Mumbai: Bail should be the normal, jail an exception. And when the system puts a woman behind bars, it inadvertently affects an entire family, says lawyer and activist Sudha Bharadwaj, who is now out on bail after being arrested in 2018 for her alleged involvement in the Elgar Parishad programme and the subsequent Bhima Koregaon violence.
Sitting on the elegant white steps of Mumbai’s iconic Asiatic Library, a place where the city’s rich and poor, old and young have all left an imprint, Bharadwaj, on a humid Tuesday evening, talks about the world she saw inside prison, which she has captured in her book, From Phansi Yard.
The book is a collection of Bharadwaj’s perceptive observations about her fellow prisoners, seen from behind the bars of Yerawada Central Jail’s ‘phansi yard’. As Bharadwaj spent the majority of her incarceration at the Pune jail in a solitary confinement, she could only briefly talk to her fellow inmates.
In a conversation with ThePrint, she spoke of the world behind bars as ‘a reflection of the society outside’ where the privileged and the impoverished, the haves and havenots, the old and young co-exist, and the class, caste, religious and gender differences are just as stark.
“Whenever you put a woman in jail, you are putting a family in jail. Either those children are with the women living in that jail or they are outside yearning for the mother,” Bharadwaj says, looking back at how her daughter, Maaysha, suffered while she was incarcerated.
In her book, Bharadwaj talks about how her daughter’s letters were full of anger and loneliness, to which she would respond with hope, peace, and calm. But because of prison security, she would always receive her daughter’s letters late, and it would inadvertently lead to a lag in responding to them. “It was frustrating,” Bhardwaj says.
Bharadwaj was arrested in August 2018, when she had decided to take a step back from her duties as a lawyer, trade unionist and activist, and focus on her family. As she writes in her book, Bharadwaj had moved to New Delhi in 2017 to spend time with her daughter who was about to go to college. She then took up the first formal job of her life at the age of 56—a visiting professorship at National Law University, Delhi—and decided to focus on her health. But the normalcy was short-lived. Bharadwaj spent a considerable time at Pune’s Yerawada Central Jail and Mumbai’s Byculla women’s jail before walking out on bail in December 2021.
“People (system) have to be a lot more liberal with bail. I found too many people in prison who really shouldn’t have been there at all,” Bharadwaj says.
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Reflection of the world outside
The accounts of women prisoners in From Phansi Yard give glimpses of the various dimensions to class, caste, and community differences inside prison.
Bharadwaj says that the one place where class differences are the most stark is at the prison canteen.
“After some time, the monotony of the regular food starts getting to you. People pep it up with canteen (supplies)…the snacks, farsan, chutney, achar (pickle). Things to spice up life. Everybody needs it,” she says.
Everyone is assigned duties in prison barracks and the poorer women often perform the duties of well-off people in return for canteen supplies. “Jail is just a reflection of society. Everything out there is here as well,” Bharadwaj says.
In prison, the country’s religious minority is in majority. Muslim women constitute a large section, but aren’t ‘looked down upon’, according to Bharadwaj.
“You had the jail following the rules for the Roza. The kitchen would open early in the morning. What really came through as stories that floated down is that the gang wars at Yerawada jail would be on religious lines and it was the higher-ups who decided who won. And in a polarised atmosphere, if the administration of a jail gets polarised, it can be very dangerous,” Bharadwaj says.
One of the records in her book is the story of a Muslim man who was brutally beaten up in the Yerawada jail’s Gandhi Yard following an altercation between Muslims and non-Muslims. Some Muslim prisoners attacked non-Muslims, who retaliated. From what reverberated through the walls of the prison, the senior-most jail authorities gave a “tacit go ahead to the retaliation,” Bharadwaj writes in her book.
There’s a happy postscript to the story though. A month later, the Muslim wife and the Hindu girlfriend of the injured Muslim prisoner were seen sitting outside a jail barrack, discussing his health.
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The caste differences are just as prominent in jail, Bharadwaj writes. A Nepali inmate complains about how only “lower people” at the prison are Buddhists like her. A child crying while being yanked by her sour-faced mother for not getting enough sympathy and gifts, probably because her mother is a Dalit. Or how the job of a jail sanitation worker, the “steadiest wage work jail can offer”, is always taken up by prisoners who are Dalits or from the Other Backward Classes.
There are gender biases too. The release of a woman prisoner could be delayed if there is no “respectable family member” to receive her. Or she is sent to an institution.
“You consider a woman adult enough to be tried, even sentenced, but when she is released, you don’t consider her adult enough to take care of herself?” Bharadwaj asks.
Stricter the law, stricter the statute
In her book, Bharadwaj has mentioned the story of a Marathi actor who was cheated by her producer and allegedly sexually abused too. The actor would talk about how she “taught him a lesson.” She broke into the producer’s house and assaulted him. He accused her of stealing Rs 6,000.
“Surprisingly, she hasn’t got bail though it’s nearly a year now. According to her, it’s because her case is being tried by a MCOCA court (the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, which has stringent bail conditions) and there have been endless adjournments. But is she actually charged under this draconian law? Even she doesn’t seem to know,” Bharadwaj writes.
Bharadwaj, who herself was arrested under the stringent UAPA (Unlawful Practices Prevention Act), says these laws that prescribe stricter punishment need to be used carefully.
“When there is a law that is beyond normal criminal law, then there are some safeguards which are actually built into the law. Sanction [by a higher official] is one of them. But what is the point of the sanction if the concerned officer is going to sign without even looking at it, without looking for material, without saying what the material was that the officer saw?” she adds.
Another thing that needs to change in prisons is the availability of legal aid to inmates, according to Bharadwaj. The activist spent almost all her time informally helping prisoners file legal petitions and applications at Mumbai’s Byculla jail, where she was housed in the barracks.
“You need dedicated lawyers who are accountable to the client, that is, the prisoner. Not accountable to the legal services authority. That means you have to go and take the trouble to meet the prisoner, make sure they understand the chargesheet; you have to understand their circumstances, their stories,” she says.
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Prisons also need to become correctional centres in the true sense of the term.
“The reformatory staff—there aren’t enough doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, teachers, and you (jail administration) don’t give access to people who will work well with prisoners to ensure that they don’t get back into crime and are rehabilitated,” Bharadwaj adds.
One of the accounts recorded in From Phansi Yard is about a woman who would always sit away from others. She was infamous for not bathing for days and storing rotten food and stinky clothes in her barracks, and she was on a night pill. One day, she shouted and cursed everyone loudly about how she is ill-treated all the time.
Referring to how the prison needs more counsellors, Bharadwaj says, “It’s so clear that many women here need psychotherapy, not punishment.”
(Edited by Ratan Priya)