‘How Long Can the Moon Be Caged?’: An investigation of how the state can stifle dissent brutally
Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia also write about those who are battling to uphold individual and human rights.
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The book, How Long Can the Moon Be Caged?: Voices of Indian Political Prisoners by Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia begins with a quote from the book, The Gulag Archipelago by Russian literary great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
‘At no time have governments been moralists.
They never imprisoned people or executed them for having done something.
They imprisoned and executed them to keep them from doing something.’
And the authors prove this in chilling, frightening and alarming detail.
As Vijayan and Recchia state, “Political prisoners challenge existing relations of power, question the status quo, confront authoritarianism and injustice; they stand with the disenfranchised. Theirs is a ‘thought’ crime: the crime of thinking, acting, speaking, probing, reporting, questioning, demanding rights, defending their homes, and, ultimately, exercising citizenship.”
Arrests and incarcerations
The state’s response: widespread arrests and incarcerations. Even illegal bulldozing of homes. One of the authors’ research colleagues, student activist Afreen Fatima’s house in Uttar Pradesh, was demolished by the authorities on June 10, 2022.
The first chapter, “A Season of Arrests”, chronicles in a timeline from May 9, 2014, to April 17, 2024, the arrests, temporary releases, and rearrests of many activists, poets, fact-checkers, journalists, lawyers, social workers, intellectuals and members of the Dalit community. It adds up to 41 pages.
It also reports on the judicial fight waged by these individuals and groups, even as...
