"Hopefully waiting" writes Shoma Sen from prison
This handwritten note by Shoma Sen marks five years in prison for the activist and academic.
As we enter the sixth year of our incarceration the predominant feeling over the last five years is that of waiting. From waiting for default bail in the seventh month of our imprisonment, most of us are still waiting. In jail, we sit there waiting for court dates, waiting for mulakaat, waiting for the newspaper, waiting for bail and for the jail God called Memo. In jail, our sense of time itself gets warped. When a lawyer tells a prisoner that she will get bail in one or two days, it may actually mean one or two years. 24 hours of clock time could mean 24 months in judicial time.
So, what keeps us going through these five years? Apart from our own thoughts, beliefs, and ideals and each other's company it was the courage and suffering of ordinary people with frugal means struggling for freedom, who had been confined within these stone walls for an even longer period; that gave us patience. Outside, it was the tremendous support we received at the national and international level, from the smallest protest to the massive farmers movement that we found overwhelming. The continuous efforts of our devoted, efficient legal team and having brilliant legal luminaries appearing for us gave us tremendous hope. Family and friends coming from distant places to meet us in court, standing in long queues in the hot sun or pouring rain for a 15 minute conversation with a glass panel separating us, families going through all the travails and disappointments along with us have also been very endearing.
In this warped sense of time, everything that I left behind in June 2018 floats before my eyes like the vivid present. But I know that by the time I come out the world will be a very different place. While AI is penetrating into all walks of life we write with pens and paper, stick postal stamps on envelopes. We live in the stone age without knives, scissors or needles. We read about the Russian Ukraine war, climate change disasters, people’s agitations in France, India gearing up for elections and still, we of the Bhima Koregaon Elgar Parishad case keep waiting, hopefully waiting.