How Indian jail authorities prevent political prisoners from communicating with their loved ones

24/5/2022

Dear Dada,

I thought of beginning this letter by some good oldfashioned backscratching. One of my new friends who is doing an LLM at SOAS and is from India was telling me about his experience of working with death row prisoners in Yerwada Jail. He used to work with this organisation called Project 39A that does legal work around the death penalty. Many of the convicts he would come to visit in Yerwada were part of your learning groups! He was describing the change he could see in their approach and interactions with him as a result of your classes. They even had started asking him more questions about the progress of their cases. He was very appreciative of the support you were giving those prisoners. I personally was pissing with pride when I heard this. It was very heart-warming to know that the initiatives you had taken up had led to such tangible changes in the lives of the people around you. It is so inspiring to see how you in the midst of such a terrible situation also continued your work of helping and guiding others. Chalo, now backscratching is done and I will proceed with the letter…

— This excerpt was shared with the authors by Susan Abraham and is reproduced with permission.

Writing letters and waiting for letters is, however, a double-edged sword: since it is a source of hope and love for prisoners and their families, at the hands of a cruel state it becomes a way to exploit their vulnerabilities. Communication with loved ones is a lifeline for prisoners but jail authorities use letters and access to other means of communication as a way to extort obedience, impose submission and enforce their petty authority. Phone or video calls are denied or cut half-sentence; letters are censored, delayed or even withheld. Umar Khalid reflected on this in one of his letters: “I wait eagerly for the five-minute weekly phone call or the ten-minute video call twice a week to hear from home. But just as we start talking, the timer ticks off, cutting the call. Never before have I realised the value of every second like I do during such calls to home.”

For Sharjeel Usmani, writing was not even an option as he was not allowed to keep a pen or a pencil and paper. For the short while before he got caught, however, Sharjeel managed to hide the writing material inside his pillow. The letter that is published in Chapter 6 “Voices of Indian Political Prisoners” is one of the few that he managed to entrust to a supportive Muslim guard who brought them out of the jail and delivered them to his friends. Nodeep Kaur was not allowed to have paper, but she had a pen, so she wrote notes and letters on the front page of books she borrowed from the prison library.

Nargis, the wife of Khalid Saifi, told us that the jail authorities did not allow her to give her husband a drawing that their daughter Maryam had made for him – they just refused and did not give any explanation. Eventually, Maryam asked her mum to draw a message for her father with henna on her forearms so she could take a photo and show it to her dad and no one could take it away from her.

Sahba Husain, who is Gautam Navlakha’s life partner, had to go through a score of court petitions to be allowed to communicate with him. As the couple are not married, the authorities used this as a tool to make their life absolutely miserable at every step. It all started the day that Gautam was arrested: since the law, if taken by the letter, technically only allows blood relatives and married spouses to be prisoners’ point of contact, their legal counsel had to obtain a special court order to allow for Sahba to be Gautam’s point of contact. Once this was cleared, the authorities made sure she did not automatically get the right to phone calls, letters and mulaqats: even for this, she had to obtain a separate court order.

What may seem like a tedious bureaucratic process has in fact huge emotional consequences: all these legal steps take a lot of time and money. For one, this creates a profound gap between those who can afford to fight for their rights and those who can’t; and for another, it leaves families for weeks and weeks without news of their loved ones as the authorities intentionally slow down and delay the decision-making process, turning it into a punitive instrument for families and prisoners alike.

Sahba highlighted how the system is operating in such a way that the pursuit of justice and the recognition of basic rights are turned into privileges that only those who have cultural, social and economic means can afford. While their home was in Delhi, Gautam was jailed in Mumbai: this meant that she had to fly and book a hotel every time she went for a mulaqat. As Taloja jail authorities allow for a meeting each week, she would generally travel on a Friday, meet Gautam on a Saturday and then take off on a Monday night after going to see him again in the morning, thus making use of the following week’s mulaqat. She said that, at 71, this was a huge cost both financially and physically, but she could not conceive of not going to see him at least once a month.

Gautam’s lawyers made a request to allow them to have weekly video calls, given that the family was not in the same city, but the jail authorities claimed that they did not have the necessary facilities. Even though their legal counsel contested that this was clearly not true as video call facilities were set up in jails during the COVID-19 lockdown, the jail authorities stood by their decision.

This whimsical behaviour of the jail authorities pushes people to believe that this process is, in itself, a punishment. To further confirm this, Sahba recounted an episode that happened during one of her trips to Mumbai. She had reached the jail early in the morning, taken a token to wait for her turn in the meeting schedule and then gone to stand outside – Taloja has no facilities for waiting families and they have to wait in the open, irrespective of the heat or the rain, with no shelter or place to sit. When her turn came, she was told that it would not be possible for her to meet Gautam as he had been taken to hospital for urgent medical check-ups. As she walked away and headed to her car, heartbroken, as they had refused to tell her which hospital they had taken him to, she got a glimpse of Gautam through the window of the jail’s ambulance. She jumped in her car and followed the ambulance, embarking on a 40-kilometre chase, until they reached the JJ Hospital in South Mumbai.

With a cheeky smile that suddenly lit up her face, Sahba told us that this absurd episode turned unexpectedly positive – once they reached the hospital, she was able to hug Gautam, and sympathetic policemen allowed them to walk hand-in-hand up the stairs to the clinic, and she could be with him all through the process, without a glass wall separating them. And here she quoted one of Gautam’s favourite lines, where Leonard Cohen sings: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

To counter the absurdity – if not the sheer cruelty – of jailers and jail authorities, Sahba and Gautam have a recurring joke: they believe that “people like us” should work as jailers because only people like us would be able to recognise prisoners’ dignity and treat them and their families with respect.

This kind of reasoning left us both puzzled and admiring of the kind of moral fibre that is needed to be able to think in those terms. It is tough to make light of the relentless persecution meted out to political prisoners and their families, and yet people manage to conduct themselves with grace and humanity.

Excerpted with permission from How Long Can the Moon Be Caged?: Voices of Indian Political Prisoners, Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia, Context/Westland.