‘NURTURING HOPE IN PRISON A RISKY BUSINESS’: UMAR KHALID WRITES FROM TIHAR JAIL
Umar Khalid
A book I finished recently is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead. It is a fictional account but one based on his real experiences of imprisonment in Tsarist Russia sometime in the mid 19th century.
Reading the book, the eeriest thought that came to me was how little has changed when it comes to experiences of imprisonment, even as the world has transformed in so many ways. Over 150 years have passed since the events described in the book, and also it is from a different part of the world, but at many places, I felt as if he was narrating things and occurrences that I see around myself here at Tihar.
At one place in the book, he quotes a fellow inmate reflecting about the state of imprisonment — “We are not alive though we are living and we are not in our graves though we are dead.”
I remember telling Ban (Anirban Bhattacharya) and Daisy some time back wherein I tried to describe how surreal it was to return to jail after my brief seven day interim bail. I had in fact invoked a Biblical story about jail being like the graveyard of the living. Interestingly, I hadn’t read the book back then.
There is indeed something about captivity that makes one feel like a state of somewhere between life and death. And if I had invoked the Biblical story to refer to it as “The Graveyard of the Living,” Dostoevsky titled his account The House of the Dead.
In a few days it is going to be five years since the day I was brought here. At times I am amazed how I have survived so long in the same confined space, and not been restless through most of this period. Well, there were days when I was irritable and depressed — and unfortunately Buno (Banojyotsna Lahiri) became the person whom I vented it out on — but such days were few. Mostly, I have been at peace all through this time.
Quite early on in his account, Dostoevsky writes that in jail one has enough time to learn patience. But I don’t think I will carry this patience to the outside world — once I am out, whenever it is, I will be back to my restless self. I realised this in those 7 days that I spent outside in December last.
Anyways, another reason I have survived this space for so long and been calm about it, is because I have not thought about time in such large chunks. Though eventually it became clear that this would be a long haul,, But while living through the days here, there is always an immediate date to focus on – one that is usually a few days, or at the most a few months away — I am talking about the bail hearings going on since July 2021. These dates at short periods give us something to look forward to, something to live by, something to mark time by, and also something to hope about.
About hope in prison Dostoevsky has some reflections. He writes, “From the first day of my life in prison, I began to dream of freedom. To calculate in a thousand different ways when my days in prison would be over became my favourite occupation. It was always in my mind, and I am sure that it is the same with everyone who is deprived of freedom for a fixed period. I don’t know whether the other convicts thought and calculated as I did, but the amazing audacity of their hopes impressed me from the beginning.
The hopes of a prisoner deprived of freedom are utterly different from those of a man living a natural life. A free man hopes, of course (for a change of luck for instance, or the success of an undertaking), but he lives, he acts, he is caught up in the world of life. It is very different with the prisoner. There is life for him too — granted prison life — but whatever the convict may be and whatever may be the term of his sentence, he is instinctively unable to accept his lot as something positive, final, as part of real life. Every convict feels that he is, so to speak, not at home but on a visit. He looks at twenty years as though they were two, and is fully convinced that when he is let out at 55 — he will be as full of life and energy as he is now at 35.”
Again at a later point in the book, he writes, “Without some goal and some effort to reach it, no man can live. When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster in his misery. The one object of prisoners was freedom and to get out of prison.”
Probably I am no longer the optimist that I used to be earlier, as some of my friends have felt. It is true. But my lack of optimism is based on a realistic assessment of the present political situation.
And as I have said earlier too, nurturing hope in jail is also a risky business. The higher you hope, the higher is the height from which you come crashing down. Simply put, I am afraid of hope, so I try not to remain hopeful.
But when it comes to this kind of an attitude to survive jail, I am quite an exception. Everyone here is insanely hopeful, even those in the most hopeless situations. It is exactly as Dostoevsky puts it in the above quoted lines: they keep hoping, they keep praying and sometimes, their hopes and effort bear fruit.
Let me tell you one such story.
I know a prisoner who has been in jail for the last 29 years. He is sentenced for life — and unlike a normal life imprisonment — which is basically 14+ years, — his punishment categorically states that he is to remain in prison till his breath without any parole. The court had given him capital punishment, but after being on death row for several years, he was saved from the gallows by a presidential pardon. Rather than death by hanging, he was to remain in prison till his natural death.
And as mentioned above, he was to get no parole ever. So he continued to live, but with the knowledge that till his last breath, he was to remain in jail.
When he came to jail sometime in the early 1990s, he was in his 20s. Now he is in his 50s. In jail, he largely keeps to himself. In the morning, he leaves for his mushakat (assigned physical work). In the evening, he plays badminton for an hour or so with a few other inmates — that is the only time you can see him getting excited and showing some emotions.
Day after day after day, he has been living this same life and with the knowledge that this is how it is going to be for the remaining years of his life.
In jail he is quite respected by most prisoners — mainly because of the sheer time he has spent in jail, and also because he mostly keeps aloof and is reserved to himself, not interfering in anyone’s affairs. In the initial days, I wondered where that peace came from? Was it because of some realisation of his crimes? Did he feel guilty about what he had done all those years ago? Did he feel that what he was going through was a result of his actions? Did he feel that he was going through some sort of penance? Or maybe he felt no remorse at all.
Needless to say, I never asked him what he felt about what he had done. You don’t ask such questions in jail.
As I said, I used to observe him daily going about his daily routine. I thought he had resigned to living the life of captivity for the rest of his life. Little did I know that he too has not abandoned hope, and having discovered a legal opening in his case, had been making some efforts towards it for the last few years to get some relief.
While the Presidential pardon categorically stated that he was to remain in jail till his last breath without any parole, it did not say anything as to whether he can avail furlough or not.
Furlough or a holiday from jail is a system instituted by the prison dept under which convicted prisoners, provided their appeal is not pending in High Court and their conviction has been upheld by the High Court, and they have spent a minimum of 3 years in jail and most importantly their conduct is good — are eligible for three holidays from jail in a year — once for 3 weeks, and twice for 2 weeks.
It is different from parole in the sense that it is given to the prisoner by the prison dept for good conduct, and unlike parole which is only approved by the court for some specific reasons — say a marriage in the family, or a death in the family, etc.
In other words, a prisoner earns his right to furlough through his good conduct in jail. Basically, this system is meant to incentivize good conduct in jail, while also ensuring that a convict is not totally cut off from his family and society — so that if, whenever he is to be rehabilitated in the society, he has links with the society. Basically, it fits in with the entire reform theory about jail.
Coming back to this prisoner — when he first moved court demanding that the court issue instructions to the prison dept to consider him for a furlough — the Prison Dept never considered him for furlough citing the Presidential pardon order that stated that he was to remain in jail till his last breath — the court did not rule in his favour, stating that while the Presidential pardon might not have categorically mentioned anything about furlough, the spirit of that order was that he was to remain in jail without any relief. He challenged it in the High Court, but the High Court also did not rule in his favour.
As a last effort, he challenged the High Court order in the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court ruled in his favour — saying that furlough was a right that couldn’t be taken away from him, because he has earned this through his conduct over 28 years in jail.
Finally, he was granted a 21-day furlough, and after 28 years in jail, he got to step out of jail.
When he came back, I asked him what the outside world seemed like after all those years. I asked him who came to receive him, and how he came back to jail. As I said earlier, he speaks little.But in the few words he spoke, he said he felt as if he was outside for 21 minutes, not 21 days.
He also spoke of how only a handful of the relatives he knew back in the 1990s are alive now and how many new family members he met who were strangers to him, and to whom he too is a stranger.
In case you are wondering why he didn’t run away, why he voluntarily walked back into prison even after he got a chance to step out, that’s because has still not stopped hoping, and is in fact expecting more relief from the courts in the coming years. He himself told me thus — that now he is eligible for three furloughs every year — and if he keeps going out and coming back to jail for a few years, the court may consider him eligible for release.
I wondered how that was possible, considering that his order that allowed him furlough was only restricted to that and did not comment on the merits of his conviction or the nature of his punishment.
But I did not ask him such questions, letting him hope — for hope allows him to live at peace with himself in jail.
Finally, he cited the relief given to those involved in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination conspiracy last year by Supreme Court as if to say that he saw his own in keeping hope alive — “they were all involved in killing the PM, maine PM ko to nahi maara tha na” was what he said to me! One would never run away because hope, no matter how outlandish, is a powerful deterrent.
Dostoevsky also addresses this in his works — as to why prisoners don’t run away hough there were no paroles or furloughs back then, but they still went out to work in penal colonies and didn’t always have guards overlooking them.
And what he says corresponds to so much of what I see around myself here in Tihar. Dostoevsky writes that prisoners don’t run away because they value the time they have given to prison.
The only ones who try running are those who were in the beginning of their sentence. Anyone who gives that considerable time to jail won’t run away even if the gates are opened for them. He will wait for the court order first. He will count on hope.
Those are a few thoughts I had on hope and waiting, on despair and longing.
Five years have passed, almost. Half a decade. That’s time enough for people to complete their PhDs and look for jobs, time enough to fall in love, marry and have a baby, time enough for one’s kids to grow beyond recognition, time enough for the world to normalise the genocide in Gaza, time enough for our parents to grow old and feeble.
Is it time enough for our release?
Umar Khalid is a former JNU student leader and PhD scholar in history, known for his activism and dissent against state policies. Arrested under UAPA in 2020 for alleged conspiracy in the Delhi riots, he remains in Tihar Jail without trial.