New Delhi: In a letter sent to the Indian ambassador to Israel Sanjeev Kumar Singla, a group of Israeli poets have called for the immediate release of poet and activist Varavara Rao. The octogenarian has suffered a number of medical issues in prison recently, and his lawyers have filed for medical bail in the Bombay high court.
Rao, the poets argue, has been an inspiration to many because of his decades of work and his “courageous and enduring opposition to religious Orthodoxy, the discriminatory caste system, the oppression of women and the accelerated neoliberal development across India”. Because his brave words, he has become the “enemy of landowners, large corporations, powerful and corrupt politicians and security forces”.
“The arrest of Dr. Varavara Rao is an integral part of the steps taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP to reduce the democratic space in the country, and part of the political persecution and indictment of journalists, human rights activists, critical politicians and citizens and minority groups. There is a real fear that India will continue to deteriorate and go back to the period of Indira Gandhi’s emergency regime in the mid-1970s, during which serious and systematic violations of human and civil rights were committed,” the poets say.
The full text of the letter is below.
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We, poets from the State of Israel, wish to convey through you a demand to the Prime Minister of the Republic of India, Narendra Modi, to immediately release from political arrest the revolutionary-Marxist poet and intellectual, cultural and literary critic, teacher and human rights activist Dr. Varavara Rao.
Dr. Varavara Rao wrote his first poem in 1957. From 1966 to 1998 he taught thousands of students literature in the Telugu language. His courageous and enduring opposition to religious Orthodoxy, the discriminatory caste system, the oppression of women and the accelerated neoliberal development across India, the thousands of poems he wrote and published, the thousands of speeches he delivered at conferences and political events, the intellectual power he gave to social movements, and his support for India’s indigenous communities’ struggle for justice and human existence – these made Dr. Varavara Rao an enemy of landowners, large corporations, powerful and corrupt politicians and security forces.
Also read: Arnab Goswami and Varavara Rao, Unequal Citizens Before the Law
For example, in 1985, Dr. Varavara Rao was arrested on charges of handing out bombs to protesters over the death of a Radical Students Union activist. Dr. Varavara Rao wrote this poem in response to the false accusations:
REFLECTION
I did not supply the explosives
Nor ideas for that matter
It was you who trod with iron heels
Upon the anthill
And from the trampled earth
Sprouted the ideas of vengeance
It was you who struck the beehive
With your lathi
The sound of the scattering bees
Exploded in your shaken facade
Blotched red with fear
When the victory drum started beating
In the heart of the masses
You mistook it for a person and trained your guns
Revolution echoed from all horizons.
In 1990 Dr. Varavara Rao wrote a poem on the destruction of the habitats and forests of indigenous communities by multinational corporations participating in state development projects, such as the construction of dams that primarily serve the urban population through the dispossession of indigenous communities:
WHEN THE MOONLIGHT MOVES INTO THE DARK
For just a nest no aborigine
Cuts away the wooded-shelter.
For the simple slash-burnt crop no man of the forest
Burns down the nurturing woods.
Even when the hill people
Cut the bases and burn the stumps,
And harvest,
On the hillside, in the slope, on the brink:
Whose sweat of the brow turns into whose burp?
A little moisture of the palm is enough
For the forest that fells and billows away in the Godari –
Forest, the target of hewn lacerations.
Taking forms it fails to find itself in.
This civilizing forest –
Who owns this hauled-out wealth?
In cities and in bungalows
All the riches hidden behind closed doors
Are the forest.
All the power, inciting rare game on the prowl,
Is pillaged from the woods.
Forest with its broken back and blown-out belly,
Dams spreading across its mouth
From reservoir to granary
Measuring heaps of sweat pearls
Burning the fuel of dismal lives-in-death.
In the wilderness of city
Cementing with flesh and blood of the forest
The iron system of justice.
In ‘safari’ robes stitched in the hide of skinned forest
On the intestinal pages of the woods
Death sentences preserved in writing . . .
In the forest reserve
As moonlight prowled –
Furiously, when you set the forest dwellings on fire
Those fires that would show your shady face to the world
Fires – your hideous greed that would put mankind to shame.
Those fires of tears that cannot quench your insatiable thirst.
The blaze smites the vigorous,
Rising defiant, bloody fires.
Flames, flames – the bloody crops
Sprouting in the dwellings you burnt down
Vines entwined everywhere
Flames blossoming new worlds.
Over the past 45 years Dr. Varavara Rao has been arrested repeatedly. Among other forms of persecution, 25 indictments have been filed against him for political reasons. He was held in prison for about 8 years awaiting trial, at the end in 13 of them the courts acquitted him and the state withdrew from the other 12 indictments.
On August 28, 2018, Dr. Varavara Rao was arrested again, this time along with other prominent human rights and civil rights activists, on false charges that he was involved in a conspiracy to fight against the state and in the armed struggle of Maoist organizations. He was initially placed under house arrest but since November 17, 2018, although he is suffering from many medical problems (such as chronic pancreatitis, heart problems and recurrent fainting) and has been hospitalized several times, and in spite of the rapid spread of the COVID virus in prisons in India, the state refuses to release him on bail or under house arrest, and also refuses to provide ongoing information to his family about his health condition.
Also read: How the Right Is Starting a Psychological War by Targeting the Old and Ageing
The arrest of Dr. Varavara Rao is an integral part of the steps taken by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP to reduce the democratic space in the country, and part of the political persecution and indictment of journalists, human rights activists, critical politicians and citizens and minority groups. There is a real fear that India will continue to deteriorate and go back to the period of Indira Gandhi’s emergency regime in the mid-1970s, during which serious and systematic violations of human and civil rights were committed.
Historian Mukul Kesavan wrote “One way of finding India’s public intellectuals is to follow the bodies“. Beyond the fact that the denial of Dr. Varavara Rao’s freedom is shameful in itself, and attests to the cowardice of the government led by Narendra Modi, if his health continues to deteriorate and he dies in detention this will be an irremovable stain on the history of the Republic of India.
Poets should not populate the prisons of India. Poets should populate the hearts of the citizens of India and the world, challenge the existing repressive order and make the voice of humanity heard.
Tal Nitzan
Yaacov Bitton
Ofra Offer Oren
Mati Shemoelof
Eran Tzelgov
Dr. Uri Weiss
Sivan Har Shefi
Eli Eliyaho
Prof. Dror Burstein
Shlomo Hatuka
Ron Dahan
Raya Rotem
Efrat Mishori
Oded Wolkstein
Roni Eldad
Shira Horesh
Amir Menasheof