A Mumbai Uber cab driver, overhearing a phone conversation on the anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) protests, took his passenger, a poet-activist, to the police station on Wednesday night.
An activist, Kavita Krishnan, tweeted on what she called the “scary episode” involving poet Bappadittya Sarkar on Thursday.
Mr Sarkar said in a statement, tweeted by Ms Krishnan, that he took an Uber cab from Juhu to Kurla around 10:30 pm on Wednesday. During the journey he was discussing with his friend (on a mobile phone) people’s discomfort with the “Laal Salaam” slogan at the Shaheen Bagh protest in Delhi.
Last night, poet @Bappadittoh had a scary episode in Mumbai, at the hands of an @Uber driver and @MumbaiPolice cops (see screenshots): a glimpse of scary India under NPR NRC CAA, where every person will be incentivised to suspect & turn in others & police can harass everyone. pic.twitter.com/OOKUB58BxK
— Kavita Krishnan (@kavita_krishnan) February 6, 2020
The driver, who was listening, stopped the cab and told Mr Sarkar he wanted to withdraw money from the ATM. The driver returned with two policemen, who allegedly asked Mr Sarkar why he was carrying a “Dafli” (a percussion instrument), and also asked him his address.
Mr Sarkar told them he was from Jaipur and had visited the anti-CAA “Mumbai Bagh” protest in the city earlier in the day. He was carrying the instrument because he was “sloganeering”, he told them.
The driver allegedly asked the police to arrest his passenger as “he was saying he was a communist, was talking about burning the country and making a Shaheen Bagh in Mumbai”. The driver also claimed he had recorded the phone talk.
Mr Sarkar was then taken to the police station, the statement said. He requested the police to listen to the conversation and asked the driver what he found offensive in his conversation.
The driver allegedly said to him, “You people will destroy the country and do you expect that we will sit looking at you. You should be thankful that I took you to police station and not somewhere else.”
“It was in that moment that I felt unsettled, some sense of fear set in and stayed through the night,” the poet-activist recounted.
The police asked him about his ideology and “the people he read”. According to Mr Sarkar, the police also asked him “absurd” questions like his father’s salary and how he sustained himself without a job. And they kept asking why he was carrying the “Dafli”.
The police were polite to both of them and asked Sarkar not wear red scarf and carry Dafli.
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