The Incarcerations

‘Shah presents striking evidence, drawing on expert forensic analysis, of the alleged planting of incriminating documents on the laptops of those detailed; cyber trails apparently point both to police officers and to Indian hackers-for-hire happy to do this sophisticated dirty work’

Daily Telegraph

‘Shah, a professor of anthropology at LSE, tells with literary aplomb the Kafkaesque story of these sixteen intellectuals and activists falsely accused of conspiring to kill Modi… a gripping and uplifting book’

The Times

‘It is the best book I’ve read about the full scale assault on democracy in India, and with the general elections scheduled to conclude in June, it’s essential reading for understanding what’s happening to the country right now’

New Statesman

‘Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what is truly happening in India now – and why we have a duty to support those who are sacrificing everything to keep democracy possible across that great country’

Yanis Varoufakis

‘No finer account has been written yet about the collapse of the world’s largest democracy’

Pankaj Mishra

‘Deeply researched and frequently shocking’

Nature Magazine

‘The Incarcerations shows how outdated the established narrative about India has become… Shah convincingly argues that key material in the prosecution cases against the sixteen activists…were fabrications planted by the Indian police on the computers of some of the accused’

Literary Review

‘Alpa Shah tells the story of the BK-16 with razor-sharp analysis and the genuine compassion of a good storyteller’

Ece Temelkuran

Alpa Shah was raised in Nairobi, studied at Cambridge and completed her PhD at the LSE, where she now teaches anthropology. She is the author of ‘In the Shadows of the State’ and a co-author of ‘Ground Down by Growth’. She presented the radio documentary ‘India’s Red Belt’ for BBC Radio 4’s ‘Crossing Continents’.