Kab tak abhī rah dekheñ ai qāmat-e-jānāna

Kab hashr muayyan hai tujh ko to ḳhabar hogī

(How long must I wait O beloved of mine

You surely know when Judgement Day is fixed)

Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote these lines in 1959, months after his release from General Ayub Khan’s prison. This was his second arrest. The first arrest was in 1951, when he was implicated, along with Sajjad Zaheer, in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case and sentenced to death, though the change of government commuted the sentence. In the ghazal from which these lines are taken, Faiz reflects a deep sense of loss of hope. Yet, in this concluding sher, there is still an expectation – of the Day of Judgement, when there will finally be justice. The ‘qāmat-e-jānā’ here is the figure of the transcendental beloved – who else can know when the Day of Judgement is fixed?

Writing from jail a few months ago, jailed student-activist Umar Khalid mentioned having recently read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, a novel in which Dostoevsky drew heavily from his own experiences during four years in a Siberian prison. Having spent five years in prison himself, Umar finds an eerie resemblance to the life Dostoevsky describes. The book becomes the occasion for his reflections on hope – and how risky hope becomes when one is incarcerated. The higher your hopes, the greater the sense of disappointment and betrayal, especially if you are an undertrial whose trial has yet to begin after five years of arrest.

For an incarcerated person, hope is first and foremost about regaining personal freedom. Gulfisha Fatima, Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, Khalid Saifi, Shifa-ur-Rahman, Meeran Haider, Athar Khan, Saleem Khan and many others have now spent several years in jail while their trials have not yet begun. The charges are still being framed. Yet, as Umar writes in his letter, every date for a bail hearing kindles a small ray of hope, and one begins to live from tareekh to tareekh – however fragile that hope may eventually prove. That faint possibility, that something positive might just happen, keeps the prisoner going.

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In the last five years, this has happened repeatedly. Over and over again, under one pretext or the other, hopes have been dashed to the ground. Lofty pronouncements from the judiciary about ‘bail is the norm’ and the importance of the right to life and liberty in the constitution – all begin to sound hollow. And why not? When hearings are postponed repeatedly, for some reason or another, can anyone doubt what is really going on?

The actor Prakash Raj said it clearly in a recent meeting to demand the release of all those falsely implicated in the Northeast Delhi riots cases, ‘Everyone knows everything; everyone in the courts know too – both the parties,’ he said, referring to the prosecutors and the defendants. Prakash Raj’s point was that the government is afraid of all these young, bright leaders of the future because they stand in defence of the Constitution of India. But he also underlined that they are Muslim, and that their being singled out has everything to do with their religious identity.

All of this is true. And yet, as Umar highlights, hope in the life of the incarcerated is tied to "the next date" and the next step in the legal battle. Even if the judicial process becomes farcical, that tiny ray of hope persists, resting on the integrity and valiance of some lawyers and judges. The judicial arena, then, remains critical for the country, where the defence of citizens’ constitutional rights must be kept up consistently.

However, it would be unwise to start believing that this is the only arena of struggle against despair. In the longer term, we need to tether our hope to something more substantial than the globally crumbling edifice of democracy.

At one point, Umar recognises that he is "probably no longer the optimist that I used to be earlier, as some of my friends have felt’ and explains that this ‘is based on a realistic assessment of the present political situation." What he says is sad but entirely understandable. To all our heroes still facing indefinite incarceration – Gulfisha Fatima, Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, Khalid Saifi, Shifa-ur-Rahman, Meeran Haider, Athar Khan, Saleem Khan and others – I want to say: while immediate circumstances of a prisoner may seem hopeless, it is in these moments when one must look beyond the present. Know that you are not alone, and that your life and struggle are part of a larger cause. That alone sustains us. Romain Rolland once used the expression “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”, later celebrated by Antonio Gramsci during his imprisonment as a motto for sustaining hope.

Gramsci’s solitary life in Mussolini’s prison invites us to reflect: what hope is there when, as Faiz writes, “Bane haiñ ahl-e-havas mudda.ī bhī munsif bhī / kise vakīl kareñ kis se munsifī chāheñ (the oppressors are now plaintiffs as well as judges / Whom can one ask to fight one’s case, who can one expect justice from)."

Yet, even with this despondent thought, he ignites the optimism of the will: “Yūñhī hamesha ulajhtī rahī hai zulm se ḳhalq / na un kī rasm na.ī hai na apnī reet na.ī (This is how the people have always challenged oppression / Neither is their tradition new, nor our inheritance novel)."

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So, in that spirit, dear friends, I want to speak of the inheritance that we, in the struggle against injustice, share. I want to draw your attention to something that is at once more depressing and more hopeful, and which defines this moment: we only have to turn our gaze outwards, towards the world, to see that the farce we witness here is now truly global. The protests against the combined Western sponsorship of the genocide in Gaza, gathering steam across the Western world, have exposed the mask of democracy. Those protests are all it took: peaceful protests of the kind we saw during the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) struggle, which led to many of you being framed. Such protests are being met with the same brute force everywhere.

‘Due process of the law’ and, indeed, the sanctity of all the supposedly hallowed institutions of democracy have rapidly crashed before our very eyes. And not everywhere is this linked to the rise of a Trumpist rightwing – the case of Britain under the Labour Party and Kier Starmer are a case in point. Almost identical in a fashion to our regime here, in July, the British government banned Palestine Action, branding the group a terrorist organisation.

Yet, the nakedness of the power of the oppressor is also before our eyes, for all the world to see. That is an accomplishment of the power of people like you, who are now rising in their millions across the world. It is that counter-power that has forced the masks off. If this struggle takes one form in the Western world, in our world – Asia and Africa – we have seen massive uprisings in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, Indonesia, Philippines, Nepal and Madagascar, challenging the brazenness and arbitrariness of power.

In many cases, they have forced a change of government too. Yes, there are difficulties, because often, in post-uprising scenarios, the forces of the old order step in again in new form. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that the winds of change are blowing – they may still be finding their way, but they are blowing for sure.

Let us recall, once again, the electrifying moment when Iqbal Bano sang Faiz to challenge the hated and oppressive regime of Zia-ul-Haq and everyone joined in:

Jab zulm-o-sitam ke koh-e-girāñ / ruuī kī tarah uḌ jā.eñge

Hum dekheñge / lāzim hai ki hum bhī dekheñge.

In the end, we will perhaps all still sing together, in different countries, across continents.

Aditya Nigam is a political theorist based in Delhi.

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