In the early hours of 10 September 2019, a team of police officials, including personnel from the Pune Police, turned up at the doorstep of Hany Babu MT, an associate professor in the University of Delhi’s English department. They raided his apartment in Noida and seized his laptop, mobile phone and other electronic devices, as well as two books. The raid lasted six hours but according to Babu, the police said they did not have an official search warrant at the time.
The police informed Babu that the search was conducted in connection with the Elgar Parishad and Bhima Koregaon case. They were referring to the arrests of several civil-rights activists and lawyers, who had been accused of involvement in caste-based violence in Bhima Koregaon, Maharashtra, on 1 January 2018, and of organising the Elgar Parishad, a mass public meeting on the previous day. Police officials across different states have conducted similar raids in connection to this case, including at the homes of K Satyanarayana—an academic at the English and Foreign Languages University Campus in Hyderabad—and Stan Swamy, a priest and Adivasi-rights activist.
Shaheen Ahmed and Maya Palit, the multimedia and books editors at The Caravan, respectively, spoke to Babu about the raid at his house and its aftermath. They also discussed his participation in anti-caste movements and in a committee for the defence of the incarcerated professor GN Saibaba, a Delhi University professor who was arrested in May 2014 on charges of having links to Maoists, and sentenced to life three years later. Situating the raid on his house in a broader moment of attacks on academics across the country, Babu said, “I think this is not an isolated thing, because this whole building up of an atmosphere, of having a negative campaign against people who are active in sociopolitical fields, this has been going on for long.”
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