Yesterday, the CBI court in Ahmedabad discharged police officers, refusing to allow prosecution of those charged for 2004 fake encounter of the the 19 year old Ishrat Jahan. On the same day, Umar Khalid completes 200 days of being wrongfully incarcerated, and Natasha Narwal has been in jail for defending the constitution for over 300 days.
Mahashweta Devi writes in her monumental work, Mother of 1084 about “a society that gave the dead the right to live, and denied it to the living”. She is filled with disdain for how “the prisons were overflowing with the revolutionaries, but things in everyday life went on normally.”
For Bol this week, Akhil Katyal reads his moving poem “An Evening Walk (while a friend is in prison)”, dedicating not just his words, but with a force of protest and solidarity, also the everyday ordinariness which includes freedom — to Natasha Narwal.
