Now that Spring and April have arrived in England, the English poet can well sing, ‘O to be in England, now that April is there’. We being poor Indians see nothing special in Indian summer and Indian April which is only less hot than May. Of late,weather Gods are unkind to India. Floods in April, heat wave in Mumbai during March, summer in winter, winter in summer and so on.Where does prison and prison life fit into all this?
Indian democracy is a wonderful thing; it treats everyone and everything as equal. We have unmanageable crowds everywhere, on the streets, railway stations, bus stands…… they all groan with people. Those of us who have been lucky to have gone inside jails, not as residents but even only as visitors, will find the same situation there too. Milling crowds, unmanageable rush and so on. Inside and outside it is the same. The media occasionally covers prison stories. Tihar, supposed to house 45,000 prisoners groans with 95,000. Gone is the time when people did not mind a short sojourn in jail to avoid crowds, but now the prisons are more crowded than the outside world.
Prison life has the same VIP culture as the outside world. Our inimitable TV anchor Arnab Goswami talks on his channel about VIP culture in every corner of India. Money talks and you can have doors opened for you and you are entitled to VIP treatment even in prisons. If you are a political leader particularly in states like Haryana, you can walk in and out of prison as you wish, despite the severity of your sentence. Political clans like the Chautalas or D.P. Yadavs are sentenced to long prison terms for serious crimes. But they don’t bother. Within hours they are favoured with medical certificates which transfer them to prison hospitals or posh clinics where they enjoy long spells of ‘treatment and recuperation’, before they are summoned again by the honourable court .
Prison life teaches the VIP convicts many escape routes. Parole, furlough, imaginary illnesses and so on, all of them meant to hoodwink authority. But you should know how to make use of these tricks. The Chautala or D.P. Yadav family members convicted for long terms in prison are constantly out enjoying life because they can claim as much parole as they want, being “VVVIP” prisoners. Don’t ask me what items are passed from hand to hand to facilitate such exchanges. But you won’t find these details in any prison manuals.
Let us forget the VIP aspect of prison life and find out how involved ordinary citizens including teachers, striking
workers, students, ordinary protestors and the like are. The easiest thing in India is to get arrested, spend a day in the lock up and emerge as a hero. This happened to me a couple of times when I was a student and later an industrial worker. We went on strike, I don’t know for what, and scattered when the cops chased us. A tough cop caught hold of my collar and threw me into the police van. It was morning, we were driven to the local magistrate’s court. The honorable magistrate shot a couple of questions, I mumbled a couple of answers and we were in custody till evening. By that time, the prisons had become crowded, there was no space for the latecomers and we were let out. And I emerged ‘Prison Returned’!
You know, Bollywood would not exist without court scenes and prison scenes. Watching movies for the past 50 years, I have wondered if prisoners would ever change uniforms (than the present striped ones) to make them more modern. If heroes like the Khans can change costumes ten times in a movie, why can’t the poor hero-prisoner wear different uniforms. Finally, I like the American way of sentencing felons. In a state which had abolished death penalty if the guilty man had kidnapped, robbed, raped and killed a girl, the judge would sentence him to 70 years in jail for crime 1, 40 years for crime 2, 80 years for crime 3, 95 years for crime 4 – all sentences to run concurrently. The man would be spending around 800 years in jail, don’t ask me how! But he would definitely become an expert in prison life.
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V. Gangadhar
The writer is a well-known satirist.[/column]