{"id":340685,"date":"2022-12-01T01:08:18","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T06:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=340685"},"modified":"2022-12-02T01:13:25","modified_gmt":"2022-12-02T06:43:25","slug":"were-prison-conditions-better-in-the-years-passed-by","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/were-prison-conditions-better-in-the-years-passed-by\/","title":{"rendered":"Were prison conditions better in the years passed by?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Where are prison diaries and books of the day? Why don\u2019t prisoners write, so that we know what\u2019s taking place in there? Are prisoners of the day discouraged from offloading their everyday experiences?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

What can be termed as a series of shockers are reports coming in right from this summer of 2022 of several jailed inmates, imprisoned in the jails of Uttar\u00a0 Pradesh, testing\u00a0 positive for\u00a0 HIV. And some of the HIV infected also testing positive for TB.<\/p>\n

Focusing\u00a0 on the\u00a0 news reports published earlier in June, about\u00a0 22\u00a0 inmates in the Saharanpur jail tested positive for\u00a0 HIV,\u00a0 and\u00a0 6\u00a0 inmates in the\u00a0 Gonda\u00a0 jail. And in early September, 26 inmates of the district jail at Uttar Pradesh\u2019s Barabanki tested positive for HIV. News reports stated that the tests were conducted by the health department during a three-phase HIV camp held at the jail from August 10 to September 1, and of the 26 people, two were undergoing anti-retroviral treatment at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in Lucknow.<\/p>\n

And now, in November, comes in news from Ghaziabad situated Dasna Jail –\u00a0 that\u00a0\u00a0out of 5,500 inmates 140 are HIV positive, and 35 of them also have TB. These are officially released figures, together with this disturbing fact \u2013 currently, around 5,500 inmates are lodged in Ghaziabad situated Dasna jail against a capacity of 1,706 inmates.<\/p>\n

How does one react to this? Shocking, to say the least. The only positive here is that at least the State has admitted this alarming fact \u2013 that is,\u00a0 HIV infected prisoners are there, imprisoned in those\u00a0 jails. Mind you, in all probability they couldn\u2019t have been infected when they were initially jailed, because it is mandatory to conduct medical tests before imprisonment.<\/p>\n

Relevant queries do come up: How did they get HIV infected in the confines of these jails and prisons? Why weren\u2019t medical tests conducted on the prisoners when the initial symptoms came up? What steps are undertaken for deadly infections, including the tuberculosis infections, not to further and infect many more of the jailed population? What steps are being implemented or undertaken to lessen the overcrowding aspect to jails? Is the concept of open- jails a better option; with prisoners able to breath fresh air and move about along a larger stretch? Above all, what is the State doing for the under-trials? Technically innocent, as yet to be proven guilty yet they sit languishing for years, if not for decades. Wasted lives with sheer nothingness holding out!<\/p>\n

Where are prison diaries and books of the day? Why don’t prisoners write, so that we know what’s taking place in there? Are prisoners of the day discouraged from offloading their everyday experiences or inner most thoughts and emotions? Are the imprisoned men and women reduced to such levels of hopelessness that they don’t want to yield the pen or else try to key in, that is, if computers and laptops are even available in the prisons in these ‘developed’ times? Also, is there that basic freedom for the imprisoned to write fearlessly and freely and in that ongoing way, day after day, in that imprisoned state?<\/p>\n

When one thinks of prisoners of today, it gets significant to mention that perhaps prison conditions were relatively, rather significantly better, in those years passed by.<\/p>\n

I just re-read this\u00a0 book – ‘Prison Days’ (Speaking Tiger) by Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, with a foreword by her daughter, Nayantara Sahgal. This prison diary was written by her in the early 1940s, and as one reads through what comes out is the ground reality of that historic phase when hundreds of the who’s who were imprisoned. And these included Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and members of his family.<\/p>\n

To quote Nayantara Sahgal from the foreword – “My mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, wrote this prison diary during her third and last imprisonment under British rule. It begins on 12 August 1942, six days before her forty-second birthday. World War11 was on, Allahabad, like the rest of the country was under military rule. Arrest and imprisonment took place without trial. Several lorries filled with armed policemen arrived that night at Anand Bhawan at 2 a.m. to arrest one lone, unarmed woman, who, along with her husband, Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, and her brother Jawaharlal Nehru, had committed her life to the non-violent fight to free India from British rule, under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi\u2026My father was already a prisoner in the Naini Central jail in Allahabad, where she was taken, and he would later be transferred to a jail in Bareilly, where he would fall mortally ill, and finally be released only to die. My uncle was imprisoned ‘somewhere in India’. It was not made public until much later that he and other leaders of the Indian National Congress were held in the Ahmednagar Fort. My older sister, Chandralekha, aged eighteen, and my cousin, Indira Gandhi, aged twenty-five, were arrested later and taken to Naini Jail.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In this book, there is no mention of physical tortures inflicted on Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit but then as she writes in the preface, “This little diary does not attempt to record all the events which took place during my last term of imprisonment… the treatment given to me and to those shared the barrack with me was, according to the prison standards, very lenient – the reader must not imagine that others were equally well treated. When the truth about that unhappy period is made known many grim stories will come to light, but that time is still far away.”<\/p>\n

After one has read through this slim book, one wonders where are the books written by prisoners of the day.<\/p>\n

Lily Swarn Saba\u2019s book of ghazals<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chandigarh-based poet Lily Swarn Saba\u2019s book of\u00a0 ghazals\u00a0\u2013Yeh Na\u00a0 Thi\u00a0 Hamari\u00a0 Qismat-<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 published in Urdu and\u00a0 Hindi ( yet to be\u00a0 translated in English) holds out on the\u00a0 sheer strength of her ghazals. Hitting, powerful and touching.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d first\u00a0 met\u00a0 Lily\u00a0 around 2019 at the\u00a0 South Asian literary-poetry meet organized by Ajeet\u00a0 Cour, in New\u00a0 Delhi, and what\u00a0 had\u00a0 immediately struck was Lily\u2019s pair of eyes.\u00a0 There was a certain sadness spread out on her beautiful face, with the eyes relaying emotional strain or call it sadness. And over lunch as we got talking, she\u2019d told me that her young son succumbed to cancer, leaving her and the family immensely pained and in deep sorrow.<\/p>\n

In fact,she has dedicated her this book to her son \u2013 Gobind\u00a0 Shahbaaz\u00a0 Singh.<\/p>\n

Though\u00a0 one is\u00a0 tempted to write\u00a0 one ghazal after another from her book as each ghazal holds out\u00a0 but space constraints come in way. Leaving\u00a0 you, with these lines from her book:<\/p>\n

Dard hota nahin hai sabhi\u00a0 ke liyai<\/p>\n

Yeh\u00a0 to\u00a0 tohfa\u00a0 bana\u00a0 hai\u00a0 kisi\u00a0 ke\u00a0 liyai\u2026<\/p>\n

(This pain is not\u00a0 for everyone, a present\u00a0 only for someone\u2026)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where are prison diaries and books of the day? Why don\u2019t prisoners write, so that we know what\u2019s taking place in there? Are prisoners of the day discouraged from offloading their everyday experiences? What can be termed as a series of shockers are reports coming in right from this summer of 2022 of several jailed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":340687,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[23,14770,2205],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340685"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":340688,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340685\/revisions\/340688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media\/340687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}