Contents
Dramatis Personae
PROLOGUE
From a nest to a cage
Media trials
#MeToo Urban Naxal
A temporary relief
BK-16
INTRODUCTION
The mother of democracy
Rising authoritarianism
The multi-armed octopus
Custodians of democracy
PART ONE
American citizenship surrendered
A happy Cambridge childhood
Some things you just absorb through osmosis
'Commies' in an American Dream
A legendary labour leader beckons
A small cog in the red and green union
The need for an identity?
A new marital home
Losing a mother and a father
The Sarkeguda 'fake encounter'
Becoming a lawyer
The first legal victory
Protecting democratic rights
Scaling the wall of silence
The paper fight and the street fight
The battle against the mining corporations and state nexus
An array of democratic rights lawyers and activists inspired
Hounded out
A pillar of democratic rights
PART TWO
Justice delayed is justice denied
Arbitrary arrests
Is anyone listening?
A utopian oasis in an urban jungle
Cutting ties with family
Into the tiger's den
Questioning the proselytisation
The priest who leapt across the church walls to become an Adivasi
Groomed to be a Jesuit Director
The dark side of the Church unveiled
The second baptism of social analysis
The need to protect indigenous rights
An engine of activism
A 'national traitor' and the burial stone, Pathalgadi, movement
Impossible to do business
PART THREE
Speak out before your turn comes
Reservations within reservations
The Khairlanji murders and India's hidden apartheid
Tracing the footsteps of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar
The lonely furrow of an organic intellectual
Hindu right-wing forces wooing Dalits
The next Dr Ambedkar
PART FOUR
An annual Dalit commemoration at a British war memorial
Anita Sawale heads into a riot
Fire tenders
Justice short-lived?

PART FIVE
The new plot
A loud appeal of the people
People's poets
The literary rebel anti-fascist front
Connecting two unconnected events
Nothing adds up
The Gadchiroli Massacre
An activist professor of English
A young forests rights activist
A Dalit lawyer who holds the police to account
A perennial student-activist fighting for the rights of political prisoners
Whoever spoke out was targeted, the case of the writer-cartoonist duo
PART SIX
Fabricated letters?
A Trojan Horse hacked computers?
Clearing Stan Swamy's name
The Pune City Police?
The search for the holy grail
of the state? Cyber warfare backed by the highest levels
The curious case of a Delhi University professor
Israeli spyware sold to governments
Cyber doubts
Hacker-for-hire mercenary gangs?


'Everyone has the right to imagine, make assumptions, presumptions, but fact is fact.'
PART SEVEN
A letter from prison
The 'crimes' of a democratic rights activist and journalist
Exposing one of the world's densest and bloodiest military occupations, Kashmir
The Muslim Other in the world's largest prison house
How light gets in
PART EIGHT
The process is the punishment
The octogenarian revolutionary poet and priest at the claws of death
Neo-liberal economic policy and anti-dissent anti-terror laws
A war without witnesses
The judiciary compromised
One of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists
PART NINE
Clipping the wings of the last bastions of democracy
The 'mother of democracy' grows fascism
The seeds of democracy preserved within fascism
EPILOGUE
Chronology of key events in the
Bhima Koregaon case
List of illustrations
Glossary
Acronyms
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index