By Sumanta Banerjee
The term Concentration Camps’ was used to describe the notorious prisons run by the Nazis in the 1930-40 period in Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and other places in Germany, and occupied territories in Europe. The plight of the prisoners who were held there had been well documented by later researchers who delved into the records of those camps and interviewed the survivors. Their findings revealed that the main targets of the Nazi regime were the minority Jewish community, political opponents and intellectual dissidents. They were picked up and kept confined within the walls of these so-calledcamps’, where they died – from tortures, denial of medical treatment, or suffocation in gas chambers.
New replicas of Nazi-era Concentration Camps have emerged in what is claimed to be the world’s largest democracy. The Indian government has officially acknowledged that at least 4,484 people died in police custody during 2000-2020. This was revealed by the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs, Nityanand Rai in the Lok Sabha on July 26, 2022 , in response to a question. Incidentally, the highest number of such custodial deaths was reported from UP – a state ruled by the BJP. Even before that, the NHRC (National Human Rights Commission) in its annual report of 2020 had listed some 17,000 people who died in police and judicial custodies during that year. The latest report of the National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) reveals that 88 custodial deaths happened in 2021, the highest number reported from Gujarat – a state incidentally ruled by the BJP – echoing the record of prison deaths in BJP-ruled UP !
Police custody and judicial custody
For readers who may not know the separation between the two types of custodies, let me explain the difference – which is mere terminological, since both result in the same plight for the prisoners. Persons who are arrested on any charge are instantly taken to the local police station (or thana’), where they are incarcerated in a cell that is attached to the office premises. The tiny cell is barred by a metal grill, which is opened only to allow meals to the incarcerated persons. During this stay in the police custody, the prisoners are subjected togrilling’ (a term ironically enough sounding like grill’ which they face within the cell). It means interrogation by the police intelligence agencies, often accompanied by physical torture (euphemistically described asthird degree methods’) in order to extract confessions from the prisoners to admit to crimes that they may not have committed. But these forced confessions enable the police to justify their arrest and demand their imprisonment. The lower courts also, without corroborating the authenticity of these so-called confessions, sentence them to imprisonment.
The prisoners are then transferred from police custody’ tojudicial custody’ – a term to describe jails. Here they are incarcerated under two categories – as (i) under-trial prisoners (pending sentences from courts), and (ii) convicts already sentenced by courts to serve a certain period of imprisonment. But in these jails also, the prisoners continue to suffer from the same plight that they underwent in police station cells. They continue to be tortured by a new set of guards – the jail wardens, who beat them up on the slightest pretext. Their daily staple are contaminated drinking water, undercooked food and stale leftovers from the previous day. When they fall ill as a result, they are denied medical treatment. Most of the custodial deaths reported by the NHRC are due to malnutrition of the prisoners, infections from unhygienic jail conditions and lack of timely medical attention.
Deaths in jails – killings through ill-treatment
While the majority of these deaths in judicial custody goes unreported in the media due to their obscure origins, some of these cases have recently attracted public attention because the victims of such deliberate ill-treatment are well-known social activists who are incarcerated on false charges. Among them was the late octogenarian Father Stan Swamy, who was kept imprisoned in Taloja Central jail in Maharashtra for years, and despite complaints of ill-health, he was denied medical attention till he reached the extreme stage, when he was transferred to a hospital where he died on July 5, 2021.
Soon after, Pandu Narote, an Adivasi peasant activist who was imprisoned in Nagpur Central Jail, died on August 25. According to reports, he was ill, and despite repeated requests for hospitalization, the jail authorities refused permission. Pandu Narote was a co-accused with another well-known social activist – G. N. Saibaba, former professor of Jawaharlal Nehru University of Delhi, who is undergoing life imprisonment in the same Nagpur Central Jail for his alleged Maoist links. The wheel chair bound professor has been medically certified as 90% physically challenged. Yet he has been incarcerated within the confines of a narrow circular cell (called `anda cell’ because of its similarity with the interior of an egg). The jail authorities also require him to clean his own cell. They are literally driving him to share the fatal end of Father Stan Swamy, and his co-accused Pandu Narote, among many other victims of the Indian prison system.
Among other disabled political prisoners who still manage to stay alive in these cells like G. N. Saibaba, is the student leader Atiq-Ur-Rehman who is in a jail in UP, while suffering from partial paralysis and after effects of a heart surgery. Other prisoners from the notorious Taloja jail and several prisons have been complaining about the inhuman conditions that they live in and the lack of medical facilities when they fall ill.
Tales of survivors
Some of the prisoners – both political and non-political – after their release, have recounted the experiences they went through behind the bars. They give us blow-by-blow accounts of the horrible living conditions in Indian jails, where the inmates are also subjected to physical torture by jail wardens. But their narratives also bear testimony to their fighting spirit. Even in those deadly environs of the jails, they mustered their innermost strength not only to survive, but also to mount protests against unjust acts of the jail authorities.
Let me draw the attention of readers to some of the chronicles by the survivors – which often eerily resemble the experiences undergone by their predecessors from the Nazi Concentration Camps. In the 1970s, one of the many victims of the Indian prison system was Ramchandra Singh, barely twenty years old, who was thrust into Hardoi District Jail in Uttar Pradesh in September, 1970 – accused of Naxalite activities. During his 13-year incarceration (all through his transportation from Hardoi to Unnao, and then to Fatehgarh Central Jail), he managed to smuggle out his secret diary of his daily experiences, written in Hindi, with the help of friends. It was first serialized in the journal Rashtriya Sahara in 1984. Its English translation by Madhu Singh came out in 2018, under the title: 13 Years: A Naxalite’s Prison Diary. Here is a quote from the book, where Ramchandra Singh narrates how prisoners were tortured : “… the barbarous tortures inflicted upon inmates in solitary confinement was enough to make the cruellest of the inmates shudder with fear. Throughout the day one could hear the victims howling with pain.”
Another chronicle reveals the plight of women prisoners in Indian jails. A Kashmiri Muslim woman Anjum Zamarud Habib was arrested on 6 February, 2003, under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) and was sent to Tihar central jail in Delhi, where she spent five years till her release in December 2007. After her release, she recounted her experiences in Tihar jail in a book written in Urdu – which was translated by Sahba Husain into English and published in 2011 under the title: Prisoner No. 100 : An Account of My Nights and Days in an Indian Prison. Here she remembers “the dark and terrifying images from the jail (that) would come alive..” During an interview with her some years after her release, in Srinagar, Sahba Husain broached the topic of sexualized violence against women prisoners, and whether she knew about it. . Anjum Zamarud Habib said: “Yes, I am well aware that this happens both during interrogation and in jail…”
Apart from the revelations of the inhuman conditions in Indian jails, these testimonies of the survivors also expose the irresponsible role of the judges who initially sent these innocent people to jails, without corroborating facts and relying solely on framed up charges by the police. It took years for the victims to approach the higher courts, which overturned the verdicts passed on them by these judges of the lower courts, and acquitted them.
Shouldn’t these judges who sent them to prison, and who were eventually found to be wrong in accusing them, be hauled up for accountability, and if necessary, prosecution ? Shouldn’t they be held responsible for ruining the .. lives of hundreds of young people ? Shouldn’t they be asked to compensate them who were victims of their irresponsible judgments ?
Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008).
