[ad_1]
I did not realise that when I said, “Don’t come back here,” to Stan while seeing him off at the gate of the jail hospital, it would prove ominous.
It was May 28, 2021, and Arun Ferreira and I drove him in a wheelchair to the gate of the jail hospital, extremely happy over the Bombay High Court order to shift him to the Holy Family Hospital, albeit for only 15 days. I was quite hopeful that his bail petition, which was being heard, would also be granted during his hospital stay and so he may not be back, quite like VV Stan tested positive for COVID-19, and two days later he was moved to the intensive care unit. Though he was also being treated for heart-related ailments, the newspapers reported that he was responding very well. The court monitored his health closely and extended his stay till July 18. Everything appeared to be going well. However, on July 3, his health deteriorated and he was shifted to the ICU and the next morning put on ventilator support. The next day, that is, July 5, 2021, during the hearing of his bail application, Mihir Desai, his lawyer, announced to the Bombay High Court that Stan had died that morning.
The long journey of Stan from his village in Tamil Nadu to Jharkhand to the Philippines to Bengaluru and then back to Jharkhand and finally to a jail and hospital in Mumbai had come to an end. He had completely dedicated himself to the most dispossessed and marginalised, as a true Jesuit. With his death, he brought the focus back on the fundamental rights of Indian citizens, the legal architecture that curtailed these rights, what it meant for those who worked with communities, at the grassroots, through legal and non-violent means, and the conditions of prisons. In his life and death, Swamy left lessons for India.
I had not heard of Stan before. While at IIT Kharagpur, I often conducted training programmes for managers at the Indian Institute of Coal Management (IICM) in Ranchi. Most evenings, I met friends in town but did not know about Stan or his work at Bagaicha, which was also in Ranchi. The first time I heard of him was when his name appeared in the BhimaKoregaon case along with mine. When I filed my petition in the Bombay High Court to quash the FIR against me, Stan’s petition was also filed, incidentally, also argued by my lawyer, Mihir Desai. I was present in the court when it was first heard. While my case was keenly opposed by the Pune police, in Stan’s case, they simply told the court that he was just a suspect. Hence his petition was set aside while mine and Gautam Navlakha’s were heard further. Stan remained outside during the time of our surrender.
When Varavara Rao was lodged in a cell on the ground floor of the Hospital, along with Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira as his caretakers, my loneliness ended. Though meetings with them were not allowed, communication was possible. People on the ground floor could come into the courtyard and easily speak with us on the first floor. Important information coming through letters or mulaqats was thus exchanged. Another channel was the kamwallas, who stayed upstairs but worked in the hospital downstairs. Since they could go anywhere, they were easy conduits for transmitting messages.
Stan was arrested on October 8, 2020, and brought to Taloja Hospital during the night of 9 October. As I learned of his arrival downstairs in the morning, I went to see him with the permission of the jailer. He was lying on the floor near the door in the common barrack. When he was woken up by fellow inmates for me, he struggled to get up and was helped by others to rise. He fumbled for his hearing aids and put them on. His face lit up like a child’s on hearing my name, and he conveyed all his affection through the grip of his Parkinsonian hands on mine across the bars.
After the meeting, I saw the CMO and pleaded with him to put Stan in a separate cell with caretakers, preferably from among our co-accused, as was done for Varavara Rao. The CMO readily agreed, and the very next day Stan was shifted to a separate cell along with Chacha, the kamwalla. When Varavara Rao was sent to the outside hospital, the jail could have easily placed Vernon and Arun with Stan, but for whatever reasons, they sent Vernon back to his circle and thankfully placed Arun with Stan, along with Chacha. Arrested under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act following charges pressed by his step-granddaughter, Chacha had told Arun that he had been trapped. One did not know what the truth was, but Chacha worked very hard in jail, doing all kinds of jobs after jail duties to earn a packet of cigarettes, which he was fond of. Arun and Chacha lived with Stan until he left the prison forever.
Stan had multiple issues in prison due to his health condition. He could not even hold a glass of water steady to drink from. Outside, he told us he used a sipper bottle and straw to drink water, but they were disallowed by the prison staff when he was brought to Taloja. He could not hear without a hearing aid and was unable to speak on the phone during mulaqat. To ensure that his precious minutes were not wasted, Arun would take the phone and communicate with his friend Joe, who was registered with the jail. Fortunately, the guards were humane enough not to object to this.
By the time the sipper issue was communicated to the lawyers and they could file an application on November 7, already a month had passed. The court nonchalantly asked the NIA to file a reply by November 26, after 17 days, comfortably, after the Diwali vacation. For every single matter, the court would mechanically ask for a “say” from the same circle superintendent or NIA, or both. Courts often talk about “application of mind”, but I hardly found the judges demonstrating it themselves. Small matters like a sipper and straw requested by a Parkinson’s patient should not have been an issue to resolve with arguments. A judge should rather be amazed that such issues are brought to the court at all and summon the jail superintendent to explain matters. But such things are just not done. It is a ritual that on every single application, the respondent party must file a reply.
The NIA responded that it had conducted a personal search of Stan Swamy during his arrest in the presence of independent witnesses and “no such straw and sipper were found”. The court ruled: “In view of this contention, the application being devoid of substance deserves to be rejected.” When this matter leaked outside, it created a wave of denunciation and became a metaphor for the insensitivity of the Indian prison system and the state towards an 84-year-old Jesuit dissenter.
Meanwhile, Stan had asked for a full-sleeved sweater, a thin blanket and two pairs of socks. He wrote in a letter to Joe, “I am sorry to hear that these materials were not accepted at the prison gate and the one who brought them had to take them back not once but three times.” A prisoner would not know about such things until he is informed by a letter or in the next mulaqat, both of which were so uncertain. Letters suffered delays and mulaqats happened with a cycle time exceeding a week, extending sometimes to even two weeks. Stan’s defence team had to make another application seeking directions to the jail superintendent to allow Swamy to receive winter wear and a straw and sipper that would be sent to him at his own cost. The court sought a report from the jail superintendent and posted the hearing for December 4. News of this leaked out and the “sipper and straw” issue became an international outrage. Ultimately, on December 4, 2020, Stan finally received a straw, a sipper and his winter clothes from the jail staff.
Those days were scary. COVID-19 was at its devastating peak. We often heard of someone dying and occasionally saw a dead body being taken out. There was not even a proper stretcher in the hospital to show respect, at least to a dead body. The kamwallas dumped it on a thick jail blanket and carried it by holding the corners. Only after months, when the COVID menace had receded, did we see a formal stretcher being used in the jail.
There was built-in motivation throughout the hierarchy to flaunt excellent management of the pandemic across the country. Despite reports of half-burnt carcasses floating in the Ganga, the government remained in denial mode. The country’s entire health infrastructure collapsed under the severe wave of the COVID-19 variant that struck it, but the government did not budge in acknowledging, let alone trying to rectify matters. Instead, in the wake of the deaths of 63 children due to oxygen shortage at Gorakhpur’s BRD Medical College hospital, the doctor in charge of the paediatric section, initially hailed for paying out of his own pocket to purchase oxygen cylinders as parents panicked, was blamed. Predictably, he had a Muslim name. Some 20 days later, Dr Kafeel Khan was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh Police Special Task Force, allegedly for his responsibility for the children’s deaths. He spent eight months in jail before being granted bail by the Allahabad High Court in April 2018, with the court observing that there was no direct evidence of negligence on his part. Two years after his suspension, arrest and imprisonment, a 15-page government probe report confirmed the high court’s observations.
Such instances of brazen injustice had become the new norm. Later, when the pandemic subsided and the actual death count began to emerge, India’s under-reporting became world news. The WHO claimed that several million COVID-19 deaths had most likely gone unreported, estimating that over 4.7 million people – more than ten times the government figure – had died because of the virus.6 As usual, the government vehemently denied this until the issue faded from public memory, like hundreds of others.
Even in those crisis-ridden times, we managed to steal little moments of joy. Stan was supposed to be walked in the corridor by Arun, as per the doctor’s advice. Besides, both Stan and I were included in the daily monitoring of blood pressure, temperature and oxygen count of prisoners. This provided me with a convenient excuse to come down and meet both Arun and Stan every morning, allowing us to spend time together. I would walk with Stan as he recounted stories and expressed his concern for the jail staff. He pitied the kamwalla boys who had to carry heavy metal containers of food three times a day to distribute to inmates. He wondered why the prison administrators hadn’t thought of a simple solution like wheeled trolleys. I retorted, saying it went against the very purpose of the prisons. Stan, too innocent to grasp my sarcasm, genuinely believed in humanising the prison system. Besides, there was no ramp provided in the prison so the wheeled trolleys could be plied. The prison, just ten or 12 years old, didn’t comply with disability norms.
To my dismay, in the next weekly round, Stan stopped the jail superintendent and voiced his suggestion. The contingent of officers and guards must have been stunned by such concern from someone whose own suffering knew no bounds. It was too human a request to be understood by the superintendent, who seemed devoid of empathy and particularly prejudiced against us. When his juniors explained what Stan had said, he simply dismissed it and moved on.
On another occasion, Stan, with childlike glee, was eagerly waiting to disclose something to me. He said, “Do you know, Anand, I am going to live up to 185 years.” Never before had we seen him bothered about the charges against him. His only complaint was about being separated from the people he loved. However, the previous evening he had counted the punishment for each charge against him from Arun and did some mental maths to amuse himself with the foolishness of the entire system. His maths was a simple summation of all the sentences the charges entailed, plus his present age. I remarked that if the authorities found out, they might make the sentences run concurrently, denying him even that privilege. He seemed disappointed.
In jail, one of the sadistic methods employed is to keep you constantly on the move. Without notice you might be ordered to shift to another circle or even inside the same circle within minutes. It was used as a disciplining tool. Not pleased with the persistent challenges we BK prisoners posed, there was a move to shift us to different jails in Maharashtra. Fortunately, it was successfully stalled. Sometimes these moves proved to be blessings in disguise, as when some of our co-accused were shifted to the Anda (called so because it was round in shape and egg-like) cell from various circles. Likewise, one day, suddenly, Stan, along with Arun and Chacha, was moved to the first floor of the Hospital where I was lodged, allowing us to meet comfortably during open hours. Walking and chatting with Stan, I learned much about his past.
Stan was born in a village in Tiruchirapalli (Trichy) district in Tamil Nadu. Inspired by the life of Jesuits while studying at St Joseph’s School in Trichy, he joined the Madurai Jesuit province and opted for the Jamshedpur province of the Society of Jesus. He graduated from St Xavier’s College, Ranchi, and later pursued theological studies along with a master’s in sociology in Manila, the Philippines. There he learned from student protests the importance of struggling against power. During his further studies, he befriended a Brazilian Catholic Archbishop, Hélder Câmara, whose work among the poor inspired him greatly. Stan returned to India and worked in Chaibasa, developing a lifelong love for the Adivasis. Except for his tenure as director of the Indian Social Institute (ISI) in Bengaluru, during which he spent some time studying in Belgium, his work was focused on Adivasis. At ISI Bengaluru, he initiated courses in social analysis and community mobilisation.
Even while living in Bengaluru, his love for Chaibasa remained strong. He returned there in the 1990s after his term at ISI ended. He helped revive JOHAR (Jharkhandis Organisation for Human Rights) to strengthen the gram sabhas in the Adivasi villages based on their cultural values and customary practices. With the advent of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s, extractive industries began displacing Adivasis, prompting Stan to establish ‘Bagaicha’ in Ranchi in 2005 to address these issues. Before his arrest, Swamy had filed petitions highlighting the misuse of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) against Adivasis. Courts often dismissed these pleas, citing “national security”. He lived in Bagaicha until the NIA took him to Mumbai on October 8, 2021.
On March 23, 2021, Stan filed an application for bail on medical grounds, which was rejected by the NIA court. During the hearing of his appeal, he was summoned on May 21 before a division bench of Justices SJ Kathawalla and SP Tavade of the Bombay High Court via video-conferencing from the Taloja prison. We thought he could make a case for being shifted to an outside hospital. But Stan was in his element and told the court bluntly, when it asked him if he wished to be admitted to JJ Hospital for “general treatment in order to improve his overall health”:
I have been there twice. I am not for being hospitalised in JJ Hospital. What medicines will that hospital give me? It will not improve; it will keep going. I would rather die here very shortly if things go on as it is … I was taken to JJ hospital and there were a lot of people but I had no opportunity to explain what I should be given. There are some medicines which the jail authorities gave me, but my deterioration is more powerful than the tablets they are giving me.
He further told the court, “The only thing I request is to consider for interim bail. I have been in deteriorating condition. I would rather be in Ranchi. I do not think any of that [hospitalisation] is going to help.”
Both Arun and I were taken aback when he told us about this exchange on his return. Alas, this simple desire of his would go unmet!
Excerpted with permission from The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir, Anand Teltumbde, Bloomsbury India.
[ad_2]
Source link