Alpa Shah talks to Nick Higham

Anthropologist Professor Alpa Shah discusses the incarceration of 16 human rights defenders in India and explains how it is a bellwether for the collapse of democracy in the country and marks an attack on key defenders of pillars of that democracy.

Shah says the Bhima Koregaon case saw 16 professors, lawyers, journalists and poets imprisoned as Maoist terrorists without credible evidence and without trial. She explains how their emails and mobiles were hacked and how implanted electronic devices were used to gather evidence. And she looks at the life stories of the 16 and the issues they fought for in representing India’s three main minorities, Adivasi, Dalits and Muslims.

Shah is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford and author of Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerillas, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and winner of the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book prize. Here she talks to journalist Nick Higham, who was the BBC’s first ever media correspondent and is a former presenter of Meet the Author on the BBC news channel.

This event is part of a series on uncovering public scandals and campaigns against injustice.