UP govt’s crackdown on anti-CAA activists ‘unprecedented’: The Guardian

NEW DELHI: The ‘notoriously intolerant’ BJP government’s crackdown on some of the most recognisable civil society activists has been unprecedented in both scale and fervour, write Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Shaikh Azizur Rahman in The Guardian.

In the write-up, the leading protesters arrested during the anti-citizenship law stir narrate their ordeal during their time in the jails in Uttar Pradesh.

One of the known activists, 73-year-old Mohammad Shoaib was quoted in the write-up as saying that he was arrested in the middle of the night and brought to a police station in Lucknow. “Police officers abused me badly while I was in their custody and they threatened me in many ways.”

“During the anti-CAA protests in UP, Shoaib was among dozens of leading social and legal activists who began to be systematically and illegally targeted, rounded up and de