The Incarcerations pulls back the curtain on Indian democracy to tell the remarkable and chilling story of the Bhima Koregaon case, in which sixteen human rights defenders-professors, lawyers, journalists, poets-have been imprisoned, without credible evidence and without trial, as Maoist terrorists.

Alpa Shah unravels how these alleged terrorists were charged with inciting violence at a new year’s day commemoration in 2018, accused of waging a war against the Indian state and of plotting to kill the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Expertly leading us through the case, Shah exposes some of the world’s most shocking revelations of cyber warfare research, which show not only the hacking of emails and mobile phones of the accused, but also implantation of the electronic evidence that was used to incarcerate them. Through the life histories of the ‘incarcerated’, Shah dives deep into the issues they fought for and tells the story of India’s three main minorities-Adivasis, Dalits and Muslims-and what the search for democracy entails for them.