Don’t Be Political

Illustration by Ridwan Noor.

Of late, I have stopped convincing the people around me here of the reality. After all, how many lies should I debunk? And to how many people? It makes me take a step forth and ask: is it simply a case of people being misled—waylaid by propaganda? Or do people, deep down, want to believe in these lies because it caters to some of their subconscious prejudices?

— Umar Khalid, from Tihar Jail

I don’t remember the first time I got interested in “politics”. Maybe in class 5, when I started reading the newspaper religiously. There was this section in one of the famous Bangla newspapers, Prothom Alo, which used to be called “khola kolom”. The bloggers or journalists who wrote there were dangerously articulate and specific. I used to love reading that section for the sake of it being so beautifully written. And I remember discussing those writings with myself in my diary. That’s where I realised that what an extraordinary human being you have to be to comprehend and question something everyone ought to abide by. Later, when I moved to Malaysia to complete my secondary education, I got the opportunity to study in one of the most diverse schools in Malaysia, where students came from many Middle Eastern countries, and many of them were also staying in Malaysia as refugees. So I was fortunate enough to realise and appreciate the concept of having a state. By growing up in that crowd, I got more into geopolitics.

Umar Khalid raising his hand while surrounded by police officers. Photograph: Hindustan Times.

In 2019, my friend, who happened to be an Indian muslim, shared about the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act). She was worried about her family back home, and as she was also one of my closest friends, I got worried for her as well. So I started researching the events that have been happening in India, simply out of curiosity. That’s when I read about Umar Khalid. A student. An Activist. But a terrorist?

“Politics”. This one hated word is another one of the many perks that keep it alive. Ever since then, I have been told “dont be political”, “it’s none of our business”, “I don’t know who that is, and I don’t want to know either”, “Can we talk about this new movie instead?”. And after getting these responses from people, I started questioning whether people are forgetting the mere concept of being humane, showing “care”. Anyways, I kept quoting Mehedi Hasan, I kept staying amazed by the questions he asked. And I started realising why it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. People like Mehedi Hasan or Umar Khalid are not everyone’s cup of tea because they trained their cognitive ability with such power that they were feared by the ones who didn’t have the mental capacity to belong with them. Maybe Abrar Fahad has been told, “don’t be too political”. However, the point of writing about them is that I thought activism is all about awareness. But are we self-aware about what we are consuming? Because I was not. I lost the capacity slowly to act as a citizen. I lost the mere strength of learning, because I became a slave of the very system they questioned.

The biggest weapon we have to survive responsibly is to keep on learning, to learn complex concepts like “two-state solution” before another reel of genocide from the eastern world floods our social media. Stay on politics. To question it. Question propaganda. To get out of short paragraphs and 2-minute videos and to watch documentaries, to read questionable and banned books. To support everything and nothing. I watched this documentary once again. I have moved on from my life, but Umar is still there, in prison. A 40-second video that went viral among people with short attention spans, who didn’t bother to watch his whole speech in Amravati, put him in jail. In those 40 seconds, the part of him saying, “ We will not respond to violence with violence. We will not respond to hate with hate,” was not displayed and was rather cut out. It’s high time we fight. Not for Umar. Not against the tyrants. But for ourselves. We fight with ourselves to be better than judging a PhD scholar, an educated young mind, with a 40-second clip. Rather than just being lawyers, doctors, and engineers, it’s time to be educated and discuss complex topics within ourselves. So that another Umar Khalid does not suffer year after year in pain and agony. It’s high time we get political. To become revolutionary, we just need to read and watch content which lets us stay aware. And that to do only for ourselves. It’s that time in the global era, where we learn from Authors, Writers, and poets. We will read Newt Gingrich, and we will also read Mahmoud Darwish. To understand what we support and to understand what we reject, we must hear both sides. Because the real freedom comes within. The real freedom is freedom of thinking.

And to those who come at you saying “dont be political”, quote Marwan Makhoul,

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.