Seek meeting with UP CM on unemployment, get arrested. A new normal?: CASR

Counterview Desk 
Civil rights network Campaign Against State Repression (CASR)* condemning the Uttar Pradesh government’s latest alleged “suppression of youth activists”, has said, it is part of larger ploy to undermine Dalit, Adivasi, Kisan and democratic voices:

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Two activists from Sanyukt Yuva Morcha, Rajesh Sachaan and Anil Singh were arrested this week for merely emailing the Principal Secretary of the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister to fix a meeting with Yogi Adityanath upon his 30th October visit to the city of Allahabad. The meeting was sought to discuss the question of unemployment among youth and the email was requesting a viable time to discuss the same with the Chief Minister.
Instead of democratically discussing the matter with the activists, Yogi Adityanath government chose to arrest them for even raising the simple request to meet and discuss people’s issues. Even feudal monarchs would set up darbaars to listen to some of the people’s grievances but in Yogi Adityanath’s Uttar Pradesh, asking for a meeting is a crime, with Sachaan and Singh being arrested at night while they were sleeping!
Uttar Pradesh has been turned into a hotbed of onslaught on democratic activists but of note is the particular nature of the repression in Uttar Pradesh. In the state, the Constitution-violating UP Control of Goonda Act has been invoked to suppress land struggles by Dalit and Adivasi farmers.
Various cases have cropped up in Uttar Pradesh where 50-60 fake charges were filed against struggling Dalit and Adivasi farmers who were fighting for the rights to the lands they tilled and to the forests they live in.
The Act has been used to arrest and demonize leaders of land struggle movements in Uttar Pradesh and declare them “goondas” even though a constitutional bench of the Supreme Court in a 1960 judgement struck down the Central Provinces and Berar Goonda Act, 1946, a precursor to the present Goonda Acts. In 1999, the Allahabad High Court stated that the UP iteration of this act had the scope for becoming an “engine of oppression.” 

In Gorakhpur this month, 79-year old retired IPS officer and human rights activist SR Darapuri along with various leaders of an on-going Dalit Panchayati land struggle movement were arrested. The democratic rights of land to the tiller, the rights of Adivasis to their forests and the rights of Dalit landless farmers to the Panchayati land are brutally suppressed in Uttar Pradesh.
The so-called “double engine” sarkaar of Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath function in tandem in the suppression of democratic rights, with the National Investigation Agency (NIA) conducting multiple raids in various places in the state against farmer organizations, student organizations like Bhagat Singh Students Morcha, academics like Seema Azad and Manish Azad, lawyers like Vishwavijay and Soni Azad, along with labour activists like Ritesh Vidyarthi a few months ago.
Campaign Against State Repression (CASR) condemns the arrests of student activists and all democratic activists in Uttar Pradesh and demands their immediate release.
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*AIRSO,AISA, AISF, APCR,BASF, BSM, Bhim Army, Bigul Mazdoor Dasta, bsCEM, CEM, CRPP, CTF, Disha, DISSC, DSU, DTF, Forum Against Repression Telangana, Fraternity ,IAPL, Innocence Network, Karnataka Janashakti, LAA,Mazdoor Adhikar Sangathan, Mazdoor Patrika, Morcha Patrika, NAPM, NBS, Nishant Natya Manch, Nowruz, NTUI, People’s Watch, Rihai Manch, Samajwadi Janparishad,Smajwadi Lok Manch, Bahujan Samjavadi Manch, SFI, United Against Hate, United Peace Alliance, WSS, Y4S)