“You can’t help but think about whether those who knew us, those who fought alongside us, are starting to forget that we are still inside”, Apeksha Priyadarshini wrote on her social media after her ninth visit to Tihar Jail.
Priyadarshini, a close friend of Umar Khalid, routinely paints her anguish, pain, helplessness, and hope after her every visit. While her chronicles always came across as the last leaf not willing to decay despite the bitterest cold, these words from Khalid, sceptical about his comrades’ memory, are heartbreaking, while at the same time significant, as one wonders whether people are really getting willfully accustomed to the violence perpetrated against young minds.
The Trial Of Chicago
While his family and friends wait for a fair trial, I went back to a 2020 film, 'The Trial of Chicago 7,” to understand the implications of a trial that is neither civil nor criminal. Set in the 1960s, this courtroom drama traverses a unique time in the democracy of the United States; a time of unleashed violence being meted out with brick-scorched resilience and an outcry for peace within the country itself.
Aaron Sorkin begins his film from the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago while creating a juncture where the seven main characters (read defendants) met only to be confronted by the state power later dodged and charged with conspiracy and incitement to riot after their protest against the Vietnam War turned violent.
While the defendants having a gusty lawyer at a palatial courtroom tries to navigate a ‘determined’ legal system weaving together the actions and apprehensions of the charged and the state, the sharp yet sassy Sacha Baron Cohen played Abbie Hoffman threw facts on face reluctantly stating “This is a political trial that was already decided for us”. For their part, his beguile comrades as well as the lawyer turned down the truth.
While you concentrate, on the judge, the public prosecutor, and the charges framed, your imagination runs wild from 1968 United States to 2020 India, and the similarities are a marriage made in hell. The eulogies sang about the greatest democracy from the intolerant, abrasive judge settles the hypocrisy while toning what being a productive citizen meant to a State. It lingers somewhere between two corsets of unquestionable subservience to savage violence (the ability to perpetrate in favour of the state).
So, when the state attendants perpetuate violence it is proclaimed a duty, and when dissent arises, it gets labelled as a conspiracy.
But the film mainly feels timely because of its cohesive use of the term “a political trial”, and one wonders what it exactly means when a due procedure is seen to be followed, but justice remains a farce.
If this allowed an answer, another important question is the veracity of a prescribed law, and this teleports you to what St. Augustine had said: "an unjust law is no law at all”, and to tap a bit further, it’s a tool of oppression.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute elaborately describes it, “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” Therefore, when political activists and students in India protests against unjust laws like the UAPA (Unlawful Activities Prevention Act) and CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act), they are actually calling to their moral duty.
While Sorkin tried to balance the seriousness of the subject with metaphorical jokes and the sharp tongues of the defendants, gravity got its just treatment from a scene where Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) was gagged and scuffed in the federal court.
A member of the Black Panther rightfully asking for a fair representation was incorrigibly wronged. A bastion of racism and discrimination that the State had been for the black people gets his minuscule replica in Judge Hoffman, whose innocuous accreditation of himself as being fair and racially unbiased is shocking yet sickeningly familiar to the ‘neutral’ audience in India.
As and when the invariable difference of approach and treatment towards black was settled, the manifestation of what it meant to be black in the States got scribed; the eerily symbolic similarity to the treatment of the minorities (read Muslims) in India gets illuminated. A Tom Hayden or a Jerry Rubin can disagree and be critical of the state with the harshest statements possible and will never fall to the fate of a Bobby Seale or Fred Hampton (leader of the Black Panther unit of Chicago who was executed).
The ending had its nuances and overtly heroic reprises, making you believe you are watching a piece of art.
However, because creativity can never be divorced from politics, it takes you back to the words of Khalid.
Have we really forgotten our comrades? Are we getting ourselves at ease with the injustices and seeking solace in the artistic representation of the “justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done”? I don’t have a collective answer for this. The film wasn’t some triumphant endorsement of justice and values, it is more of a mirror to a system swamped with prejudice and hatred. I wish for a better Indian counterpart.