India: RSF Strongly Condemns the Arrest and Remand of Civil Liberties Committee Leader Kranthi Chaithanya and the Criminalization of Other Activists
We hereby share a statement issued by the Revolutionary Students’ Front (RSF).
We, the Revolutionary Students’ Front, strongly condemn the arrest and remand of Civil Liberties Committee leader Kranthi Chaithanya, and the criminalisation of several other democratic activists in Tirupati, which is part of the assault on democratic voices by the brahminical Hindutva fascist Indian state. What happened at the 20th State Conference of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee is a textbook demonstration of how the state, its police machinery, and Hindutva vigilante forces function as a single ideological bloc. On that day, Sangh-affiliated forces illegally removed their banners, raised communal slogans, threatened conference participants, and openly disrupted the democratic gathering. The police, instead of taking action against these forces, protected them and selectively targeted Kranthi Chaithanya.
The banners in question did not incite violence. They did not attack any religious community. They exposed the fascist logic of a proposed “Hindu Rashtra” through satire. For this, sedition charges were slapped on the activists, national emblem laws were weaponised, and activists were sent to remand. This proves one thing clearly : that in today’s India, opposing Hindutva fascism itself is treated as a crime. This incident also exposes how the Indian Constitution completely fails to protect the democratic rights of the people. Although Article 19(1)(a) guarantees freedom of expression, in reality, the right collapses the moment dissent challenges the brahminical Hindutva fascist ideology of the state. The Bombay High Court’s 2015 Aseem Trivedi judgment clearly held that criticism of the government, satire, and artistic dissent do not amount to sedition unless they incite violence or public disorder. Yet sedition charges have been imposed upon them. This shows that constitutional rights exist largely on paper, while their enforcement is controlled by institutions of the Hindutva fascist state.
The Civil Liberties Committee has a long and well-known history as a secular, democratic organisation. Its opposition is not to Hinduism or to Hindus, but to Brahminical Hindutva fascism, which seeks to replace the Constitution with Manusmriti, strip people of the constitutional rights that they have at least on paper and establish India as a fully fascist corporate brahminical state.
We demand the immediate and unconditional release of Kranthi Chaithanya, the withdrawal of all false and vindictive cases against him, and the dropping of charges against all other CLC members and individuals named in this FIR, including Hemadri, Chittibabu, Srimannarayana, Chiluka Chandrasekhar, Venkateshwarlu, Rajasekhar, and the printing press workers who have been dragged into this witch-hunt. The use of sedition and national symbol laws against political dissent must stop. We stand in full solidarity with the Civil Liberties Committee. We call upon students, workers, intellectuals and all progressive, democratic forces to resist this fascist onslaught and defend the right to dissent.
