Cry for Teesta, cry for India, cry for Justice

By M K George

Rome, June 27, 2022: There is a pathetic scene in the Bible when Jesus was carrying the Cross-to Calvary, to be crucified there. Looking at the exhausted and pitiable face of Jesus, the women on the roadside cried. Jesus turned and said to them, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children.”

One is rudely reminded of the above scene as we hear of the arrest of Teesta and others.

Reports on June 25 say: “A day after the Supreme Court upheld the clean chit by the SIT [Special Investigation Team] to then Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the 2002 Gujarat riots, the Ahmedabad Detection of Crime Branch (DCB) arrested retired state DGP R B Sreekumar, whose role had been called into question by the Court, and Mumbai-based activist Teesta Setalvad, who backed the petitioner Zakia Jafri…FIR filed against Sreekumar, Setalvad and Sanjiv Bhatt on ‘forgery, fabricating false evidence, criminal conspiracy.”.

The courts have said it and who are we ordinary mortals to question the courts? However, the simple question haunts us: There are so many who think the opposite of what the courts are saying, who believe exactly the contrary. They are the victims. They are the eyewitnesses. So whom do you believe? Do you believe the victims or the authorities?

There is so much happening in India now. And so fast, they happen. But the speed seems to be selective. For hate speech from the supporters of the ruling regime, very few are arrested and at a snail speed. When it comes to human rights defenders, there is a haste in arresting and incarcerating them. One wonders why this haste.

Teesta Setalvad has expressed fear that there is threat to her life. She says that she was roughed up as she was picked up from her Mumbai home and taken to the Santa Cruz police station, where she was placed under arrest. She was reportedly taken to the Ahmedabad Crime Branch by road. Just before being whisked away to Ahmedabad, Setalvad filed a handwritten complaint with the Santa Cruz police station saying, “I fear for my life.”

One cannot but remember Stan Lourdusamy and over a dozen other human rights activists who are languishing in Indian jails. Remember how Stan was taken from his residence in Ranchi and flown to Mumbai under arrest. Reports and after reports say that the evidences against the human rights activists in jail now were planted in their computers.

Stan now rests in peace or anger over the injustice in the grave. The others in the jails wait for a justice that may never come. Now, will Teesta, Sreekumar and others become for the country another name in the list of those in the jail? One shudders to think so.

The graveyard silence of the middle class Indians, the subservience of the media and the almost total conquest of institutions of democracy in India by right wing forces do not augur well for India or for the world.

May be we can take a leaf from the Black lives Matter movement. In their website they say, ‘Neither our grievances nor our solutions are limited to the police killing our people. State violence takes many forms- it includes the systemic underinvestment in our communities, the caging our neighbourhoods, government policies that results in the poisoning of our water and the theft of our land, failing schools that criminalize rather than educate our children, economic practices that extract our labour…..’.

One cannot fail to see the similarity of situations. There is a huge crisis of justice in the world today. With the Ukraine-Russia war dominating the world scene, a looming threat of famine across the world, especially in the poorer countries and the fear of a possible nuclear confrontation, international attention on cases like that of Teesta and other human rights defenders are likely to get little attention. And remember, nothing will happen in India, without international pressure.

The big question remains, how we wake ourselves up and others to hear the cries of the victims of state violence. Remember Martin Luther King’s words: ‘The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”

Cry for Teesta, Cry for India, Cry for Justice!

(Father M K George is based at the Jesuit headquarters in Rome.)