The construction of national security against a propped-up other has been instrumentalised by the colonial and postcolonial Indian state’s enactment of certain laws and deployment of a range of punitive tactics against those it deems unruly and characterises as “criminal”, tortures, “disappears”, “encounters” as well as against entire communities who are further considered suspect, surveilled, and harassed. In this third and final panel of the webinar series, panellists Jenny Rowena, Mirza Saaib Bég, Abdul Wahid Sheikh put forth the current pressing issues of carcerality and security state including, arrests of academics, never-ending arrests, detentions, and killings in Kashmir in the name of national security, and illegal arrests and criminalisation of Muslim community.
About the Speakers
Jenny Rowena is a teacher at a college at Delhi University and the partner of Prof. Hany Babu, who has been unjustly imprisoned in the Bhima Koregaon case.
Mirza Saaib Bég is a Kashmiri lawyer, Kofi Annan and Weidenfeld-Hoffman scholar. He recently completed his postgraduate degree in Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. He regularly contributes through seminars, writing and organisation aimed at dialogue on legal and political issues of Kashmir.
Abdul Wahid Sheikh is a school teacher, lawyer, activist, and author of Begunah Qaidi (Innocent Prisoner), which recounts his experiences of his wrongful incarceration for nearly a decade and of others similarly implicated in terror cases. He works with the Innocence Network to support individuals seeking to prove their innocence in cases of wrongful conviction.
Track: Indigo — Nelvian [Audio Library Release]
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