🍸Dalit rights activist Sudhir Dhawale wrote this poem in Taloja jail in Navi Mumbai where he was incarcerated for more than 6 years in connection with the Bhima Koregaon- Elgar Parishad case. Besides being a tireless rights campaigner, Dhawale is a prolific writer and spent the punishingly long mundane hours in solitary confinement penning down his thoughts. He authored five books and numerous poems. The following poem is an ode to his artiste friends Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor from Kabir Kala Manch, who were arrested in connection with the same case in 2020 by the National Investigation Agency. Before their arrests, the duo released a video, disclosing that they were being threatened by security agencies to turn an approver and spend less time behind bars. The two continue to remain imprisoned.
I didn’t plant the bomb,
I didn’t even dream of it,
I shall not collaborate, with you.
An approver is
an accomplice to the devil,
and sleeping with the devil, blissfully
is the sleep of the sepulchre!
Your ultimate arrogance
threatens again and again
with a barrage of questions one after the other
You roll out your democratic weapons
of fear, fright and inducements
You issue final warnings again and again
﷽Or else, you promise to ‘annihilate our lives'
and still, ‘if you don’t confess then,
we’ll get your mother, sister, wife, daughter
here, right in front of you...’
Yet, we didn’t bow to your tyranny
Didn’t even make offerings of shit.
We stood tall, steadfast
on the side of truth,
on the side of equality,
on the side of justice,
on the side of love...
We have awoken.
We are poets,
moulding weapons from words.
We don’t betray the people,
don’t abort principles.
The pen is our legacy,
to the words of our heritage
we remain faithful.
The writing of mercy petitions is your tradition
♏yet you can’t let go the conceit of the title of ‘Swantantra Veer’
We scorn
your hypocritical traditions
We refuse
to join your treacherous and servile parade
Your are welcome to your fake freedom,
We
shall not sell our souls,
We
shall not auction our dreams,
Were we to speak quietly like this one by one,
your ego would only further swell.
As always, you’ve kept losing your balance.
You’ve always been of weak mind
and have had a perverse heart.
You rave
and snarl
“Surrender,
you sister f*****.”
You provoked the bee hive
and
then you clownishly yell
"Save me! Save me!"
You blocked every path back to our homes,
put barricades on the path of the light;
you it was who ran our media trials,
and went on to increase the number of arrests...
What fear of death can we have
We
are those who have given up our homes and all
We
are those who walk to the gallows with a smile
We shall never plead
before your naive jails and barricades.
We know for sure that
until the demons of sorrow are destroyed,
ideas shall never die!
