I write this article with goosebumps. Partly because, I write about living in an India where dissent is horrifically muzzled, but also because the air-conditioner in my office in New Delhi is too strong. This is not my attempt to trivialise the gravity of the situation of lawyer Sudha Bhardwaj, journalist Gautam Navlakha, poet-activist Varavara Rao, Arun Ferreira and Vernon Gonsalves, but to put it in hard-to-digest perspective, which brings into focus my privilege.
As a self-confessed young liberal woman, I stand for the rights that Bhardwaj, Navlakha and Rao have spent their entire lives fighting for. But, I can’t appropriate their victimisation by a powerful state. Not only would it be unfair, it will also give ammunition to those who’ve propped up the straw man of an “Urban Naxal” for us to collectively hate. We are not like Bhardwaj, Navlakha, Rao and others, because it’s not us who have been placed in house arrest till 6 September and who, in one fell stroke, are now enemies of the country we so fiercely love.