First there was applause and then there were tears; one was filled with hope on the one hand after witnessing extraordinary strength under extreme duress. At the same time, one could not help feeling sad and angry after listening to Dr. Ilina Sen, who has been waging a marathon battle for the release of her husband Dr. Binayak Sen, a human rights activist and public health specialist, who remains incarcerated in Chhattisgarh for more than a year under false and vague charges.

Ilinaji spoke with great fondness about how Binayak Sen and she first moved to Chhattisgarh, where they have been working for more than three decades among miners, peasants and indigenous groups on issues of health, livelihood and civil liberties. She also talked about Rupantar (an NGO she founded with Dr. Binayak), which runs projects like a rural village medical clinic, educational programs for brick kiln workers and city slum dwellers, and biodiversity and organic farming initiatives for food security.

She then narrated with great clarity the events of the past year and the circumstances leading up to Dr. Sen’s arrest. Anecdotes like these gave us an inside view about the man who is being vilified by the State Govt. of Chhattisgarh for speaking out against the gross human rights violations in the state. She concluded by thanking us for our support, and we all vowed to keep the fight for justice alive.

Although I have been reading about these unfortunate events for the past year, listening to Ilina Sen in person was a soul-stirring experience. It left me wondering on how someone who had spent his entire lifetime working selflessly for the betterment of others could be treated so brutally by the state? We should ALL be standing up for people as such and for restoring democracy at times like this!

-Arun Gopalan, AID-College Park
Dr. Ilina Sen was in the US to receive the 2008 Jonathan Mann
Award for Health and Human Rights on behalf of Dr. Binayak Sen