Courtesy Kobad Ghandy
Kobad Ghandy is a communist and anti-caste activist who spent a decade in various jails, in Delhi and Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere, as one of Indiaâs most high-profile political prisoners. When he was first arrested in 2009, he was accused of being a âsenior Maoist leader,â even as he now stands acquitted by the courts of those charges. Finally out of jail in late 2019, he began chronicling his life experiences, writing at length about what turned him to communism, his witnessing the inception of the Dalit Panthers and other peopleâs movements in Maharashtra with his late partner, Anuradha, and the physical conditions across Indian prisons. These culminated in the book Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir,
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
LISTENING to communist icon Kobad Ghandy express his affection for Afzal Guru the late fellow inmate in Delhi’s Tihar jail one couldn’t help missing the love of literature and music the dead Kashmiri fruit vendor shared with a generation of Indians and fellow Kashmiris. Much of that has disappeared. As Mark Antony says, perhaps, the good is oft interred with the bones.
Guru believed in the hereafter like my mother, for example, who hoped to be able to meet the classical vocalist Gangubai Hangal in paradise, and persuade her to sing for her under a large mango tree. For the three years he spent sharing his morning tea with the alleged Maoist leader in prison, Guru told him of his imminent meeting in jannat with some of the greatest cultural and spiritual legends he admired, one such being Allama Iqbal. Among his temporal guides was Noam Chomsky who he read religiously during a dozen years in Tihar.
March 16, 2021
Dark days: On his first night in jail, Ghandy recounts being so shaken that he could neither eat nor sleep - PTI/ROLI BOOKS
Dark days: On his first night in jail, Ghandy recounts being so shaken that he could neither eat nor sleep - PTI/ROLI BOOKS×
On his first day in Tihar, Ghandy found Afzal Guru standing at the gate of the cell to greet him
When I entered the ward for the first time, it was past 7 p.m., so all the inmates were already locked up in their respective cells. As I was being taken to Block A, I was greeted by a warm smile from none other than Afzal Guru who, standing at the gate of his cell, said he was expecting I would be brought to this ward in Tihar after reading about my case splashed all over the newspapers.
Kobad Ghandy on Tihar: âJailers Wept for Afzal; Nirbhaya Rapist Vinay Sharma Was a Vile Sortâ
Kobad Ghandy, who was accused of being a politburo member of the CPI (Maoists) i.e. the Naxalites, which he denies, spent 10 years in six different jails including seven in Delhiâs Tihar jail.
Video14/Mar/2021
One of Indiaâs most high-profile ‘Naxal’ prisoners has given a first-hand account of how Afzal Guru walked to the gallows and met his death by hanging in Tihar jail in 2013.
Kobad Ghandy, who was accused of being a politburo member of the CPI (Maoists) i.e. the Naxalites, which he denies, and spent 10 years in six different jails including seven in Delhiâs Tihar jail, says that at 8 am on February 9, 2013, the day Afzal Guru was hanged, the jail staff lined-up along the two-minute route as Guru walked from the high risk ward to the
A Year After the Delhi Violence, a Letter to Our Friends in Jail
To Khalid Saifi and Umar Khalid, who made hope possible even when despair has been ever-increasing.
Khalid Saifi and Umar Khalid. Photo: Facebook/Twitter
Rights26/Feb/2021
A year after the pogrom in Delhi, there are two dimensions to the magnitude of loss. The first is more tangible, with 53 lives lost, homes destroyed and the cementing of fear and a life of segregation amongst Northeast Delhiâs Muslims, against whom the violence was primarily targeted. The other side, however, is less palpable, instead casting itself as a shroud of silence with a quiet crackdown on Delhiâs Muslims, students, activists, and unspoken friction between those who once tried to live up to the ideal of solidarity.