In our country, political prisoners are not just people in jail for their beliefs, but even those outside, picked on and punished through campaigns of harassment.
The entire polity can begin to resemble a vast prison when people committed to the defence of constitutional values and civil rights are routinely charged with sedition, terrorism and assassination plots, when they come to be incarcerated in growing numbers, exposed to deliberate cruelty and neglect amid a pandemic, when the State is either an active agent of persecution or an abettor of violence, with the law no longer a guarantee of freedom but an instrument of vendetta and repression.
This week for BOL, poet and postdoctoral fellow at department of Conflict and Development Studies, Ghent University, Soibam Haripriya reads her poem, ‘In Prison’.
The prison raids homes, gathering evidence of humanity
sniffing out the prophetic poets of doom and hope
without a trial.
Indifference is a virtue
unpunished by law.
