|
| |
Special Feature
|
| |
|
TSI
Her Father’s Daughter
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 acchha 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 plainclothes 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 separate statehood. He had also been trying to organise landless labourers against landlords.
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
