India’s Supreme Court ordered police on Wednesday to put five prominent rights campaigners suspected of links to Maoist guerrillas under house arrest as outrage grew over their detention.

Critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government have dismissed the allegations against the activists, who were detained a day earlier, and said the crackdown was part of ongoing attempts to stifle all dissent.

Police detained the campaigners, seized their laptops and mobile phones, in raids on their homes in different cities, triggering protests and a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the action.

Sudha Bharadwaj, who has been fighting for the rights of workers in parts of India such as Chhattisgarh where left-wing guerrilla groups operate, said the action against her was part of a broader crackdown on opponents of the government.

“The effort is whatever is the opposition to this regime, whether it is workers rights, tribal rights, everybody who in the opposition is being rounded up,” she told reporters outside her home in Faridabad, a short distance from New Delhi.

The arrests follow months of tensions between right wing nationalist groups and advocates of free speech that has played out in college campuses and spilled over into the streets.

Critics also say several top journalists have been forced out of their jobs for their critical reporting of the government.

The others detained on Tuesday included were Varavara Rao, a prominent poet from the southern city of Hyderabad, activists Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira from Mumbai and civil liberties activist Gautam Navlakha from New Delhi.

Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has faced mounting criticism from activists and academics, who accuse it of undermining the secular and pluralistic principles of India’s constitution.

The BJP denies these allegations but says it is opposed to appeasement of any community and has long advocated tough action to protect national security.

“These five are no threat to anyone,” said Prashant Bhushan, a lawyer for a group of leading academics that has petitioned the Supreme Court to release the activists.

“The charges against them on the face of it appear indiscriminate, unwarranted, part of a malicious campaign to threaten human rights defenders, independent journalists, writers and thinkers in the country from critiquing the government and its policies, and an attempt to muzzle dissent,” the petition said.

INTELLECTUAL FORCE

Police have also accused the five of inflammatory speeches at a rally in western India last year which led to violent clashes between Dalits, the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy, and right wing organisations.

A police officer said the main case relates to speeches made during a rally held in the city of Pune on Dec. 31, 2017 commemorating the valour of Dalits. The following day, violent clashes broke out between members of the lower caste and hardline Hindu groups.

The police officer, who could not be named because he was not authorised to speak to reporters, said police had seized documents relating to the long-running Maoist insurgency afflicting parts of the country.

The guerrillas are fighting for the rights of the landless in parts of eastern and southern India, dubbed “the Red Corridor”.

The police officer said the five activists gave intellectual force to an insurgency in which thousands of people have been killed over the years.

Modi faces an election next year and opposition parties are trying to forge an alliance to stop his Hindu nationalists from coming back to power.

The Supreme Court headed by the Chief Justice Dipak Misra said it would hear the petition challenging the arrests of the activists next week and until then they would be placed under house arrest, and not police custody.

Judge D.Y. Chandrachud, one of the judges on the bench, said the right to criticise was a crucial for democracy.

“Dissent is the safety valve of democracy. If dissent is disallowed, then the pressure cooker may burst,” he said.

A New Mexico judge received death threats and Islamophobic abuse on Tuesday a day after she granted bail to five Muslims charged with child abuse and accused of training children at their compound to carry out attacks, court officials said.

Police raided the compound in Taos County on Aug. 3 following a tip-off that children held there were starving. They found 11 children in need of food and water, and three days later unearthed the body of a toddler.

In an order published on Tuesday, district Judge Sarah Backus said prosecutors had produced evidence that was “troubling and unusual” but failed to show the defendants abused the children and were a threat to society if released on bail.

One caller on Tuesday told Backus “her throat would be slit” while another said he wished “someone would smash her head,” New Mexico courts spokesman Barry Massey said.

Backus was bombarded with abuse and criticism on Twitter, and received hundreds of calls and emails, most of which referred to her using terms like “Islamic terrorism sympathizer”, Massey said.

Backus closed her court and the Taos County courthouse went into lockdown after threats of violence against all staff.

Prosecutors alleged the dead toddler was a severely ill boy abducted from Georgia by his father, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, the son of a prominent New York imam. Prosecutors said the boy died at the compound in February as Ibn Wahhaj tried to heal him through prayer.

Prosecutors allege Wahhaj gave firearms training to two teenage boys at the compound to attack “corrupt institutions.”

New Mexico’s Republican Governor Susana Martinez slammed Backus’ bail decision in a statement, saying the state’s Supreme Court had been “dictating pretrial release for all kinds of dangerous criminals.”

The five defendants – two men, their wives and a sister – must wear GPS ankle bracelets once released on $20,000 bail each and are not allowed back to the compound, Backus ruled.

DIVIDED COMMUNITY

Their 11 children are in protective care and the defendants may visit them once released, Backus said.

The case has split the Taos County community between those who believe the group was involved in a failed attempt to live “off the grid,” and others who fear they were hatching a plot to attack schools, banks and police, as prosecutors alleged.

“There’s a murderer in the bunch,” said Larry Salazar, 67, a rancher who lives about 2 miles from the high-desert compound. “What are we going to do to protect ourselves? Where are they going to be going to?”.

Another resident, named Quincy, who requested his full name not be used, said he didn’t think the defendants were dangerous, “especially when they came in here using their real names and introduced themselves to every possible person who was their neighbour.”

Ibn Wahhaj has not entered a plea but the other four adults have plead not guilty. Wahhaj must remain in custody as he still faces a Georgia arrest warrant for the abduction of his son.

Ibn Wahhaj’s wife Jany Leveille, 35, from Haiti, was taken into custody by immigration officials on Tuesday, according to the Taos County Sheriff’s Office.

When Charlie Hebdo published cartoons of The Prophet Mohammed early in 2015 there was a violent and deadly backlash. The magazine’s office were invaded and several employees were murdered in cold blood. A few years ago a Danish magazine published other cartoons and there was a vociferous Muslim outcry. These and other events have prompted many commentators, comedians and controllers of various media to speak in defence of the ‘freedom of speech’. Why should they restrain themselves when discussing Islam? A new phrase ‘self-censorship’ has been coined and applies explicitly to matters with a Muslim and Islamic links. The implication is that commentators are being asked by the state or the establishment voluntarily to impose restrictions on what they say.

Let me say from the outset that I am not a Muslim but I have a personal interest in the history of religious practices and from that an interest in interfaith issues. Until late in life I had no idea what about Islam. Like many older people, my religious education did not introduce Islam as a religion, but from history I learned that Moors were ‘alien invaders’ spreading across North Africa until they were halted in Spain by Christians. My knowledge of the Crusades paints a picture of an ‘alien culture’. And Muslims are antithetical to Christianity in a now largely secular Western world.

As I learn more about Islam, I learn that its underpinning principles are sound, but that some Muslims just do not get it. These views can and should be challenged. This challenge will only prove successful if the challenger is informed.

Most Western commentators and opinion formers are ill-informed. I do not consider myself to be anywhere near the best informed but I know when I need to ask questions and undertake research.

For many of us, Muslims are people who have strange codes, have peculiar eating fads and a strange addiction to hygiene. Most of all they have a cruel method of slaughtering animals to eat. We have no idea that the ‘strange’ dress codes have evolved from a Middle Eastern culture that informs many Western dress codes – even if only in vestigial form. We fail to emphasise with the fact that in the Middle East, in particular, eating pig meat would have been a public health disaster and that hygiene is associated with the preparation of meat. Western professionals, who should know better, deny that correct halal slaughter is a humane process.

Most of us just do not understand Islam and fear it. We mistrust Muslims (hardly surprising when a violent rogue minority blow up planes over Egypt).

In the first week of November (2015) the BBC commissioned or permitted Roger Scruton to challenge the concept of “self-censorship” and the implied threat to the freedom of speech. Not only did he have two “Points of View” he was given a further run in an ensuing “Feedback”.

One comment leapt out immediately. It seems victims have a duty not to take offence. A second hit me after a goodnight’s rest and related to the antisemitism before World War II.

I am sorry but no one of us has the right to tell someone else that they are wrong to be offended. How do we know? We don’t. My nephew’s partner is christened “Katherine” and hates the short form “Kate”. Many shortened names are used endearingly. A colleague at work announced that she wants to be addressed as “Steph” because “Stephanie” is what mother calls her when she’s been naughty. We endearingly use other nicknames but do we know that the named party is happy with theirs. If they are not and say so repeated use constitutes bullying.

We must never presume that the targets of our “freedom of expression” will not and should not take offence. We need to negotiate. I call one young lady at work “Eric” (after Eric Morecombe). This was arrived at after negotiation. The details are work specific and personal. I am not sure that they would want others to copy me.

I doubt for one moment that Roger Scruton hates Muslims in general. No doubt he associates with some and may have worked closely with others with no ill-will.

Before the outbreak of World War II, antisemitism proved endemic. It was ‘normalised’. Those of use born during and after the WWII can only look back to the pre-war years through the prism of a modern attitude to Jews and Judaism. These are those post-Holocaust years and when we look back we cannot conceive Nazi Germany’s genocide. The post-Holocaust images simply haunt us – but this is after the event.

Just look at the Catholic Church’s complicated relationship with antisemitism and the death of Christ. Not until 1965 did the church acknowledge that Jews could not historically nor in the modern sense be collectively blamed for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Former Pope Benedict took this a step further in 2011.

Before WWII, antisemitism did not receive the scrutiny it would today. It was normalised and even parts of the Royal Family were not immune from it. This is important. Roger Scruton suggests that antisemitism occurred because “freedom of expression” was suppressed. He argues that non-Jews whose spoke in their defence were silenced but hold that thought: Jews were in a minority and a nominally Christian Western world was mostly antisemitic. Non-Jews speaking for Jews proved a minority.

Fast forward to 2015 and our understanding of Islam remains poor. Few non-Muslim community leaders know how to challenge the foundations underpinning anti-Muslim sentiment. Those people who do, people like me perhaps, are in a minority. Like Muslims themselves they have poor access to the media, which are no better informed than many community leaders.

Before the war I wonder if many reasonable people, especially those in leadership, ever thought to question why a minority group, Jews, should be ridiculed because they did not eat pig meat. Did they know why pig meat was offensive? Probably not. In 2015 and defiling a mosque with a pig’s head will be logged as specific hate crime. This was not some years ago. I recall the BBC broadcasting a comedy programme in which the victim of an analogous hate crime was mocked because he reacted to it. Yes, the victim overreacted and the reaction may not have been Islamic but “freedom of speech” currently permits such ridicule and Roger Scruton’s defence of this stance must surely be questioned by the “institutions” that seek to preserve the right to offend.

Bruce Brown (@theoldbrewer) writes in a personal capacity. You can find more of his musings here.

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