The Lucknow Conspiracy Case and the Mis-Rule of Law
An InSAF India Long Read
Introduction
This article has been written in a period of escalating intensification of state repression in India, in particular the repression of ground-level activists focusing on the land rights and human rights of marginalised Indigenous (Adivasi and other tribal communities) and caste-oppressed peoples, and religious minorities. After claiming success in ‘annihilation’ of the longstanding people’s struggle and insurgency in the Adivasi (Indigenous Peoples) areas in March 2026, the government of India has expanded its call to end ‘Naxalism’ (Maoism) in central India, to include anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-displacement and labour activists across the country as so-called ‘Urban Naxals’ or, more recently, ‘Dimagi Naxals’ [‘intellectual Naxals’]. Indian intelligence agencies and security forces are bearing down with full impunity on workers, lawyers, public intellectuals, journalists and students activists. The situation is akin to a ‘mopping up’ operation to destroy all forms of resistance and protest against the anti-people, pro-capitalist and Brahminical fascist majoritarian policies of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime.
This article spotlights what is known as the ‘Lucknow Conspiracy Case’ (LCC) that emerged from an FIR or First Information Report (RC 01/2023/NIA-LKW) filed on 19 June 2023, by the under-secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs in Lucknow to urge the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to investigate ‘alleged reports of concerted attempts by leaders, sympathisers, and over-ground workers of the banned CPI (Maoist) Party working for the revival of the Northern regional bureau of the proscribed party’. In a period of approximately three years, the NIA has raided residences of over thirty activists, and called many for interrogation[1] as well as raided the offices of organisations such as Bhagat Singh Chhatra Ekta Manch and Delhi General Mazdoor Front (DGMF), and arrested three activists.
Ajay Kumar Singhal, lawyer, writer and an anti-displacement activist was arrested on 30 August 2024. Nearly eleven months later, on 29 July 2025, Adivasi labour activist Priyanshu Kashyap[2] was arrested. Documentary film-maker (‘People’s Marx’), Vishal Singh, was arrested just over a month before him, on 22 June 2025 and at the time of writing, was admitted to a specialist hospital after passing through a critical period of deteriorating health while the state dallied with his life.
This article argues that LCC is not a unique case – the raids, arrests, fabricated charges and ‘process as punishment’ all mirror to some extent similar phases in previous conspiracy cases, in particular the Bhima Koregaon or BK-16 conspiracy case, in which a wide-ranging group of 16 academics, journalists, lawyers, students and grassroots activists were arrested under India’s anti-terror legislation, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) between mid-2018 and September 2020. They were detained and imprisoned for ostensibly conspiring with a banned organisation (CPI (Maoist)) to wage war against the government of India, as noted in the chargesheet.
We start laying out our argument by asking two questions:
How did we get to the point where Vishal, the young filmmaker who painstakingly documented the long journeys of India’s thousands of internal ‘migrant’ workers during the Covid-19 debacle, was having to fight for his own life after spending around eighteen months in Lucknow Jail?
How do states, and the Indian state in particular, justify extraordinary detention, and what happens when emergency measures become routine?
The first part of the article describes the legal architecture underpinning India’s approach to upholding national and internal security: the laws that can be categorised as preventive detention and sedition laws – statutes that let the state hold someone on ambiguous charges, without conviction, sometimes without ever bringing them to trial, on the basis that they are a danger to its existence. From Indian Occupied Kashmir to the forests of Bastar Division in the southern part of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, and to civil society more broadly in India - each has grown its own grammar of struggle, shaped by different terrain and histories and it would be incorrect to flatten them into one story. And yet, look closely enough at how the state moves in each of these spaces, and a single architecture starts to emerge beneath the surface variation: an inheritance from colonial rule, in which the instruments once reserved for the battlefield and for colonized subjects – surveillance, cordon-and-search, the language of insurgency and threat – quietly migrate into the ordinary business of governing civilians of a nominally democratic state and quashing any resistance that comes it way [3].
The second part of the article provides some general historical context to conspiracy cases in India. It argues that the BJP regime is running a concerted campaign to delegitimise civil society organisations, by framing them as institutions aiming to dismantle India’s security and integrity, following up on precedents set up by the erstwhile British government to delegitimise peoples’ struggles against its colonial rule in India.
The Beginnings of ‘Rule of Law’ in India
The foundation of the laws underpinning India’s security architecture goes back to British colonial rule (typically of things relating to governance and judicial matters broadly): the emergence of these legislations follows upon the heels of a series of rebellions in Adivasi regions in the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.[4] Rebellions were rarely quashed through military force alone – certain laws also did some of that work: anti-terror law, land administration law, and now, increasingly, laws that simply redefine dissent itself as a threat to national security.
TADA and POTA
Fast forward to four decades after the British left, in 1987, India introduced its Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TADA), and in 2002, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA). Together, these laws built what amounted to a parallel criminal justice system in which special courts were established where confessions made to a police officer were treated as admissible evidence, reversing the ordinary presumption against relying on statements made in custody; and, in many cases, no right to anticipatory bail at all, with bail after arrest made considerably harder to secure than under ordinary law. This reverses the presumption of innocence, whereby the working of the rule of law procedurally focuses on establishing the innocence of the alleged person, rather than the guilt.
Sections 120A and 120B of the Indian Penal Code are a crucial starting point to understand how these laws operate. The original 1860 provisions laid the groundwork for accusing and punishing people for conspiracy. These two sections have now been merged into Section 61 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Section 120A defines criminal conspiracy as an agreement between two or more persons to commit an illegal act, or to commit a legal act by illegal means. Crucially, the offence is complete the moment two or more people ‘agree’ to do something illegal – the actual crime need never be carried out. This effectively makes conspiracy a ‘thought crime’, and it is this provision that is most often invoked to accuse multiple people in conspiracy cases, without any need to prove that an illegal act was actually committed. The second limb of the provision – 'a legal act by illegal means' – casts the net even wider, bringing otherwise lawful activities, such as holding a protest meeting, within the ambit of the law.
In 2004, the Supreme Court upheld the law in the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) versus Union of India, reasoning that it was part of India’s international obligation to fight terrorism.
POTA further expanded police powers and allowed for special investigations, courts and trial procedures which created exceptions to the ordinary due process rights integral to any legal system to function reasonably. POTA was in use from 2001 to 2004, and the law’s victims were disproportionately Muslim. While the extrajudicial powers under this Act were later repealed in 2004, many oppressive measures were legislated into the criminal code through amendments to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) of 2004. The promulgation of both laws coincided closely with moments when ruling coalitions were being remade, and anti-terror legislation became part of the terrain on which shifting alliances and configurations of power were worked out. This marked a greater shift whereby nation building no longer needed to be staged as an extraordinary response, constructed through the figure of the terrorist or armed insurgent as the nation's constitutive 'other' as it had, by then, settled firmly into the register of the ordinary.
One feature of TADA and POTA is easy to overlook, but it mattered more than it seemed to at the time: both laws came with a sunset clause, requiring review and renewal every two years. In theory, this made them temporary – emergency provisions that had to keep justifying themselves to survive. Most defendants were ultimately acquitted, but only after years of custody had already passed – the time spent awaiting trial functioning as the real penalty, independent of the outcome. That safeguard vanished when UAPA absorbed POTA's role. Removing it changed the nature of the law itself: a measure once defended as exceptional and time-bound became a standing part of ordinary legal practice.
The UAPA
The National Investigative Agency (NIA) now operates with such broad authority that it has effectively become the state’s primary instrument for shutting down dissent. The NIA formed in 2009, was India’s first agency to be granted explicit federal powers — the ability to investigate and make arrests in any state without that state government's consent, effectively creating a ‘super security police’. Its creation was made possible by the backdrop of the global ‘war on terror’, which made manufacturing public consent for such sweeping powers relatively easy.
Look at the cases it has built its reputation on – BK-16, the string of arrests targeting journalists – and a pattern emerges: nearly all of them rest on UAPA charges, with the agency driving the prosecution. The law itself dates back to 1967, but its current shape owes far more to two later amendments: one passed after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, another in 2019. The 2008 changes doubled police custody from fifteen days to thirty; the ceiling on pre-charge detention rose from ninety days to a possible one hundred and eighty and bail increasingly theoretical. The courts were now required to deny it whenever the accusation looked ‘plausible’ on its face, bringing it under the remnants of preventative detention – a form of detention where the logic of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is inverted.
The Act defines ‘unlawful activity’ and ‘terrorist act’ in language that is, by design, extraordinarily wide. An unlawful activity is any action that supports or intends to bring about the secession of Indian territory, that questions India’s sovereignty, or that ‘causes disaffection against India’. The definitions in these laws are elastic enough to hold almost anything a government finds inconvenient. Possessing a book, or giving a speech, can be enough. Just a year ago, in August 2025, the Jammu and Kashmir administration banned twenty-five books outright – among them Arundhati Roy’s Azadi, Anuradha Bhasin’s A Dismantled State, and a book about the mass rape at Kunan Poshpora – on the grounds that they would ‘promote a culture of grievance, victimhood, and terrorist heroism’. That particular order leaned on India’s newer criminal codes rather than UAPA itself, but the language was the same: sovereignty, integrity, secession. Anand Teltumbde, Gautam Navlakha, Safoora Zargar, Umar Khalid, and Sudha Bharadwaj were each incarcerated on some version of this reasoning.
Section 38 of UAPA extends this further, criminalising mere association – the statute does not distinguish an innocent association from a criminal one, so a doctor, a lawyer, a journalist, or simply someone who gave the accused food or a livelihood, can be implicated. Further, Section 43(e)inverts the presumption of innocence that is supposed to anchor criminal law: in certain circumstances under UAPA, the accused must prove their own innocence, rather than the state proving guilt. The process itself becomes the punishment – because even an ultimate acquittal, often long delayed, does not compensate for the years that have been lost.
This did not begin in 2014 – the law has long been a tool available to successive regimes – but it has been sharpened since, with the emergence of a declaredly right-wing government focused on what it calls national security, amplifying its misuse. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data shows UAPA cases rose by a third between 2016 and 2019 alone, and the pandemic offered a further opening for arrests to proceed with less scrutiny. The clearest illustration is the BK-16 cases. Most of the 16 academics, authors, activists, advocates, poets and social workers arrested and imprisoned were leading members of India’s major democratic rights organisations. And in a supplementary chargesheet submitted to the special National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in Mumbai in October 2020, the NIA went further still, labelling nearly all of India’s major democratic rights organisations as frontal organisations of the CPI (Maoist). The law, as per the State’s narrative, meant to counter terrorism ,was turned against the very organisations built to document state violence.
The UAPA saw another round of amendments after Modi's second term in power began in 2019 whereby the authorities could now designate an individual a terrorist unilaterally, without having to produce evidence first. The logic of proof effectively flipped, it became the accused's task to demonstrate innocence, rather than the state's task to establish guilt. Nowhere did the amendment specify what actually constitutes a ‘terrorist’. It simply handed the NIA investigative authority over such cases, framed around protecting the ‘interests of India’ – a phrase left conspicuously undefined, offering no clarity on what those interests are, or whose interests count.
In practice, the UAPA functions less as a tool for prosecuting terrorism and more as a mechanism for holding people indefinitely, without ever bringing their case to trial. The numbers bear this out: most UAPA cases end not in conviction but in acquittal. A study by the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) found that 97.2 per cent of those detained under the law for extended periods were ultimately acquitted. Between 2015 and 2020, 8,371 people were arrested under the UAPA – and of them, only two hundred and thirty five were ever convicted. Adjudicating guilt was never really the point, however the process of detention was.
Taking this reasoning to Kashmir, the case of Khurram Parvez – a Kashmiri human rights defender who became an amputee while documenting landmines in 2004 in Kashmir during election-monitoring work, and whom the NIA arrested under this same law in November 2021. He was held for nearly four and a half years without ever being formally charged. A Delhi High Court finally granted him bail this June, ruling that ‘constitutional protections cannot be rendered meaningless by endless pre-trial detention’ – though even then, he remained entangled in a separate, still-open case from 2020. Therefore, the revolving doors of detention, created by these laws, continue.
The Case of the ‘Public Safety Act’
If UAPA is the law that mainland India has learned to live with, the Public Safety Act (PSA) is the law Kashmir has never been permitted to escape. This allows detention without charge for up to two years, and it is used exclusively in Kashmir (the Jammu and Kashmir PSA or JKPSA). What the constitution’s drafters meant to be an exceptional power has, under the JKPSA, become ordinary governance – the routine, not the exception. Its foundational flaw is the same one we saw in UAPA: vagueness.
Section 8 of the JKPSA permits detention for acting in a manner ‘prejudicial to public order’, a standard so open that it has been used against journalists and against children, creating a ‘jurisdiction of suspicion’. The law does not ask what a person has done; it asks what a person might do. A Kashmiri man, Abdul Waheed Bhat, for instance, was detained near a weapons cache in ‘suspicious condition,’ and his detention order concluded, without evidence, that he ‘could definitely have crossed the international border’ for training. That is the entire evidentiary standard – one of a suspected, speculated future criminal deed.
Consider the arithmetic. In 2023, Srinagar’s own police chief reported roughly ten active militants remaining in the Valley. If the JKPSA existed to counter militancy, its decline should have resulted in a corresponding fall in use of this Act. Instead, JKPSA detentions have risen sevenfold over six years. Journalist Majid Hyderi has spent close to two years in detention for allegedly using ‘the cover of journalism’ to provoke people against the government. The gap between the stated justification and the actual pattern tells its own story.
And when courts do intervene, the system has built its own workaround. Habeas corpus, the right to be released from unlawful confinement, exists in theory, but is rarely practiced. When the High Court quashes a detention order, a person can be re-detained under Section 19(2) even after a court has quashed the previous order. In the case of Mian Abdul Qayoom, the authorities themselves revoked the detention order days before the High Court’s expected judgment – and when a fresh order was issued, the habeas action had to begin all over again. One High Court judge described the result plainly: ‘It appears as if the preventive detention jurisdiction is answerable to no one’. It is a legal revolving door, one where the cell door remains closed. And in over 90 per cent of the cases Amnesty International analysed, detainees faced simultaneous JKPSA and criminal detention based on similar allegations – the JKPSA functioning as a backstop, so that if a criminal conviction cannot be secured and bail is granted, continued detention is ensured regardless.
Where This Leaves Us
There are parallel structures to the JKPSA. The Control of Organised Crime Acts being one. The first of these were enacted in Maharashtra, named the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA), and was passed by the BJP-Shiv Sena government in 1999, and the model has since been replicated in state after state where the BJP has come to power – Gujarat, Karnataka, Haryana, Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, and Delhi among them. Ostensibly framed as a tool to counter ‘organised crime’,' these laws have in practice been used to accuse people, Muslims in particular, in conspiracy cases. Crucially, they retain a provision POTA had introduced under which confessions made to the police are admissible as evidence in court. This has routinely allowed the police to extract forced confessions from one accused person and use them to implicate others in the same case, the classic method by which conspiracy cases are built.
In Chhattisgarh, there is the Chhattisgarh Vishesh Jan Suraksha Adhiniyam 2005 (CVJSA 2005) or in English, CSPSA – the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, and Maharashtra has recently passed its own, even more draconian, public safety act based on CSPSA. The language in CSPSA is again vague, giving the state room to criminalise almost anything under the garb of ‘security’ and enforcing ‘law and order’. A criminal act can include even a ‘tendency to pose an obstacle to the administration of law’and any person whose actions ‘encourage(s) the disobedience of the established law’ can be deemed ‘unlawful. That is, words such as ‘tends’ to do certain acts in Section 2(e) ignores the very basics of criminal law jurisprudence and provides discretionary power to the State and the judiciary to decide who is ‘unlawful’ irrespective of a person's action.
In addition, the law gives the state the power to inflict severe punishment for activities declared unlawful including membership of any group that the state has deemed ‘an unlawful organisation’. In states like Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, however, the public security act is only one of several laws used to criminalise, in particular, the Adivasi people. Also invoked are the Indian Penal Code, the Arms Act, and the Explosives Act, all implicating a person in what is often a fabricated crime that has nothing to do with the protest actually at hand. Adivasis are first incarcerated under these laws in what are termed ‘Naxal cases’ [5]– and in a number of similar conspiracy-type cases. UAPA has now been added on top in which the accused is accused under some form of preventative detention. A later acquittal, often delayed, becomes merely a performance of legality and the process itself becomes the punishment.
There is a broader logic at work underneath all of this. The vagueness written into these laws is not accidental – it enables a kind of juridical violence, in which the machinery of law itself, rather than the battlefield, becomes the site of coercion. What we are watching is the policing of civil society importing methods once reserved for military counterinsurgency into the everyday governance of civilians: ordinary people become suspects, and a counterinsurgency logic quietly divides the population into loyal and disloyal groups, with legitimacy defined by loyalty to the state’s own framing of national security. And a state organised this way does not stop at suppressing dissent – a securitised state ends up confronting its own people with the tools of war, in part because the capacity to kill and the capacity to extract, whether land, resources, or capital, turn out to be bound up with one another.
So – how have we reached the UAPA stage? In part, we argue that Kashmir has functioned as a testing ground for these tactics, and what is tested there does not stay there. Contrast the Public Safety Act with the National Security Act (NSA) used against the Cockroach Janata Party protesters in New Delhi. These techniques of exception, initially used to control, subjugate and terrorise populations at the margins of the Indian-State are now being imported as tools of governance to target populations situated at the internal margins. The use of these tactics has become so rife that the state of exception, once openly palatable only in territories like Kashmir, seems to be growing easier by the day to justify in mainland India.
At this point, it is worth naming the term that keeps surfacing in this context, quoted by Indian National Security Adviser Ajit Doval: civil society as a fifth column, language that echoes how the term was used around the Spanish Civil War – the population itself recast as an internal enemy, said to threaten the stability of the nation. Ajit Doval’s contribution to this discourse has been described as not simply a legal or political category but a kind of linguistic engineering – casting civil society itself as the terrorist, so that a battleground once understood as external is treated as internal instead. This counterinsurgency logic is now deployed not only on the hills of Bastar but on civil society itself. The rise of authoritarianism and the repression of dissent in the USA and parts of Europe, combined with the collective silence of Western governments on India’s human rights record have further emboldened Indian authorities to be open in their attacks on civil society.
It was in Kashmir, first, that the Indian state designated a journalist a ‘white collar terrorist’. The traditional enemy in this country’s imagination was named plainly enough – Pakistan, the Muslim, the Kashmiri. What these laws show is that same architecture of suspicion widening to include anyone who organises, documents, or dissents. Right now, the attack on civil society is the most blatant demonstration of this logic.
The NK-16 case put well-known names in front of the country – leading organisers, academics, lawyers, people whose arrests made headlines. But the people being swept up today are, increasingly, far less visible: the ones actually doing the on-the-ground work of organising – anti-displacement activists, labour organisers, student activists – rather than recognisable leadership or academic intellectuals. They are more vulnerable precisely because they are less known.
The Conspiracy Case as a Tool of State Repression
To fully understand the repressive nature of the system, it is important to place it in a historical context. Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru, three revolutionaries executed by the British government in the prime of their youth for their involvement in anti-colonial struggles, have never stopped inspiring generation after generation of Indian activists, including many implicated in the Lucknow Conspiracy Case.
Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were all members of the Hindustan Republican Socialist Army (HRSA). They were executed by India’s British colonial rulers in 1931 after being found guilty in the Lahore Conspiracy Case. This conspiracy is often presented as a case of ‘miscarriage of justice’, a phrase that is commonly heard in the corridors of justice in Britain. Such a conclusion is based on a presumption that the rule of law is genuinely just, but somewhere, somehow, in this case things went wrong. As Aparna Vaidik has argued in Revolutionaries on Trial, the prosecution and trial process clearly showed the Lahore Conspiracy Case was about state violence towards the revolutionaries. More broadly, by linking the term conspiracy to revolutionaries, States are able to quickly reduce revolutionaries to mere criminals, or something even worse, secret conspirators, in the eyes of the public. The public is also convinced that the State is not perpetrating any violence, it is making a sincere effort to maintain rule of law.
So the questions we need to ask about the LCC are not what the case is about, but:
Why are the people implicated being targeted?
Why does the state need to use a conspiracy case to target them?
Conspiracy cases were specifically used by India’s British colonial rulers to specially target communist and socialist organisations, in which the rather vague definition of conspiracy derives from the British Law of Evidence (see above, Section 120(A)and 120(B), Indian Penal Code). It is also worth noting that a conspiracy case also makes it easier for the public to accept that the police can never be sure of the extent and depth of the case. It generates a sense of vague unease, of living under siege, so once one is labelled a criminal, particularly of the ‘Naxal’ or ‘Maoist’ or ‘anti-national,’ or currently ‘Dimagi Naxal’, variety by the pliant media, the public feel safer if ‘those people’ have been rounded up.
A conspiracy case is not difficult to make up – once public perception is managed, those who are fabricating the case than let their imaginations run wild because the ‘crimes’ being described are not those that might have been carried out, but also ones that might be intended, that require two or more people to carry them out. This allows the State to file a first information report (FIR) with a few named accused people but also several ‘unknown’ accused people – running into hundreds, which include new people and whole communities that keep on being added to the case. For example in Odisha around 2005, whole villages resisting the establishment of a steel plant by the Korean company POSCO were arrested under fabricated charges. The conspiracy is also generally crafted as a crime plotted against the state. This means that the state can then present itself as the aggrieved party as well as the saviour of the people, because luckily for everyone, the intelligence agencies manage to find out about these plots before they are carried out.
In India, it was the British colonial government that began the practice of using conspiracy cases – they were particularly used to target people associated with communist and socialist organisations as they feared that these groups were spreading ideas such as communism and socialism among the Indian workers, what is often called the ‘Red Scare’ in Britain too itself.
During the period the HRSA was active, many labour movements were happening in industrialised areas, like the mill workers strikes in Bombay, in which communists were involved, the majority of whom were Indian. Still, the British needed a law under which to deport British communists like Phillip Spratt and Benjamin Bradley and prevent any support provided to Indian communist publications. The British Indian government developed a narrative that whatever economic pains people had, ‘labour disputes were undoubtedly fomented’ by the British communists, and the Russian influence, because really Communism had to be ‘alien’ to a country like India. This narrative received support from the British public because it had already been primed to believe that the Indian people’s communist Russian connections were preventing the supposedly good development that the British wanted to do in India.[6] This is useful history to know, because this trope is still prevalent not only in Britain but also in India, where all successive governments have promoted the discourse that the Adivasis in Bastar are being misled by the Maoists while the state really wants to do development for them. This reasoning is mirrored in the LCC, where the NIA has accused that the Maoists are preventing development in Adivasi regions, negating any agency for the Adivasis, insinuating that they might choose to become Maoists based on the reality that 95% of the over 550 alleged Maoists killed in 2024–2025 in ‘Operation Kagar’ were Adivasis.
Stepping back into history though once again, the Communist Party also established trade unions, peasant organisations and cultural movements, such as the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) or the Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA). Through these organisations, the Party was able to reach out to a vast number of people and survive the repression which was directly targeted against the then banned party, which included the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case in 1924 and Meerut Conspiracy Case in 1929. But this also then gave rise to the dreaded term ‘frontal organisations’, which states still use today to proscribe any organisation that it wants to ban by associating it as a ‘front’ of an already banned organisation, e.g. the Communist Party in British India and the CPI (Maoist) in present day India. In other words, the conspiracy cases were not simply about ‘prosecuting individuals’ but about breaking the organisation and mobilisation of workers and labourers. In the same vein, the arrest and execution of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev in the Lahore Conspiracy Case was not just about them as individual revolutionaries but their membership of HRSA.
Since 1947, successive Indian governments have continued to use the same tool to target communist/socialist organisations, and also, for example, people who resist its ideas of development. Over the last 50 years or so, a broad spectrum of civil liberties and democratic rights organisations (CLDROs) have played a very important part in the socio-political process of post 1947 India. That is, the CLDROs mushroomed in response to the Emergency in the 1970s, when civil society leaders and common citizens understood that the civil liberties of citizens actually needed organised efforts to protect and preserve against such ‘unusual’ situations like the Emergency. In effect, ever since then they have had to struggle to protect these rights even under very ‘usual’ conditions.
Even before the BJP came into power, individual activists from these organisations were always under the radar of the state and the organisations as a whole were also targeted, specially students unions. However, the BJP has been the most vicious, doing essentially what every openly fascist party does. Right when it came into power in Gujarat in 2002, it filed the first conspiracy FIR against organisations that were doing relief work after the pogrom that massacred Muslims, by targeting the organisations’ leaders like lawyer Mukul Sinha. Therefore, this pattern of targeting organisations that challenge repression has been a defining feature of governance under the BJP.
With the National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, an ideologue of the Brahminical Fascist RSS, declaring the civil society as the fifth column that had to be dismantled to strengthen India’s national security and integrity, the BJP-led government has run a concerted campaign of conspiracy cases to systematically delegitimise all civil society. In this, the official discourse around ‘communist as dangerous’ has been hyped up to the extent that the public see all civil society as fronts of the CPI Maoist, which ties in very well with the BJP’s extractive capitalist agenda.
Individuals are Targeted, Organisations are the Targets
Consider the Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolan (VVJVA) – the Movement against Displacement and for Peoples’ Development and labour movements particularly led by or majorly comprising Dalit Adivasi workers. How many people have heard of it or what happened to it?
Among VVJVA’s founder members was the late Professor GN Saibaba – an internationally renowned English teacher and a world-renowned scholar with 90% disabilities – persecuted for 10 years for unifying the voices of democratic dissent against the State-corporate nexus and becoming the voice of CLDROs and HRDs who spoke against the brutalities, massacring and other destruction wrought by the vigilante Salwa Judum (‘Purification Hunt’) and the state security forces in Operation ‘Green Hunt’ in Adivasi regions. Saibaba’s abduction was one of the first actions of the BJP in 2014, completing a targeting that was started under Congress. That is, in 2013, after Operation Green Hunt had become an embarrassment for the Indian state due to Saibaba and others efforts, the Ministry of Home Affairs in an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court said:
‘The ideologues and supporters of the Communist Party of India (Moaist) in cities and towns have undertaken a concerted and systematic propaganda against the state to project it in a poor light. … It is these ideologues who have kept the Maoist movement alive, and are in many ways more dangerous than the cadres of the PLGA’.
The BJP simply gave these ideologues a new label: ‘overground’ workers of the CPI Maoist, which obviously works underground. It also continued to use conspiracy cases to ‘mop them all up’ to undermine their organisations and organisational work. Mahesh Raut and the late Father Stan Swamy – both active members of VVJVA were arrested as part of the BK 16 and advocate Ajay Singhal – the first arrestee in the LCC – was also a very active member of VVJVA.
These four individuals represent the ‘layers’ of many civil society organisations – Saibaba worked to build a national-level coalition of CLDROs concerned about the happenings in Bastar under Salwa Judum, Stan Swamy and Mahesh Raut largely worked at state level in the mineral belts state of Jharkhand and Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, with the infinite patience to mobilise tirelessly, bringing people and groups together, explaining land rights laws to them in plain language. Ajay Singhal was deeply involved with ground level organising in both anti-displacement and labour spaces, as are those at current risk of being arrested in the LCC, including labour activists Shiv Kumar and Manjeet of Majdoor Adhikar Sanghtan and anti-displacement activist Rohit Kumar. Shiv Kumar was coerced to become a witness in the case and then tortured when he refused. Rohit had just recently secured bail after nearly three years as an undertrial prisoner due to several cases filed against him by the Bihar Police and the NIA when in August 2026, he received a notice from the NIA for questioning under the LCC.
On an individual level, we see the same pattern repeated again and again: scores of civil society actors interrogated, intimidated, harrassed and raided by the NIA during the purported investigation, while some are accused and offered protection if they become witnesses. But there are many who refuse to do so, like Professor Hany Babu, the twelfth target of the BK 16 case. These individuals are then arrested, and meanwhile someone else becomes the accused – the cycle continues. All the while, accused are taken into unjustified pre-trial detention, left to languish in jail, often in solitary confinement while the NIA creates a case with some legal structure that involves multiple people and is fraught with irregularities: baseless allegations, repeated denial of bail, some acquitted and then rearrested, and repeatedly delayed court hearings.
Following the LCC, advocate Ajay Singhal’s bail application was again refused recently. The courtroom trials are but a sham. About 600 of the 827 page conviction judgment in Saibaba and his co-arrestees case – there were 5 of them – were filled with cut and pasted sections of various books and pamphlets several times – many of them communist. Same story in the 10,000 page chargesheet in BK-16, where also in 2020 in a supplementary chargesheet, the NIA labelled nearly all major CLDROs in India as frontal organisations of the CPI(Maoist).
As limitless blackholes, these omnibus cases also can mop up whole dissenting communities like the Odisha case mentioned above or the Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand, or they can continue to pick up individuals from the pro-people movements under the pretext of the Moaist spectre – in fact with the new allegation of ‘dimagi Naxal’, an active delegitimisation exercise of the whole Naxalite movement is currently underway.
Thus, to understand which people are being targeted in the LCC and who might be in the future, it may be useful to first look at who was targeted in the Saibaba case and the BK-16. Was the late Pandu Narote, a co-accused of Saibaba, a communist, or a socialist or a social activist or an Adivasi farmer going about just living his life? Father Stan Swamy was a Jesuit priest who drew deeply on Jesuit Liberation Theology and Marxism, and will always be remembered for his ability to bring disparate groups and people together. In other words, building liberation movements. He also led the 2014 VVJVA study that exposed how thousands of Adivasis in Jharkhand were being picked up and jailed for years on end without trial – all alleged of being Maoists whether they really were or not. Both died after their health deteriorated in the prison. Saibaba survived about seven months after he was released after 10 years of gruelling prison conditions, including solitary confinement. All three are institutional murders.
Conclusion
Today, the conspiracy case continues to play a vital role in the State’s efforts to jeopardise the functioning of India’s CLDROs, even to the point of decimation, through its construction as a ‘limitless blackhole’ where due process is routinely bypassed to add more and more accused to a case keeping them mired in the legal system. The state gains public consent for this because there is widespread belief that the rule of law as established by the British is just per se – it is its misuse that is the problem. And if the revolutionaries are given a chance for a fair trial, they will be able to prove this. We concur with the view that conspiracy cases are not about miscarriage of justice but are the ‘site where the violence in what is called 'rule of law' is exercised in its full nakedness against communist/socialist organisations in particular and ordinary people who militantly refuse to toe the fascist state’s line’. In effect, conspiracy cases are tools to delegitimise and suppress any organised effort by the citizenry; individual expressions of protest and dissent, now increasingly restricted to social media, are still tolerable, but any efforts at organisation are immediately suspect of challenging the state’s authority and the dominant socio-economic and political order.
Breaking down the idea of conspiracy also allows making links between what’s happening in India and how these same ideas are today being used in other countries such as in the UK to suppress – for example – Palestine activism and other climate justice activism. Should the still existing and active MI5 in the UK be called out alongside the Gestapo – ostensibly consigned to history – when making the connections between the NIA in India and other fascist States; and that the BJP itself is a proclaimed frontal organisation of the RSS, a paramilitary organisation which has itself been proscribed a number of times in so called independent India due to its terroristic activities and which has openly proclaimed its opposition to the Constitution of India.
To conclude, as argued at the start, a conspiracy case – and so the LCC – is not unique in itself, but a tool to essentially break up the building resistance. Vishal Singh’s condition is stable at the time of writing and a medical bail application is being pursued – will the state let him survive?
F. Aziz and L. Singha for InSAF India, August 2026
Notes
[1] Many are members of organisations such as Manesar General Majdoor Sangh (MGMS), Delhi; Delhi General Majdoor Front (DGMF); Bhartiya Kisan Union (Krantikari); Punjab, Bhagat Singh Students Morcha, Banaras; People’s Union of Civil Liberties (UP); Savitribai Phule Organization; Majdoor Kisaan Ekta Manch; Inquilabi Chhatra Morcha; Majdoor Kisaan Morcha; Students For Society, Punjab (SFS); Majdoor Adhikar Sanghtan; Forum Against Corporatization and Militarization.
[2] Priyanshu Kashyap hails from Bastar, Chhattisgarh, the epicentre of the Indian State’s counter-insurgency programme that was escalated in 2024 with the killing of hundreds of Adivasi peoples.
[3] Listen also to Damodar Turi, Human Rights Defender and Convenor, Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolan (VVJVA, Movement against Displacement and for Peoples’ Development), the first speaker in Session 4 of the Deadline or Death Sentence Series, ‘Towards the Deadline (2): The State as Agent of Corporate Capitalism’, August 2025.
[4] For example, the Santhal Hul of 1855 – a Ho Adivasi uprising against British rule, moneylenders, and landlords – was followed by the Santal Parganas Settlement Regulations 1872 restricting the transfer of Adivasi land to outsiders. Birsa Munda’s uprising of 1899–1900 was followed by the Chotanagpur Tenancy Act of 1908. In both cases, legislation arrived in the wake of rebellion, framed as protection for Adivasi land rights while also tightening administrative control over the region.
[5] Quill Foundation’s Report Exposes Patterns in Naxal Prosecutions in Gadchiroli. 29 October 2024. Radiance News [Presuming Guilt: A Study Highlighting Patterns of Prosecution & Trial in ‘Naxal’ Cases in Gadchiroli, 2002-2015]; see also Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group. Undertrial Prisoners in the Bastar Division, 2015. This criminalisation of Adivasis/Indigenous Peoples’ is acknowledged in official government reports (e.g. Ministry for Tribal Affairs, Government of India. Report of the High Level Committee on Socioeconomic, Health and Educational Status of Tribal Communities of India, Ministry for Tribal Affairs, 2014, section 9.11. Repeated demands for the release of undertrial prisoners in Bastar have only resulted in committee reports, for example the Patnaik Committee and the Buch Committee, with no further action (Indigenous Peoples Rights International. Criminalisation of Adivasis and the Indian Legal System. November 2021. Baguio City, Philippines, pp.203–204.
[6] Rashmi Aggarwal. 2026. How Indian communists built a mass movement and why the state feared it; Anand Teltumbde. 2025. Dalits and the Indian Constitution; Prem Shankar Jha. 2025. The Dismantling of India's Democracy; Aparna Vaidik, 2024. Revolutionaries on Trial;Partho Sarothi Ray. 2022. Political prisoners unite the British Raj and the ‘New India’;Arvind Narrain. 2021. India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance; KG Kannabiran. Wages of Impunity: Power Justice and Human Rights; Anil Kalhan. 2007. Colonial Continuities: Human Rights, Terrorism, and Security Laws in India.
We thank the many comrades who gave time to discuss the ideas presented here and read the various drafts of the paper, all of which helped to ensure that the nuances of the argument came through clearly.