MP Police Treat Reading Political Ideology as Evidence of Crime

Police Tell Court Books on Fascism and Communism Are Evidence Against Accused

October 23, 2025

Madhya Pradesh Police have cited books on fascism and communism as evidence in a chargesheet against a youth collective founder accused of hurting religious sentiments. If political literature can be treated as criminal evidence, then any citizen engaging with dissenting ideas risks being branded a threat to public order.

Saurav Banerjee, co-founder of the youth collective How We Ought to Live (HOWL), was named in a chargesheet submitted by Madhya Pradesh Police in a trial court. He was booked under Sections 299 and 302 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which pertain to acts intended to outrage religious feelings, as reported by The Indian Express.

The case followed an incident in July, when Banerjee and other members of HOWL held a press conference at the Indore Press Club to respond to allegations of “anti-Hindu activities” published in a regional daily. The event was reportedly disrupted by local right-wing groups, and Banerjee was allegedly assaulted at the venue. An FIR was filed against him two days later.

The police chargesheet cited as evidence the seizure of a Hindi-language book on fascism and another on the communist movement. It also referred to witness statements, including from the main complainant, Sachin Bamania, and his brother Pankaj, who claimed Banerjee insulted Hindu deities. Other witnesses made similar claims but admitted they were not present during the alleged incident.

Further allegations in the chargesheet include claims of substance abuse, unauthorised construction on a villager’s land and receiving payments in US dollars. The police said they required more time to investigate possible foreign funding. Banerjee’s lawyer stated that the foreign payments were for translation work and had been declared in tax filings, and denied any derogatory remarks or unlawful activity.

Banerjee was subsequently granted bail by the Madhya Pradesh High Court.

What’s most shocking here is that the state’s formal legal machinery has cited books on political ideology as part of the evidentiary basis for criminal prosecution under religious offence laws.

In a democracy, reading or owning literature about fascism, communism, or any other political tradition cannot, by itself, be treated as evidence of intent to hurt religious sentiments. Doing so converts an individual’s intellectual engagement with political ideas into grounds for criminal suspicion. This breaches a basic premise of constitutional law: that freedom of expression, including political speech, is protected unless it incites violence or constitutes a direct threat to public order. That bar is nowhere close to being met here.

The fact that police cited a book on fascism as incriminating, without alleging that it was written or distributed with the purpose of inciting hatred, suggests that political ideology itself is being conflated with subversion or blasphemy. This violates both the right to political thought and the right to due process. More dangerously, it institutionalises an inversion: where the tools of state power appear less interested in protecting citizens from targeted violence and more invested in criminalising dissenting voices after they are attacked.

Here, the sequence of events is instructive. Banerjee and his group were accused of “anti-Hindu activities,” after which they attempted to publicly respond. The press conference was violently disrupted, Banerjee was allegedly beaten, and days later, the police filed an FIR “against” him. The chargesheet that followed did not investigate the violence or its perpetrators but instead presented Banerjee’s intellectual materials, alleged foreign funding and community organising as the basis of suspicion.

This is part of a growing pattern. Laws meant to address religious offence, public order or foreign funding are increasingly being used to go after those who do not align with the dominant political or cultural narrative, be they activists, students or independent thinkers. What makes this case especially stark is how openly it treats thought itself as dangerous. The chargesheet does not rely on incitement or hate speech. Instead, it presents the mere possession of certain books and ideas as grounds for suspicion.

There is precedent for this, but only from regimes no citizen would willingly choose to live under. In Nazi Germany, texts by Jewish, Marxist, or liberal thinkers were publicly burned, and possession of such material could attract the attention of the secret police. Stalin’s Soviet Union criminalised the reading of anything deemed counter-revolutionary, punishing those who owned unapproved literature. Under Franco in Spain, books tied to communism, regional nationalism, or secularism were tightly censored, with even private libraries kept under watch. During apartheid in South Africa, holding material critical of the regime or aligned with Black liberation was treated as a criminal act.

If reading a book on communism becomes part of the evidentiary chain in a religious offence case, the logical end point is a society where intellectual life itself is treated as suspect.

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