I write this open letter with the notes I jotted down exactly one year back while in prison in Parappana Agrahara jail in Bengaluru. As a 20-year-old in the summer of 2003, I had just completed my second year at Yale University and started working as an unpaid legal intern at the human rights organisation ACLU in Washington, DC, USA. Five of us college-going friends – of whom I was the youngest – were occupying shared housing. While the four others slept on beds in separate bedrooms, I insisted on sleeping on the hard floor in the hallway throughout those three months. When questioned why, I responded with a cavalier, idealistic bravado – “after college, I will be in Karnataka, India, doing grassroots activism, and I’ll be surely jailed, so I better get used to sleeping on the ground!”
That prediction – possibly even a youthful predilection – appears to have actualised from February 22-28, 2022, when I spent seven days as inmate #1957 in Parappana Agrahara Jail, Bengaluru, for an innocuous tweet. The tweet questioned whether a Karnataka High Court judge based on his past (anti-women) ruling had the intellectual clarity to furnish justice in the explosive hijab-in-classrooms case. It still boggles my mind to think about the basis of how my post ‘promoted enmity’ between groups and merited a flouting of arrest protocols to incarcerate me. Nevertheless, a week ‘in the hole’ gave me time to think.
What is truth? I hold that the ideal (equality) actualised by correcting the wrongs of the past (justice) through scientific facts and analysis (rationality) is the panacea for present-day societal ills. This is the essence of the ‘idea of India’ as elucidated in our Constitution’s preamble and the truth.
Every single one of those nights I lay awake in cell #12 alongside four sleeping and snoring fellow inmates, (re)pondering such transformational paradigms. The pair of ceiling tubelights kept on the whole night in each cell to prevent any untoward actions, provided me plenty of illumination to read the books on Babasaheb Ambedkar that my wife Megha had packed for me when I was in police custody before my arrival at the prison. Some years back, I had learnt about how Bhagat Singh, a century ago, successfully led protests for reading materials while in jail and was engrossed in a book on Lenin when he was taken to the gallows. That had inspired me to tell Megha that if I were to ever be taken to jail, I’d want to take books on Ambedkar with me – she had remembered that.
In jail, the exact time at any point was always unknown. The sun’s trajectory and three meals a day gave us an approximation of the hour. At both dawn and dusk, we were allowed out of our cells briefly for a walk on the ground where we interacted with other prisoners whose chequered pasts and rollercoaster journeys could make for compelling film screenplays. Most conversations, however, centred around two major themes: what we were inside for and when we would get bail. In 20th-21st century history, we have seen that these ‘time-pass’ conversations can often lead to the most unlikely of friendships where those from differing ideological frameworks find ‘common ground’.
Along with the steel plate and cup, each inmate was allotted on arrival, we were all given a bar of soap on Friday mornings to ostensibly cleanse ourselves thoroughly in the open toilet/shower corner. Prison authorities went on rounds during that afternoon, and our treat for ‘cooperation’ was a laddu sweet on that day after dinner. The sumptuous jail food was prepared by a few inmates for all 5,000 prisoners and staff. I fondly recollect eating tasty puliyogare (tamarind rice) for breakfast on February 24, 2022, on my 39th birthday.
Those of us in prison were cut off from the world outside our walls. Information about societal happenings reached us either through an occasional one-minute phone conversation, small talk by jail authorities, or a newspaper that we got to read for only 15 minutes a day by reason of high demand rather than any codified rule. Music is something I desperately pined for. Shanthappa’s singing was an oasis in the desert. A 35-year-old dialysis patient from Kalaburagi incarcerated for a decade, Shanthappa would sit outside my cell, rendering folk melodies and self-written Babasaheb songs, captivating us all artistically, emotionally and viscerally. Shanthappa was released six months after me; it brings me joy that we are still in touch and meet consistently. It's ironic that the faces of all those who served sentences with me are etched in my mind; but in just a week with no access to a reflective entity, I practically forgot how my own face looks – a short-term amnesia of which I became aware only after I saw myself in the mirror upon my return home.
While it was a sign of a strong judiciary that many inmates I met serving long sentences were perpetrators of violent crimes against women and children, several were also victims of India’s flawed criminal justice system. According to statistics, Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim youth are ‘overrepresented’ in prisons across the nation. This data directly correlated to my interactions in Parappana Agrahara jail where a high percentage of prisoners were from Dalit and religious minority backgrounds. (One Muslim journalist youth I spoke to was implicated on the same charges as me for writing against the same judge on social media two days after me.)
As we all know, this lopsided presence in prisons has nothing to do with particular communities somehow being more ‘prone’ to wrongdoing. Instead, the reason is a defunct criminal justice system where those who have power – political, financial, caste-based, family-based, popularity-based, etc. – to influence the police, judiciary, power structure, and minds of the public have a high possibility of eluding punishment, while those without such influence are often victimised to varying levels. ‘Scapegoating’ by the police of those from marginalised communities and previous offenders is quite rampant. The recent Supreme Court discharging of 11 Muslim, anti-CAA activists, is a prime example of the police charging innocents when they cannot apprehend the actual perpetrators. A systemic transformation in terms of criminal justice is much-needed.
My ideological role model Thande Periyar is said to have gone to jail 23 times in 15 years in 20th-century Tamil Nadu for his revolutionary dismantling of inequality. On a personal level, my grandfather went to prison during the freedom struggle and my younger brother as a 19-year-old was jailed in the USA while leading an opposition to the Iraq War (2004). I am fortunate to have role models both across the globe and inside the home. I still chuckle at my fellow inmates’ innocence when we were all sharing laughs and they found out I had been given bail to be released the next day. ‘Can’t you stay a little longer?’ they asked. Well, fellas, if our movement for an equalitarian Karnataka demands that I come back to Parappana Agrahara, it will be a homecoming I will gladly embrace.
Chetan Ahimsa is an actor and an activist. Views expressed here are the author’s own.