There is a belief among prisoners that when someone gets bail, the co-accused will also soon get bail on the same grounds. It is difficult to say when this will happen, it may take six months or even six years.
The truth is that I spent time in jail, but it feels as if time has bitten me. On a cloudy evening of June 21, 2018, I was being taken to Yerwada Jail in Pune. I knew watches weren’t allowed in prison, yet I was still holding on to my Titan watch. I had to deposit it at the gate. After about six years, it came back to me like an antique in a museum. Time was stuck in a brown government envelope, sealed in a box. The time that had stopped ticking. I had been in jail only a few hours, but my warden had spent 22 years in jail. When I was entering the jail, she was preparing for her release. The bell would ring at five o’clock to wake us up. Someone sings the Marathi bhajan, ‘Ughda Dwar O Deva’ (Open the doors, O Lord), and when ‘Madam’, carrying a big bunch of keys, shouts, ‘Thamb, Thamb, Udhte’ (Wait, we are opening), everyone starts laughing. When the staff in the barracks brought tea, breakfast and milk, we realized that it must have been seven o’clock. Now we are free, inside the high walls of the compound, topped with barbed wire. We can roam in the garden, go to the bathroom, queue up under a tamarind tree for hot water, sit on the lawn and talk to friends, wash our clothes and dry them at designated places, collect our morning meal in broken aluminum plates like beggars and return to our barracks.
This is also the time when other things ‘arrive’. “Dispensary niche!”, screams the maid from the gate. She tells that the doctor and the dispensary have arrived (though the dispensary is in a corner of a room in the office). Meetings come, canteen comes, clothes come from family, library comes and most surprisingly, court also comes. This means that the van that takes the prisoners to the court has arrived and we have to stand in line to show our naked bodies before being let out of the jail. The most pleasant, of course, is when the chicken arrives, the dumplings or the fruits arrive.
We are different tribes living in different villages (barracks). The bell rings at 12 noon. It’s time to stop to go to the barracks and rest. The 3 o’clock bell tells us it’s tea time. At 5pm we are relieved to know that another day has passed. The bell guides us to our temporary homes. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on an unknown island, we too can put another mark on the branch to record our past days.
There is no night time. If you suddenly wake up from a nightmare, which happens often, you have several ways to anticipate it. You can hear the milk van rolling into the prison and the night guard shouting to wake up the canteen staff. From this you will know that it is 3 or 4 am in the morning.
For me, the initial months passed the slowest, but later, especially after shifting to Mumbai, the time in jail went by quite fast. This did not mean that there was less anxiety or frustration; I was just getting used to jail life. I measured time from appointment to appointment, from one court date to the next or from the filing of each bail application and its progress and eventual rejection. Every time an application was filed, there was a little excitement and hope in the mind.
Meeting lawyers and relatives or talking to them over the phone during the Covid pandemic provided hope. The applications were very well drafted, the arguments in the hearing were good, yet in my heart I knew that the chances of getting bail were slim. We all were very happy for Sudha Bhardwaj who got default bail on December 1, 2021. The bail of eight of us was rejected. When some lawyers assured us that we would also be out soon, it seemed that the time of release was just around the corner. But I soon realized that a week or two in jail meant a year or two in court.
It was very sad in health matters. Everyone knows that due to such delay Stan Swamy lost his life and Varavara Rao was almost on the verge of death. Not only the accused in our case, but many other prisoners also fell seriously ill due to such red tape or negligence of the jail administration.
In Byculla, every year we saw at least one prisoner lose his life. Sometimes, prisoners would tremble with fear due to the extreme anxiety caused by prison life. Spending the whole night with a fellow prisoner who was having trouble breathing, eyes rolled up, body loose and cold was like torture for the entire barrack, as we kept calling the doctor or the guard for hours.
Although Yerwada jail had a doctor and an ECG machine, Byculla did not. No doctor would come to see any serious patient at night and advice had to be taken from the jailer over the phone. If she gave permission, the gate would be opened and the patient would be taken to J.J. Would have been taken to the hospital. If the power went out at night, without a fan, the suffocating smell of sweat would permeate the barracks. Yerwada Central Jail had a generator that started instantly, but Byculla Jail, located in Maximum City, south Mumbai, where even slum dwellers have inverters, had nothing, not even emergency lights.
There is a belief among jail inmates that when a person gets bail, his co-accused will also soon get bail on the same grounds. But it is difficult to say when this will happen, because it may take six months or even six years. For example, many people got bail in the Bhima Koregaon case but lawyer Surendra Gadling has been imprisoned for seven and a half years. There are also such prisoners who get bail, but due to not being able to arrange ‘surety’ (bail amount or guarantee), they remain in jail for years.
In the unfortunate circumstances of conviction, the illogicality of the time limit given in the sentence drives the prisoners to despair. Many women accused of murder may actually be victims of sexual abuse or domestic violence, where the murder was an act of compulsion to escape that situation. Nevertheless, under what was earlier called Section 302, the minimum punishment is life imprisonment, but there is no fixed limit on ‘life’. Life imprisonment used to be for 14 years, now it is considered till the end of a person’s life.
If we ask what effect spending time in these so-called ‘reform homes’ has had on the prisoners, we will find that most of the prisoners come out bitter. I have heard women say that they have been put in jail for no fault of theirs and after getting out, they will actually commit a crime. Many women accused of murdering their husbands were acquitted, but they were separated from their families, especially their children. They are frustrated that even menial jobs often require background checks, which will prevent them from getting good jobs.
During their stay in jail, the women’s friendship continued outside also. Such women provide each other with living space and financial help. Being political prisoners, the joy we felt upon being released, the feeling of acceptance in the society to meet family and friends, is rare for other women prisoners after release. Most women end up in prison because of socio-economic aspects of crime, and huge disparities between people based on class, caste, gender and religion. Without considering these issues of social justice, justice cannot be delivered in these times.
(Shoma Sen is a women’s rights activist and assistant professor and was the head of the Department of English Literature, Nagpur University. On June 8, 2018, she was arrested by the Pune Police for her alleged involvement in the Bhima Koregaon cases.)
