Dispatches from Nagpur Jail
Arun Ferreira
After spending about five years in jail, Mumbai-based
activist Arun Ferreira was released on bail in January this year. In May 2007,
he was arrested in Nagpur on charges of being a Naxalite. The police claimed
that he along with a senior Naxal leader, Ashok Satya Reddy alias Murali, was
planning to blow up the historical Deekshabhoomi complex (where Babasaheb
Ambedkar embraced Buddhism in 1956). In September 2010, he was acquitted of all
charges by a Nagpur court, but was re-arrested by plainclothes policemen and
charged with an alleged crime that occurred when Ferreira was locked up in
jail. An alumnus of Mumbai’s St Xavier’s College, 39-year-old Ferreira kept a
prison diary during his incarceration in Nagpur Central Jail. We reproduce here
a shortened version of his experiences
and some of the sketches he drew in prison.
The anda barracks are a cluster of windowless cells within
the high-security confines of Nagpur Central Jail. To get to most cells from
the anda entrance, you have to pass through five heavy iron gates, [and] a maze
of narrow corridors and pathways. There are several distinct compounds within
the anda, each with a few cells, each cell carefully isolated from the other.
There’s little light in the cells and you can’t see any trees. You can’t even
see the sky. From the top of the central watch tower, the yard resembles an
enormous, airtight concrete egg. But there’s a vital difference. It’s
impossible to break it open. Rather, it’s designed to make inmates crack.
The anda is where the most unruly prisoners are confined, as
punishment for violating disciplinary rules. The other parts of Nagpur jail
aren’t quite so severe. Most prisoners are housed in barracks, with fans and a
TV. In the barracks, the day-time hours can be quite relaxed, even comfortable.
But in the anda, the only ventilation is provided by the gate of your cell, and
even that doesn’t afford much comfort because it opens into a covered corridor,
not an open yard.
But more than the brutal, claustrophobic aesthetic of the
anda, it’s the absence of human contact that chokes you. If you’re in the anda,
you spend 15 hours or more alone in your cell. The only people you see are the
guards and occasionally the other inmates in your section. A few weeks in the
anda can cause a breakdown. The horrors of the anda are well-known to prisoners
in Nagpur jail, and they would rather face the severest of beatings than be
banished to the anda.
While most prisoners spend only a few weeks in the anda or
in its cousin, the phasi yard, home to prisoners sentenced to death, these
sections were where I spent four years, eight months. This was because I was
not an ordinary prisoner. I was, as the police claimed, a ‘dreaded Naxalite’,
‘Maoist leader’, descriptions that appeared in newspapers the morning after I
was arrested on 8 May 2007.
I’d been arrested at Nagpur railway station on a brutally
hot summer afternoon. I was waiting to meet some social activists when about 15
men grabbed me, bundled me into a car and drove away at high speed, kicking and
punching me all the while. They took me to a room in a building my abductors
later told me was the Nagpur Police Gymkhana. They used my belt to tie my hands
and I was blindfolded, so that the police officials involved in this operation could
remain unidentified. From their conversations, it became evident that I had
been detained by the anti-Naxalite cell of the Nagpur Police. The assaults
never stopped. Through the day, I was flogged with belts, kicked and slapped,
as they attempted to soften me up for the interrogations that were to follow.
However, post 9/11, there was a change in the way peoples’
movements came to be perceived. The so-called War Against Terror made security
the prime motive of State policy. In India, special laws were promulgated to
squash inconvenient truths. Organisations were banned, opinions were
criminalised and social movements were branded ‘terrorist’. Those of us who
worked to organise tribals or the oppressed in rural areas were termed
‘Maoists’.
In 2010, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared that Maoists
were “India’s greatest internal security threat”. Some were ‘encountered’ or
‘disappeared’, while others were arrested. In places like Chhattisgarh,
Jharkhand or Vidarbha in Maharashtra, all non-partisan political activity was
branded as ‘Maoism’ and dealt with accordingly. In the months before my
detention, many Dalit activists in Nagpur had been arrested on charges of
radicalising the Amberkarite movement by infusing it with the politics of
Naxalism. All this meant that I wasn’t entirely unprepared to be arrested
myself.
Despite having contemplated this hypothetical situation, I
wasn’t quite prepared to become a target of [State] excesses myself—to be
arrested, tortured, implicated in false cases with fabricated evidence, and
locked away in prison for several years.
Within a few hours, I was woken up for another round of
interrogation. The officers appeared polite at first but quickly resorted to
blows in an attempt to make me provide the answers they were looking for. They
wanted me to disclose the location of a cache of arms and explosives or
information on my supposed links with Maoists. To make me more amenable to
their demands, they stretched my body out completely, using an updated version
of the medieval torture technique of [the wrack]. My arms were tied to a window
grill high above, while two policemen stood on my stretched thighs to keep me
pinned to the floor. This was calculated to cause maximum pain without leaving
any external injuries. Despite their precautions, my ears started to bleed and
my jaws began to swell up.
In the evening, I was made to squat on the floor with a
black hood over my head as numerous officers posed behind me for press
photographs. The next day, I would later learn, these images made the front
pages of papers around the country. The press was told that I was the chief of
communications and propaganda of an ultra-left wing of Naxalites.
I was then produced before a magistrate. As all law students
know, this step has been introduced [to the legal process] to give detainees an
opportunity to complain against custodial torture—something I could establish
quite easily since my face was swollen, ears bleeding and soles so sore it was
impossible to walk. But in court, I learnt from my lawyers that the police had
already accounted for those injuries in their concocted arrest story. According
to their version, I was a dangerous terrorist and had fought hard with police
to try to avoid arrest. They claimed that they had no option but to use force
to subdue me. Strangely, none of my captors claimed to have been harmed during
the scuffle.
That wasn’t the only surprise. In court, the police said
that I’d been arrested in the company of three others—Dhanendra Bhurule, a
local journalist; Naresh Bansod, the Gondia district president of an
organisation called the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti; and Ashok
Reddy, a resident of Andhra Pradesh, people I had never met before. The police
claimed to have seized a pistol and live cartridges from us. They said we had
been meeting to hatch a plan to blow up the monument at Deekshabhoomi in
Nagpur. If the police could convince people that Naxalites were planning to
attack this hallowed shrine, this could convince Dalits not to [have any] truck
with leftists.
But mere allegations couldn’t suffice. They needed to create
evidence to support their claims. The police told the court that they needed us
in custody for 12 days to interrogate us. While the journalist and I were kept
at Nagpur’s Sitabuldi police station, the other two were taken to the Dhantoli
police station. Every morning, we would be transported to the Police Gymkhana
for continuous rounds of interrogation that lasted late into the night. First,
they attempted to force us to sign a confessional statement they had drafted.
When that failed, they got the court to agree to allow us to be subjected to
the scientifically dubious practice of narco-analysis, lie detectors and brain
mapping tests, which they hoped would bolster their allegations. So although
legally I was no longer in their custody, the police could still interrogate me
under the guise of conducting these forensic tests. Preparations were made to
transport us to the State Forensic Science Lab in Mumbai.
Before that, we were formally admitted to Nagpur Central
Prison. I stooped through the low narrow door into the complex that would be my
home for 54 months. In keeping with procedure, first-time prisoners are
presented before the gate-officer. Tradition, and perhaps training, demands
that even the most mild-mannered gate-officer be at his aggressive best while
dealing with new entrants, who, in jail slang, are called ‘Naya Ahmads’. It is
the gate officers’ job to give the newcomer a crash course in meekness and
mindless subservience. A lathi at his side serves as a teaching aid.
The officer is also supposed to enquire whether the new
prisoner has suffered injuries due to torture in police custody, and, if so,
record his statement. In my case, I had a bleeding ear, swollen jaws and sore
feet. But in reality, the officer threatens anyone trying to make a complaint.
By custom, all injuries are recorded as having existed before the prisoner was
arrested. A strip search followed, standard protocol for new entrants to the
prison. I was stripped to my underwear and ordered to squat in a line with the
other new entrants awaiting my turn with the jadthi-amaldar (the man in charge
of searches). Our every belonging was scrutinised and thrown on the dirty road
for us to humbly gather together again. Hazards like packets of biscuits and
beedis were pocketed by the staff.
We were unfortunate to arrive in isolation, but if the
prisoner’s wait at the gate coincides with the entry or exit of one of the senior
jail officials, he is privileged to witness a ceremony of colonial vintage.
Senior jailors and superintendents can’t be expected to bend low to enter
through the door. So the main gate is swung open to allow these sahibs to walk
through, heads held high. When they are sighted at a distance, the gate guard
issues a yelp of caution: “All hup!” All staff stand to attention and all lower
life forms are swept into corners out of sight or forced to their haunches.
Most Naya Ahmads are then taken to the After Barrack, where
they spend a night or two before being assigned to a fixed barrack. This
waiting period allows the jail staff, convict-warders, inhouse extortionist
gangs and other sharks to assess what they can extract from the latest catch.
Middle and upper class entrants are easy targets. They are softened up with
dark stories of prison-life horrors and not-so-veiled threats. Young boys are
targeted for free labour and as sex toys. Contacts are made and deals are
struck to ensure better treatment when moved to the regular barracks.
Next is the mulaija or check-in-process. New prisoners are
lectured on the value of prison discipline by a convict warder or jailor. Each
new inmate has his identifying marks noted and is weighed, measured and
examined by a doctor and psychologist, before being presented before a phalanx
of prison divinities, led by the Superintendent. A Body Ticket is presented to
each prisoner, listing his prisoner number and offences registered against him.
These offences form the basis of how he will be classified, and, to some
extent, how he’ll be treated in jail.
Before the mulaija, procedure requires the new entrant to be
bathed. However, shortages of soap and water often prevent the diligent observance
of these rules. Instead, most Naya Ahmads are rushed through the
rough-and-ready hands of the nai kamaan (literally, the Barber Command), one of
the work groups to which prisoners could be assigned later. The Naya Ahmad’s
next stop is the Badi Gol, the area in Nagpur Jail that houses the prisoners
awaiting trial. Each is allotted a barrack. That, theoretically, is where I
should have been headed too. But in my case, the procedures were all jumbled
up. Twelve days after I had been picked up by the police, I was hurriedly put
into the anda barrack, given a prison uniform, and after a quick meal at 4 pm
of besan and chewy rotis, [put on my way] to Mumbai by train.
The drug was
administered like a drip, at a controlled pace so that I should remain in a
trance for [a long] time. The forensic psychologist started asking questions
and the conversation was video recorded. Although the police were not permitted
to enter the laboratory, the forensic experts themselves used the drug with
police efficiency, with total disregard for medical ethics or my health. The
police had prepared a list of questions for the psychologist to ask: where I
kept arms and ammunition, and whether I was associated with suspected
organisations or people. I remembered some of this later. It was a little like
recollecting a dream after waking up. I didn’t remember all the details with
complete accuracy, but I hadn’t forgotten the highlights.
On my return, after a week, I was implicated in another five
cases involving Naxalite violence. The police were granted another 20 days of
custody. This meant that I was back in the hands of the police at a police
station in Gondia district. This entailed more sleep deprivation, more
harassment and more interrogation. I was fortunate to have got away relatively
lightly. The police injected petrol into the rectums of two of my co-accused,
which resulted in days of anal bleeding. For me, it was more stretching,
flogging with a strip of conveyor belt, which the Maharashtra police
affectionately call “Bajirao”, and more jaw slamming.
By this time, the results of the Mumbai narco-analysis tests
had come in. They failed to provide any grist for the police case, so the
authorities got a court to surreptitiously order another round of tests at the
forensic lab in Bangalore. Here, the tests were conducted by the notorious S
Malini, who was later dismissed from duty when it was discovered that she’d submitted
false papers when applying for the job. Malini was well regarded by police
forces across India because she always managed to get them the results they
wanted. She had apparently solved the Malegaon blasts case of 2006, the Mecca
Masjid blasts case, and also the Sister Abhaya case. Years later, all these
were proved to have been falsely investigated. During narco-analysis, she
slapped and abused me, pinched my ears with pliers, and even administered
electric shocks to me and my co-accused to keep us from turning unconscious.
But this didn’t do the job either. So the police implicated
me in two more cases and interrogated me for two more weeks. That’s how the
first year of life after my arrest proceeded. The police would implicate me in
new cases, obtain custody to interrogate me, inflict terrible forms of torture
on me, fail to extract a confession, return me to jail, only to implicate me in
yet another case. It was only when the police finally filed chargesheets in
these cases that I had a new routine, one that involved making weekly or
sometimes daily trips to court to wait for these cases to be heard. I now had
the luxury of contemplating the rhythms of prison life.
Morning brings a mad rush to the tanki or haus, as the
bathing tank is known. Four hundred prospective bathers laying claim to a 60 by
3 foot trough means a hurried bath even at the best of times. In summer, when
the water being pumped out of the well is likely to run dry, the pace is bound
to be frantic. Jail lore tells of the guy who’s not fast enough and has to
rinse off the soap by catching the drops dripping off his neighbour’s body. The
ones who don’t learn to brush teeth, take a bath and rinse out their underwear
in 10 minutes flat are destined to scrape the bottom of the haus.
Negotiating the morning crowds at the tanki and long lines
at the toilets requires not only speed but some presence of mind. This is
particularly important in the yards and barracks with a large number of
undertrials who have to prepare to attend court. In less than two hours,
between the opening of barracks at 6.45 am and the court call at 8.30 am, they
have to not only complete ablutions and a bath, but also catch their queues to
collect and then have tea at 7 am, breakfast at 7.30 am and lunch between 8 am
and 8.30 am.
It wasn’t easy for my body to adjust to the absurdity of
having lunch just a half hour after breakfast. The early lunches, like so much
else in prison, are the result of sheer callousness. Undertrials often spend
the hours between 8.30 am and 6.30 pm on their way to court, in court, and
being driven back, but the jail authorities have not seen it fit to provide
them a packed lunch that can be had in the afternoon. High Court orders
directing that this should be done are observed in the breach. But since the
Jail Manual, which governs all activities in prison, has laid down just what a
prisoner must consume, the authorities fulfil their obligations by distributing
lunch to undertrials at 8 am. But when you are one among many hundreds running
after scarce resources, you normally end up giving up something—either your
toilet or bath, breakfast or lunch.
The food distribution is done by the energetic taapa kamaan,
one of the many prisoner teams that play a vital role in keeping the jail
functioning. The taapa kamaan are busy from the time the barracks are opened at
around 6.45 am until they are locked around 5 pm, running around with large
food containers—the taapaas from which they take their name. Two thousand
stomachs demanding their timely due can be a tense proposition, and the taapa
workers are a harried lot. They have to ensure that each Manual-prescribed item
reaches each barrack in sufficient quantities to supply the stipulated amount
to every prisoner present at the morning count.
Within this unit, the post of taapa commander can be quite a
lucrative assignment. The commander is normally a convict warder, a
long-serving prisoner who is given the duty of an overseer of other labouring
prisoners. He is paid Rs 35 per day, but can earn a healthy side income by
trading the resources under his command. By manipulating distribution, he can
generate a surplus to be placed on the open market. The bhais who pay him off
get more and better food. But the taapa commander’s privileges pale in comparison
with the deals that jail officials strike with contractors who supply the
kitchen raw materials. Many jail employees are able to take enough home to feed
their families on prison supplies. These leaks result in the depletion of food
that prisoners are served. In order to ensure that portions meet the weight
stipulations of the Jail Manual, even the most inedible portions of vegetables
make their way into prisoners’ thaalis—this can even include the rope that
suppliers use to tie vegetables together.
As a result, we often attempted to improvise. One way out
was to re-cook the food by spicing it up with pickles and chilli-garlic powder
purchased from the prison canteen. This process is called handi, after the
cooking pots fashioned out of aluminium plates. We would fabricate a fireplace
from bricks or by chiselling and reshaping other aluminium vessels. Strips of
newspaper and sun-dried chapaatis were used for fuel, but sometimes bits of
plastic, dry twigs, old clothes, pilfered prison bedding and even copies of
legal documents found their way into the fire.
‘Handi’ is also the term for the group of prisoners who take
their meals together. They pool the provisions they buy from the canteen and
forage from elsewhere. In the barracks, all members of a handi group sleep in
one place. For people like me in the cells, however, [joining] a handi group
wasn’t possible—we were locked alone in our cells so couldn’t have dinner
together. Still, we ensured that the food cooked in one cell was passed on to
others. This was managed through a strategy called the gaadi. The dishes would
be placed on a piece of cloth that was dragged along the ground by using a
string thrown from one cell to the next, rather like a sleigh made of fabric.
The Maharashtra government’s near-total ban on
non-vegetarian food also challenges the skill and ingenuity of the prisoner.
Trapping and hunting of squirrels, birds, bandicoots and other types of small
game is a serious occupation. Even locusts and other insects that occasionally
swarm the prison were collected to be sun-dried roasted and relished. Cloth
traps sometimes managed to snare a bird. Others were brought down with make-do
catapults. Traps in drainpipes and other passages sometimes yielded bandicoots.
But the more popular method for both squirrels and rats was hunting by
hand-and-stick. If one was sighted, a cry would go up and hunters would gather
to corner the prey.
A well-fed bandicoot—which tastes a lot like pork—was a
sizeable feast for a meat-starved group. It was quickly depilated, dismembered
and cooked in a corner away from the prying eyes of jail staff and their
informants. The spot behind the latrines was considered safe. This was be done
under the watch of the latrine-cleaning danda kamaan, who were omnivorous and enthusiastic
participants in both the chase and feast. As the band sat around for the treat,
the conversation would drift back to better times. A person would talk of wild
boars, another would remember rabbits. The high walls and iron bars seemed to
recede. Things weren’t as bad as they seemed.
Even the deepest sleepers sometimes have to surrender to
other sounds of the prison night. With each inmate living through his own
private nightmare, moans, groans and sobs from adjoining sleepers are frequent.
The awakened neighbour usually slaps the offender into silence. But not all
troubled souls are so easily subdued. There are those who pierce the night with
shrieks and are given much rougher strong arm [treatment] before they are
quietened. The screamer who actually needs psychiatric help gets not even
sympathy. As the whole barrack is roused, the more vicious types join the
watchmen in beating and kicking him. Many believe this to be the only possible
therapy to exorcise the devil who has taken possession of him. In a while, he
is silenced and relative calm descends once more. But sleep is elusive, as [the
quietened] prisoner strains silently to hide from his own demons. As seconds
and minutes drag out, there is no clock to tell the time. Another hour is
forfeited, never to be returned.
When we could get our hands on them, crime novels were
always a hit. Lee Child and John Grisham novels would substitute for the
absence of action or court room drama we longed for. I also read the
Scandinavian novels of Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell.
The other concession grudgingly allowed by the jail
administration is the mulaakaat (meeting) with family and friends. This is
permitted once a month to convicted prisoners and once a week to undertrials.
The families who manage to save enough money to make the long journey from
their village to the jail are expected to first register their names in the
morning at the mulaakaat booth near the jail gate. They must hang around for
three or four hours, braving sun or rain, as the jail administration supposedly
checks whether they are security worthy of a mulaakaat and have not yet
exhausted their quota. After an exhausting wait, the visitors—most often women
and children—are then led in batches to a room with heavily meshed windows,
each with a prisoner waiting on the other side. On the other side, the
prisoners have been warned that they should not exceed the time sanctioned for
their mulaakaat. Undertrials get 20 minutes; convicts, 30 minutes. There is
always a certain desperation on both sides of the mesh, as prisoners and their
families make sure that nothing to be conveyed is missed in the short time at
hand.
My first visitors were my parents and brother. Although my
wife wanted to visit me, we decided that she should not do so because of police
threats to arrest her too. At the first mulaakaat, my parents could only see me
as a silhouette behind the wire mesh. They had only by voice to recognise me
by. The wire mesh ensured that no reassuring hugs could be exchanged. As my
detention stretched on, my family only managed to meet me every two months.
We’d plan to meet when I was being produced in court, though the guards
escorting me would occasionally refuse to grant us this luxury. Through my
years in jail, my baby son never got to see me. He did not know that I was in
prison. If he had come, he’d have to see a silhouette with fettered hands for a
father. We felt that this would be too much for a two-year-old to understand.
My family would try to fill me in about happenings at home,
and I would entertain them with anecdotes about prison life. But as the number
of cases in which I was being charged kept increasing, developments in each
trial became more confusing, and discussing them with my aged parents became
difficult. Ultimately, the mulaakaats narrowed to my giving them a list of
things I required and their promising to bring them to the next meeting and
write regularly.
After the initial shock conviction, they had to steer
stoically into a routine amenable to living out the long years in jail—which in
the case of life sentences in Maharashtra average 17-18 years.
A large number find some solace in a rigid schedule of
prayer and fasting, puja, namaaz and roza. Prison nurtures spirituality. It has
the merit of at least temporarily inducing the type of peace obtained by
casting your lot with the supernatural. The sanctimony of ritual has the
sanctity of administrative approval. It benefits the prisoner to show up at, or
even organise, religious ceremonies sanctioned by the jail management.
This game of hide-and-seek between illusion and fact,
between hope and despair, is the constant of almost any prisoner’s existence.
The trick to be mastered is to ensure that fact is not permitted to pierce
illusion and despair not allowed to overcome hope. Once prisoners realise this,
it isn’t really that difficult to keep their balance.
As an undertrial, you tell yourself that the trial’s going
well, all witnesses [against you] have failed, and you are bound to be
acquitted. If you have been convicted, you pin your hopes on the higher courts.
And in this, the endemic delays of the Indian judicial system are a real
blessing. Hope remains alive till the Supreme Court, by which time you have
reached what you feel should be the end of your sentence. It is then the
remissions and pardons that you look forward to.
You enter that puzzled yet hope-filled period of waiting for
the finalisation of your likhaan, the colloquial term for the review file
prepared by the Jail Judicial Department for every long-sentence convict. This
document is sent to the state government for reviewing prisoners’ sentences and
to obtain an order of premature release. This file reports the prisoner’s
conduct in jail and contains calculations of the set-offs he is eligible for.
It also contains recommendations of the jail, police and administrative
authorities. Since government rules for a premature release are so complicated,
it is rare for any prisoner to be able to estimate what likhaan he will finally
get.
It takes years for Mantralaya to decide. It is only then
that you have some idea of when you can expect to be finally released. This
starts your ulti ginti, the countdown, as you tick off the days remaining for
you to go home.
Throughout all this, as you battle to maintain your balance,
the abiding symbol of hope and despair is the Lal Gate, the red exit gate. It
reappears in rhetoric, in small talk, in jokes and of course in your dreams. It
is the barrier that holds you in and the opening that will lead you out. The
secret is to ignore the barricade and only see the door. That helps maintain
some semblance of normal life.
But for some, the long years of prison life are without the
slightest contact or communication with the outside world. Poverty prevents
them from even finding the money for the surety the State demands for sending a
prisoner on furlough or parole.
As the day would come and go, despair would render this most
talkative of inmates unusually silent.
In a short time, he’d be pinning his hopes on his next
release date.
On reaching the court, I would find that I had been brought
late or that the judge was on vacation. Often, my trips and those of my lawyers
would go wasted because the prosecution witness had not turned up.
One particular case dragged on for over three years and was
finally completed with my acquittal after the examination of only one witness.
My captors were using the due process of law to penalise me. My only hope was
to patiently complete each case and be finally released.
In my first year in prison, in the isolated anda barrack, my
co-accused and I were kept away from the other prisoners because the jail
administration considered us far too dangerous to be [allowed to associate]
with them.
To signal that we were different, all alleged Naxalite
prisoners were forced to wear prison uniforms with green arm bands. In April
2008, all 13 of us went on an indefinite hunger strike. Among our demands: end
our isolation, stop arresting social activists as Naxalites, and don’t force
undertrials to wear uniforms.
In order to undermine us, we were dispersed into separate
barracks. I was transferred to phasi yard—for prisoners [on death row].
Our strike lasted 27 days. None of our demands were
fulfilled. Instead, the police officer who was conducting an inquiry into the
matter advised the jail officials to scatter us across other jails. An
additional criminal case was registered against us, of attempting to commit
suicide—this was the ninth case I had to deal with.
I was crushed at the thought of having to [suffer] the same
cycle of torture, bail applications and endless waits for trial dates all over
again. But this time, thankfully, it was quicker. A vociferous public outcry
and the skills of my lawyers worked in my favour.
(Courtesy: OPEN magazine)
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