Scroll.in / by Arvind Narrain

His battle with the British Raj’s ‘police conception of the state’ speaks with uncanny precision to the contemporary moment.
The 137th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru on November 14 provides us an opportunity to recover a Nehru for contemporary times. “There are no democratic institutions or traditions,” he wrote about the British Raj. “We have instead a well-established practice of ordinance and dictatorial rule and the suppression of the liberties of the person of speech, writing, assembly and the press.” …
Today’s writers from prison ranging from Umar Khalid to Sudha Bharadwaj, Anand Teltumbde to Sharjeel Imam, Arun Ferreira to Seema Azad are all heirs of the Nehru of the prison days. Nehru spent nine years in a colonial jail. Umar Khalid has spent six years in jail in Modi’s India.
Just as Nehru evoked the injustices of the colonial state, today’s political prisoners evoke the injustices of the “undeclared emergency”.
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