A most extraordinary thing happened in Jail yesterday evening. In my last letter, I said how with the children, we wonder about rainbows and fireflies.
Tag: prison
If instead of being hanged by the neck
you’re thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, your people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,
you won’t say,
“Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag” —
You’ll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it’s your solemn duty
to live one more day
to spite the enemy.
The Campaign Against State Repression (CASR) calls on all democratic organisations and individuals to come together and condemn the denial of relief for Prof. Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha, stand in solidarity with all such voices of democracy and demand the immediate release of all political prisoners. Our unity at this time of crisis is all the more urgent and necessary for our silence in the time of injustice is bound to render us voiceless in the days to come. Let us unite and demand
Immediate reprieve from arrest of Prof. Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha.
Immediate release of all political prisoners lodged in jails all over the country, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
1. Immediate release of all under-trial prisoners and persons convicted on minor charges to decongest prisons.
2. Action (with restraint in light of COVID-19) against the perpetrators of violence in the Bhima Koregaon case including Sambhaji Bhide and Milind Ekbote.
Repeal of all draconian laws like UAPA, NSA and PSA, among others.
In India, we are witnessing the psychopathological connection between the prison and the nation state in its entirety at the moment, in the context of both the Kashmir Valley and the creation of our latest architectural wonder, the detention center in Assam.
As a nation, we are being bound on principles of these two, I would argue, architecturally similar ideas , of silencing a space and of containing a people (within a space).
He smiles
he laughs
through the bars
to shake me up
from my early morning dreams
with a hug
of a good morning
clanking a huge bunch of keys
into the cage of my life sentence.
BACHCHA PRASAD SINGH, alleged CPI(Maoist) Central Committee member who has been recently released after Six years and Four months in various prisons, in a lengthy interview to Shailza Sharma in Kafila talks of prisons and political prisoners, analyses the international and national situation and indicates What is to be Done. On a personal note he concludes: “I was always a part of the radical movement, I am a part of the radical movement and will always be a part of the radical movement”
I remember hearing you speak after your release from prison after more than nine years. Keeping aside the mental and physical torture, those years gifted you solitude, within the cocoons of which you could read and write quite a lot, you had said. Yes, solitude is indeed the most cherished thing for a reader.
Imagining India Without Prisons
What connects the murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis to the imprisoning of Nodeep Kaur in New Delhi to the detaining of Ahed Tamimi by Israeli authorities to the house arrest of Syed Ali Shah Geelani in Kashmir? How do race, caste, policing and occupation interconnect across borders?
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