From India's largest newsroom, I'm Arun George, and this is the Times of India podcast. If you're not somebody who knows all about prisons, think back to what you do know about them. Apart from the high walls in the overcrowded jail, most films that have characters that go to jail invariably deal with prison breaks. Then there's the films that deal with overcrowding and gangs in jails. Sometimes there's a bit of a glimpse into the sexual abuse
and hierarchies in jails. Mumbai based journalist Sukanya Shanta, who writes for The Wire, has reported extensively about jails and the criminal justice system. She says that at any point of time, India's jails are always filled well beyond capacity. Across India we have some 1350 to 1370 prisons. The prison capacity is off. I think three 2.75 or 3,00,000 people who have actually worked
in prisons for many years. They say that some 15 to 20,00,000 prisoners people actually get processed by the criminal justice system. That means some somebody would be actually sent to jail for a few days and it will come out. But the at the end of the year when the prison sent, like when the prison data is actually collected, you are around 4 1/2 to 5,00,000 of prisoners. And during COVID, it had actually gone up to 5.5 to 6,00,000.
In 2022, it was found that 76% of the inmates in India's jails are under trials. That is, the trial in their case is yet to be completed. Thousands are in jail just because they don't have the money to pay their bail. A majority of those in jail are from backward communities. None of this is anything new to anybody who's familiar with data
on India's jails. But in 2020, Sukanya Shanta reported on one aspect of jails that all the studies about jails had missed caste based labour allocation and segregation on the basis of caste in prisons. While hearing a petition filed by her in the Supreme Court, Chief Justice of India Justice DY Chandrachud thanked Sukanya for her reporting which brought these issues to the court's attention.
In today's episode, my colleague Alka Dukkar and I are in conversation with Sukanya Shanta about what her reporting reveals about the problematic manner in which people are handled in Indian jails. Sukanya says that when she started her reporting on the issue nearly five years ago, it wasn't exactly a surprise to her that caste based practices exist
in prison. Caste is a social reality that we know of and there is nothing surprising to an extent that caste practices continue in in the prison. What surprised her was what she found in a jail manual. A jail manual is a document that dictates how jail should be run
by a state. It also specifies in black and white the rights of a prisoner, what they are entitled to get and what they don't have to do. Somehow like I just happened to stumble upon one prison manual of Rajasthan and I realised that it has very explicitly mentioned things about caste based labour division in prison. And from there like I just like got very curious, I started actually looking for more and more prison manual. And prison anyway is like a
state subject. So you have every state having a very specific prison manual, Sukanya. Says that when she spoke with people who had been in jail, many of them never knew this document, the jail manual, existed. So she began working with organizations that work in jails to get access to more manuals across states. So it took me like some time to get these prison manuals and then I realized like 11 states still actually have very explicit mention of caste.
If you look at it say Rajasthan Mpup, they mentioned specific caste groups like the schedule caste groups from their states. Say for example MP in Rajasthan has mentioned of things like prisoners belonging to Meta community will be assigned job of manual scavenging. In the case of UP it becomes Jatav community in in the case of West Bengal it it is the
Chandal community. Sukanya says that in the beginning she felt that while these practices were listed in the jail manuals, this surely must not be implemented inside the jails. She discovered she was wrong. We conducted like some 35 to 40 interviews of prisoners from across different states. Most of them were from Bahujan communities but some were also sovereign us to like understand the different caste experiences that each might actually have in
prisons. So we realise that things that are mentioned in the prison manual definitely is getting implemented, but there are like so many more experiences which are much worse than what is actually written. Sukanya says that when anyone goes to jail for the first time as an under trial in a case, your personal details are noted. 1 aspect that's always noted is your caste. In prison, your details are like actually taken down in the under
trial section. There's an under trial section in the prison where your details are like actually noted down, where your age, your, your education, your gender, your caste, if you're landed, if you're landless, all type of things are like actually mentioned in that in that diary. So the moment you enter you, you are looked at as an individual
who's a cast bearing individual. You aren't looked at as an individual who has committed a like an XYZ crime, an individual who's entering a prison space for the first time so should be identified as a as a first time offender or a repeat offender. You just looked at as a person carrying your caste identity.
Among the interviews that Sukanya conducted was one of a young man whose family was originally from Bihar but had migrated to Delhi. After completing an industrial training course, he travelled for work to a factory in Rajasthan. This man works for a couple of days and there is some theft incident that actually happens in that workshop. And the owner of that workshop decides to he he he thinks that this man is involved in this, in this theft and he reports him to the police.
He is immediately arrested and sent to jail. He goes to jail and he mentions his caste and then is he? He says that he is from so and so caste from Bihar. And then he's asked what is the category of the cast and he says he like may like in his in his own words, I'm just repeating that He says so then they mention it is as SC when he goes to jail the first day itself, he is actually asked to clean up
the jail go jail veranda. So then he starts cleaning, cleaning up. And he thinks that maybe I'm like somebody who's very young who's also, it's my first day in jail. He's watched a lot of Bollywood films. So he thinks that, OK, maybe like, this is how, like, criminals are actually treated inside prison. So I have to actually go through this from sweeping veranda. He's asked to like, clean
toilets. He realizes that, OK, there are like, many prisoners who are coming inside much after me, but they aren't actually assigned this job. And there is a certain understanding that this impure job or like unclean job has to be done by somebody who belongs to a certain caste. And then he recalls that, OK, fine, I was asked about my caste. So that is the reason why the caste has been asked. At one point in time, he is asked to actually clean a septic
tank, which gets choked. And this is not something that he is equipped to do. He doesn't know how to actually enter that suspect and actually go and do the cleaning work. But the jail authorities compend him to like actually just undress and get into that septic tank and clean it up. I met him a couple of years later and then he speaks about like, and, and he still carries a trauma.
And the way he speaks about it, he actually says that like how he for the first time, he realized that because he had actually not stayed in Bihar and he, like his, his parents had actually migrated from Bihar to Delhi. So like he, he didn't really have that caste experience. And in Delhi, like, because they were migrant family, like their experiences were brutal of another kind, but not
necessarily of caste. And then in prisons, he suddenly, like, actually told that he's he's Dalit and he's assigned this job. Like he says, like, I felt very dirty. And he associates that very impure feeling around it because he was made to feel that way. And then when he was asked to do these things, other prisoners who must have actually come in much after him must have been implicated in cases much more serious than what he was actually arrested for. Those were not actually asked to
do this kind of work. He speaks about how some some people from Brahman communities were actually made to just carry out the cooking work inside prison. Cooking is clean. And so because it's clean, we will actually have somebody from a higher caste, a so-called higher caste, actually do that job. And this is mentioned in the prison manual. Yes, but even if it is not mentioned in the prison manual, this is largely the practice across all states.
During her reporting, Sukanya says she also discovered that in at least one jail in Tamil Nadu, prisoners were actively being segregated on the basis of caste. She explains what she found. Now segregation of basis of caste is not a part of any prison manual but that's a practice that we actually came across in the southern part of Tamil Nadu where where caste atrocities are rampant in those areas of prisons actually also have had a lot of violence inside the prison because of caste.
So I was talking to some some of my sources who work in prisons in the southern part of Tamil Nadu. I came across this one specific mention of Palayampothai prison. There the entire prison is structured around caste. The physical structure of prison is built in such a way that barracks are actually named as Pakas. So there is this one barrack which is called Pallar Barrack. Pallar is a schedule caste, the pallor caste. Barack is very far away from say, the library, from the
canteen, from the hospitals. The priorities are actually given to the Nadars and the divers. Then I realized that this is something that was known to people and some human rights defenders in that area had also already gone to the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court.
So I got in touch with the lawyer and then I realized that when the case came up for hearing, the home department of Tamil Nadu state told the court that we will not be able to handle a law and order situation if we don't segregate them. And that was like a one line argument that had happened in the court and the court readily accepted it.
What appeared commonsensical to the Tamil Nadu court might well appear the same to many of us. Sukanya says there's an easy, real world explanation to show the ridiculousness of this decision to segregate prisoners on the basis of caste. Somebody in the prison must have actually come up with this genius idea in Tamil Nadu where they decided, OK, fine, let us just segregate these people and put them separately somehow. It must have worked at some point in time.
While it began with an idea, they also thought that if it's a Pallar barrack, let us just send a prison official who comes from that caste in that in that barrack. So they did not just segregate the prisoners on the basis of their caste, but also prison officials. Their understanding might have been like, OK, we wanted to just segregate them because it is so difficult for us to handle them.
But think of the same scenario outside where we say that, OK, in villages there are like conflicts happening. So let us just say that somebody belonging to a Dalit community cannot come out of the of the Dalit basti. Somebody coming from the Savarna community cannot come out of the Savarna basti. That's not something that is possible, right? There would be so much outrage if that were to happen. So when we understand that it is wrong in the space outside prison, how are we unable to
think of it? It can. It is like it's actually atrocious to do something inside prison. Yeah, that's something that I I wonder sometimes. How did it go unchallenged for years according to you? Actually, I would sound a little critical of the organizations which work on prison if if I were to answer this question. You have like a lot of organizations across the country working on prisons. And these organizations are like are the ones with academic
rigor. They are the ones which have permissions to go inside prison because those permissions are given by, say, like the High Court or maybe the state authorities or maybe in some cases the Supreme Court. These are the ones who who have like very specialized researchers and the campaigners working on the subject for many years. They are the ones who also have access to all these prison manuals and forget about prison manual. They have access to prisoners.
They are the ones who are talking to prisoners. When I actually came across this manual, I had spoken to some people and then they said, yeah, we did see like a mention of caste in the prison manual. And to my mind, like maybe it's it's like a person because I'm a journalist or maybe because somebody who has been writing from an anti cast perspective
for some time. Maybe that's the reason it actually occurred to me. But somehow I just felt like people who are working in human rights space for so long and they have been reading this prison manual for day in and day out. And they have the privilege of actually going inside prison on a on a regular basis, much more than you and I can actually as journalists can ever think of accessing this space. Then how is that they did not
think of caste? My very simple understanding, in a very blunt way if I were to put it, is because most of us who are actually working in prison space also belong to communities which will not be targeted and criminalized the way the Bhaujan population actually gets targeted. So caste is something that doesn't actually occur to us as a important factor to be addressed.
Sukanya says that jails also have a safeguard provided by the Constitution that should ensure that such practices don't take place. However, that safeguard, which is the judges and the court system, don't work very well in this regard. Another thing is like when a person is sent to prison, the person is no more in police custody but in judicial custody. So it's a judiciary which is actually supposed to be the guardians. They are the ones who are actually the custodians of the
person inside the prison. So their welfare is a judiciary's responsibility. You have mechanism in place where your judicial officers are supposed to actually go on visits in the jail. But the practice is such that your judges, your magistrates do go to jail. They meet the Superintendent and along with the Superintendent, they might actually do a recce or a visit of the entire jail.
So that the power dynamics also such that like any prisoner, it were to actually speak about the grievances, they will never be able to access that that that judicial officer who was entering the prison space. It actually defies the whole purpose of their visits. And one knows like how exactly the state works. The state would really not want to like think or apply itself and talk about human rights of
the prisoners. So the state is doing what it's doing, but the check in balance that can be actually carried out like by the judiciary or or by the civil society, even that is failing because caste isn't looked at as a factor so seriously or or it doesn't move people or it doesn't alarm people as much as compared to maybe say some other kinds of human rights violation which doesn't carry the baggage of
caste. Sukhane says that after her reporting, she approached multiple organizations and individuals to take up this issue before courts. That didn't happen, though. Meanwhile, she kept reporting on other aspects of jails that were problematic, including the inherent myosin rules against certain tribes because they were deemed criminal during colonial rule. Nearly three years after she published her first report, she explains why she decided to file a petition in the Supreme Court.
My lawyer, Disha Vadekar, who's also dear, dear friend. So she and I would actually discuss about these things very often. And she's primarily why this entire petition even actually happened because the discussion initially was like, OK, I'm gonna let her like there. We'll just write a letter and we'll just like just do away with that. But but like slowly we just realized, OK, fine, we can actually find a way to file a
petition. So then we just like worked more and more on the whole aspect of Vimukta Jathis. And then we already covered aspects from my story like we brought it out. And then we like actually looked at the constitutional violations that can be looked at. And then we we looked at like different sections that can be like mentioned in the petition. And then the petition was
finally shaped. So the petition was filed finally only last year in December, so three years after the after the story was first published. The court has emphasized on the prisoner's right to dignity and I think this is the beginning of the change. The court has ordered the ending of such labour practices and how hopeful are you that it will end them?
It speaks about like right to dignity, like Section 21, like Justice Neva Chandra should actually spoke like at length in the court about it. He also spoke at length about how these practices are unconstitutional, are known to us but they are in practice and for a judgment to be implemented and to actually have it work in the prison, it takes like a
great deal of time. Today because certain favourable order has been passed, we can't expect it to be implemented tomorrow and day after for the entire practice of caste discrimination, untouchability that is going on inside prison. To just talk, it's difficult. It's something that's a big
task. The court has also acknowledged this as to be a massive task and hence even when the case has been finally disposed of, the court has actually said that now we are converting this into a Suomoto petition now and it will no more be called as Sukanya Shanta versus Union of India but discrimination in prisons. They have actually gone about expanding the ambit of the entire petition that I had filed. Like in my petition, my focus
was entirely on say caste. The judges have now said that OK, you caste is one factor that she is covered extensively in her petition. But there are like so many more discrimination which might have actually been missed out in the petition or in the story. So let us just focus on those
things. So the court has also now pushed the whole idea of keeping it as an open case where it is actually given an invitation for people to come and and register like as in like if there are like more such practices of discrimination that is happening on the basis of gender, on the basis of disability. So like these are the aspects that needs to be covered is what the judges have understood as in right to dignity is something that has been upheld.
But it will take a great deal of work and a long time for all our mechanisms, like all our monitoring mechanisms, for our states, for civil society, for the media, all of it to actually work in tandem to ensure that the rights are protected. But despite a verdict in her favour and the problems that come due to the noting of prisoners caste, Sukanya says she will be appealing against one aspect of the Supreme
Court's verdict. But one thing that has actually come up in the judgement which was not a part of a prayer and we think will actually do a lot more injustice to the whole prison discourse and the prisoners is the court's order which says that the caste column in the prison register should be removed. Now, if you remove the caste column from the prison register, that means your NCRB data will not have any mention of caste or religion in the data.
So the prison statistics of India which actually comes out with data every year will not have any information because that is the only place where the data is collected. When I go to the prison and I give like all my details, one of the detail that is collected is about my caste identity. It's the most unscientific way that it, that it is done. They, your prison official will be sitting there and will ask you like which is which cars do you belong to?
And then you say like I am from a higher caste, lower cost Dalit caste, whatever word I use like a local lingo, whatever their understanding is a ticket. But something we have, we have even if it is in the most unscientific way it is collected. We still have some way of actually collecting this information and that's the only information we have for a policy makers to actually work.
That is only information that we have to talk about over a presentation of the Bhaujan caste or Muslims inside prison. And this has come after a lot of efforts. Like in 2018, if I'm not mistaken, the NCRB data had stopped collecting the caste information, at least giving it out in the NCRB data. Then people who are working in prisons insisted that like, no, you have to put the data. And then after that, again, the data has been given out.
So if the highest court has actually come up with this order and the state has a tendency of not wanting to collect this data anyway, they would, they would actually implement this one particular thing before anything else. Like me, along with my lawyers are trying to understand what is the best way of bringing this to the court's notice and stopping this before it actually gets implemented. Some states have done away with the caste based occupation in
prisons. How did they bring the changes? Can it be an ideal manual for other states? Actually, no, it can't be an ideal manual because so this change happened soon after the story was reported.
So when we put out a story in 2020, Rajasthan was the first one they had to do it because the court actually directed them to do it. So the moment that happened, a few states which were anyway in the process of amending their present manuals and they also like just went about removing the mention of all those things that I had flagged in my story. But like I was not able to flag everything in my story.
Like I was, I was able to say like look at the cars with labor practice, but I had missed out on the on the mention of quote UN quote habitual offenders or the wandering tribes as mentioned in some of the states. So because I had missed it, these states which actually amended their prison manual, they also missed it. So it was not like something that they had invested themselves and that realized, OK, fine, we have a problem in our manual.
So let us just like completely like go through an overhaul. That's not what they did. It was mostly like a patchwork done there. Like OK, like something has been pointed to us, let us just correct it. In fact, the 2016 model, the model prison manual, which the Central Home Department actually takes pride in and says that every state should follow this model prison manual. And that is how our prisons will actually have then will be taken care of the rights of all the prisoners.
That itself is flawed. Like there are like so many inherent biases within that model prison manual, which was pointed out in our rotation. And the court has actually asked for the model prison manual also to to correct all the problems in the prison manuals. We don't really have a model right now. I think the the Union department actually does this type of type of work and then comes up with the model and maybe that can actually then be implemented in
other prisons in other states. You just said that the central government's sort of ideal model prison law itself was flawed. What possibly explains that? The prison manual is actually handled by this one department called the Bureau of Police Research and Development. So it is a bunch of IPS officers, bunch of prison officials, they are the ones who have drafted the model prison manual.
This model prison manual is drafted from a police, from a state authorities perspective, not from the prisoner's perspective. While they have actually done away with mention of say caste, they have nothing to talk about say, presence of dry latrine in prisons. Like why do you have dry latrine in prisons still when it is already prohibited under the Manual Scavenging Act? And if they exist, then who are the ones who are cleaning it?
It uses the word habitual offender just like that without even like actually understanding or giving an understanding of what it means. Who are these habitual offenders? It actually further allows other states to then think or assume that their understanding of habitual offenders is correct and then they continue with it.
The whole understanding of like prison reformation is something that the Union government keeps talking every few years and every few years there will be like some human rights organization which will talk about, OK, prison needs like some kind of reformation, some kind of overall has to happen there. So they will keep doing that. That activity continues, but that activity, the main stakeholder or which is the incarcerated person is
completely missing from that. So it's like the people from outside the prison are deciding the fate of people from inside prison. Sukanya says that jails and prisons are unique places where everything is rationed and no one gets anything more than what is deemed necessary, whether they're a convict or an undertrial. It's also a system that no one in the outside world seems to care about, and no one represents inmates in parliament
or state assemblies. Sukanya says that as a result, there's a lot that's wrong with how Indian jails are run. Every every individual actually has like a space measured for them to be inside the prison. It's calculated like how like how tall the person is and this much space can be allotted to an individual. Similarly the food is actually weighed and given to the prisoner.
So if you have a space where the capacity of a prison space is only to accommodate say 1000 prisoner and but in that prison instead of 1000, there are 4000 people who are actually staying, are forced to stay. That means in a space which is already so crammed up, you have 4 times more people like actually using that space. And the resource prison budget, if you look at it, it has not seen any kind of improvement in
many years. If there are like some 4000 prisoners and you have only one resident, like a medical officer who actually is assigned that job. So that person is also overworked and also disinterested and also has absolutely no mechanism to keep a check on him. So then he is like acting absolutely disinterested and he's not like actually carrying on with the duty. The system is completely in
shambles. The criminal justice system is often cited as a system in which merely having to deal with it is a punishment for most people. Despite the Supreme Court repeatedly saying that bail should be the norm, thousands of under trials spend months or years in jail. Sometimes they even spend the length of a potential sentence in jail even before their trial is completed.
Sukanya Shanta says jails are a space where the state continues to act with impunity and with no regard for people's rights. The experiences that prisoners have actually like, shared over years, I've realized that that is 1 space where the state is able to do whatever they feel they can do. And there is very little that has been questioned and very few of us are actually feeling appalled when things like when they could do that to like say, father stands for me.
Like there was so much media attention in that case. There was like so much human cry. There was a pending case in the High Court. So it was like almost like a High Court monitored case, but still when it came to giving him a small sipper, like he was denied that a man who was so fragile, so, so like actually almost at the fag at the end of his life, he was imprisoned and he was kept there during COVID and and he passed away.
Any of them like, like, do they deserve such kind of treatment? Of course not. Law says that a person can be punished only once for a crime, but there's a ongoing repeated punishment that keeps continuing inside prison space. Today's episode was produced by Jayaraj Singh and Sahil Gupta. For a daily spotlight on people, ideas and stories that matter, subscribe to us where available on the Times of India website, Spotify, Apple, Amazon or wherever else you get your
podcasts. For any new steps of feedback, mail me at arun.george@timesgroup.com.