Behind Bars: Prison Tales of India’s Most Famous by Sunetra Choudhury. Published in 2017 by Roli Books, M-75, Block M, Greater Kailash II, New Delhi 110048. Pp: xxii + 266. Price: Rs 395.
The brutalities and inequities in India’s prisons have been the subject of numerous books and official reports over the decades. Some of those accounts have been so stark or so hard-hitting that even those inured to large-scale and egregious injustice have been moved to strong emotion. And yet these publications have led to hardly any tangible improvements on the ground; on the contrary, the downward slide has only accelerated in the 70 years since independence, whatever the country’s other achievements during this period may be. In this slim volume, Sunetra Choudhury (pictured facing page ), a television journalist who has taken a keen interest in the criminal justice system, shines a torch on the colossal subversion of legal and administrative rules, and the widespread mistreatment of prisoners, in India’s largest incarceration facility, the Tihar Jail in Delhi.
Where this book differs from previous exposés of the Indian prison system is that it also throws a powerful light on how influential detainees are mollycoddled by the same iniquitous system that rubs the noses of the dispossessed and the powerless in the dirt and robs them of all human dignity. As one of the privileged denizens of Tihar puts it, "If you steal 1,000 rupees, the hawaldar will beat the shit out of you and lock you up in a dungeon with no bulb or ventilation. If you steal 55,000 crore rupees then you get to stay in a 40-foot cell which has four split (air-conditioner) units, internet, fax, mobile phones and a staff of 10 to clean your shoes and cook you food.”
Choudhury’s exposé is based partly on interviews with those who have served time in the jail and partly on information gleaned through secondary sources. The book features prisoners from a wide range of backgrounds, and documents the experiences of many familiar names, including Amar Singh, Pappu Yadav, A. Raja, Somnath Bharti and Peter Mukherjea as well as one or two less well-known characters (such as Rehmana, a young lady who came under the lens of the intelligence agencies after she had married a Pakistani national implicated in the terrorist attack on Delhi’s Red Fort, and Khushi Sheikh, a transgender bar dancer who was gang-raped while in police custody). Of particular interest to readers of this magazine would be the chapter on Kobad Ghandy, the 68-year-old Parsi revolutionary who has been described variously as a ‘Marxist ideologue’ and ‘Naxalite leader,’ and who has been behind bars for some eight years now (there is, it has to be added, some confusion about Ghandy’s age: some accounts have put it at, or closer, to 70 while a Wikipedia entry refers to his year of birth as 1951, which means he would be no older than 66 years at present).
Even those with little sympathy for Ghandy’s ideological attachments — which includes the present reviewer — will find it difficult to ignore, much less condone, the shabby treatment that the criminal justice system has meted out to this former public school boy who, while pursuing a course in chartered accountancy in England in the 1970s, got involved in leftist politics and gave up a comfortable middle-class life for revolutionary activities. Together with his wife, Anuradha Shanbag (who died from cerebral malaria in 2008), Ghandy is reported to have engaged in acts which amount to furthering the cause of the Communist Party of India-Maoist, a terrorist outfit banned under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. In due course, he was also slapped with a number of other charges, including criminal conspiracy, cheating and forgery (these relate to fake Aadhaar and PAN cards reportedly found in his possession). After being moved around various jails, including Tihar (wh-ere his plight attracted the attention of Choudhury), Ghandy was acquitted of some of the terrorism-related charges by a court in Delhi in June 2016, but continues to remain in jail on account of other pending charges.
The book details the many indignities that have been heaped upon an increasingly frail Ghandy (he is said to suffer from, among other things, hypertension, a bad knee, slipped disc, arthritis, cervical spondylitis and irritable bowel syndrome and has also been treated for a prostate problem), and these make for depressing reading. The unmentionably filthy surroundings in which he has been housed, the gargantuan struggles to obtain clean drinking water, the near-futile attempts to get a cataract operated upon, the denial of proper toothpaste (which led, at one point, to his teeth rotting), and the constant fear of the notorious bladebaaz gang (a group of men who delight in slashing fellow-prisoners with blades for no reason at all) are but a few examples of the trials and tribulations he had to face while under incarceration. When coupled with the interminable wait for justice and the unpredictability of what may come next, it is not difficult to imagine the toll that the totality of such experiences must be taking on Ghandy’s precarious existence.
What particularly rankled with him — and, arguably still does — was the unfairness in being denied bail. And here Ghandy touches upon an all-too-familiar theme, viz. the lack of an independent judiciary in present-day India. "It is true,” he tells Choudhury, "technically, judges are supposed to be independent. But here in jail, it is common talk (amongst criminals) as to the going rate for bail, parole, etc. Such judges easily buckle under pressures from the government and the police. At the trial court it is difficult to find such upright judges.”
On a different tack, Choudhury recounts Ghandy’s controversial, but firmly-held view that Afzal Guru, the Kashmiri separatist who was convicted and hanged for the 2001 terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament, was "not anti-national.” In a letter reproduced in toto as an appendix to the book, the contents of which are unlikely to win Ghandy many friends, he expands on that view:
"Guru was exactly the opposite of what the media has portrayed him as — a fundamentalist fanatic. No doubt he was a staunch believer in Islam, and did his namaz five times a day, observed roza and other Islamic customs. He also had great faith in the other world — jannat — which gave him enormous courage to go to the gallows with his head held high and apparently without an iota of fear.”
Even more controversially, Ghandy went on to say: "Afzal was not only vehemently opposed to the methods of the fundamentalist, of bombing/killing, the innocent public, he also had a deep dislike for the Pakistani/ISI (Inter Services Intelligence). He would often say they were worse than the RAW (Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external intelligence agency) and were responsible for the killings/assassinations of a large number of intellectuals who were for azaadi (freedom) and not for merger with Pakistan. Particularly during the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) upsurge in the 1990s, which was then not pro-Pak. Afzal said large numbers were killed by ISI besides the Indian government (sic). He also gave me a concrete picture here: virtually every aspect of Kashmiri life was controlled by the army making the entire valley like an open prison. He would regularly compare the life of Kashmiris to that of the Palestinians. He was under (sic) the opinion that the Pakistanis were doing more harm to the Kashmiris’ struggle than assisting it — Kashmiri people were being used as a mere tool in Pakistani’s conflict with India, the sacrificial lamb of the India Pak conflict.”
These reflections may be viewed by some as risible and by others as naive in the extreme. But few would argue that they justify the continuing refusal of the authorities to grant Ghandy — and others in his position — what any decent criminal justice system owes every human being, viz. a fair trial within a reasonable time, followed, where appropriate, by punishment according to the law. It is the continuing and stubborn denial of that basic right which will rile even those bitterly opposed to Ghandy’s views and ideology.
For all its virtues, the book is not without blemishes. The most prominent among these is a certain sloppiness in the writing which manifests itself from time to time. The editing too leaves much to be desired — the bane, sadly, of many books published in India, and particularly inexcusable in an era when standards of production (including overall get-up of books) have seen a welcome improvement.