Arundhati Roy writes to Shahidul Alam
Day of the Imprisoned Writer 2018
November 20, 2018 / Indian Cultural Forum
Dear Shahidul,
It’s been more than a hundred days now since they took you away. Times
aren’t easy in your country or in mine, so when we first heard that
unknown men had abducted you from your home, of course we feared the
worst. Were you going to be “encountered” (our word in India for
extra-judicial murder by security forces) or killed by “non-state
actors”? Would your body be found in an alley, or floating in some
shallow pond on the outskirts of Dhaka? When your arrest was announced
and you surfaced alive in a police station, our first reaction was one
of sheer joy.
Am I really writing to you? Perhaps not. If I were, I wouldn’t need to
say very much beyond, “Dearest Shahidul, no matter how lonely your
prison cell, know that we have our eyes on you. We are looking out for
you.”
If I were really writing to you I wouldn’t need to tell you how your
work, your photographs and your words, has, over decades, inscribed a
vivid map of humankind in our part of the world—its pain, its joy, its
violence, its sorrow and desolation, its stupidity, its cruelty, its
sheer, crazy complicatedness—onto our consciousness. Your work is lit
up, made luminous, as much by love as it is by a probing, questioning
anger born of witnessing at first hand the things that you have
witnessed. Those who have imprisoned you have not remotely understood
what it is that you do. We can only hope, for their sake, that someday
they will.
Your arrest is meant to be a warning to your fellow citizens: “If we
can do this to Shahidul Alam, think of what we can do to the rest of
you—all you nameless, faceless, ordinary people. Watch. And be afraid.”
The formal charge against you is that you have criticized your country
in your (alleged) Facebook posts. You have been arrested under the
Section 57 of Bangladesh’s infamous Information and Communications
Technology Act (ICT) which authorizes “the prosecution of any person who
publishes, in electronic form, material that is fake and obscene;
defamatory; tends to deprave and corrupt its audience; causes or may
cause deterioration in law and order; prejudices the image of the state
or a person; or causes or may cause hurt to religious belief.”
What sort of law is this, this absurd, indiscriminate, catch-all,
fishing trawler type of law? What place does it have in a country that
calls itself a democracy? Who has the right to decide what the correct
“image of the state” is, and should be? Is there only one legally
approved and acceptable image of Bangladesh? Section 57 potentially
criminalizes all forms of speech except blatant sycophancy. It’s an
attack, not on intellectuals, but on intelligence itself. We hear that
over the last five years more than 1200 journalists in Bangladesh have
been charged under it, and that 400 trials are already underway.
In India too, this sort of attack on our intelligence is becoming
normalized. Our equivalent of Bangladesh’s ICT Act is the Unlawful
Activities Prevention Act under which hundreds of people including
students, activists, lawyers and academics are being arrested in wave
after wave. The cases against them, like the one against you, are flimsy
and ludicrous. Even the police know that they are likely to be
acquitted by higher courts. But the hope is that by then, their spirits
will have been broken by years in prison. The process is the punishment.
So, as I write this letter to you, dear Shahidul, I am tempted to add,
dear Sudha, dear Saibaba, dear Surendra, dear Shoma, dear Mahesh, dear
Sudhir, dear Rona, dear Arun, dear Vernon, and also, dear Tariq, dear
Aijaz, dear Aamir, dear Kopa, dear Kamla, dear Madavi, dear Maase, dear
Raju, dear hundreds and hundreds of others.
How is it possible for people to defend themselves against laws like
these? It’s like having to prove one’s innocence before a panel of
certified paranoics. Every argument only serves to magnify their
paranoia and heighten their delusions.
As both our countries hurtle towards general elections, we know that we
can expect more arrests, more lynching, more killing, more bloggers
hacked to death, more orchestrated ethnic, religious and caste
conflagrations— more false-flag “terrorist” strikes, more assassinations
of journalists and writers. Elections, we know, means fire in the
ducts.
Your Prime Minister, who claims to be a secular democrat, has announced
that she will build 500 mosques with the billion dollars the Government
of Saudi Arabia has donated to Bangladesh. These mosques are supposedly
meant to disseminate the “correct” kind of Islam.
Here in India, our rulers have dropped all pretense of the secularism
and socialism that are enshrined in our constitution. In order to
distract attention from the catastrophic failures of governance and
deepening popular resentment, as institution after institution—our
courts, universities, banks, intelligence agencies—is pushed into
crisis, the ruling power, (not the Government, but its holding company,
the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,) is alternately cajoling and
threatening the Supreme Court to pass an order clearing the decks for
the construction of a giant Hindu temple on the site where the Babri
Masjid once stood before it was demolished by a rampaging mob. It’s
amazing how politicians’ piety peaks and troughs with election cycles.
This is what we are up against, these neat definitions of the perfect
nation, the perfect man, the perfect citizen, the perfect Hindu, the
perfect Muslim. The postscript to this is the perfect majority and the
satanic minority. The people of Europe and the Soviet Union have lived
through the devastation that these sorts of ideas caused. They have
suffered the matchless terror of neatness. Only recently Europe marked
the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht—the event that marked the
beginning of the Holocaust. There too it all began quite slowly. There
too it began with elections. And there too the old murmurs have started
up again.
Here we’re going to witness our own scorched-earth elections in the
coming days. They will use their fishing-trawler laws, they will jump at
shadows to decimate the opposition.
Fortunately, we are an irredeemably untidy people. And hopefully we will stand up to them in our diverse and untidy ways.
Dear Shahidul, I believe the tide will turn. It will. It must. This
foolish, shortsighted cruelty will give way to something kinder and more
visionary. This particular malaise, this bout of ill-health that has
engulfed our planet will pass.
I hope to see you in Dhaka very soon.
With love
Arundhati
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