Dr Kafeel Khan’s plight highlights the condition of Kashmiri prisoners too

With news-reports coming in of Dr Kafeel Khan’s wife fearing his very survival and safety in the Mathura Jail, where he sits imprisoned, I have been wondering the very vulnerability of an Indian Muslim prisoner, in the backdrop of the horrifying communal times we are living in. The Hindutva agenda is so overpowering that none of the communally twisted politicians has been arrested or even questioned in the backdrop of the Delhi pogrom of 2020 even when there are several videos playing out their communal provocative speeches, and also many victims holding them responsible for this pogrom. Ironically, instead of getting booked, these very tainted politicians are roaming about with security cover! State protection for the culprits … for those politicians terrorizing us day and night!

If Muslim boys and men could be so brutally attacked by the Hindutva goons on the streets and mohallas of northeast Delhi, all under the watchful gaze of the cops, then one can well imagine what could be taking place behind the high walls of the prisons.

Then come to mind the news reports about the Kashmiri prisoners battling severe health problems and finding it very difficult to survive in the prisons of Uttar Pradesh and Delhi and in other northern states of the country.

This makes me recall what I read rather re-read the books written by several former prisoners and also by those who have been interacting with the imprisoned population – Anjum Zamarud Habib’s ‘Prisoner No. 100’ (Zubaan). Mohammad Aamir Khan’s ‘Framed As A Terrorist’( Speaking Tiger) Abdul Wahid Shaikh’s Begunah Qaidi (Pharos Media), Mufti Abdul Qayyum Ahmad Husain Mansuri’s ‘I Am A Mufti &I Am Not A Terrorist - 11 Years Behind the Bars’ (Published by Jamat Ulama, Ahmedabad and Maharashtra), Nandita Haksar's "Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal - Patriotism In The Time of Terror" (Bibliophile South Asia,) Iftikhar Gilani’s ‘My Days in Prison’ (Penguin ).

If you read what these former prisoners had to face in prison, you’d realize how tough, unsafe and humiliating it got for them.

And it feels more traumatic when their tormentors are released and set free. Though it gets almost impossible to nail or arrest any of the tainted cops, yet even if that happens in those rare cases, there is every possibility of they getting bailed out …set free!

I must hasten to add that nothing comes as a shocker in these RSS-ridden times. I recall when in the first week of August 2017, the special CBI court discharged former IPS officer DG Vanzara and also the Rajasthan-cadre IPS officer Dinesh MN in the case of alleged fake encounters of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Tulsiram Prajapati, there was little hue and cry from the opposition.

This, when there is this vital backgrounder to the encounter specialist’s killings. After all, DG Vanzara, a DIG-rank officer, was arrested on April 24, 2007, in connection with the alleged fake encounter of gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kausar Bi , who were abducted by the Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad from Hyderabad on their way to Sangli in Maharashtra. Sheikh was killed in an alleged fake encounter near Gandhinagar in 2005, after which his wife ‘disappeared’, killed! Prajapati, an eyewitness, was also allegedly killed by the police in 2006…The Sohrabuddin case was transferred to Mumbai in 2012 on the CBI’s request for a fair trial. In 2013, the Supreme Court clubbed the “fake encounter” case of Prajapati with that of Sheikh.

DG Vanzara’s this particular letter published in RB Sreekumar’s book ‘Gujarat -Behind The Curtain’ ( Manas) carries pointers. I’m quoting from this book:

“DIG D. G. Vanzara, jailed since April 2007 for the alleged guilt of committing fake encounters, in his resignation letter to the government of Gujarat, dated September 1 2013,–‘Tendering of resignation from my service with renunciation of all post-retirement benefits …Gujarat CID / Union CBI had arrested me and my officers in different encounter cases, holding us to be responsible for carrying out alleged fake encounters, if that true then the CBI investigating officers of all the 4 encounter cases of Sohrabuddin, Tulsi Ram, Sadiq Jamal and Ishrat Jahan have to arrest the policy formulators also, as we, being field officers have simply implemented the conscious policy of this government, which was inspiring, guiding and monitoring our actions from very close quarters. By this reasoning, I am of the firm opinion that the place of this government, instead of being in Gandhinagar, should either be in Taloja Central Prison at Navi Mumbai or in the Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad.’ ”

After reading these books, one wonders: Why are the communal cum corrupt jail officers not booked or dismissed? Where is the transparency? Why should we go only by police hand-outs? Why shouldn’t a non-governmental agency be allowed to carry out simultaneous investigative probes? Why should the minorities sit in fear of the police and its ways?

After all, it is not difficult to arrest an innocent and heap terror charges on him; with that, he sits languishing. Not to overlook the patent one-liners that go along with the arrests — the arrested has ‘confessed’ his or her ‘crime’ to the police. Who will believe that the arrested ‘confessed’ without those torture sessions? Aren’t we aware of the fact that the police can make one confess any possible crime in the midst of torture sessions? And we are more than aware that the police can arrest and detain just about anyone!

Though big-bodied commissions had been set up to look into the living conditions of the Muslims of the country yet it seems unfortunate that there's no looking into the condition of the imprisoned Muslim population.

It’s relevant to point out here that I had asked Justice Sachar who was heading the Sachar Committee why don’t they extend the Committee’s findings to jails and the jailed population. He made it very clear that it did not come under their mandate. As he put across, “The Sachar Committee had tried to go a little extra finding, in terms of doing a headcount of the Muslims in the Indian Army and see what a volley we faced.”

Unfortunately, the Sachar Committee could not extend its probe to what has been happening behind those high walls of the prisons.

But today we simply can’t bypass the prison happenings! Why don’t apolitical groups set up an independent commission to look into the lives and conditions of the prisoners?

On Sarojini Naidu’s death anniversary: Her verse titled ‘Panjab 1919’.

Sarojini Naidu, the versatile political activist and poet died on March 2, 1949. Now more than ever it seems relevant to recall her poetry. Tucked in the volume ‘Jallianwala Bagh- Literary Responses in Prose & Poetry’ (Edited by Rakhshanda Jaleel, published by Niyogi Books), is this verse of Sarojini Naidu, titled - Panjab 1919.

“How shall our love console thee, or assuage/

Thy hapless woe; how shall our grief requite/

The hearts that scourge thee and the hands that smite/

Thy beauty with their rods of bitter rage?/

Lo! Let our sorrows be thy battle –gage/

To wreck the terror of the tyrant’s might/

Who mocks with ribald wrath thy tragic plight,/

And stains with shame thy radiant heritage!/

O beautiful! O broken and betrayed!/

O mournful queen! O martyred Draupadi!/

Endure thou still, unconquered, undismayed! /

The sacred rivers of thy stricken blood/

Shall prove the fivefold stream of Freedom’s flood,/

To guard the watchtowers of our Liberty.”

The views expressed in the article are author’s own