Courage is a strange quality; it seems to grow the more it is quenched.
Take the case of student leader and activist Afreen Fatima, whose father – Welfare Party of India leader Javed Mohammad – was detained on false charges on June 10, 2022, and arrested the next day, following the protests by the Muslim community against two BJP leaders who made derogatory remarks against Prophet Muhammad. Fatima’s mother and sister Sumaiya were also detained on June 11. Fatima and her sister-in-law refused to go to the police station. On June 12, the authorities razed their home to the ground, ensuring that Fatima’s mother and sister were present to witness this. Amidst such cruelty, I ask Fatima a question that puzzles me: Where does she get the courage to fight on when she has so much to lose?
Her reply is almost sardonic. “As a Muslim, I can say that we have nothing to lose anymore,” she says. “On the face of it, everything looks ok, but that is not the case. Every time Muslims step out of their home, they are taking a huge risk. They might be lynched on the street or arrested on false terror charges or framed for being part of a protest. They can be charged under the UAPA [Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act] or the NSA [National Security Act]. The burden is on us to prove our innocence, not on the state to explain why a person is considered a national security threat.”
Fatima is part of the Polis Project, a New York-based research and journalism organisation with a focus on South Asia. In March 2020, at the Polis Project, a series on political prisoners called ‘Profiles of Dissent’ was launched, which evolved into the book How Long Can The Moon Be Caged? by Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia, with Fatima as one of the researchers. “The publication of 27 profiles made us understand how urgent it was to articulate a more complex and nuanced understanding of the situation of political prisoners,” Recchia tells THE WEEK over Zoom.
She is right, because the book truly is an eye-opener. One might have known the rough outline of what happened to these political prisoners, from the 16 accused of abetting the violence that broke out in Bhima Koregaon in 2018 to those arrested in the anti-CAA protests of 2019. Yet, the true extent of their agony is intricately fleshed out in the book. It is like the writers have coloured inside the black-and-white images of a sketch book, lending the images depth and vividness.
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Courage, as the writers posit in the book, is also something that increases when it is shared.
On January 15, 2021, when Father Stan Swamy, one of the 16 accused in the Bhima Koregaon case, completed 100 days in jail, he wrote: “First of all, I deeply appreciate the overwhelming solidarity expressed by many during these past 100 days behind the bars. At times, news of such solidarity has given me immense strength and courage especially when the only thing certain in prison is uncertainty.” He describes how the 16 co-accused had not been able to meet each other, as they were lodged in different jails or different ‘circles’ within the same jail. “But we will still sing in chorus,” he writes. “A caged bird can still sing.”
A recurring theme in the book is the solidarity among the prisoners. Vijayan and Recchia describe how most of their conversations with prisoners and their families started with long discussions on the status of other prisoners. As the news of their meetings went around, people started asking them for an update on others and made them carriers of information in this wider network of people, “who may or may not have met before, but who are now connected by a shared destiny”.
“Something that we heard constantly from the families is how keeping the discussion alive outside jail is important for the prisoners, and how it gives them great strength,” says Recchia.
One part of the book is the letters and poems written by the prisoners themselves, and something that comes through is the resilience of the human spirit. In each of the prisoners’ stories, there is a turning away from the self and turning toward a cause larger than themselves. Even when inner reserves of courage seem to ebb away, they draw from an outer source – the strength of their conviction. It is a source that can replenish the spirit even when the body is tortured, a fact that the state does not realise, even as it beats, bruises, and starves the prisoners.
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Above all, courage continues when its presence seems redundant. Even when, with all their courage, the prisoners’ cause seems to be a lost one.
According to the writers, the Narendra Modi government has been growing more despotic, and has systematically defanged institutions like the judiciary, the media, and the police. They say that vigilante squads, lynching and communal violence have become the norm.
After Modi returned to power in 2019, the UAPA was amended to give authorities the power to unilaterally designate anyone as a terrorist, without having to provide evidence. The funds allocated to the intelligence agencies have also increased, along with the scope of their powers. Last year, the Law Commission of India widened the scope of the sedition laws and increased the punishment that could be imposed from three to seven years. Under the proposed new definition of sedition, a mere ‘inclination’ and ‘tendency’ to incite violence or cause public disorder was enough for a person to be charged; proof of actual violence was no longer required.
The writers say that the state has been brutally quenching dissent with such laws. According to them, things are especially bad for Muslim political prisoners, so much so that one of them, Sharjeel Usmani, says that no one speaks about it because they all expect it and take it as a given. The wife of Khalid Saifi, who was arrested in 2020 for protesting the lack of religious freedom, told the writers that he was beaten with a lathi, urinated upon and waterboarded. The mother of Athar Khan, who was arrested during the Delhi pogrom of 2020, said that he was once beaten so badly that even his shoes broke. Poet and activist Varavara Rao recalls an incident when he had a urinary ailment for which he needed a catheter that had to be changed every two weeks. The jail authorities ignored his requests and kept the same catheter for two months, which led to an infection that left him in a prolonged state of delirium and hallucination. He lost his memory and control over his body and consequently had to wear a diaper. His family had not been informed of his condition and when they were finally able to see him in hospital, he was on a bed with soiled sheets, semi-conscious and incapable of recognising even his wife.
After all this torture, what bewilders is how the prisoners go back to their activism once they are let out. Those like Usmani have been relentlessly active in his grassroots work since his release. When Nodeep Kaur was asked whether she was afraid of possible repercussions after returning to her struggle for the dignity of daily-wage labourers upon coming out of prison, she said she now fights with renewed energy, because she owes it to those who supported her work and agitated for her release.
Perhaps what Natasha Narwal, a student activist who was arrested in 2020, wrote about glimpsing the moon from their barracks window best explains the courage of these political prisoners to fight on, clinging to a hope which is lodged too deep for the reaches of a lathi stick:
“[The moon] is caged in the grills but the moonlight is coming to us filtering through them,” she writes. “Before coming inside our ward to be locked, I managed to see some stars as well giving the moon some company. I don’t know when one will be able to see the night sky without these grills and bars. How long will or can the moon be caged, Hum dekhenge (We will see).”
How Long Can The Moon Be Caged: Voices of Indian Political Prisoners
By Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia
Published by Westland Books
Price Rs599; pages 282