wields its power not just through physical surveillance, but through an internalization of the State’s disciplinary gaze. The Incarcerations stands as a powerful act of memory and defiance against the authoritarian tendencies of a neoliberal, carceral, and increasingly fascist Indian state.
13As I read The Incarcerations, Achille Mbembe’s articulation of the necropolitical system of governance (2019) reverberated throughout its pages, particularly his claim that the state’s sovereign right to kill is exercised under the guise of civilizing violence and monopolizing truth. Father Stan Swamy’s death in custody becomes emblematic of this necropolitical regime, in which the state not only withholds life-sustaining care but reconfigures vulnerability itself as a threat. Shah’s intervention is especially vital in this context, not only as an ethnographic indictment of the carceral state, but as part of a growing body of critical scholarship responding to India’s democratic backsliding and rising Hindu majoritarianism (Jha 2017; Purohit 2023; Chopra 2019; Hota 2023; and Sajjanhar 2024). Recent works like these have uncovered the various tools of repression, which are frequently cultural and digital, as well as highlighted and detailed how India’s democracy has been hollowed out from within, exposing how caste, indigeneity, and technocratic populism are embedded into the state’s disciplining apparatus.
14Through its investigative rigor and unflinching moral clarity, The Incarcerations, stands as one of the most urgent and necessary contributions to this conversation, refusing complacency and demanding accountability in an era of compulsive, manufactured silence. It reflects a mode of engaged anthropology that challenges the disciplinary boundaries between scholarship, activism, and solidarity. Shah joins a growing body of scholars—including those working in the traditions of Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2009), Didier Fassin (2013) and Kim TallBear (2017)—who argue that ethnography must be ethically situated and politically accountable, especially when dealing with state violence and carceral regimes. Refusing the comfort of neutrality, Shah writes from a position of alignment with the incarcerated, showing how anthropological knowledge can be mobilized not just to interpret the world, but to intervene in it.