THEOn the streets of Bangalore, protesters gathered, residents standing defiantly alongside students and activists. Their posters displayed slogans such as “defending farmers is not sedition” and “when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes a duty” and most held the photo of a smiling young woman: Disha Ravi, 22.
Ravi has been a well-known figure in Bangalore’s vibrant environmental circles for the past three years, but over the weekend she became the face of the Indian government’s violent crackdown on dissent.
On Saturday, she was arrested at her home, which she shares with her mother in Bangalore, flown to Delhi, placed in the custody of Delhi police without a lawyer and charged with sedition and criminal conspiracy.
“This government in India is attacking environmental activists and Disha’s arrest shows that there is a clear and deeply worrying pattern,” said Leo Saldhana, an environmental activist in Bangalore. “The objective here is to destabilize and then erase all differences.”
Ravi’s alleged crimes are related to a “toolkit” document linked to ongoing farmers’ protests in India, which the police say is evidence of a coordinated international conspiracy against India.
Since November, hundreds of thousands of farmers have camped around Delhi, demanding that three controversial new agricultural laws be repealed because of concerns that their livelihoods will be left to the mercy of private companies. Ravi, the farmers’ granddaughter, had passionately supported their cause.
She is no stranger to activism. In 2019, inspired by Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, whose global climate protest movement Fridays For Future (FFF) saw millions of schoolchildren struggling with their failure to fight global warming, Ravi co-founded the Indian branch of the FFF network and started organizing strikes across the country.
She had already felt the impacts of climate change on her life. The town house where she lived with her mother, who raised her as a single mother, flooded every time it rained, getting worse every year and her hometown, Bangalore, should be running out of water in a matter of years. His grandparents, farmers, fought drought, crop failure and floods as a result of global warming.
“My motivation for joining climate activism came from seeing my grandparents, who are farmers, fighting the effects of the climate crisis,” said Ravi in an interview in 2019. “At the time, I didn’t know what they were experiencing was the crisis climate change because climate education does not exist where I come from. “
Whether coordinating environmental strikes, participating in lake cleaning operations, organizing tree planting exercises or organizing climate action workshops, Ravi has always been there and was known for her in-depth knowledge of the issues. She was also the sole provider for the family and reconciled work at a plant-based food production company alongside her activism.
“Disha was known for being incredibly hardworking, totally dedicated to environmental causes to the point that she was exhausted because she was so deeply committed. I worried about her sometimes, that she sacrificed her well-being for her activism, ”said a fellow activist from Bangalore who asked not to be identified for fear of the authorities.
In the international press that covered the global phenomenon of the FFF movement, it was Ravi who was interviewed regularly and was often very critical of the policies of the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“We are not just fighting for our future, we are fighting for our present,” she told the Guardian in 2020. “We, the people most affected, will change the conversation in climate negotiations and lead a fair recovery plan that benefits people. and not our government’s pockets. “
Fridays for Future India was already on the Delhi police radar. In July 2020, after the group launched an online campaign against a proposed law that would dilute environmental regulations, the group’s website was temporarily taken down by the Delhi police cyber crime unit.
Since September, attracted by her personal family connection, Ravi has launched her passion for the cause of India’s farmers. Some fellow environmental activists said they warned her against this. Defending farmers was at risk of attracting unwanted attention from authorities and government, which in recent weeks have taken an increasingly draconian approach to those who participated, spoke or even reported protests.
Accusations of sedition had already been made against journalists, activists and politicians, and the police erected concrete barricades, barbed wire and stakes around farmers’ protest camps. Farmers accused of inciting violence in a demonstration were charged under anti-terrorism laws and were not bailed for six months.
The problem for Ravi emerged in the toolkit document, which was tweeted by environmentalist Thunberg as part of her message that she “supported farmers”. The google doc was a compilation of information, hashtags, suggestions for actions, ideas and contacts for anyone who wanted to help support farmers – a common tool of organized protest movements.
Thunberg’s tweet outraged many in India who saw it as external interference, as effigies on his face were burned by protesters. The police then seized the document shared by Thunberg as evidence that there was a coordinated conspiracy “to wage an economic, social, cultural and regional war against India”. The police accused Ravi and two others of conspiring with terrorist organizations to create the document and encourage Thunberg to tweet it to his millions of followers.
Ravi told the court on Sunday that she edited only two lines of the toolkit, which she said had no seditious reason behind it. “I was just supporting the farmers. I supported the farmers because they are our future and we all need to eat, ”she said, passed out in court before being held in custody for five days.
After his arrest, a wave of fear washed over environmental circles. The fellow activists were very afraid to speak to the media and many WhatsApp groups used to organize themselves were silent.
Ravi’s arrest also caused an explosion of indignation. Former Environment Minister Jairan Ramesh called his detention “completely atrocious” and “unjustified harassment and intimidation”, while a joint statement by more than 50 academics, artists and activists described the actions of Delhi police as “illegal in nature” “and a” state overreaction “.
On Tuesday, the Delhi Commission for Women, a government agency, sent a warning to the Delhi Police demanding more information about Ravi’s case. Former finance minister P Chidambaram was just as scathing. “” India is becoming the theater of the absurd, “he said.