Crimes and punishments

This compilation of writings on India's prison ecosystem has many hits but some glaring misses

The general public’s understanding of the justice delivery system revolves around the binary of “crime” and “punishment”. It is this mindset that encourages people to hate the criminal, not the crime.

For several decades, researchers, journalists, rights activists and legal scholars have been presenting arguments, suggesting frameworks, and implementing systems of change to humanise the prison ecosystem and ensure that prisoners get to exercise basic rights guaranteed in the Constitution. This book is a compilation of such works. It is particularly timely given the Supreme Court’s recent pronouncements on under-trial prisoners and their right to life.

Consisting of ten essays, the anthology has been edited by the international director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), Sanjoy Hazarika, and the head of the prison reforms programme at CHRI, Madhurima Dhanuka. Like any collection, it has some great and not-so-great works.

A glimpse into some great works first. The essay, “Wahid and the Different Shades of Torture,” an extract from Hindustan Times National Political Editor Sunetra Choudhury’s book Behind Bars: Prison Tales of India’s Most Famous (Roli Books, 2017), tells us the story of Abdul Wahid Sheikh, who was one among the wrongfully accused people behind the 2006 Mumbai train blasts. Because of his Muslim identity, he suffered nine years of imprisonment. The brief essay touches on the case and its aftermath, but leaves the reader craving for more. (To learn more about Wahid, one can also turn to Josy Joseph’s latest The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State published by Context in 2021.)

Delhi-based lawyer and activist Vrinda Grover’s sensitive and surgical examination of the Hashimpura massacre in 1987, when policemen killed 50 Muslim men in cold blood during communal riots near Meerut, is an exceptional read. She writes, “All through the long and tortuous course of the Hashimpura case, it was a challenge to fill the gaps created by the loss, erasure, suppression and destruction of material evidence.” This observation signals how the state can get away with inflicting violence against a targeted minority and can remain unaccountable for decades.

She leaves us with several questions to ponder: “What is the status accorded to human rights within the police system, beyond lip service and platitudes, by higher-ups at academic conferences or ceremonial occasions? Are the bonds of ‘brotherhood of Khaki’ so strong that law cannot pierce through to secure accountability?”

Deepan Kumar Sarkar, an advocate at the High Court of Calcutta, in his essay notes how our “general approach to convicts or even accused persons is usually black and white,” denying them basic freedoms. And the Indian Police Service (IPS) officer Chaman Lal sheds light on the role of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) in ensuring such freedoms to prisoners.

Lal’s essay is full of startling revelations. It demonstrates how there is an “over-representation of minority/Muslim communities and SC and ST groups in the prison population”. According to a 2012 study, Muslims constitute 21 per cent, Scheduled Castes 22.4 per cent, and Scheduled Tribes 13.3 per cent of the prison population. Their share in the Indian population is 14, 16.2, and 8.2 per cent, respectively. The essay also painfully notes the grievances of convicts and describes every bureaucratic process — and loophole — that is in place to address the issue.

The role of “correctional training” is documented by S Ramakrishnan, another IPS officer, in his essay, “Development of Strategies for Correctional Training at the Regional Institute of Correctional Administration, Kolkata”. From the model, design and implementation of the training modules to describing the need for an iterative and re-evaluative approach to training, his essay serves as a primer for the prison ecosystem to effect change.

Two essays, by Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty and Amrita Paul, highlight the plight of people in detention centres. Barooah Pisharoty’s essay is too brief, but Paul’s searing account of the plight of Rohingya Muslims can leave one in tears. It also highlights the alleged anti-Muslim bias of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government.

“The World of Prisons” by Sugandha Shankar and Sabika Abbas is the best among the lot because of several reasons. First, its language is empathetic, sensitive, and inclusive. It not only tells the story of prison inmates but also of prison staff. The researchers note how “prisons are [also] plagued by the same social, gender, cultural, [and] caste issues” as the outside world and remind us how penetrating into a prison system is still a deeply troubling exercise, often leaving one bereft of hope for change. This sentence sums up their lament: “[W]hile we can make recommendations for change; it is others who decide whether or not recommended changes will be accepted and implemented.”

Several essayists in this book offer the phrase “institutional bias” to highlight how nuance escapes us while discussing prison-related issues. It makes me wonder, isn’t using male gender pronouns throughout this volume (barring one or two essays) a sign of a heteropatriarchal bias in writing? If these pronouns were used not as a gendered category, but for a person in general, then that must be addressed in the introduction. But the editors failed to do so. They also left out an assessment on the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on prison and justice-delivery systems. If that research is being undertaken or incomplete, shouldn’t the editors have addressed it even in passing?

Further, the editors call the first essay — a listicle of rights of prisoners, something that even a tenth-grade student can write down — by the former jurist Madan B. Lokur “powerful”. It’s not more than a 1,500-word long essay, but it has eight subsections and concludes in a jiffy.

There’s also complete silence on under-trial prisoners of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). A response to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed in 2020 revealed that 90 per cent of prison inmates in J&K were under-trial prisoners. Given that this volume’s introduction is dated April 2021, it could have merited a line or two at least, if not the whole analysis by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which is available and reveals that 76 per cent of prisoners are under-trials in India, the highest ratio being in Delhi and J&K (91 per cent) and among the total under-trial population, 20 per cent are Muslim, 73 per cent Dalit, tribal, or Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

This volume also forgets to talk about the rights of political prisoners and fails to mention the names of academics, writers, and activists, such as Anand Teltumbde, Gautam Navlakha, G N Saibaba, Umar Khalid, and Khalid Saifi, all of whom are rotting in jails around the country. This book boasts of its array of illustrious contributors, but it seems that it was either produced in a rush or the editors didn’t have the foresight to publish a more critical collection.

The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. Instagram/Twitter: @writerly_life