Explained : Incarceration as Politics: A Timeline of Political Prisoners In Independent India and Its Impact

Across countries and political systems, incarceration has always been used as a tool to control the masses. It has been justified through shifting legal terms such as national security, public order, and counter-terrorism. 

While the laws change, the logic remains the same. It has time and again proved that dissent against any government will be treated as a threat. ​

India’s post-Independence history reflects this pattern. Movements such as the Anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s, the emergence of the Naxalite movement in the early 1970s, mass arrests during the Emergency, the 1990s where the governments were made and broke like dominoes and the intensified targeting of minorities, students, activists, and political opponents after 2014 mark different moments of the same trajectory. Each phase has expanded the classification of the “political prisoner”, not reduced it. 

This timeline examines political prisoners charged under national security laws, including the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) which was in force from 1971 to 1978, and later replaced by the National Security Act (NSA), and the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), operative between 1985 and 1995, which laid the groundwork for the present-day Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). 

These statutes have enabled prolonged detention, making the judicial process vague and giving way to the normalisation and criminalisation of political opposition. 

In the 1960s, political imprisonment was shaped by mass movements contesting the idea of cultural and linguistic uniformity. In Tamil Nadu, C.N. Annadurai, the founder of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), had emerged as a central figure in the anti-Hindi movement, which framed linguistic autonomy as a democratic right.