Dissident Spotlight: Abdul Kalam Azad
In 2019, Abdul Kalam Azad posted a poem online. This poem was written by Hafiz Ahmed, a Bengali Muslim in northeastern India.
While Muslims have faced persecution throughout India’s modern history, the Bengali Muslims face unique challenges. They migrated from Bangladesh during the British colonial era and remain viewed as outsiders or illegal immigrants. Since partition, many of these people remain undocumented, having no way to prove they have lived in India for several generations.
Ahmed’s poem, Write Down ‘I am Miyah’, challenges the ongoing discrimination these Muslims face. It reads in part:
Write
I am a Miyah
Of the Brahmaputra
Your torture
Has burnt my body black
Reddened my eyes with fire.
Beware!
I have nothing but anger in stock.
Keep away!
Or
Turn to Ashes.
For posting this poem, Azad and nine other poets were charged under India’s criminal code for “inciting hatred between communities.”
Thin Skin in Government
Write Down ‘I am Miyah’ pointed out how intolerant the community these Muslims live in has been to them. The northeastern Indian state of Assam decided that noticing the generational prejudice is the real crime.
The term “Miya” is a pejorative way to refer to Bengali Muslims, one the poet repurposed to criticize a society that has continued to persecute his community. That included the 1983 Nellie Massacre, in which over 1,800 Miya Muslims were murdered.
The Nellie Massacre came during the Assam Movement, an anti-immigrant uprising that included many instances of ethnic violence, though the Nellie Massacre was the most infamous.
The Assam Movement drew a sharp line between “indigenous” Assam Indians, who were supposedly losing land and jobs to Bengali Muslims, and the Miya Muslims, who are targeted by the state’s Hindu majority.
Azad was released on anticipatory bail the next month. But the prejudice that made his relationship to a poem he did not write a crime remains rampant in Modi’s India.
This is a powerful piece highlighting how state power punishes visibility. The decision to criminalize Azad's sharing (not even authoring) the poem shows how governments often view documentation of injustice as more threatening than the injustice itself. I've seen similar patterns where regimes crack down hardest when marginalized communites start claiming their own narratives publicly—once you put words tothe experience, it becomes harder to deny. What hapened here in Assam feels like a textbook case of shooting the messenger while ignoring decades of structural violence.