From Indias largest newsroom, I'm Arun George and this is the Times of India podcast. Mana Ki abhi tere mere armano Ki Ki mat kuch bhi nahi mitti ka bhi hai. Kuch mol Magar in Sano Ki Ki mat Kuch bhi nahi in Sano Ki E Jate. Jab Jisdin Jute si ko ma toli na Jaye Ki Bo suba kabhi tohi. That's trade unionist and human rights lawyer Sudha Bhardwaj singing her favorite song pinned by Sahir Ludhianvi. Sudha Bhardwaj has been out of the headlines for a while, so
let's refresh your memory. Sudha Bhardwaj is one of the 17 people arrested in what is called the Elgar Parishad case. One of those accused and arrested in the case was Jesuit priest Tan Swami, who died in custody in 2021.
The 17 people arrested in the case are accused of delivering inflammatory speeches at the Elgar Parishad conclave in Pune on the 31st of December in 2017. The Maharashtra police claimed that the speeches triggered violence at the Bhima Koregaon War Memorial, which is a significant place for the Dalit
community. The police claimed that the Elgar Parishad event was backed by Maoist and the probe was later taken up by the National Investigation Agency. 2 Hindutva group leaders accused of making hate speeches before the Elgar Parishad event never faced any serious charges. Sudha Bharadwaj was granted bail in 2021. She can't talk about the specifics of the case yet, but she can talk about her new book titled From Fasi Yad, My Year with the Women of Yerwada, which has just been released.
The book is an account of the world of women prisoners in Yerwada jail in Pune, where Bhardwaj was launched for two years in the high security wing that is called Fasi Yard. My colleague Alka Dukar caught up with her at the house in Mumbai that she's required to stay in as part of the conditions for her being granted bail. Among other things. Alka spoke with Sudha Bhardwaj about her time in prison, what her book documents, why she's still an optimist and the importance of dissidents in a
democracy. I don't know if we should congratulate you on this book because, as you have named it, Pasi Yard dedicated this book to all who are unjusticely incarcerated. Do you count yourself in one of those? Yes, I think I do. But I think I'm one of many. Many people have been in Justly Incarcerated. And yeah, that is why the book is dedicated to them. One of your bail conditions says that you must not leave Mumbai. You have described this situation previously as you're in exile.
So would you like to elaborate on this? How badly do you miss Chhattisgarh? Actually at a very young age, at the age of 25 itself, I got involved with the trade union. Of late, Comrade Shankar Guhaniyogi and ever since then I have been in Chhattisgarh working with the 1st in Delhi Rajara, then in Bhilai. Then it was the trade union movement itself which made me a lawyer. And then I shifted to Bilaspur where we had a group of lawyers called Janhit.
So my entire life has been there and my friends, my colleagues, my comrades, my young associates. Everybody out there. So it is really exiled for me. I miss everything about Chhattisgarh. Are you a true Mumbaikar now? To be fried. Oh yes, I find Mumbai still a very much working class city even though all the mills have closed down.
It still has a very working class flavor about it, and now that I've got used to travelling in the local trains and all that one thing, I find that it's a very it's a very alive city. It's a very, you know, all the time bustling, moving, and of course, rents are prohibitively expensive. I'm just very lucky that I have friends who were willing to allow me to live in their houses, otherwise I couldn't have afforded it. But yes, food. Maybe you can purchase for ₹5 a meal and ₹5000 a meal.
Also, all kinds of people are here, and the city, in a sense, embraces all of them. So I am also one in the crowd. I feel embraced by this city. One of the things Sudha Bhardwaj documents in her book is being forced to trade in her sarees for the Salwar kurta in jail. When Alka spoke with her, she was dressed in a blue kurta in Salwar. She explains to Alka how the sari became a part of her life and why she had to change what she wore in jail.
I used to wear Salwar Kutta in my early union days during the Bhilai movement, which was the major movement of the contract workers of Bhilai. So that time, during that railroad Co agitation, there was a police firing, 17 people had died, many people were in jail, some people were wounded, they were in the hospital. And at that time I used to be rushing around from place to place, sometimes to the hospital, sometimes to the court, sometimes to the union
office. And I became very conspicuous because of my Salwar Kurta, which is not a very normal race in Chhattisgarh. Mostly grown up women wear Saudi. I think just to, you know, be normal like everybody else. In 1992, I just took a decision. I'll only wear Saudi. And that continued till I was arrested. I was surprised by the the jail not permitting T-shirts and pants and so on. And later on I realized that that is because the jail has a
concept of being feminine. And it is very concerned about women who dress like men, because I think it also has that typical stigma about lesbianism. So that is the real reason. And that is why they insist that either you wear Salwar Kutta or you wear Saadi. And because we have to wash all our clothes and Saadi is too difficult to do so much of washing, there's no space to dry it. So yeah, so I shifted to Salwar Kurta, and I've continued with
that. Otherwise, for many, many years, I had been wearing Saudi. Why would you name the book the the name you have? Given from fancy yard, This was me looking out from fancy yard it one. When we went to Baikala we were in the barracks and it was probably we had much more opportunity to talk and discuss with other prisoners. But because there I'm more or less became a lawyer. I was writing applications and all that. So there's a certain ethics of
being a lawyer. You don't talk about your cases to people. So that that's when my writing, the stories about the women stopped and my notebooks were only filled with you know, CR number, police station sections and what is to be written in the application and all that because we were in the in the in that single cell. It would be surprising. How did I get to know these stories at all? And that is what I've tried to explain in in the section about how this book came to be
written. Which when we went for Mulaka, or when we went to the courts, or when we went for canteen or to the hospital or when we were queuing up to get the water or, you know, these were the occasions on which we would bump into these women and talk to them. So actually the sketches were written when I felt that I knew enough about a person, but it would happen over.
Many encounters with that person and that's where there's no date or it's not really a diary, its gathering that and then when I felt I knew a woman well enough then I would write about her. How did you keep your connection with the outside world when you were in? Prison As a prisoner under the UAPA, we have restrictions on who can come and meet us, so it is only either our lawyers or blood relatives. They are very. Strict about that.
For example, people from my union could not come, so it would be just lawyers and my daughter, basically, because I don't have nobody else in my family really. But yeah, when we went to the court. Many people would come to the court to meet us, but they would be restricted. They would not be allowed to talk to us. They were kept at a distance. We actually got a remarkable number of letters and postcards in solidarity from all over the world.
But we were not given most of them because all letters which go to the jail are censored. So actually it takes about a week within the jail for those letters to be read and then passed on to us. And most of these because they'd say, who are these people? Unknown people are writing to them. In Yedvada, I hear that many people wrote to me on my birthday, but I never got those letters. But in Baikala we were given those letters and that was a beautiful thing.
And otherwise of course newspapers. When we were in Yedvada, between Professor Sen and myself, we would take The Indian Express and The Hindu and in Baikala we would also take Mumbai Mirror. We really missed it when it went. That was one of our favorite newspapers of course in Baikala when we were in the barrack Then there was the television also but you know how it is the remote of the of the TV is with the Kambali.
So she is the one who decides which nagin serial we have to see and which SAS bow serial we have to see. Sometimes you know when there will be tea time. Please, please, please 500 CDTV Dekhna dhna and then put on for the to see what is the. The use of the farmer's agitation or whatever it is. So that's how we we kept ourselves in touch with the world. True stories. You have portrayed life inside the prison and the harsh realities which we are aware of.
But more details. But tell me about yourself. How was your journey and how were your days inside prison? Did you ever lose hope? How did you manage your stress when bail was rejected? I think that is just, that is me as a personality, that right from my young days and from the age of 25 or so, I've always worked in collectives. So I I worked with the trade union and in a collective of lawyers in the UCL, always with groups and always with with a
lot of people. So it was very it was a very isolating experience to be in the cell and I think. Actually, my way of getting over what you're saying that, you know, how did you feel my way of getting over was writing these stories. I mean, this was really cathartic for me that I was trying to make sense. I was trying to reach out to these women without being able
to really reach out to them. It is not that it was an unthinkable thing that happened to me, but of course when it happens, it is shocking initially. But I think the positive thing about me is that I am. Very conscious that even in that situation we were still much more privileged than most of the women around us. Many of them were very poor, a lot of them were uneducated, some of them were completely illiterate. Many of them had been abandoned by their families.
They didn't have proper lawyers. They didn't know what was the condition of their case. And in Baikala, I had no time. Once they got to know that, you know, Aunty is a lawyer and Aunty is ready to help and ready to write the applications in triplicate in Hindi. I didn't know that much. I didn't know Marathi, so I'd write it in Hindi for them. And also that Auntie doesn't tell stories. But Ted doesn't tell tales. She doesn't gossip about the case. She doesn't talk about 1
prisoner to another prisoner. So when they got this idea about me, they started lining up Auntie Mello. Please charge sheet Pardo you know please write this application for me. I would be busy sometime till 12:00 at night. I was writing the applications, of course. The disappointment about bail and all that in a way. When I came into jail, I told myself, look, one has to just trust on friends outside that they will get get me the best possible legal defense and one
just has to wait. So in that sense, I sort of steeled myself for a long stay and that is why I didn't have to suffer so much when bail was rejected so many times. And that was deliberate. But yes, I really missed my daughter. And I think my daughter really missed me. I had come to Delhi thinking I need to give time and place to my daughter. It's a critical time in her career. She needs some support. I need to earn something also to
put her through college. So it's ironical that that was the time I was picked up. So at a time when I was acutely aware that I need to give her time. That is exactly the time when I was taken away from her, so this is a bad time for her. When Sudha Bhardwad was released on bail, one of the photos released by a friend on social media showed her inside a car, smiling broadly at the camera. It's a smile that pops up often during the interview as well.
Alka asked her about why even photos taken of her while she was being arrested captured her smiling. When the situation is very bizarre, when you don't even understand, you know, why are you being picked up? What is happening with you? Why is this happening with you? As in, my reaction is to laugh. What else can you do? So even just as to smile and bear it, and that is what I did. There were very rare occasions when I would feel very bad most
of the time when I got. Letters from my daughter. I would feel very bad because the letters were full of her sadness or loneliness, difficulties that she was having, and I knew that by the time I write the reply to her, that moment will have come and gone. I'm not able to comfort her. It was only on very few occasions that that would happen, and otherwise I would
keep myself busy. We're back in conversation with trade unionist and human rights lawyer Sudha Bhardwaj, who has just released a book called From FASI Yard. In this segment, Alka speaks to Sudha Bhardwaj about her entry into trade unionism, what drives her activism, and what fuels her hope that she will get justice one day. So you were born in USA, you spent your primary school days in England, grown up in JNU campus and then studied at IIT Kanpur before pursuing law degree.
How did your educational journey impacted your? Apart from mathematics, I also loved history. I loved literature, particularly History of the Freedom struggle I'm extremely interested in. And that passion remains with me. The rigorous science background, which I the study, which I did in IIT Kanpur for the mathematics degree, I think helped me in a way logic and law go well together. I became a lawyer only much later, at the age of 40 or so, and that was because my union
needed a lawyer and. It's difficult for workers to afford a lawyer, but what helped me the most was being with people. What you learn from being there, from living with people, from struggling with people. It is when you try to change something that you understand most about it, that's when you you really understand how things work. The theory was important, but the practice was far more important.
Highly educated person like you could have got into any foreign university and focused on personal financial growth. Why did you become a human rights activist or trade unionist? You are mentioned in the book that your parents return to India in response to the appeals made for nation building efforts. Do you have the satisfaction of continuing their legacy? How did I come to those choices? I mean, it happened so gradually and naturally that I it's difficult for me to really point
out exactly how and when. My parents also took choices of this guy and my mother chose to return from Cambridge. Chose to come and set up a centre for Economic Studies and Planning. It was a centre of excellence within the the JNU. It became one of the most celebrated departments of economics in history in in in political science and economics. They were really very original minds working there in in that university.
So I think all that definitely had an impact when I started interacting with the working class. That is where I think what the whole shift. From an academic or intellectual profession to deciding to go with the Peoples movement, go with the union, that I think that decision came to me pretty early. It came to me during my my period in of study in IIT Kanpur
around the end of that. 8384 was the time when the Asiad was happening and all those construction work was happening in Delhi. And all these labourers were being brought from Rajasthan, from Chhattisgarh, from the poor rural areas, from the hinterland and being brought to construct all these stadia and flyovers and all that. There's a transformation in in. Delhi because of the virtually bonded labor conditions of those workers.
And I think that was when I decided that, you know, I have to pick my lot in win them and and it has to be a whole time thing. It can't be a part time thing. It has to be whole time. And then I was lucky enough that we got introduced to Shankar Guhan Yogi. And then when I went to Delhi Rajaratu, I was completely floored by it and that that Union, it was such a experience being part of it. It was like sitting in the lap
of the people. It was a bustling place and so many experiments were being carried out and people were so enthusiastic about it. And there there was a hospital, there was schools being run by the union, there was the anti alcohol movement and all that. And then gradually, when it came to the Bhilai movement, then Neogi suggested that we should get involved in the trade union itself.
Initially I thought that I will go and teach in the school there and so on. But then I became part of the union and then later the union workers told me to become a lawyer. So I became a lawyer. Did. You ever regret renouncing American citizenship? Never. Not for a moment. Never. See, I am very much, very much an Indian. My parents were Indian. Very much an Indian.
And from becoming an urban Indian, I wouldn't say I've become a rural Indian. I've become very much a part of Chhattisgarh and of that community of workers, and I've interacted with workers and farmers and Adivasis from that area. I consider myself completely Chhattisgarhi. So what is the need to go to America or anywhere else? Do you hold any passport now? No. Ever since I renounced my citizenship, I never got a passport made. I didn't bother to get a passport made?
I asked this question because we know that the numbers of people renouncing Indian citizenship is only growing every year today. Be part of nation building efforts or not? I don't know. It's difficult for me. I mean, these are personal choices, but. I believe that building the nation is not just the growth concept, which is given that you know, the corporates are making a lot of money, but the actual living conditions of people is
getting more and more miserable. That is not my idea of development or my idea of growth. My idea of growth and development is when peoples lives become better. When they have a secure livelihood, when they have a decent house to live in, when the children can go to school, they have decent medical facilities. When we are able to protect the environment, we we at least have clean water and clean air. So I think those things are worth fighting for and working
for. And and this is my country, I I have to work and fight here. So you started your first formal job at the age of 58. It went on for a couple of years and then three years in prison. Did you try to get employment after you released on bail? Well, it was at the age of 58 and I was only lucky enough to teach for a year. I love teaching in the National Law University. I was fortunate enough to teach there. And I had some marvellous students and I thoroughly
enjoyed teaching there. In fact, I had been given an extension, so I would have probably taught for another year at least, had I not been arrested after coming out.
I have really not tried for a formal employment because I am quite aware that it will be very difficult for any university, Oregon, any institution to take me up as an employee because of this case and so on. I'm very lucky that I'm a lawyer and Lloyd is an independent intellectual in that sense, and they're sort of self-employed at the moment. Basically it is unions which are supporting me.
I do legal cases for them and I'm lucky enough to be associated with the senior advocate for whom I'm able to draft cases and so on. So basically it is my legal work which sustains me. A person like you has social capital, but general assumptions or biases are that human activists like. You get a lot of foreign funding. Well, I think somebody just needs to look at my bank account and they'll get to know that the only regular money which came in was when I taught for that one
year. And no, I have never been funded by anybody before. It was my union which supported me throughout my years in Chhattisgarh. Later on, to some extent, yes. My legal work, I never earned money. I earned a lot of friends. I think that is what I really earned, and that is what has helped me instead. I mean, that is why I'm surviving today. I think again, not because of
money, but because of friends. You were saying that when you walked out of jail you had nothing in your bank account. I had nothing. That's absolutely correct. You have called yourself a constitution abiding person, but do you feel that people like you were looked up as dissidents in current time? See, being a dissident is not being anti democratic. A democracy demands dissidents of certain kind. For example, a democracy requires a Free Press, and the Free Press is a critical press.
Democracy demands that there should be a an opposition. Without an opposition, you can't have a democracy. So certain kinds of dissidents are built into democracy. And I think as a lawyer, as a trade unionist, as a human rights activist, it's perfectly constitutional to be a dissident in that form. In fact, it's required in order that you actually have a, you know, living, growing democracy. So for you, what is the true meaning of freedom?
I think the true meaning of freedom is to be able to what one thinks is right, to be able to be with people and what I've done all my life. Which is be with people, be along with them in their fight to have a better society. That is my greatest freedom within whatever limitations. I mean, I have to be here in Mumbai and I can't go back to the place of my work. That's why I call it an exile. But Despite that, I would say within my restrictions, I'm
still continuing with my life. In the same way. How do you and your daughter prepare for the future? Being lodged inside the jail one more time cannot be ruled out, right? I think this is the reality that we have to face. I mean I am still only out on bail. The trial is extending ahead of us, though I believe that I will be acquitted. But trial is yet to happen and the the judgment is yet to be passed. Do you ever discuss this
possibility? My daughter doesn't like discussing it and I quite see why. I just hope that I get the time at least to help her stand on her own feet before such an eventuality comes. And I also hope that we will all be acquitted of this case. Do you believe that you will get justice from the system? I think justice and equality are two things which are very innate
to the human being. Even if they're two very small children and you give one child one roti, give another child 2 rotis, the child with one roti will throw away that one roti and say you give me just like that person. So the sense of equality and justice is very deep inside us, and I believe that that cannot be suppressed for long. Even if for some time in a system it appears that these these very basic fundamental emotions are being suppressed,
it cannot go on forever. No kind of suppression, no kind of tyranny can last forever. It's not possible. So you are an optimist and. Very much I believe in, in humanity, I believe in people, and I think they're powerful enough sometime or the other to make those changes. Today's episode was produced by Jayaraj Singh and Anuja Singh.
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