I was taken inside the thana and made to sit in a tiny room. Then the questioning started. The man who had brought me here spoke to me politely. But then another cop came in and said very rudely, ‘This is your country and you shout slogans against it?’

I found this very strange. When did I shout slogans against the country? I have been shouting slogans against Modi and that’s no secret. Had Modi now become the country? By now I was beginning to get the feeling that something was seriously wrong. On what grounds had I been arrested, I asked them. Where was the warrant?

‘You’ll get the warrant in jail,’ he said. ‘There, you’ll get everything.’

After that he spoke to someone on the phone. He asked if he should arrest me.

After disconnecting his call, he asked for my father’s number. I am bad at phone numbers – I don’t even remember my own. Luckily I remembered Pitaji’s since he had been the first to get a phone at home. Calling my father, the cop told him that I’d been arrested for ‘sedition’. Read more