On the morning of October 9, Adum Tayom was getting a haircut in a town in Arunachal Pradesh when the police barged into the barber’s shop.
They grabbed Tayom, a leader from the Upper Siang district, and three other activists and pushed them into a police van. They were taken from Pasighat to the state capital, Itanagar, where they remain in preventive detention.
All four are residents of Geku, a village on the banks of the Siang river that has been at the heart of protests against a proposed 11,000 MW dam in the district.
The activists are members of the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum or SIFF, which represents agriculturists from the Adi community. The group has been stalling surveys for the dam for years, claiming that it will submerge their ancestral lands and displace them.
For several hours after Tayum was picked up, the police gave no information about his and his colleagues’ whereabouts, nor were their families informed. “We were not told about his arrest for more than eight hours,” Osunam Tayom, his wife, told Scroll. “He was not told why he was being arrested. We did not know which jail he was taken to.”
Later that night, the Upper Siang district magistrate said the four had been held under the...