BK-16 Prison Diaries: Anand Teltumbde reflects on his arrest and incarceration

ILLUSTRATION BY ARUN FERREIRA FOR THE POLIS PROJECT

To mark six years of the arbitrary arrests and imprisonment of political dissidents in the Bhima Koregaon case, The Polis Project is publishing a series of writings by the BK-16, and their families, friends and partners. (Read the introduction to the series here.) By describing various aspects of the past six years, the series offers a glimpse into the BK-16’s lives inside prison, as well as the struggles of their loved ones outside. Each piece in the series is complemented by Arun Ferreira’s striking and evocative artwork.

Though I have been active in the civil-rights movement for over four decades, contributing to defence of the states’ hapless victims, I never imagined that I myself would land up in jail one day as those we defended. Even after the Pune police arrested five activists in connection with the violence at Bhima-Koregaon on 1 January 2018; even after the cops read out a letter purportedly written by a Maoist functionary to me, as they recovered from the hard disk of one of the arrestees and obviously implicated me into the crime; even after they raided my house in the campus of Goa Institute of Management in our absence—I thought they might not arrest me. My delusion about my eminence was rudely demolished when they arrested me as I alighted from the Kochi-Mumbai flight at the Mumbai airport on 2 February 2019, in the wee hours of the morning, as…


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Anand Teltumbde held top management positions in BPCL and Petronet India before joining as Professor at IIT,Kharagpur (2010-2016) and subsequently Goa Institute of Management until he was implicated and arrested in the Bhima Koregaon case. He had a parallel career as a civil-rights and educational-rights activist and is General Secretary of CPDR. He authored more than 30 books on issues of caste, class and neoliberal economics as an aid to peoples' movement.