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One recent “point,” Bhattacharya recalled, was Khalid telling them that from what he had seen in jail, Hindi-language newspapers are how most inmates got their news. If they were running public campaigns to persuade the BJP government to release political prisoners under their regime, they should start writing in Hindi. Lahiri recalled that while English-language newspapers carried both the prosecution and defence arguments of Khalid’s year-long bail hearings in the trial court hearing the Delhi riots conspiracy case and then the Delhi High Court, the Hindi language newspapers barely reported the arguments Khalid’s lawyer Trideep Pais made in court. They, however, carried the claims made by the police in a prominent place, with headlines that made allegations sound like facts.

While granting bail to student activists Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita and Asif Iqbal Tanha in the same case, the Delhi High Court found the police had not made out a prima facie case of a terrorist act, and the use of “superfluous verbiage, hyperbole and stretched inferences”, did not make it one.  Furthermore, the division bench of Justice Mridul Siddharth and Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani asked whether the crimes alleged threatened the defence of India, warranting invoking of UAPA, observing that in its “anxiety to suppress dissent,” the state was blurring the lines between the right to protest and terrorist activity. Narwal, Kalita, Tanha, and Safoora Zargar, have received bail from the Delhi High Court, and Ishrat Jahan from the lower court, others charged under the UAPA, Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Khalid Saifi, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Sharjeel Imam, and Meeran Haider, have had their bail rejected by the lower court.

In the eastern UP district of Ghazipur, for instance, near Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Parliamentary constituency of Varanasi and where bodies were found floating on the Ganga, around 19,700 people died between 1 July 2020 and 31 March 2021, compared to 1,600 over the same time period in 2019-20, an increase of 1,136%. That is 18,000 excess deaths compared to the same period in 2019-20 and 197 times more than the officially reported Covid-19 toll, which was 92. As in other states, UP’s Civil Registration System (CRS) is supposed to register all births and deaths. But as the Registrar General of India’s (RGI) 2019 report noted that UP registered 63.3% of all estimated deaths. In other words, around 4 of every 10 deaths in UP are not counted, and nearly 31% are registered anytime after a month from death.

In February 2021, union minister Prakash Javadekar told Parliament that no child had been deprived of an online education during the pandemic. “Nobody was deprived of education and online education,” he said. The statement belies what many activists on the ground know. Only 30% of the rural population has internet access and 65% in larger cities; just 35% of internet users are female, only 21% are internet mobile users, finds GSMA’s Mobile Gender Gap Report, 2020. With kids at home and many unable to access online classes, adult livelihoods lost and illness expenses mounting, more and more children are being put to work.

Between 1 April 2020 and 5 June 2021, National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) told the Supreme Court in an affidavit, 30,071 children had either lost both parents, or one, or been abandoned. Of these, 23,147 had lost one parent and were living with the sole surviving parent, 3,138 with extended family and 2,409 with a guardian. Only 928 of these children, 3.1%, had been institutionalized at children homes, shelters and orphanages. These figures are an underestimation, given that official numbers of the dead have been severely under-counted. The catastrophic second wave saw a surge of untested, undocumented and unmonitored infections and deaths particularly in rural India where 800 million, or 65% of the population lives.

The onset of the second wave sent employment rates plummeting killing the hope that employment would pick up in the first quarter of the year. A combination of partial lockdowns, the economy failing to generate adequate jobs, and a lean agricultural season—6 million job losses in the agricultural sector in April 2021 alone—saw labour participation rates for April 2021 fall to 39.98%, the lowest since May 2020, according to Mahesh Vyas, managing director, Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE). The numbers of those unemployed but looking for work swelled from 6.2 million in March to 33.9 million in April.

With no substantive response from central or state governments, Swamy and Turi put together a research team to map the state of undertrials in Jharkhand’s prisons. Travelling across the state, and filing right-to-information requests with the police in each district—most went unanswered—the team released a report in 2016 with the life histories of 102 UAPA undertrials statewide. The undertrials were overwhelmingly Adivasis and Dalits, whose cases languished in the criminal-justice system for up to 10 years. For example, the report had the story of Shobha Munda, a woman with eight pending cases in a court in the southern Jharkhand town of Ghatsila. She had not been able to appoint a “reliable lawyer” for her defense, though she had been in jail for “not less than four years already”. About 59% of households of undertrials in the report earned less than Rs 3,000 per month and were forced to sell assets, such as goats, to meet bail conditions or legal expenses.