Photo: AP
I met Saeed at the Bombay High Court exactly a year ago. He had appeared a picture of gloom, fear and desperation. Yet, despite his apparent destitution, he had put some money together and filed on his father’s behalf the petition before the High Court that the judges have now ruled on. I wrote of the attack on the prisoners in TEHELKA, quoting eyewitnesses from family members who had gathered outside the jail during the attack, and also from Sohail’s petition. (Descriptions Of A Struggle; Vol 5, Issue 33, Dated Aug 23, 2008; http://www.tehelka. com/home/20080823/)
According to Sohail’s petition, there was an “escalation of torture and humiliation” of these accused for six months before the assault. Possibly at the behest of police officers probing the terror cases, Sathe had been pressuring these under-trial prisoners to turn approvers in such cases and implicate their fellow accused. When she failed to succeed with even one, their intimidation and terror began.
Acting on Sohail’s plea, the High Court judges directed a city judge, NT Nalawade, to hold a judicial inquiry into the incident. Nalawade visited the jail, surveyed the site of the assault, and interviewed prison officials as also Sohail and the others who had petitioned the High Court. Nalawade also “made discreet inquiry… with many prisoners who included foreigners, Hindus and Muslims” to see if any was “tutored”.
Nalwade trashed Sathe’s version of the assault. She had claimed that the prisoners had broken through concentric rings of security and attacked the jail authorities with bricks and stones. But Nalawade concluded that the “bricks and stones were not available… and [the] story of the jail authority was not true”.
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JUDICIAL FURY
We have no doubt in our mind that force was used disproportionately and excessively for extraneous reasons, and not for the reason to maintain discipline in the jail
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The convicts or the under trials are human beings and have to be treated like that. Jail authorities have a special responsibility to protect their rights and be their custodian and reformer
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The conduct of the Jail Superintendent was shameful. Behaving like a dictator inside the jail is not acceptable. Such officials if left to manage the jail would negate our democratic principles
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Most prisoners received very serious injuries. The jail doctors manipulated the medical certificates to help jail authorities. The role of these doctors is reprehensible and shameful
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Rejecting Sathe’s claim that the prisoners broke through various gates, he said: “They [prisoners] were required to pass first the grill gate which is on the first floor and which is kept ordinarily in locked condition… A constable is posted at this gate. After this gate, there is another gate and it always remains in closed condition.” Thus, “it does not look probable” that the inmates broke through the two gates to overpower the constable.”
A few days after the assault, the police took two prisoners – Sayed Jafar and Sunil Walmiki – to a magistrate claiming that they wanted to turn approvers. But as soon as the two appeared before the magistrate, they told him that Sathe was torturing them to force them to turn approvers.
