Tag: Omar Khalid

You Can't Jail An Idea

You Can’t Jail An Idea

By Amit Sengupta

The God of Loss.
The God of Small Things.
He left no footprints in the sand, no ripples in water, no image in mirrors.
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Now, they have got after author Arundhati Roy. After ten years of tracking her life and times, replete with balanced, critical and insightful resistance to the Neo-Nazis gone berserk, the Booker Prize winner and international celebrity, has become the first target of the fake prophet’s unpopular and hated regime in the scorching summer of June 2024. Certainly, all the heads of state in Italy are currently fully aware of his glorious deeds, past and present, at the G-7 Summit, including that he was banned from travelling to the US for ten long years, and became a global pariah, after presiding over the carnage in Gujarat, 2002.

Indeed, running a crippled government with a lost mandate, despite all the machinations of the Election Commission and his stooge media, discredited and rejected by almost half of the Indian voters, having just about scraped through in his own constituency, the ‘non-biological’ one has not changed his spots. And, clearly, he is refusing to learn any lessons from history.

The draconian UAPA case against Roy yet again reminds the nation of Gulfisha, Sharjeel and Umar Khalid. Indeed, have we forgotten them all — brilliant, young scholars, rotting in prison in this heat wave, for more than three years now, without a legitimate bail, imprisoned on what are widely believed to be cooked-up charges, with no evidence whatsoever?

Is it a crime that they are not celebrities, and, instead, are legitimate Muslim citizens of a secular democracy? Thereby, should they be treated as ‘second class’ citizens which Mr M wants to turn into a one-dimensional, repressive, racist and patriarchal ‘Hindu Rashtra’? Is it a crime to be a Muslim – modern, young, enlightened — in contemporary India?

Besides, is it not a recurring message, that once the series of mob-lynching of Muslims under State protection stopped, mainly because of the outrage against it across the nation, these scholars were picked up and punished, only because they were peaceful dissenters, articulate in their reinterpretation of a pluralist society, and firm believers in the Indian Constitution?

So, who is Gulfisha?

She is also called Gul. Gul means a flower. Perhaps, a rose. Gul has done her MBA, is considered exceptionally talented by her friends and family, and apart from other public causes, she used to take English language classes with local Muslim women during the non-violent protests against the polarizing anti-constitutional CAA.

Gulfisha, Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam (L to R)

She was not alone in this kaleidoscopic mass movement of rainbow coalitions. Led by brave students, especially women, of Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, including students of JNU and other campuses, and the mothers and daughters of Shaheen Bagh in the neighbourhood, the protests had rocked the country. Tens of thousands of people were on the streets across India, and innumerable Shaheen Baghs were being born in towns and cities.

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That is why, Mr M’s best Gujju buddy wanted to send an ‘electric current, with every button pressed of the electronic machine, during the assembly polls in Delhi in 2020, which they so badly lost, yet again. Wonder, why should a Union home minister inflict electric current on his own citizens, and what a crude and ugly message it really meant for the women of India?

The deadly Delhi riots followed. Inevitably, one community suffered the most. And members of the same community, young dissenters, were all picked up and punished. So predictable is this perverse pattern! Injustice follows injustice, like an Orwellian nightmare!

According to a report by the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) (April 9, 2024): “On March 5, the Delhi High Court’s Justices Suresh Kumar Kait and Manoj Jain heard a petition for bail. The court decided to reserve its bail verdict. Gulfisha Fatima again was sent back to prison. As the probe by the police continues, April 9 marks four years of the incarceration of Gulfisha. She has been implicated and accused of violence during the north-east Delhi violence of 2020.”

“…The police had further claimed that she had had an office near the protest site from where she would take to planning riots with others, including those accused in the case such as Khalid Saifi, Natasha Narwal, Devangana Kalita, and her lawyer Mehmood Pracha…”

Natasha and Devangana were later released on bail after spending a long time inside the prison. They are both scholars in JNU. Their release should have marked a precedence. None of that happened.

Indeed, the CJP reported that after several such arrests, experts from the United Nations called the arrests politically motivated and called for Gulfisha’s release, along with other protestors. “These defenders, many of them students, appear to have been arrested simply because they exercised their right to denounce and protest against the CAA  The experts termed the arrests as “designed to send a chilling message…that criticism of government policies will not be tolerated.”

And what about Sharjeel Imam? Have we forgotten him also?

Sharjeel hails from Jehanabad, Bihar. His academic record tells a story, not found easily in most Muslim homes, not even in most Indian homes. He completed his BTech and MTech from IIT-Bombay and joined JNU in 2013 for his Master’s in ‘Modern History’. Two years later, he started work on his PhD theses. He has been framed with multiple charges and continues to languish in jail.

All who have met Umar Khalid, know him to be an affable, happy, friendly, resilient, forthcoming and brave young man, whose heart beats for the poor and against all forms of injustice. A firm believer in the Indian Constitution, his passionate and captivating speeches were mesmerizing, taking the audience to a journey of new facts and insights about Indian society, its past and present. He represented the modern aspiration, values and ethics of the young generation – non-sectarian, open-ended, always ready to listen to the others’ viewpoint, and steadfast in his faith in the idea of infinite resistance against all that stands for evil. He finished his PhD from the Centre for Historical Studies in the School of Social Sciences in JNU.

Khalid Saifi, his friend and comrade in the ‘United Against Hate’, is also languishing in prison. Similar charges. A big-hearted husband of a loving and brave wife, with three beautiful children, he was doing relief work in the riot-affected areas on the day he was picked up. He remains resilient and strong, though his wife and kids miss him like hell. Her occasional posts on the social media are heart-breaking.

Only a totally cruel and heartless regime can do this to a mother and her children — what they have done to him!

Delhi Lt Governor VK Saxena has now accorded sanction to prosecute Arundhati Roy and a former professor in Kashmir, Sheikh Showkat Hussain, under the UAPA, for allegedly making provocative speeches at an event in Delhi in 2010.

Besides the relentless hounding of the popular AAP government, Saxena has done precious little for the people of Delhi. The citizens of Delhi know too well, especially the poor, that all that they have gained under the AAP government has been unprecedented – fantastic, world class government schools with specialized skills and modern equipment for children coming from humble homes, free bus rides for women in the Delhi Transport Corporation, an end to the hounding of hard-working street-vendors, rickshaw-pullers and vegetable-sellers by the municipal corporation and cops, multiple body tests, hospital services and mohalla clinics with not a penny spent, and, of course, free water and highly subsidized electric supply.

Saxena has no credibility whatsoever. Now, the hounding of Arundhati Roy, will make him internationally famous – albeit for the wrong reasons.

Certainly, Roy is not going to succumb or compromise. Instead, she will become more resilient and inspiring. Undoubtedly, this is the time for the INDIA alliance, civil society and women’s groups, farmers, students, teachers, workers and ordinary citizens, to teach this totally corrupt and crony capitalist regime, without a mandate, a lesson. Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, yet again, should lead this struggle for human and fundamental rights – and the Right to Dissent. And the Left should join them in the barricades.

The Neo-Nazis have been squarely defeated in the ballot box. This is the time for the people of India to hit the streets. Peacefully. If thinkers, scholars and creative writers can’t express themselves peacefully, than that society can never ever call itself a democracy!

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The Ground Is Shifting – Slowly, Silently

By Amit Sengupta

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
– Nietzsche

If in the beginning was the word, then silence is not always golden. If, in the beginning is silence, then there is always a twist in the dark narrative. If a tragedy follows a nightmare, and a nightmare then follows a tragedy, and it thereby becomes a damned vicious circle, then the wordless silence can become sinister, almost diabolical.

As the condemned people of Manipur would tell you.

Or, ask the people of a ‘democratic, secular, pluralist, socialist’ India – the happy story of their lives since the fated summer of 2014, sans the dominant narrative of fake news synchronized ritualistically by fanatic loyalists of the media and the army of thoughtless bhakts. Ask them, and a torrent of clueless, insensitive and incoherent verbiage floods the vitiated atmosphere, like waters from a filthy gutter, and all forms of ethics, form and content, argument and ideas, go for a toss. If the fake messiah has spoken, or chosen silence, then it will be as it is; Manipur, and the country, can go, get damned!

So what is it that compels him to choose this uncanny silence in the face of the whole world asking him to speak up?

Is it something new? No. Not at all.

Did he choose to offer condolence to her family when journalist Gauri Lankesh was murdered by Hindutva fundamentalists, no less vicious in their murderous thoughts and actions, as Islamic fundamentalists? Did he choose to share the grief on the killing of ace photographer Danish Siddiqui, a Pulitzer award-winner, on the frontlines of a battle between the Taliban and western forces in Afghanistan, even while the entire Western media made their homage, and even the Afghan president shared his sorrow with the family of Danish?

So why was Sanna Irshad Mattoo, a brilliant Kashmiri woman journalist, clicking her rare and precious pictures against all odds in an extremely difficult conflict zone, denied the joy of visiting the US to collect her coveted Pulitzer? What is the petty pleasure which an ageing and fossilized establishment gets, (with not an iota of positive thoughts inside their political unconscious) by denying a young, female role-model the right to her prestigious award, while, in contrast, they should be celebrating her and the honour she received?

Not only that, they have put other Kashmiri journalists in prison, in a state, where, literally, the media has been gagged since the abrogation of Article 370, the clampdown, and the military occupation, subjecting the entire population into an eternal state of trauma. Is this how they imagine the people of Kashmir can be integrated to the idea of a mainland?

Ditto with late UR Ananthamurthy and Girish Karnad, great cultural icons. Ditto with our world champion women wrestlers, who were dragged and brutalized on the streets of Delhi, even while he walked like a mythical monarch holding a mythical Sengol, in the new Parliament building, boycotted by the entire Opposition. Even while a muscular BJP bahubali from UP, accused of hounding and harassing women wrestlers, including by a minor, still roams scot-free! He even has the audacity to speak about the Manipuri women who were paraded naked on the streets, gang-raped and mob-lynched, even while the BJP-led regime in Imphal and the entire security establishment tacitly looked the other way.

Chief of the Delhi Commission for Women, Swati Maliwal, one of the few brave public figures who chose to go to Manipur and meet its people in the relief camps, said: “I went to Churachandpur alone, without any security. I met the families of the two women who were stripped, paraded naked and sexually assaulted. If I can meet them, why can’t the chief minister? Why can’t he go to Churachandpur and other affected places in his bullet-proof car?”

Indeed, in one case, a boy was allegedly picked up by the cops for putting up a Facebook post, and, then, guess what did they do? They gave him away to a blood-thirsty mob!

In another case, two Kuki women working in a car-wash garage in Imphal were reportedly gang-raped, beaten up and murdered by a mob, and the spectacle went on for a long time, but the cops and para-military forces were nowhere around. A freedom-fighter’s mother was burnt alive inside her own home. A Kargil soldier’s wife was murdered. And someone else’s daughter has been gang-raped. Horror stories are endless and no one knows when these tragedies and nightmares will at all end!

In another macabre twist, as in the ghastly parade of a Kuki mother and daughter, stripped on the streets, which led to huge national outrage, several such instances point to the active role of women in instigating and supporting these grotesque public spectacles – the murderous assaults on the body and soul of other women — as allies of male rapists and murderers.

What have they reduced this beautiful state of Manipur into? How have they turned such nice people into ugly monsters?

ALSO READ: Every Corner of Imphal Has Become a Relief Camp

Certainly, all of this, reminds us of the state-sponsored genocide in Gujarat, 2002, when innocent citizens of India, including children, were raped, gang-raped, burnt alive and murdered, while a large population celebrated and glorified the genocide and murderers. No wonder, they were garlanding the killers and rapists in the Bilquis Bano case, whereby, her child, family and friends were murdered! Not only that, one of the killers was being felicitated by the BJP in Gujarat.

So what is this goddamned message to the entire country and the world? We will do what we will, you can go get damned!

While miscellaneous monsters, mob-lynch specialists and gang-rapists are currently ruling the roost, apparently backed by the regime, it has been three years since brilliant, young scholars, Umar Khalid, Gulfisha, Sharjeel, among others like Khalid Saifi, are rotting in jail. Their crime? Protesting peacefully against the communal and anti-constitutional CAA.

In this litany of infinite injustice, there is not one moment of pause. There is not one word spoken which can heal, console and soothe the nation’s soul. There is not one gesture, not even symbolic and ephemeral, which can help the nation walk away from the vicious, the sinister, the diabolical. It is this eternal festival of hell-fire which hounds this condemned land, where evil stalks, like a death-wish, crushing all that comes on its way.

Amidst this despair and pessimism, what is it that compels him to choose this compulsive silence? In contrast, he is in full force, waxing eloquent to hired, mostly Gujarati NRIs, all over the world, while being honoured with sundry awards, even as he makes multi-billion arms deals – to benefit whom, in a country with tens of thousands jobless, homeless, poor and hungry?

For one, there is a path-breaking paradigm shift happening right now in India which has rattled him and rendered him speechless. Two, he and his genius think-tank, seem totally clueless in their unimaginative counter-attacks – using metaphors which only boomerangs on them.

Consider this golden statement of someone who has otherwise chosen silence when faced with a ravaged Manipur, or, the sexual harassment of our women wrestlers, etc. According to a BJP MP, while speaking to them in a parliamentary party meeting, “He said the East India Company, the Indian National Congress, the Indian Mujahideen and the Popular Front of India also had India in their names.”

INDIA has undoubtedly rattled him and his party. There is a new wind blowin’ in this ‘New India’. India needs hope and healing. India will find hope and healing. The nation will definitely resurrect and redefine its own destiny; its own secular democracy and its own rainbow coalition. It’s time for him to go. Enough is enough!

Chronicles Of An Arrest Foretold

By Amit Sengupta

I was 20, and I won’t let anyone say those are the best years of my life
– Paul Nizan, Aden Arabia

On social media platforms, there has been a new celebration of nostalgia in lockdown: #MeAt20, pictures when you were in the 20s.

While many discovered old forgotten memories and fresh, open-ended, non-dogmatic, young and idealistic faces from the past, mostly in black & white, the vicious signs of the contemporary times in India came back like a sudden jolt. Masrat Zahra, a Kashmiri photo-journalist in her 20s, was booked under a stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, for uploading “anti-national” posts on social media. The action is repetitive and inevitable, and it seems shocking, surprising, lacking both sanity and humanity, every time it arrives in its bitter ritualism. Why, you ask yet again, knowing so fully well the depressing answer. For God’s sake, why, and that too during a global ‘Mahamari’, amidst death and dying?

However, what do you do with those who love the sinister and the diabolical like in a compulsive, obsessive, B-Grade horror movie, constantly looking for ‘potential victims’, using their constitutional powers like feudal, unaccountable, revengeful monarchies and dictatorships? And what do you do when the old and the ageing, in the last phases of their life’s illustrious graph, choose to become so vindictive and hateful against the young, especially the educated and the professional young, that they want to hurt them so badly, demonise and dehumanize them, clamp draconian laws against them, brand them ‘anti-nationals and jehadis’, among other clichéd ‘badges of honour’, and, finally, lock them up in prisons, even while the justice system seems so tragically distant and indifferent?

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Can parents hate their children? Can teachers hate their students? Can gurus hate their shishyas? Can a good coach hate the sportspersons he is teaching the difficult craft of the game? Can the ageing and the powerful so hate the young, instead of celebrating their brilliance? Are they not the future of hope, and the hope of the future, the nation’s scaffoldings?

Yes, it seems, if we look at contemporary times in India, which is gloomy and foreboding, not because of the young, but because of the old: the bitter, Hobbesian old.

There are many pictures which Masrat Zahra has taken in her young career as a photo journalist, including on women, in places not many journalists would dare to go in a ‘conflict zone’. Her pictures have been authentic and non-partisan. Homai Vyarawalla was an ace woman photojournalist during the colonial period, and there have been rare and few instances of women taking up the camera. Young Masrat’s pictures in Kashmir’s sublime and difficult terrain are loaded with subliminal depth, sensitivity and angst; they capture news as much as transcend ‘news as instant history’.

ALSO READ: Has The Nation Forgotten Kashmir?

This is no mechanical reproduction of art or current affairs. This is the craft of story-telling and visual history, this is time unfolding and recorded with a spontaneous click of the camera. There is nothing spontaneous in her camera, or her art of photography. It is built through years of observation, silence and absorption of the unhappy and uncanny reality in Kashmir, now under a military lockdown since August 5.

As a photo journalist, surely, she has the right to photograph all she sees: the falling of the leaves in sad autumn, like Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’, the leaves becoming kaleidoscopic; or, the stillness of the Dal Lake during an entire day’s life, as if life’s infinite sadness has stopped the ripples of the waters; or, the barbed wires and the barricades. So, why is she being hounded, a young and brilliant person with great promise? Instead, India, and its government, should be proud of her.

And why hound Peerzada Ashiq as well, the credible correspondent of The Hindu in Srinagar? If this is not a direct attack on the freedom of press, as it was when they tried to hound Siddharth Varadarajan, Editor, The Wire, then what is it? Siddharth only did his duty as a professional journalist, he only reported what many others were doing. So why pick and choose, while all those who run the flourishing hate factories can get away with fake news, planted stories, character assassinations, doctored videos, communal and social hatred in full public glare, and again and again, like a chronicle of a tale foretold?

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They have booked some of the brightest young people in our intellectual horizons without any iota of evidence. Safoora Zargar, a MPhil scholar in Jamia, significantly also from Kashmir, Meeran Haider, from Jamia, both doing relief work in difficult circumstances, Gowher Geelani, a journalist, and, once again, Umar Khalid, who has done his PhD from JNU, and against whom not one charge has been proved despite their best efforts to demonise him, including with doctored videos. Besides, Khalid Saifi of United Against Hate and Ishrat Jahan, both working in relief operations after the riots in Northeast Delhi, were arrested. Khalid was allegedly tortured too, with his legs in plaster.

Is it, because, they are all Muslims?

Fortunately, barring the compulsive sell-outs, the entire journalist fraternity has stood up in protest and in solidarity. Said the Editors Guild of India: “The Editors Guild of India has noted with shock and concern the high-handed manner in which the law enforcement agencies in Jammu & Kashmir have used the prevailing laws to deal with two Srinagar-based journalists, Masrat Zahra, a young freelance photographer, and Peerzada Ashiq, a reporter working for The Hindu.

“Any recourse to such laws for merely publishing something in the mainstream or social media is a gross misuse of power. Its only purpose can be to strike terror into journalists. The Guild also believes that this is an indirect way of intimidating journalists in the rest of the country as well. The journalists should be put to no harm or further harassment. If the government has any grievance against their reporting, there are other ways of dealing with such issues in the normal course. Mere social media posts of factual pictures can’t attract the toughest anti-terror laws passed for hardened terrorists. And in the case of The Hindu reporter, the correct course was to escalate the complaint to the newspaper’s editor. The Guild demands that the Union Territory administration of Jammu & Kashmir withdraw the charges forthwith.”

Meanwhile, the Indian Women’s Press Corps (IWPC) said that it is shocked at the manner in which the law enforcement authorities in Jammu & Kashmir, over the last few days, have invoked laws to clamp down on freedom of speech and expression that violate fundamental rights laid down in the Constitution. The IWPC notes that the intentions of the authorities in J&K is to strike fear in the hearts of journalists who are simply doing their job. This is a clear message that the Union Territory will not tolerate dissent.”

Several civil society organisations and collective bodies of journalists, including the Committee for the Protection of Journalists and the Network of Women in Media, India, have protested against the intimidation of journalists. The international media is also reporting on the gasping breath of the largest democracy.

Indeed, if this government wants only a puppet media, a loyalist intellectual community, and a youth which should only toe its line, then Indian democracy is in serious danger. Perhaps, we have already crossed the line of control. And that is bad news.