First published in Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s collection of poetry “Mere Dil Mere Musafir” in 1981, the poem has become a powerful symbol of protest and featured in Bollywood
MUMBAI — The Nagpur police have filed sedition charges against organisers and a speaker at an event where famous Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s iconic poem ‘Hum Dekhenge’ was presented.
A group of artists from Mumbai sang the poem at an event organised last week by the Vira Sathidar Memorial, run by the late actor-activist Sathidar’s wife, media reports said on Wednesday.
The poem was written in 1979 in response to the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan. First published in Faiz’s collection of poetry “Mere Dil Mere Musafir” in 1981, the poem has become a powerful symbol of protest and has been featured in Bollywood.
The event organisers and the speaker have been charged under Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), along with other sections related to promoting enmity and public mischief.
The FIR, filed by a local Nagpur resident, Dattatray Shirke, claimed that at a time when the country was bravely fighting Pakistani forces, the radical left in Nagpur were busy singing a ‘Pakistani poet’s’ song. The FIR also misquotes lines from the poem as a threat to the government. The actual line of the poem, “sab takht giraye jayenge” (a need to shake the throne), is misquoted as ‘Takht hilaane ki zaroorat hai’.
Sathidar, an accomplished actor, prolific writer, journalist, and political thinker, died in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Satidhar was also an Ambedkarite and the editor of Vidrohi magazine. Since his passing, his wife, Pushpa, is one of the organisers of the annual memorial.
A committee was formed after Sathidar’s death under the name ‘Vira Sathidar Smruti Samanvay Samiti’, which has been instrumental in organising the annual event. This year, social activist Uttam Jagirdar was invited to speak. Although the FIR does not name individuals explicitly, it refers to the event’s organiser and speaker.
Sathidar, claimed to be on the wrong side of the law, was picked up and allegedly harassed by intelligence sources. His Vidrohi magazine is celebrated as a discourse of dissent against caste and class discrimination. He directed Court, a seminal movie and India’s official entry to the Oscars in 2016, in which he also played the role of a folksinger. The movie unveiled the injustice of the Indian legal system.
Pushpa Sathidar is also a renowned activist of people’s movements.
This is the second case this month in which the Nagpur Police have targeted an individual’s freedom of expression. Earlier, a 26-year-old Kerala-based journalist, Rejaz M. Sheeba Sydeek, visiting Nagpur, was arrested for posting a photo of himself posing with two fake guns and opposing the Indian Army, reports said.
Initially investigated by the Nagpur city police and now handled by the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS), Sydeek is accused of opposing Operation Sindoor – India’s military strikes against terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The agency has also alleged that Sydeek has connections with banned organisations, including the Communist Party of India (Maoist), Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen. These banned organisations have radically different ideologies and the police have accused Sydeek of espousing the ideologies of each of these groups.
