In The Incarcerations, professor of social anthropology at the London School of Economics Alpa Shah recounted the chilling story of the ‘Bhima-Koregaon 16’, the human rights defenders who were professors, lawyers, journalists and poets arrested for allegedly conspiring to incite caste violence in Maharashtra on 1 January 2018, and for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the government. The book detailed the research (see here, here, here) that showed how many of the BK-16, their trial yet to begin even five years later, had their emails and mobile phones hacked, and evidence planted.
Now, a second book this year on this dramatic case investigates the circumstances of how this prosecution was built, and the socio-political context of the caste violence in Bhima Koregaon, 30 km north-east of Pune, on the morning of 1 January 2018. It views that violence as a clash between two world-views—one striving to challenge social hierarchies, the other justifying them.
In Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste - Brahminism’s Wrath Against Dreamers Of Equality, journalist Ajaz Ashraf takes a close look at the performances and speeches at the Elgar Parishad in Pune on the eve of the Bhima Koregaon violence. These critiqued Brahminism, prime minister Narendra Modi and the ‘new peshwai’ or new age caste oppressors. It provides a rare glimpse into how a Hindutva leader in Maharashtra used the state’s widespread reverence for Maratha warrior king Shivaji to foment anti-Muslim feelings; and studies the impact that James Laine’s book on Shivaji had on Maharashtra’s anti-Brahmin consciousness.
Ashraf uses interviews, reportage, research and archival material to detail how a right-wing think-tank impacted the police investigation into the violence at Bhima Koregaon. He unravels the investigative agencies’ conspiracy theories and takes readers into the lives and the work of the BK-16 before their arrest.
Ashraf’s reportage builds portraits of all the main characters—those behind the conspiracy theories, those who organised the Elgar Parishad, the right-wing leaders who fanned the violence, their disciples who describe how they were brainwashed, the BK-16 themselves and more.
EXCERPT
Media focus on the octogenarian Shiv Pratishthan Hindustan leader, Sambhaji Bhide, has largely centred around his penchant for creating controversy. Typically, he claimed in July 2023, at a meeting in Amravati, that Mahatma Gandhi’s real father was a Muslim landlord. There arose a cry to arrest Bhide for insulting Gandhi.
Even Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis joined the chorus of protest, saying, “Whoever speaks against our national icons will face action.” Days later, though, Fadnavis, in a volte-face, praised Bhide for working for Hindutva and connecting the Bahujan youth to the forts of Chhatrapati Shivaji.
Fadnavis’s statement suggests he is partial to Bhide for ideological reasons, but it is also true that the cult following he has among the youth of Maharashtra restrains the State from taking punitive action against him. His influence transcends party loyalties. Bhide has become an icon because of his highly successful endeavour to popularise Chhatrapati Shivaji among the youth.
Yet this endeavour of his has been rarely scrutinised by the national media, which is disarmed by his spartan lifestyle. For instance, after Bhima Koregaon erupted, an India Today team visited Sangli, where Bhide resides.
Its story described him as an ardent admirer of Chhatrapati Shivaji, an organiser of a
marathon trek named Durga Dauda, and a Muslim-baiter who “disapproves of history of Shivaji that portrays him as an all-inclusive ruler and insists that Shivaji was a staunch Hindu icon who fought Muslims.”
Much of the India Today story focussed on the shakha, or camp, Bhide organises daily. When the India Today team reached Sangli’s Vishnu Ghat on the Krishna river, Bhide, sporting a luxurious moustache, arrived riding a bicycle, at 5 am. The India Today team was asked to shutter its cameras, and invited to join the Pratishthan members in the morning prayer, the opening line of which is “Jayati Hindu Rashtram,” or Long Live Hindu Nation. Prayer over, the assembly performed the Surya Namaskar. Such media coverage of Bhide unwittingly depicts him as a Hindutva maverick worthy of curiosity or amusement, not of alarm.
Bhide is anything but a maverick. There is a method to his mission, which is to harness the popularity of Chhatrapati Shivaji to spread Brahminical Hinduism.
Insight into Bhide’s thinking and the working of his Shiv Pratishthan Hindustan was provided to me by Vijay Vilasrao Patil, a 46-year-old farmer, whose admiration, in his youth, for Bhide was next only to his adoration of Chhatrapati Shivaji. The relationship between the master and the pupil grew deep enough for Bhide to confess to Vijay Vilasrao Patil that his real name was Manohar Anant Kulkarni, but he chose to call himself Sambhaji Vinayak Bhide. His was not a random choice. Ideology guided him. As he explained to the pupil: Sambhaji refers to Chhatrapati Sambhaji, who, to Bhide, symbolises the courage of Hindus, for he chose death rather than acquiescing to Aurangzeb’s conditions to save his life; Vinayak is a tribute to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, the Hindutva ideologue, and Bhide is the surname the Brahmin community of Kulkarni often adopts.
In this narration by Vijay Vilasrao Patil there can be discerned factors that spur Maharashtrian youth to join Bhide’s cult. Patil belongs to an agricultural family of Shigaon village, in Walwa taluka of Sangli district. His family is quite influential largely because it had, in pre-Independence India, zamindari rights. His grandfather was a farmer. His grandfather’s cousin, Vishwasrao Atmaram Patil, was a lawyer and history buff, who was elected as MLA, in 1980, from the Walwa constituency. The family was opposed to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its tendency to bait Muslims.
But the village school where Patil studied was altogether a different world. It had an unmistakable anti-Muslim ambience, spawned by the history books used for lessons. These books portrayed the historical period popularly known as Medieval India as centuries of religious conflict between Hindus and Muslims. Patil is Maratha, and Hindu. It is easy to fathom a fourteen-year-old — the age at which Patil said he became politically aware — becoming enraged by stories that framed Muslims undertaking military campaigns to defeat and subjugate Hindus for establishing the rule of Islam and securing converts. It charmed Patil, the schoolboy, that none other than Chhatrapati Shivaji frustrated the mighty Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb’s design to conquer the Deccan, and established his own kingdom.
Chhatrapati Shivaji became Vijay Vilasrao Patil’s hero. His fervour for the Maratha ruler was boundless.
It also irked the school-going Patil that the birth anniversary of Chhatrapati Shivaji was not celebrated in Shigaon and its adjoining villages, which the Congress dominated. The reason, it was speculated, was because the Congress did not want to offend Muslim sentiment. And the few who did celebrate the Jayanti were branded as Shiv Sainiks. How unjust, Patil fumed. His sentiments against Muslims became pronounced when riots broke out following the December 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid. He recalled feeling enraged by local newspapers’ fabricated reports of Muslims killing kar sevaks, or those who had participated in the demolition at Ayodhya, and dumping their bodies in rivers.
He was now unabashedly anti-Muslim.
At seventeen, he shifted to Peth Vadgaon, a city in Kolhapur district, for a college education. His passion for Shivaji and opposition to Muslims prompted a friend to tell him about Bhide. Patil hadn’t heard of the barefoot, moustachioed leader. Bhide was, in the friend’s description, a champion of Hindutva. “I did not then know the difference between Hinduism, Hindutva and Brahminical Hinduism,” Patil told me.
One fine day, he and his friend went to Sangli, where their first port of call was Bhide’s residence in Gaonbhag locality. They were told he had already left early in the morning to conduct the daily shakha at Vishnu Ghat, the very venue the India Today team visited decades later. When they reached there, the sun was long up and the morning prayer was over. The duo found Bhide seated among fifteen people at the Vishnu Mandir. His friend knew Bhide, and Patil was introduced to the leader as a Chhatrapati Shivaji bhakt, who wanted to propagate his values and work for the Hindu religion.
“His conduct was so impeccable that I thought he was God in human form,” said Patil, adding that he began to look upon Bhide as his father, a replacement for his own who had died before he began school.
Patil joined the Shiv Pratishthan Hindustan. He attended Bhide’s lectures wherever he delivered them. His speech, Patil said, followed a structure. Bhide would speak against Gandhi and Nehru, in decidedly abusive language, then switch to raising alarm over the rising population of Muslims. Did they know, he would ask his audience, that infants died of heart attack when loudspeakers came alive with the azan, or the Muslim call to prayer?
Bhide’s anti-Muslim propaganda influenced Patil so deeply that he would bristle at the very sight of Muslims. “It was not that he would explicitly tell us to assault Muslims, but I had been brainwashed,” Patil recalled.
A quality common of successful leaders is the ability to spot among their followers those who will carry out their commands and work diligently and selflessly for them. Bhide began writing to Patil, informing him in advance of the venues of his meetings. He also asked Patil to undertake propaganda work for the Pratishthan, to send Inland Letter Cards and postcards to his acquaintances, informing them about the organisation and its work. The internet revolution was still some years away. Patil followed his instructions, even writing to parents to send their children to join Bhide; and began to hold a monthly session of Pratishthan members that he had recruited. This was his very own shakha, which quickly multiplied. No doubt people flocked to him because of his family’s reputation, but he emphasised that he also endeared himself to them with his conduct that was modelled on Bhide’s.
“People were as devoted to me as I was to Bhide,” Patil said.
Family elders were disapproving of Patil’s politics. Most of all the cousin of his grandfather, the elderly politician, who would say that “Bhide is RSS” masquerading as a Chhatrapati Shivaji bhakt only to foment riots against Muslims. The grandfather’s cousin implored Patil to leave the Pratishthan. But who abandons one looked upon as a father?
An important factor behind Bhide’s popularity among the youth is the trek he organises every year to forts associated with Chhatrapati Shivaji’s military expeditions, even taking the very route his army is said to have followed. This is the marathon, or Durga Dauda, to which the India Today story referred. These treks are for anywhere between three to four days. Patil described a typical trek to me, its rules, and the mechanism of indoctrinating participants. Like all the others, he would take pre-cooked food to last him for the duration of the trek. When his water ran out, he would refill from a well. The participants were prohibited from purchasing water or food. Few ever flouted Bhide’s orders. The trekkers would make scheduled halts at villages. An invited guest would address them and then they would sleep under the open sky.
“Such was our fervour that rain and cold did not matter,” Patil reminisced.
On reaching the earmarked destination, the trekkers would undergo a mandatory “orientation course” involving an address by a prominent historian, such as Balwant Moreshwar Purandare, popularly known as Babasaheb Purandare, whom Patil blamed for “leading Maharashtra astray” through his immensely popular writings. One common factor in all these lectures, whether delivered by Purandare or others, at night halts in villages or during the orientation course, was to imagine Chhatrapati
Shivaji in the Hindutva mould. The trekkers, almost all young, were told that Chhatrapati Shivaji fought against the Muslims because they slaughtered cows. They said the Muslim army, during its invasion of Maratha principalities, would abduct poor
Kunbi women and rape them. They would later be sold for two annas. In other words, Chhatrapati Shivaji was great because he was the protector of the cow, Hindus and Hinduism.
“These lectures never educated us on Chhatrapati Shivaji’s beneficial policies. For instance, that he created a society and raised an army that included all castes and communities,” Patil said.
The treks Bhide organised would attract as many as 4,000 to 5,000 participants.
The last trek that Patil went on was in January 2003. It was from Lal Mahal, near the Shaniwarwada Fort, to the Lohagad Fort. This was also the year in which James Laine’s book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, was published, upsetting many with its reference to the joke about Shivaji’s parentage, and the portrayal of his feats as the work of his Brahmin ministers. Equally, there was this talk that Laine was assisted
in his research by Brahmin scholars, such as Purandare and Ninad Bedekar, the two men who had lectured Patil and other trekkers. Laine denied their involvement in his research. But Patil was struck by Bhide’s attitude to the controversy — he refused to speak on Laine, let alone critique him.
“His is an organisation inspired by Chhatrapati Shivaji, but Bhide would say the controversy did not have anything to do with us or our work,” Patil recalled, still sounding amused so many years later. Doubt began to creep into Patil’s mind. He was reminded of how his grandfather’s cousin would accuse Bhide of exploiting Maharashtra’s devotion to Chhatrapati Shivaji to promote Brahminical Hinduism.
Around this time Patil’s mother fell ill. He shifted to Kolhapur for her treatment. His circle of acquaintances here did not share his ardour for Bhide, preferring to discuss Jotiba Phule, Shahu Maharaj, and B.R. Ambedkar. These leaders, he realised, had worked for the nation’s good. How come Bhide never spoke of them? Bhide did indeed speak of Phule but only to castigate him for not believing in devtas or gods. Patil read books and attended public lectures of intellectuals whom he categorised as progressive. He was particularly impressed by Communist Party of India leader Govind Pansare’s portrayal of Chhatrapati Shivaji.
Around 2008, Patil wrote a letter to Bhide, accusing him of propagating an “ideology destructive of India.”
Bhide and Patil were no longer communicating. But the erstwhile follower was restless with guilt, for turning many Hindus against Muslims. The only way out of the emotional turmoil was to atone. Back in the village, amid his farming, he went to each and every person who had, because of him, become a Bhide follower. He told them he had been awakened to Bhide’s motives and mission — that he was a repugnant person, for he was dividing society. For India’s good, they too must sever their links with Bhide. “They believed me,” Patil said.
But peace still eluded him. To quieten the incessant chatter of his conscience, in an exemplary display of courage, Gandhian in nature, he built bridges with the Muslim community. “Earlier, whenever a Muslim family would hold a function, the police would ask me whether they could hold it in the village or outside,” Patil said, laughing. “But now Muslims are an extension of my own family.”
Patil, today, is not associated with any civil society group, although he says he was much impressed by the Sambhaji Brigade, a wing of the Maratha Seva Sangh, after he attended its exhibition on history in Kolhapur. He supports in whatever way he can progressive civil society groups. He cited an example: in 2015, the Fadnavis government bestowed on Purandare the Maharashtra Bhushan award, provoking organisations to hold protest meetings. At one such meeting of the Sambhaji Brigade,
in Sangli, Jitendra Ahwad, an MLA, climbed the podium to address the audience. A gang of Shiv Pratishthan Hindustan activists stormed the podium to disrupt the meeting. Patil was quick to confront them. “On seeing me, some ran away, the others I chased away,” he said.
A few days later, Bhide called him and said, “What you did was not right. I did not expect this of you.” He hung up, without waiting for Patil’s response. For the pupil, his atonement was complete — he felt truly liberated.
(Bhima Koregaon Challenging Caste: Brahminism’s Wrath Against Dreamers Of Equality by Ajaz Ashraf, published by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta.)