Under trials and convicts from the valley in Delhi’s Tihar jail are singled out for punishment and humiliation by the jail staff and other inmates, who perceive them as terrorists.
Sheikh Saaliq
Ehsan Antoo, a Kashmiri, still remembers with horror the day he was brought to Tihar Jail after being charged under the Official Secrets Act in 2004. “After I entered the jail, I was forced to remove my clothes. The jail authorities said they wanted to see an identification mark on my body. Instead, they made me turn around. What happened next was something that still makes me tremble,” Antoo recalls. Further indignity was in store for him and other Kashmiri prisoners as jail authorities used fingers and bamboo sticks to further traumatize them. When Antoo retaliated, he was beaten up. “I had other identification marks on my body, but I was made to strip and brutalized only because they wanted to humiliate me,” says Antoo.
While this is an extreme form of torture, Kashmiri prisoners released after serving jail terms in Tihar allege that they were singled out for severe punishment and humiliation, not just by the jail staff, but by other prisoners too, who perceived them as terrorists. Many were beaten up so brutally that they had to get their heads stitched. According to a Hindustan Times report, 18 cases of blade attacks were reported inside Tihar in 2013. Most of them went unnoticed and unreported. Even the families of these prisoners were unaware of the incidents. Most of those, who are charged with terrorist activities, have been in Tihar for the last 20 years.
As they sit in dark cells, counting the days, months and years to freedom, killing time is the least of their problems. What’s more difficult to bear is extreme hostility. Sudden, vicious attacks by other prisoners have scared them out of their wits. Gangs in Tihar, be it in the male or female wards, have made life hell for these Kashmiri prisoners. Danger lurks everywhere.
PAIN AND TORTURE
So bad has the situation become that many of them went on a hunger strike last month, protesting against an order by the director general (prisons), restricting the rights of high risk ward (HRW) prisoners. In a petition to the Delhi High Court, they alleged that “malpractices and inhuman treatment” were meted out to them by jail authorities. In early February, a team of lawyers from the Jammu and Kashmir Bar Association visited Tihar on the orders of the high court. A report was later released, which highlighted the problems faced by Kashmiri prisoners.
Antoo clearly remembers the day he was attacked in a police van as he was being taken for a court hearing. “The van stopped and we had to step out. That’s when a fellow prisoner hit me on the face with his elbow and attacked me with a razor. I was lucky the blade missed me by a whisker,” he says.
Khurram Parvez heads the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, and has been following the cases of Kashmiri prisoners for a long time. He says the ill-treatment of Kashmiri prisoners inside Tihar Jail is an ongoing issue, which needs to be addressed urgently. He feels attacks on them are happening due to the myopic thinking of other prisoners, who consider Kashmiris as terrorists.
“There is no way prisoners can be attacked so systematically without the help of jail authorities. The attacks are mostly carried out with weapons. In a high security jail like Tihar, it is impossible to bring such weapons in. This clearly indicates that jail authorities are helping the attackers,” Parvez says.
IN THE FEMALE WARD
Shockingly, even female Kashmiri prisoners are not spared. Zamrooda Habib was a Kashmiri prisoner in Tihar and kept a diary, which was published into a book titled Prisoner No 100: An Account of My Nights and Days in an Indian Prison after she was released. The book is full of incidents, anecdotes and experiences about the dark world inside the jail. One line from the book quotes Delhi police telling her during interrogation, “You are a separatist leader of Muslim Khawateen Markaz (MKM). We would just strip you naked, take your snaps and distribute them all over India, thus defaming you forever.”
Habib, who now heads the Association of Families of Kashmiri Prisoners, says she was charged under anti-terror law POTA and lodged in Jail No 6, meant only for women.
But that hardly mattered, as what happened to male prisoners “also happened to me”, recalls Habib. She was the only Kashmiri woman lodged in Tihar, and had to face the brunt of “blade gangs” in her ward too. Most of them attack prisoners who have been charged with anti-national activities. “When a group of prisoners came to know that I was a Kashmiri, they caught me by my hair and dragged me all around the ward. They beat me ruthlessly and called me a terrorist,” she says.
Habib remembers one Afghan woman, who was charged with drug-smuggling. She was beaten up so mercilessly that she died. The cause of her death, she says, was extreme lower abdominal bleeding. “She was repeatedly kicked on her abdomen,” says Habib.
TERRORIST TAG
Syed Maqbool Shah, an accused in the Lajpat Nagar blasts of 1996, who was acquitted after 13 years in Tihar, says that dangerous gangs inside the jail pose a constant threat to prisoners’ lives. Kashmiri prisoners, he alleges, are deliberately kept with thieves, murderers and mafia, evoking a sense of fear among them. “I was lodged in a ward with druggists, murderers and other dangerous criminals. They would carry blades and attack other prisoners. I was often called a terrorist by other inmates,” Maqbool says.
Gautam Navlakha, a prominent human rights defender and a lawyer, says these attacks are the “worst kind of punishment”.
Take the case of Rafiq Ahmad Shah, who was attacked so severely inside Tihar that he had to be referred to a hospital for treatment. His father, Muhammad Yaseen Shah, learnt about it through social media on March 24 this year. Rafiq was arrested on October 29, 2005, in connection with a series of blasts that rocked Sarojini Nagar market, Paharganj and Kalkaji in Delhi, killing 50 and injuring 104. The next month, Rafiq was arrested from his home in Alasteng in Srinagar and since then, Tihar’s HRW No 5 has been his home.
The torture is particularly hard on families. Rafiq’s mother Mehmooda says with concern: “Our kids are being attacked in jails and we don’t even know. Whenever we go to visit them, they prefer to remain silent. Even if they want to tell us about these attacks, they aren’t allowed to do so. We are forced not to speak in Kashmiri so that jail authorities can follow our conversation,” she says.
FUTILE ATTEMPT
Javid Ahmad Khanwas, arrested in 1996 in connection with the Lajpat Nagar blasts, is lodged in HRW No 6. A few weeks back, his cousin Farooq Ahmad came all the way from Nawapora in Kashmir to meet him, but he was not allowed. Disappointed, he returned home.
Javid’s father Mohammad Shafi Khan says: “My son is not treated well. Like all other prisoners, Javid is also bearing the brunt of being a Kashmiri.”
However, Tihar jail spokesperson Sunil Gupta denies all allegations. He says jail authorities treat all prisoners equally, and minor incidents are controlled. But the kith and kin of these Kashmiri prisoners live in constant dread and concern. “Tihar Jail is no different from a torture cell. Our kids are under constant threat of getting killed there,” laments Mehmooda.
How can these prisoners expect ingratiation, given such a trail of torture?