Romila Thapar and others.; and by Sandeep Pandey et al.

Romila Thapar And Others Appeal For Prompt Treatment For Varavara Rao

Appealing to the government of Maharashtra and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to facilitate the release of poet and activist Varavara Rao to JJ Hospital in view of his reported ill health, academics Romila Thapar and Prabhat Patnaik and others have said ‘there is no reason in law or conscience” to hold him in these circumstances.

Varavara Rao is at the Taloja Jail in Navi Mumbai as an accused in the Bhima Koregaon violence case. On Saturday, his family said that the poet’s health had deteriorated and he was delirious. His daughter Pavana told The Wire that Rao has not been provided adequate care in the jail and has started losing coherence. The statement by his family is also appended below.

The complete statement of Romila Thapar and other academics is as below.

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According to press reports and the statement of his family, the renowned Telugu poet and writer, P. Varavara Rao is extremely ill in Taloja jail. He is suffering from low levels of sodium and potassium as diagnosed by the JJ Hospital, Mumbai, where his treatment was abruptly terminated and he was taken back to Taloja Jail in Navi Mumbai. This is a life threatening situation for someone who is 81 years of age, and already suffers from high blood pressure and heart conditions.

We appeal to the Government of Maharashtra and the National Investigation Agency to facilitate the immediate transfer of Mr. Varavara Rao to JJ Hospital where he can receive proper treatment. Mr Rao poses no flight risk and has voluntarily submitted to all investigations for the past 22 months. There is no reason in law or conscience to hold him in circumstances that increase risk to his fragile health.

Even before Mr. Rao was arrested, we had been arguing that the investigation should be impartial, speedy and supervised by the judiciary. We have now reached a stage where his life is at stake. To knowingly risk the life of a person in state custody by refusing proper medical treatment would amount to a form of the “encounter”, an extra-legal punishment which the State institutions are duty-bound to forego.

We appeal to the authorities to assure the nation that the Indian State respects the rule of law and the Constitution, by ensuring that P.Varavara Rao receives immediate and proper treatment and that his family is allowed to look after him during his illness.

Appeal issued by the following five petitioners who had approached the Supreme Court on the matter of the Bhima Koregaon arrests (Romila Thapar & Ors. Vs. Union of India & Ors., Writ Petition 32319 of 2018):

Romila Thapar, Prabhat Patnaik, Devaki Jain, Maja Daruwala, Satish Deshpande.

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Press Release, July 12, 2020

Don’t Kill Varavara Rao in Jail!

We, the family members of Varavara Rao, world-renowned Telugu revolutionary poet and public intellectual, who is incarcerated in Navi Mumbai’s Taloja Jail, are very much worried about his deteriorating health. His health condition has been scary for over six weeks now, ever since he was shifted in an unconscious state to JJ Hospital from Taloja Jail on May 28, 2020. Even as he was discharged from the hospital and sent back to jail three days later, there has been no improvement in his health and he is still in need of emergency heathcare.

The immediate cause of concern now is that we are very much perturbed at the routine phone call we received from him on Saturday evening. Though the earlier two calls on June 24 and July 2 were also worrying with his weak and muffled voice, incoherent speech and abruptly jumping into Hindi. As an eloquent and articulate public speaker and writer in Telugu for over five decades, a Telugu teacher for four decades and known for his meticulous memory, this fumbling, incoherence and loss of memory were in themselves strange and frightening.

But the latest call, on July 11 is much more worrisome as he did not answer straight questions on his health and went into a kind of delirious and hallucinated talk about the funeral of his father and mother, the events that happened seven decades and four decades ago respectively. Then his co-accused companion took the phone from him and informed us that he is not able to walk, go to toilet and brush his teeth on his own. We were also told that he is always hallucinating that we, family members, were waiting at the jail gate to receive him as he was getting released. His co-prisoner also said he needs immediate medical care for not only physical but also neurological issues. The confusion, loss of memory and incoherence are the results of electrolyte imbalance and fall of Sodium and Potassium levels leading to brain damage. This electrolyte imbalance may be fatal also. Taloja Jail Hospital is not at all equipped to handle this kind of serious ailment either in medical expertise or equipment. Thus it is highly required that he be shifted to a fully equipped super specialty hospital to save his life and prevent possible brain damage and risk to life due to electrolyte imbalance.

At the present juncture we are leaving aside all the pertinent facts like, that the case against him is fabricated; he had to spend 22 months in jail as an undertrial with the process turned into punishment; his bail petitions got rejected at least five times now and even the bail petitions with his age, ill-health and Covid vulnerability as grounds were ignored. His life is the top most concern for us right now. Our present demand is to save his life. We demand the government to shift him to a better hospital or allow us to provide required medical care. We want to remind the government that it has no right to deny the right to life of any person, much less an undertrial prisoner.

P Hemalatha (wife)

P Sahaja, P Anala, P Pavana (daughters)

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Only Political Vendetta Can Explain Varavara Rao’s Incarceration

Surabhi Agarwal and Sandeep Pandey

The renowned Telugu poet and political activist Varavara Rao has been in police custody since 18 November 2018. The charges against him are: waging war against the state, conspiring to overthrow the government and plotting the assassination of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Varavara Rao is one of India’s foremost intellectuals who has inspired three generations of activists, writers and students. He is one of the founders of the Viplava Rachayitala Sangham (Revolutionary Writers’ Association) or Virasam which has played a major role in the development of Telugu literature in the last half-century. His poetry – which speaks of the brutality of state and societal repression, and expresses an unwavering commitment to the struggle for social justice – has been translated into all major Indian languages.

According to a profile published on the Poetry International Archives website, in Varavara Rao’s poetry, “there is evidence not only of commitment to a cause but commitment to craft. These are poems of anger, of outrage, biting indictment certainly. But there is also a palette of tonal variety. For Rao is also a lyric poet whose work is capable of combining elegy with hope.”

In addition to being a poet, Varavara Rao is a renowned literary critic and translator. His PhD thesis ‘Telangana Liberation Struggle and the Telugu Novel: A Study Into Interconnections Between Society and Literature’ is regarded as one of the finest works of literary criticism in Telugu literature. He has also taught literature for 40 years, during which time he launched the popular literary magazine Srujan. The magazine provided a platform for the promotion of modern Telugu literature and was published for over 25 years until 1992.

The persecution Rao under the Modi regime comes, of course, as no surprise. Writers and poets have always been at the forefront of political dissent under authoritarian and autocratic governments and are always among the first voices to be suppressed during such times.

Varavara Rao is no stranger to harassment and imprisonment by the state. He was first arrested in 1973 because the revolutionary nature of his poetry was seen as a threat by the government. At that time the Andhra Pradesh High Court had ordered his release, stating that writers cannot be arrested for simply giving expression to their imagination. He was arrested again in 1974 and then in 1985 but was on both occasions eventually acquitted of all charges.

When the Emergency was imposed in the country in 1975, Rao – who had recently got out of jail on bail after being charged in the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case – was promptly rearrested. 30 other members of Virasam were also sent to jail during this time. Refusing to be silenced, they kept their struggle alive by collaborating to launch a hand-written literary magazine for the prison inmates.

Rao has spent a total of 8 years in prison so far, but prison walls have never been able to restrict his artistic spirit. He has continued to write poetry and translate important literary works into the Telugu language even while incarcerated. In fact, almost half of the corpus of his writings has been composed in jail.

Varavara Rao’s most recent arrest was for his involvement in the Elgar Parishad rally which took place in December 2017. The event was alleged by police to have Maoist links and was held responsible for the Bhima Koregaon anti-Dalit violence that followed.

All ‘evidence’ against Rao in the case is based on some letters recovered from computer hard drives which were seized by the police from the homes of various political activists. The police failed to follow proper protocols during the raids and in the gathering of data from the hard drives. An investigation by Caravan Magazine has revealed that the hard drives contained a kind of spyware which allows their activity to be monitored and files to be planted on them from a remote source. Since then there have been reports of spyware attacks on several other activists as well. This strongly suggests that the evidence is fabricated.

The content of these letters led to the imprisonment of 10 others in addition to Varavara Rao: Surendra Gadling, Sudhir Dhawale, Mahesh Raut, Sudha Bharadwaj, Rona Wilson, Shoma Sen, Gautam Navlakha, Arun Ferriera, Vernon Gonsalves and Anand Teltumbde – all of whom are well-known social and political activists and have been openly critical of the Modi government.

Recently, in a letter addressed to Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, former information commissioners Shailesh Gandhi and M. Sridharacharyulu have stated that there is no implicating evidence against Varavara Rao. They have pointed out that the Pune police and the state investigation teams investigated the case for 16 weeks but could not collect “even an iota of evidence”.

The Maharashtra government, which recently came to power, had also declared that they would close his case file soon. But the union government hurriedly transferred the case to the National Investigation Agency, preventing any possibility of justice.

Mr Rao is now 80 years old. He recently developed major health complications because of which he has had to be hospitalised. His continued imprisonment under such circumstances, especially in the face of the risk posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, is completely unacceptable. He must be released immediately.

It is a matter of shame that dreaded criminals in India receive political patronage and hence even after a number of cases filed against them are able to remain outside jail, whereas intellectuals like Varavara Rao languish in jail. The faliure of the government on various fronts like foreign policy, domestic law and order, tackling coronavirus crisis or the associated problem of migrant workers, sagging economy is also because the Bhartiya Janata Party government has been busy pursuing the political agenda of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and acting with political vendetta against citizens who question the RSS-BJP ideology. Otherwise how does it explain the incarceration of activists when the government is preventing mass gatherings by keeping educational institutions closed and suggesting people to remain at their homes. Government acting with vengeance against citizens who participated in the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens movment all through the coronavirus crisis and during the lockdown period shows what the priority of this government is.

[The writers are associated with Socialist Party (India).]