It is time to Investigate the functioning of India’s jails / Love’s Prisoners | Humra Quraishi

18 July 2024

Once again I’m focusing on those jailed. Immediate provocation for this are these very recent news reports – Politician Mukhtar Ansari’s son Umar Ansari plea in Court that his father was given poisoned food whilst lodged in Uttar Pradesh’s Banda jail and there was no medical facility available to help save his life. AAP leader and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s blood sugar levels are a matter of concern as he sits imprisoned in the Tihar Jail; let’s not overlook the fact that he is severely diabetic and quite obviously the jailed state would be affecting his blood sugar levels. And this week’s news reports also focused on jailed BRS leader K Kavitha. She is lodged in the Tihar jail, and had to be “rushed†to Delhi’s DDU hospital… These are just some of those reported cases of the week.

What is the fate of all those who sit languishing in the jails and prisons of the country for years? A substantial percentage of those are under-trials and with that technically innocent, yet wasted their lives in that jailed state.

Not to overlook another vital fact – Even when proven innocent and finally released the going gets absolutely tough for them. They face not just economic struggles but also major social disadvantages. Affecting their health and livelihood and the connected offshoots.

In fact, these realities hit after viewing the late filmmaker Shubhradeep Chakravorty’s documentary, ‘After The Storm’. Focusing on 7 young Muslim men - Mukhtar Ahmed, Md. Fassiuddin Ahmed, Umar Farooque, Moutasim Billah, Harith Ansari, Md. Musarrat Hussain ‘Bobby’, Shaikh Abdul Kaleem - who were jailed with terror charges, until they were proven innocent and acquitted from the various courts…Chakravorty had told me that these seven were amongst the hundreds who’d been arrested, falsely implicated in bogus charges. He had detailed that young Muslim men are detained and arrested by the police on the flimsiest of charges and or even without a charge! Merely on suspicion or to create an atmosphere of fear. And even if they are acquitted after years, they sit ruined for times to come. With nobody even bothering to ask this vital - What happens to the lives of innocent men, whom the system had caged for so many years?

This documentary film was made several years back but the situation seems no better today. After reading books written by several of those who were earlier imprisoned, one wonders: Shouldn’t books authored by the former prisoners, be read by the heads of the various Human Rights Commissions? The stark truth is that something or everything is wrong with the way the system treats the imprisoned yet there is no stopping nor questioning. Where is the much-required transparency? Why should we go only by police hand-outs? Why shouldn’t a non-governmental agency be allowed to carry simultaneous investigative probes? Why shouldn’t the biased and corrupt and officials be sidetracked and exposed? Why shouldn’t the non-jailed citizens be aware of the prison conditions and how safe and secure are they. Don’t overlook the fact that last year several prisoners in the various jails of Uttar Pradesh were found to be HIV positive in that jailed state!

Also, not to be overlooked another reality. It seems that isn’t difficult to arrest an innocent and heap charges on him; with that he sits languishing as an under-trial. Not to overlook the patent one-liners that go along with the arrests - the arrested has ‘confessed’ his or her ‘crime’ to the police. Who will believe that the arrested ‘confessed’ without those torture sessions. We are well aware the police can make you confess any possible crime in the midst of torture sessions.

 Isn’t it time that a full-fledged commission is set up, which comes out with a thorough investigation of the functioning of jails and the treatment meted out to those languishing in there

I leave you to ponder and keep on pondering on what Mahatma Gandhi had to say on the jailed … his views on those amongst us who are sit jailed. To quote from the November 1947 issue of Harijan:

“All criminals should be treated as patients and the jails should be hospitals admitting this class of patients for treatment and cure. No one commits a crime for the fun of it. It is a sign of a diseased mind. The causes of a particular disease should be investigated and removed. They need not have palatial buildings when their jails become hospitals. No country can afford that, much less can a poor country like India. But the outlook of the jail staff should be that of physicians and nurses in a hospital. The prisoners should feel that the officials are their friends. They are there to help them regain their mental health and not to harass them in any way. The popular governments have to issue necessary orders, but meanwhile the jail staff can do not a little to humanize their administration.â€

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Ending with these lines of Faiz Ahmad Faiz:

Love’s Prisoners

 

Wearing the hangman’s noose, like a necklace,

The singers kept on singing day and night,

kept jingling the ankle - bells of their fetters

and the dancers jigged on riotously.

We who were neither in this camp nor that

just stood watching them enviously.

shedding silent tears.

Returning, we saw that the crimson

of flowers had turned pale

and on probing within it seemed

that where the heart once was

now lingered only stabbing pain.

Around our necks the hallucination of a noose

And on our feet the dance of fetters.’