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Hostages of the state The vast number of political
prisoners currently incarcerated in India’s prisons belies our claims of
being the world’s largest democracy. A committee for the release of
political prisoners highlights their conditions and demands that they be
set free
"The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged
by entering its prisons."
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
Maulana Nasiruddin, Sheela Didi, Nanak Baghel, Suraj Tekam,
Nirmal Brahmachari, Binayak Sen, Lachit
Bordoloi, Mohammad Afzal, Perari Valan, Pozhilan, Kunangudi Haneefa,
activists of the Bhoomi Ucched Pratirodh Committee in West Bengal, Narayan
Sanyal, Sushil Roy, Malla Raja Reddy – these are just a few names of the
growing list of political prisoners abounding in prisons in various
regions. Besides these, there are the Sri Lankan Tamils, Bangladeshi
Muslims and people from Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan who are being
denied the rights of refugees, put behind bars. A year earlier, numerous
people from Nepal were put behind bars in India, accused of being
associated with the Maoist movement there.
The growing statistics of prisoners lodged in various
prisons in India run into several lakhs. A good number of them are
political prisoners. Their numbers are fast increasing day by day. The
overwhelming approach of the government to dub any issue of socio-economic
and political significance a ‘law and order’ question has made prisons the
venue of ‘disciplining’ through torture, rape, humiliation and
mistreatment.
The Kashmiris, Nagas, people of Manipur, Assam, the Bodos,
Kamtapuris and other communities demanding their right to
self-determination have been put behind bars for waging war against the
sovereignty and integrity of the Indian nation. There are thousands of
Kashmiri Muslims lodged in various prisons in India. Most of them have
been imprisoned without even proper charges being framed against them. The
Muslim community has been a specific target of the so-called ‘war against
terror’ of the Indian state. The cases of Naxalites such as Maoists and
others being arrested from various regions such as West Bengal, Bihar,
Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh
and Kerala have filled the headlines of newspapers.
Media as the court of trial
It is in the media, its multidimensional effects on the
public psyche, that the image of the ‘terrorist’, the ‘anti-national’, the
‘single largest internal security threat’, all get profiled; towards
manufacturing consent for a state devoid of impunity – without any regard
for norms, procedures, for basic human rights of the detainees as
guaranteed by the United Nations. The construction of the ‘enemy’ of the
state starts well ahead in the media as it caricatures all outstanding
problems faced by vast sections of the people. The obliging media, in
times of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, produces a
surfeit of images of the people, their issues, their movements against
exploitation, oppression, mistreatment and discrimination, against
displacement, destitution, destruction and death, as something that has
frozen and fossilised in time and should hence be repackaged akin to the
politics of charity promoted by foreign and state-funded NGOs and
so-called civil society.
Thus tribal communities are poor as they are
anti-development; Muslims have gone astray because their religion is
conservative and they don’t feel proud to be Indian; every Kashmiri Muslim
is a suspect because of being a Kashmiri as well as a Muslim; the Maoists
are trigger-happy Robin Hoods, devoid of any politics, who resort to
extortion and drug peddling and live off the plunder of forest wealth. All
nationality movements are against the sovereignty and security of the
Indian nation. Civil and democratic rights activists who demand the
enforcement of norms and procedures, the rights of the political prisoner,
are portrayed as accomplices in fomenting terrorism, against the integrity
of the nation.
In the age of standardisation, protest or dissent has not
been spared. Dissent has also got standardised in terms of advocacy as
well as petitioning. All other forms of dissent are hence against civility
and should be punished. Thus when a detainee is brought before the people
through a trial enforced by the media, the prejudice is so great that an
opinionated public gives passive consent to the state to do whatever it
wants to the political prisoner. Any such vilifying campaign by the media
goes against the right of the detainee to be presumed innocent until
proved guilty as required by Article 14(2) of the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights.
Being a political prisoner is a definite political act
To confine a people, a person, a community, behind bars
because they have refused to be treated the way the state is dealing with
them – they have refused to be oppressed, exploited, discriminated and
mistreated – is the inability of the state to deal with its own
limitations. It is also a clear sign that the state has lost the humanity
that it claims to have or vouches to every citizen. The haste with which
the state has targeted all these people as ‘evil’, ‘anti-national’,
‘foreign’, ‘anti-development’, shows that it has exhausted its
possibilities and is threatened by its own limitations. Yes, it dreads the
free movement of such citizens. Thus limitations take precedence and
become the norm.
Today, in addition to already existing draconian laws like
the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the Disturbed Areas Act and the
Unlawful Activities Prevention (Amendment) Act, we have every state in
India enacting its own internal security laws that have given the
military, paramilitary and police sweeping powers to apprehend anyone
under the slightest of suspicions or even without them. It is the state
that has violated the norms and procedures and the rule of law to act
politically to prevent any other opinion from taking precedence among the
people. The fight for the release of these prisoners becomes important at
a juncture where the law has failed to be impartial and fair. In fact,
going through the numerous cases of incarceration one is forced to say
that all laws and procedures have been bypassed to ensure the confinement
of the political prisoner for life. Even in cases where the prisoner has
been released in certain specific instances, the traumatic life after
acquittal for the prisoner denotes the magnitude of the prejudice that
society has undergone vis-à-vis the hatred and hysteria of the ‘war
against terror’ created by the state.
Political prisoners are the measure of our humanity
Political prisoners are people who are convinced of the
possibility of a better society for the greater common good. Not only were
they convinced of the need for a better world but they were deeply
involved in making this a possibility. One might disagree with their
ideology. And some might have reservations about the means they resort to
for the betterment of a world of misery and wretchedness. Those in power
might strongly disagree with their socio-economic and political
aspirations. These people, who are denied the light of day, who are
condemned to live death within the dark walls of the prison by the
powers-that-be, belong to a wide spectrum of political beliefs through
which they dream to espouse the social cause for which they have given
their lives.
It is this conviction that forced Rabindranath Tagore to
defend the cause of the political prisoner during the days of the
anti-colonial struggle against the British. The people who fought against
the British were also against the exploitation and oppression of the
freedom-loving people of India. Today when India is being sold in the form
of Special Economic Zones for loot and plunder of her forest wealth,
mineral wealth, water, land, people, everything, by the rich and powerful,
made possible by the rulers of this country, it is natural for
freedom-loving people to oppose and fight it. Anyone who fights against
any form of oppression, exploitation, mistreatment and discrimination
cannot be a prisoner.
Defending the rights of the political prisoner
The jails are often overcrowded, with the worst hygiene
conditions. The jail manual is rarely followed. A good number of prisoners
are condemned to rot in prison as they do not have the wherewithal to meet
bail requirements. The preamble of the United Nations’ Universal
Declaration of Human Rights ensures the need for countries to uphold the
rights of anyone resorting to dissent against the policies of the state.
This guarantees the rights of the political prisoner. Contrary to its
claims of being the largest democracy in the world, India has not even
recognised political prisoners as a specific category. Though the West
Bengal government has come up with a definition of the political prisoner,
it is never implemented. It becomes important to defend the right of
political prisoners so as to have safeguards against all forms of torture,
rape and solitary confinement, for the prisoners’ right to have a lawyer
of their choice, the right to books and periodicals, to communicate, to
assemble among themselves and the right to their religion.
Especially at a time when there is a growing consensus
among the judiciary, executive and the legislature, with the active
connivance of the fourth estate, to deny any possible rights to political
prisoners, for a political prisoner it becomes important to fight for
every moment of her/his life behind bars. There is no other way the right
of the political prisoner can be achieved as she/he has been denied the
right to express political opinion or to organise on that basis.
The inaugural conference on political prisoners is a
historic and definite step in this direction. Memories of the days of
emergency revisit us as a cold reminder. This brings back memories of the
days of the anti-colonial struggle, of the valiant resistance of Bahadur
Shah against the East India Company and the attendant hanging to death of
thousands of Muslims belonging to the slaughter community. It enlivens the
spirit of the heroic martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev and
Ashfaqullah; of Bhoomaiah and Kishta Goud in Telangana in the 1960s; the
memory of Maqbool Bhat being shown the gallows in the 1980s.
(The above report was brought out in preparation for the
inaugural conference of the Committee for the Release of Political
Prisoners held in New Delhi from March 31 to April 1, 2008;
Email: [email protected].)
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