And Vernon’s letters to his son

Sagar worked for six years in the NGO sector before he flew last year to London to do a Masterrsquos at the School of Oriental and African Studies Twentyseven now he is busy writing his dissertation on sedition under British colonial rule You would chuckle at Sagarrsquos choice of topic once you know he is the son of lawyer Susan Abraham and Vernon Gonsalves who was arrested on August 28 2018 under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act for his alleged role in the violence at Bhima KoregaonThe story of the Gonsalves family is a Sisyphean tragedy Vernon was first arrested on August 19 2007 for joining the Naxalites in their war against the Indian state Out of the 19 cases filed against him he was acquitted in 17 he has gone in appeal in one case and the 19th one is pending Vernon was released in June 2013 In effect Vernon will now be tried for more or less the same charges that the judiciary quashed in 2013Just how many times a person must be tried for an imagined offence before the state stops harassing himThink about Sagar Out of the 27 years of his life his father was in jail for 10 years and counting These years of Vernonrsquos absence weigh heavier because he had scarcely been a permanent presence in Sagarrsquos childhood In 1994 the year in which Sagar was born Vernon shifted from Chandrapur to Nashik organising workers in the informal sector to fight for their rights Susan took up the responsibility of bringing up Sagar in MumbaiVernon would visit them once a month or so He would take Sagar to Pinky Cinema for films and then to an adjoining cafeacute where he would tell him stories crack jokes shoot the breeze rib him for being overweightmdashand also laugh at his own paunch He would buy him Amar Chitra Katha comics on historical personagesIn 2005 pushing 50 Vernon decided to make Mumbai his home drifting into a regular middleclass existence until it was disrupted at 1230 am August 19 2007 At that hour from the window of their apartment in Andheri Sagar saw his father with a bunch of menldquoDadrsquos here with friendsrdquo he told SusanWhen the door was opened they saw Vernon in handcuffs with a police posse in towSagar then in Standard VIII saw his dad taken to the bedroom and mom banished to the living room The cops flipped through books searched the cupboards and drawers He saw a pistol on the bed And when Susan spoke up they threatened to take her in as well He overheard his dad say to the police that in case they wanted to do an encounter they could go ahead At 330 am overwhelmed by sleep he asked dad to wake him up before he left Later Sagar came to know that Vernon had been abducted off the road many hours earlier bundled into a car driven around the city with his head in a hood and taken to some place where he was beaten upLet us not ask Who terrorises whom in IndiaVernon was not around when Sagar woke up the next morning ldquoYou would get him out soon wouldnrsquot yourdquo he asked Susan breaking downThe sonfather relationship was now confined to the letters they exchanged Vernon would send him comic strips cut out from newspapers he made birthday cards for his son Every letter ended with questions on trivia Time passed Sagar now had girlfriend problems In his second year in college Sagar went to meet Vernon at Nagpur Central Jail and spoke for 20 minutes about his broken heart as his girlfriend had called off their relationship Later Vernon wrote back ldquoYou should think of having her as your friendrdquoShe is among Sagarrsquos closest friends nowIn 2013 Vernon was out of jail The Congress government in the state had made him suffer From 2014 the Bharatiya Janata Party began to rule both Maharashtra and India Vernon was arrested for the second time in 2018 Hardened by his earlier experiences and being politically mature now the statersquos blow did not traumatise Sagar The suffering of the Gonsalves family under two regimes testifies to the Indian statersquos class characterOnce again letters defined the contours of the fatherson relationship akin to the Jawaharlal NehruIndira Gandhi bond Letters from a Father to his Daughter to letters from a father to his son the Indian state has not been cured of its paranoia for nearly a centuryFor his dissertation Sagar pored over the Constituent Assembly debate on sedition He said many members favoured retaining the sedition law as they thought the state now under the control of Indians would not unlike the foreign rulers use it to oppress the Indian people Sagar spoke of how the courts during the colonial era widened the scope of the sedition lawIs it different now I asked It was exactly then that I received a notification ldquoTeesta Setalvad has been arrestedrdquo I conveyed the news to Sagar And my questionmdashIs it different nowmdashwas answered by our silenceThe writer is a senior journalistSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper