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From 'The Sunday Indian' Magazine, Issue Dated
April 06, 2008
Away from the pseudo-activism of the Bollywood
glitterati, a young assistant director of
Taare Zameen
Par fights for her father, who is under
arrest on charges of being a Naxalite commander.
Rahul Pandita
reports.
Aamir
Khan has probably never heard of Prashant Rahi.
But on the day his maiden directorial venture
Taare Zameen Par was released to critical
acclaim, a young assistant director of his
production team lay huddled, crying silently in
one corner of a Mumbai apartment. Like the rest
of the production crew, Shikha was very excited
that the film for which she had worked really
hard for months had finally hit the cinema
halls. Her friends and relatives had begun to
call since morning, and, in the late afternoon
when her mobile phone rang again, she took it
for yet another congratulatory call. But that
phone call changed everything. It was a phone
call from the police station.
In the newly-built state prison of Uttarakhand,
on the outskirts of the capital Dehradun, a line
from Iqbal’s immortal Saare jahan se accha
Hindostan humara, written on a wall in front
of the jail superintendent’s office reads,
Hum bulbule hein iski (We are its bubbles)
instead of Hum bulbulen hein iski (We are
its bulbuls).
“So you have come to meet Prashant Rahi?” asks
the young deputy jailer, and then instructs his
junior, “Photo khincho inki (Get his
picture clicked.) Anyone who comes to meet Rahi
has to get his picture clicked first. A young
man, perhaps a prisoner on duty, does that job,
with a camera attached to a computer. He also
then takes a printout of that picture.
In the visitor’s hall, 49-year-old Prashant Rahi
receives his visitors with a warm smile.
“Imagine, the policemen who claimed to have
recovered a laptop from me did not even know how
to operate that; they actually sought my help in
getting it started,” Rahi tells this laughingly
to anyone who cares to listen.
The Uttarakhand police claim to have arrested
Rahi three months ago on December 22, from a
forest area near the state’s border with Nepal,
which they say was a temporary base of the
Maoists. He is charged of being the zonal
commander of the CPI (Maoist). Apart from the
laptop which Rahi mentioned, he claims that some
Maoist literature, which included books on Mao
and a few pages of a magazine, taken out by the
CPI (Maoist), was recovered from him. But senior
police official refute that claim. “We also
recovered a complete blueprint of the Naxalite
movement in Uttarakhand which was commissioned
to him by the top Naxal leadership,” says a
senior police officer, who supervised Rahi’s
arrest. The officer says that in the blueprint
Rahi has written clearly that earlier he was a
member of the People’s War Group, which merged
with another Naxalite group to form the CPI
(Maoist).
Rahi, a former journalist with The Statesman,
says he was picked up from Dehradun itself on
the afternoon of December 17, while walking on a
road. “I was immediately blindfolded. The
policemen in plain clothes said I was someone
called Ram Singh who had robbed a businessman in
Bijnor,” he says. It was only after senior
police officials came to interrogate him, he
says, he realised that he was being charged of
being a Naxal leader.
Rahi is a very well-known face in the
intellectual circles of Dehradun. He is believed
to have translated a number of literary classics
into Hindi. His friends say he was also very
active during Uttarakhand’s movement for a
separate statehood. He had also been trying to
organise landless labourers against landlords.
“Let’s put it this way: Rahi always felt the
urgency of doing something for the voiceless
more than we do,” says Ashok P. Misra, a senior
journalist and a former colleague of Prashant
Rahi. “But to think that he was an active
Naxalite commander is too far-fetched; I have a
problem with the way the state has dealt with
it,” he adds. Another former colleague and
senior journalist, Rajiv Lochan Shah said that
the state was trying to exaggerate the Maoist
threat by arresting people like Rahi. “After the
PM’s statement that the Naxalites posed the
maximum threat to the country’s security, it
seems that the Uttarakhand government wants to
bite deep into the cake of Central funds
allotted for fighting Naxals,” he said.
“If Rahi was indeed a Naxalite commander how
come not even a tamancha (country-made pistol)
was not recovered from him?” Shah asked. “The
fact that we didn’t plant any arms proves that
our recoveries are perfectly legal. Let Rahi’s
fate be decided by the judiciary,”
Inspector-General (Law and Order), Uttarakhand
Police, M.A. Ganapathy said.
Rahi alleges that he was tortured brutally while
in captivity. “At one point they said they will
bring my daughter and force me to rape her,” he
alleges. He says he was even forced to sign his
confessional statement. “When I wrote ‘signed
under duress’ they did not understand what that
meant,” he says.
The police has filed a charge sheet against Rahi
and, as per his lawyer, the chances of his
release on bail in near future are almost nil.
“There are lessons to be learnt from Jharkhand
and Chhattisgarh,” says the SSP of the state’s
Special Task Force, Abhinav Kumar, “It doesn’t
make sense to wait for anything big to happen
and then act.”
Meanwhile, the battle has just begun for Shikha.
A letter written to her by her father on the
International Women’s Day is clutched hard
against her chest (“He asked me to be strong”).
Away from the pseudo–activism practiced by the
glitterati of Bollywood, she is hoping that her
father is freed soon. “There is a strange rule
in the jail manual – I cannot send sweets for my
father which he likes very much,” she regrets.
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From 'The Sunday Indian' Magazine, Issue Dated
April 06, 2008
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click here
for a story in 'Tehelka' dtd. 22nd March'08
click here
for a story in 'Combat Law' March - April '08
issue
click here
for Shikha's appeal in 'Combat Law'
click here
for a story in DNA India, 27th May '08
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