Annie Zaidi: Shehla Masood’s quiet roar

On August 15 this year, she tweeted: “Happy Independence Day. Proud to be Indian.” The next day, she was shot dead. In her own car.

Thinking of Shehla Masood reminds me of a snatch of poetry: “All that this earth can give, they thrust aside… and for one fleeting dream of right, they died.” In an interview, she’d said that she was fighting for transparency, police reforms, good governance and the environment. That was her fleeting dream of right and she probably died for it.

Sorry, correction. She was killed. We don’t know why, yet. She had filed hundreds of RTI applications, and had told journalists that she was threatened and harassed after she spoke up about the misuse of public funds by various officials, including the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, and certain police officers and members of the judiciary. That was one reason she wanted a whistleblowers’ law.

And of course, she wanted to save tigers. She was especially concerned about tigers (she even signed off her correspondence with a ‘Roarr’). But to save tigers, you have to save forests. You have to ask questions about what happened to the thousands of crores that were supposed to be spent on tiger conservation in your state. That’s precisely what Shehla did.

Also, as recently as July 25th, she wrote letters to minister for environment and forests Jayanthi Natarajan, talking about illegal diamond mining in Chhatarpur. A petition against Rio Tinto, a transnational firm allegedly involved in illegal mining, had already been filed.

Since her murder, there have been allegations that evidence was tampered with. There is talk of exhuming Shehla’s body. There is talk of powerful BJP leaders being involved. Senior BJP leaders have also not said anything about the case, nor asked BJP-affiliated politicians to step down until their names are cleared in connection with Shehla Masood’s murder. They are instead taking out a ‘rath yatra’ to stop corruption.

One of the last few things Shehla did was fast — in solidarity with Anna Hazare. But despite his ‘victory’, when faced with the murder of a real person doing real things to combat corruption in her own state, Team Anna has been woefully quiet. Hazare himself is busy making statements about how Sonia Gandhi should be like Indira Gandhi. Perhaps he slept through the Emergency. In any case, nobody is fasting to bring the government of Madhya Pradesh to its knees, forcing it to investigate all instances of corruption that Shehla had pointed towards. Nobody is gheraoing the homes of BJP MLAs.

And I’m thinking, how quickly they fade — our little stars of truth that come tearing through our thick smog of violence and corruption. How quickly they fall, burn out, disappear into the dark night. She has been dead for less than a month but Shehla Masood is already fading from public discourse. The media hasn’t taken her investigations into corruption any further.

Some of her activist friends are trying to keep her work alive. Shehla had been working with a group of students to create a sort of ‘RTI leaks’ — a web resource for all information collected through any RTI application filed across India. It sounds like a very good idea and I hope the website lives and grows, for all our sakes.

Which reminds me of another poem where the lines went something like: They died that we might live — Hail and farewell! — to those who, nobly striving, nobly fell…like kings they died.
Shehla Masood, you were silenced because you dared to speak.

Your striving was noble and you died like a queen. Like a tigress. Hail and farewell.

 Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)