July 31 would have been a day of celebration for Prof Shoma Sen—her colleagues and students at Nagpur University were set to host conferences and a festschrift to honour the scholar on her retirement along with her 60th birthday. It was not to be. At the break of dawn on June 6, the Pune police came knocking at the professor’s house. Shoma, head of the English department, was arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, as were activists Rona Wilson, Mahesh Raut and Sudhir Dhawale, and lawyer Surendra Gadling from other places as part of the police probe into the violence at Bhima-Koregaon on January 1.
The professor has now spent more than three months at Pune’s Yerawada prison. The police had taken her straight from Nagpur to Pune—without a transit warrant, says her daughter Koel Sen, a Mumbai-based independent film-maker. Moreover, the police had swung into the raid just by waving an order by the Pune ACP, written in Marathi.
Koel fears the police may plant fake evidences in the hard disks and pen drives, as...
