What Freedom Means For India's Political Prisoners

Maryam was six—the youngest of three siblings—when her father, Khalid Saifi, was arrested following the sectarian violence in northeast Delhi in February 2020. The violence took place against the backdrop of months of protests led by Muslim women at several sites across the national capital and in the country, against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the proposed updates to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the National Population Register (NPR). Maryam’s mother Nargis recalls the day as the beginning of “a dark, endless night” that has been written into their fates. “Memories of her father have begun to blur in Maryam’s mind,” Nargis says. The child can only remember how he looks through photographs and videos. When Nargis asks her husband, now 45, in Delhi’s Tihar jail to tell her what “freedom” means to him, he says: “The liberty to watch my children grow up.”

At his first appearance in court, Saifi was on a wheelchair, with both his legs in bandages. He had been tortured in police custody and has been denied bail so far. FIR 59/2020, in which Saifi is an accused, is based on an alleged “conspiracy” to orchestrate the February 2020 violence at the peak of the women-led protests against the legislations that were criticised as being discriminatory against Muslims. It invokes sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), which inverts the judicial principle of “bail is the rule, jail is an exception”. Among Saifi’s seventeen co-accused, only two are Hindus. There were 38 Muslims among the 53 people killed in the violence that raged from February 23 to 26, 2020. Saifi, who was once full of joie de vivre and loved food and travel, now pines only for some time with his family. When he misses his favourite dishes, he asks Nargis to have them—“on my behalf, so I’m content”.

The ageing parents of Gulfisha Fatima, the only woman who continues to remain in jail in FIR 59/2020, saw her grow up into an “all-rounder”—that’s how her mother, Shakira Begum, describes her. In videos of the protests leading up to her arrest, Gulfisha is seen teaching some of the older women, who had perhaps stepped out of their homes to protest in a public space for the first time. “I wonder whether her education landed her in jail,” she rues. “Had she not studied, she would not have raised her voice in these protests. Perhaps, she would be sitting with us here today.”

Now Gulfisha writes her father letters from prison—always in font big enough for him to read. Shakira smiles through her tears as she caresses these letters and a few photographs of Gulfisha at convocations, receiving her degrees. “Gul loves to study and we never stopped her from chasing her dreams,” she says. “Languages, tailoring, radio-jockeying, MBA…she did every course she could.”

Theatre of the Absurd

Another woman, around 1,500 km away, in Jagdalpur central jail in Bastar, Chhattisgarh, was arrested in June this year under 12 cases, including six that had already been dismissed in court—quite a theatre of the absurd! The charges against Suneeta Pottam, 26, include murder, looting, making provocative speeches and planting a ‘tiffin bomb’. Associated with the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Chhattisgarh, Suneeta was one of the petitioners in the High Court demanding justice in six cases of extrajudicial killings in Bijapur in 2016. In 2021, she was among the Adivasi youth who led a huge protest against the setting up of camps for security forces near Silger on the Sukma-Bijapur district border. Four villagers, including a woman, were killed when the police fired at the protestors. Suneeta heads the Moolvasi Bachao Manch (Forum for the Protection of Indigenous People) in Bijapur, which emerged from these protests that spread across much of the area where similar security camps were being set up.

Like Gulfisha, Suneeta is “obsessed with reading and learning”, says her PUCL colleague Shreya Khemani, who describes her as an “intense human being” who loves to take care of everyone around her. At the Silger protest, Suneeta would go from tractor to tractor to ensure that every protesting group had enough fuel and food to carry on. Shreya says that Suneeta loves to climb trees and pluck mangoes whenever the neighbours ask.

“We have a warrant. We are taking her,” Suneeta’s friend Savitri recalls the police telling her when the activist was picked up from a women-run common house in Raipur where the two were staying. Suneeta was allegedly dragged by her hair by the police and slapped during the arrest. The lawyers have told Suneeta’s family that it may take up to two years to get her out of jail.

The Impact of the Long-drawn Trials

Kin of most undertrials in the Delhi violence case too, have been waiting for over four years with bail applications repeatedly rejected and the trial yet to begin. “The ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikaas’ that the prime minister talks about is not meant for us. We do not even have an equal right to justice,” says Noor Jehan, mother of Athar Khan, another co-accused of the Delhi violence. “Athar is in prison because he became one of the prominent voices of the protests in 2019-20.” It is Athar’s smile during the jail mulaqats that keeps her going. “If he can smile in such tough circumstances, then who am I to complain?”

The prolonged ordeal has financially wrecked many households. Gulfisha’s brothers had to drop out of school shortly after her arrest. Co-accused Salim Malik’s son Naseem Ahmad is the only one among Malik’s children, who has been allowed to continue with his LLB studies. All his younger siblings had to drop out of school after their father’s arrest. Only two of them could be re-admitted, that too in a government school, due to financial constraints. “It’s tough for us because we can’t tell the school authorities that our father is in jail. That could be dangerous for the children given the communal atmosphere in school,” says Naseem.

Another co-accused Salim Khan’s daughter Saima, and her brother, had to give up plans of higher studies and start earning. Saima, a dentist, works at a small clinic in northeast Delhi. “We were quite well-off until our father’s arrest, but everything changed in just three months,” she says. “His thirty-year-old business was shut down. My father was a globetrotter, who chose to live in India instead of accepting an offer of UK citizenship. I always saw him in suits and boots. When I met him in jail for the first time, I couldn’t recognise him.”

Some of the affected families attribute the delay in the trial to the chargesheet filed by the Delhi Police that runs into thousands of pages. “At least the hearings should be regular,” says Saima. “It is frustrating that the bail hearings show no signs of progress. We will accept whatever the courts decide, but how long must we wait? The High Court bench of judges keeps changing and hearings are repeatedly held from scratch.” Najamuddin, Athar’s uncle, believes that the independence of the judiciary from the executive is a myth when it comes to “political cases” like FIR 59/2020.

Gruelling Conditions in Prisons

Like Gulfisha and Suneeta, many women in jails across India struggle with uncertainty about their future. Advocate and trade unionist Sudha Bharadwaj, one of the 16 accused in the Bhima-Koregaon ‘Maoist conspiracy’ case, was arrested in 2018 and lived among the women at Pune’s Yerwada jail and then at Byculla women’s prison in Mumbai until her release on bail in 2021. “What hit me hardest was how so many women had been abandoned, literally dropped like hot potatoes by their families for the pettiest of crimes,” she says. “They had no access to legal aid and didn’t know the status

Like Gulfisha and Suneeta, many women in jails across India struggle with uncertainty about their future. Advocate and trade unionist Sudha Bharadwaj, one of the 16 accused in the Bhima-Koregaon ‘Maoist conspiracy’ case, was arrested in 2018 and lived among the women at Pune’s Yerwada jail and then at Byculla women’s prison in Mumbai until her release on bail in 2021. “What hit me hardest was how so many women had been abandoned, literally dropped like hot potatoes by their families for the pettiest of crimes,” she says. “They had no access to legal aid and didn’t know the status of their cases. Nobody was waiting for them outside, so they were trapped within the prison walls forever.” Shoma Sen, a Nagpur University English professor who was also arrested in the same case and got bail this April, recalls how an old woman from the Mang community died of Covid in prison while waiting for over a year for her kin to arrange the bail bond of Rs 1,500. “Many women lost their children during Covid and heard about it only much later,” says Sen.

Dealing with separation from families and friends is perhaps the toughest part of being in prison. After decades of trade union activity in Chhattisgarh, Bharadwaj was arrested just after she had shifted to Delhi to spend some time with her daughter Maaysha. They wrote letters to each other due to the high expenses of travelling to meet in jail often enough. Censorship and delays made much of this correspondence redundant. During the pandemic, says Sen, UAPA detainees were not allowed phone calls for over a month. They had no news from home and when she finally spoke to her daughter Koel over the phone, Sen broke down.

Vernon Gonsalves, another Bhima Koregaon detainee out on bail, points towards the broader implications of the Covid pandemic on Indian prisons. “A peculiar inversion in the attitudes of the judiciary and the executive was witnessed during the pandemic. While prison authorities were more practical in releasing prisoners on parole during the pandemic, the proportion of those released was low when the cases went into the judiciary’s hands,” he says. “This was because the prison authorities were more responsive to the actual prison conditions, whereas the judiciary was sending people en masse to jail and denying them bail.” Consequently, jails like Taloja in Maharashtra, were overflowing with undertrials during the pandemic even as convicts were handed out paroles to decongest the prisons. Poor healthcare facilities for prisoners made matters worse during the pandemic. According to Gonsalves, the very structure of prison facilitates deliberate medical neglect, which leads to prisoners’ deaths. “A separate barrack called the ‘budhdha’ barrack is marked out where the older prisoners are left to die without necessary medical attention,” he says.

Gonsalves was among the prisoners who took care of Fr Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest who was arrested in the Bhima-Koregaon case and died in judicial custody. He says Fr Stan was so straightforward that the jail authorities did not know how to deal with him. When Fr Stan was refused a sipper and the incident received widespread media attention and criticism, the Prison Superintendent of Taloja brought various amenities to his cell. Besides the sipper he had asked for, a straw, a walking stick, a walker, a wheelchair and a cot were brought for Fr Stan so that the superintendent could get a photograph clicked showing the priest with the amenities. Gonsalves chuckles as he recalls how Fr Stan flatly refused to accept anything except a sipper and the authorities were unable to convince him to oblige with the photo op. “Fr Stan was quite healthy when he came to prison. He would sing songs in multiple languages to keep our morale high and had a great sense of humour. The prison took a toll on his health,” he says.

The Longing for Human Contact

Even though this was his second stint in jail, Gonsalves did get deeply affected when the realisation hit that a large part of his life had been eaten up by incarceration—time that could have been spent doing so much more. “In prison, the toughest part of sustenance is not so much the physical aspects, but the lack of interaction with people,” he says. After nearly four years in Tihar jail as a UAPA undertrial (FIR 59/2020), Umar Khalid knows exactly how that lack feels. “My idea of freedom has been reduced to its very basics: the need for human contact and conversations,” says Khalid. “People who breathe free air outside take it for granted, as I did too, but it is only in this cold, dark place with no exit that you realise the bottomless void that the absence of human intimacy creates”.

Umar longs for the day when he would be able to talk to his loved ones “without a timer ticking away, without a cop hovering around and eavesdropping on our conversations, and, most importantly, without a glass separation in between”. These longings, he says, keep him “sane in these dystopian times” when the pursuit of justice itself becomes a form of punishment before conviction, sometimes without trial.

(This appeared in the print as 'What’s Outside?')