Mahavir Narwal: Father of Natasha Narwal and a Comrade to All
For the remains of a long gentle life which must have until recently yearned for the touch and embrace of his daughter, facing the prospect of a last simple wish being denied?
For us, who witness this worse than cruel injury being inflicted on the kindest of people and can do nothing about it but despair?
For the world which allows for such dehumanising nightmares to exist and continue existing?
A friend writes the above lines in mourning. It’s with a very heavy heart that we get ourselves to admit, accept and reckon with the force of tragedy that has hit us — our beloved, Mahavir uncle is no more. It was only until yesterday that we were all hoping to have Natasha Narwal reunited with her father, who had been battling the Coronavirus for a week. On Friday, her lawyers had filed for an interim bail for her to be by her father’s side as he battled the virus, but her plea did not get listed in court. The interim bail is now being registered as one seeking permission for her to attend her father’s cremation.
It is strange that at a time when we are not even able to perceive proximity, we are having to process loss. In order to understand the permanent distance that death imposes, we should first be able to differentiate it from the prolonged suspension of time. Today, when time has been standing still for a long time only to be accelerated rapidly by the sudden contracting of the horizons that we had reconciled to. The news of uncle’s demise struck us like a flash of lightning. We struggle against the weight of despair and fight desolation by reviving our memories of comrade Mahavir. We deal with the compounding grief from his loss and Natasha’s imprisonment — which imposed a gap between them that continued to remain in death — by drawing from their suffering and spirit to fight!
For those who don’t know, Natasha Narwal had been wrongfully imprisoned under draconian, “anti-terror” laws for protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act, that puts into question people’s right to political recognition and disenfranchises them from availing legal protection. She was framed as a “conspirator” in a case which was spun to deflect the violence that was meted on the scores of Muslim families whose homes were razed and loved ones killed in North East Delhi, in the ominous days of February 2020. Natasha was denied bail on UAPA charges that are levelled against her despite receiving bail on all other cases. Make no mistake, she was kept away from her ailing father by unjust laws! The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) is the punishment, it follows the logic of circularity where guilt is presumed.
One cannot say this without feeling enraged yet somehow Mahavir uncle was not resentful of the cold apathy of the State which was aggressively mobilising against his daughter who was being framed as a “riot inciter,” rather he illuminated the condition of protesting people’s suffering in a counterpoint. Holding back his tears, he said, “I’ll say dissent is a decent act. It’s a matter of the rights of individuals which can only be defended through dissent. There is no other way of defending human rights. You should be worried about a future in which dissent is not your right anymore…” Dr Mahavir Narwal was associated with the People’s Science Movement and the Gyan-Vigyan Andolan since its inception in Haryana. He was engaged and committed to progressive politics till the end.
Taking us through the violence of the law, no less ordinary, he explains, “The first FIR was registered with Jafrabad Police, for which they were arrested on 24th May. There were around 10 names in it. Her name is in that FIR, nowhere else. They were taken to the police station and next day produced before the court and the court released them on bail. But right before they were to be released, another set of police went there in the court and immediately they were re-arrested. This time under UAPA.” His calm stemmed from an ideological understanding of the nature of law in a class fragmented and caste-differentiated society, which operates in a way that there is no victory in fighting isolated battles of affording greater comforts until all people could afford a dignified living.
Some of you would be able to recall Mahavir uncle from his video interviews — where he sails us to the other side of the law — towards the permanence of suffering and struggle — dissecting the situation with measured strokes.
Despite their condition, they were both always so alive with new hopes. Expecting and plotting so much good for the world and yet being kept deprived of the simplest of joy — of each other’s company. The father and daughter continued their correspondence through e-Malaqaat, made available to prison inmates. Even the right to this correspondence did not come easily. It was in response to a petition filed by undertrials Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal (Natasha Narwal v. State), the Delhi High Court directed Tihar prison authorities to vaccinate inmates and issued directions on telecalling, e-mulaqat, waiving off monthly calling charges amongst other things.
A lot of the things that we take for granted are matters of contestation and consideration in jail, which are overcrowded in the midst of the worst surge in COVID-19 cases in the country. Natasha and uncle were both aware of the “privilege” that it was that they could still be continuing to see each other, against the generalisable threshold of violence in prison which was very high for the other inmates, who remain dispossessed and without the means or the wherewithal to gain access to their basic rights.
He never exaggerated his pain, in fact, only self-effacingly downplayed it. On rare occasions he admitted that he was engulfed by anxiety, with age, advancing and Natasha continuing to languish in jail. He was confident that Natasha would be able to survive her time in jail but doing jail time also meant an undoing of her time that could be spent outside it. He candidly confessed his fear of not being able to see her as a free person, again. Free from imprisonments of all kinds, but primarily from the four walls of the jail which have kept her captive.
He knew that beneath the scarcely constructed world of opulence, there was profound misery and exploitation. Uncle knew how those who oppose the conditions of the wretchedness of the system which thrives by breaking the backs of the working sections of the society, can be relegated to the margins with the function of oppressive laws. “Jail isn’t a terrorising space. One should not fear it. Natasha will manage as others do. Like she is looking after the jail library these days, so I said that we’ll gift you some books for the library.”
Uncle was painfully aware of the severity of the exploitation of the most marginalised communities and he recounted his trials and tribulations without a hint of self-victimisation. It seemed to me that he could do so because of his genuine belief in the transformatory potential of resistance struggles and liberatory social movements. He truly believed that his struggles were not only his but that all the struggles for democratic politics would pave the way towards emancipation and thus, were constitutively related!
He thus became the axis along whom many diverging tendencies on the political spectrum converged. He could be a comrade to everyone. A lot of us spend our entire lifetimes sparing people’s feelings and feeding our vanity, but Mahavir uncle was unsparing in his love and respect for people. You could tell that everything he did was an unreturnable gift. Till his last breath he was full of life, cutting through the fluttering bursts of worry that was gripping us all by casually mocking his corona-stricken condition. He said he would overcome each symptom with his triumphant spirit of joy.
Welling up inside, he would promise to himself that once all of this was over, he would host all the women of Pinjra Tod. An overwhelming amount of support and grief poured in from all quarters on Twitter. The sense of grief that all of us experience today, does not come from knowing uncle personally. In fact, most of us never did know or even speak to him and yet, it is precisely his ability to cut through the passage of knowledge with his all-too-pervasive presence that makes him most spectacular. We could reconstruct him and feel his warmth pass through to us from the unresting work he did, from the words in his interviews, from the gratitude-filled “thank you” messages in response to solidarity messages for Natasha.
He carried a casual confidence which was drawn from the collectivities he inhabited which is why perhaps, he invested so greatly in the dreams of her daughter. He was not only a “cool” father who “let his daughter pursue her path,” but he shared the same path of struggle for liberation of all with his daughter and was as much invested in fulfilling her dreams as his own! “Wherever there is suffering you will find my daughter there. Maybe she is not a champion of suffering but she’s an ally in tough times and that’s why I am really proud of her.”
The sparkle in his eyes refused to be dimmed by the force of the mighty. “Our daughters will evolve too… (with our struggles) When we were protesting against the Emergency, people viewed us as radical too. But how is that section of our history written now? Those who went to jails at that time are not seen as radicals today. I went to jail during the Emergency (1975) and my daughter went to jail during another Emergency.”
Mahavir uncle knew that popular perception and spaces are continually transformed by the impact of history of struggles. That even those who are condemned by the forces of power, today will not remain wretched forever. He fought beside his daughter for the dignity of the universality of emancipation of all as well as the realisation of dignity in the immediate actuality. He derived strength from his politics, not by lamenting at his struggles.
We only wish that we had assumed far greater responsibility and relieved him from the labour of relentlessly pursuing the law. Offered him rest to park his frail and aging body, which was sleeplessly bearing all the weight of his efforts towards Natasha’s release! He walked beside her, feeling her unhappiness, sharing her pain, laughing off troubles, dancing in celebration and in assuredly complementing her life, he touched the lives of us without ever directly knowing each one of us.
Leaving now with a question posed by Pinjra Tod, “As we grieve together in this moment, trying to make sense of this loss amidst the constant onslaught of crises that this pandemic has brought, a simple question begs an answer, “How does the State compensate people for these losses?”” Who will take responsibility for this intractable pain and irreparable loss? Can you make your grief talk? Or will you let it pass in silence? Hasn’t everything that needed to be said, been said already? The only answers we need are from this regime!
Update: 10th May 2021, 4 pm
Natasha has been granted interim bail for three weeks in light of her father’s demise. This comes after the urgent plea to see her ailing father was not listed by the courts on Saturday. Natasha, who has been held in Tihar Jail as an undertrial for the past year under the draconian UAPA has been granted interim bail to attend her father, Mahavir Narwal’s funeral. “Shri Mahavir Narwal is survived only by Akash Narwal who is in self isolation owing to COVID 19 and Natasha Narwal. Therefore, there is nobody else in the family to perform the last rites and cremation,” the Court noted in its order.
Her lawyer informs the court about her dire state of shock, which has jolted her into silence. In response to which the court observes that this ‘remote silence’ would/should further be maintained. Can you make your grief talk? Or will you let it pass in silence? Hasn’t everything that needed to be said, been said already? The only answers we need are from this regime!
The larger question that looms over us is, for months Mahavir Narwal was engaged in a fight to prove his daughter’s innocence. He says in an interview, “My daughter was not partaking in any conspiracy, rather the actual conspiracy is the one which relies on the UAPA to frame her as a conspirator.” With the severe laws still imposed on her, is this interim release, freedom? She is as free as the undead can be. Was it not the delay of justice, its denial? Further, this bail order does not constitute the norm. Not only Natasha but scores of political prisoners and other inmates suffer the worst of the pandemic, languishing in overcrowded jails without access to their families.
Can she be free while others are not as lucky or painfully unfortunate so as to afford release with her father’s demise as its pretext? Can she be free till all charges are dropped and all political prisoners who languish in jails impending trial are freed?