I first met Farzana in Kolkata, sometime in 2017, in a public meeting organised by Abdul Wahid Sheikh, the only one of the 13 accused of the July 2006 Mumbai train blasts case, who had been acquitted after spending nine years in prison. 

Abdul Wahid Sheikh had set up the ‘Innocence Network’, an organisation advocating for the release of his former case mates, 12 of whom were still in prison. Farzana’s husband was one of these 12 men, and she had come to speak in the meeting organised under the auspices of the ‘Innocence Network’.

I was quite impressed by the poise of Farzana in that meeting, but didn’t get to speak with her that day. However, a few months later, I was contacted by a friend, a political activist who had been sentenced to life in another case and was in the same prison in Maharashtra where Farzana’s husband was. He asked if I could meet his family and help them in any way possible, and also help pursue his case. This is how my acquaintance with Farzana and her family began.

A few days later, I was walking down the lanes of Rajabazar, on the way to Farzana’s home. Rajabazar is an area in north Kolkata, mostly inhabited by lower middle class and working class Muslim families. Anyone walking around in Rajabazar would understand what the word “ghetto” means, with thousands of families cramped in dingy rooms, uncleared garbage piled in streets and numerous small-scale industries such as book-binding and shoe-making. But within this is also so much vibrant life! 

I climbed up the stairs to the tiny fourth floor flat which was the home of Farzana’s parents, where she lived with her 10-year-old daughter. After her husband’s arrest, she had moved in with her parents, and now lived in that tiny flat with her parents and her brothers. And there I got to know the remarkable woman that Farzana was over the next few years.

Farzana came from a lower-middle-class Muslim family, which though not so well to do, valued education. Her father was a lawyer in one of the civil courts of Kolkata and her brothers were in the book-binding business. Her family had invested in her education and she obtained an MD in homeopathy, and looked ahead to a professional life of a practicing homeopath. When she was 21, she got married to a person whose family had a flourishing shoe business in Rajabazar. Together, the young couple looked ahead to a bright future.

Then, July 2006 turned Farzana’s life upside down. A couple of months after the blasts in the trains, a team of Mumbai police came and arrested Farzana’s husband, accusing him of being involved in the conspiracy. It was a bolt from the blue. Farzana’s husband had never been to Mumbai and did not know any of the others who had been arrested in the case. The Mumbai police had apparently got his name from a family of Bangaldeshis who had been picked up in random raids in Mumbai in the wake of the blasts, and who had met him in Kolkata on the way to Mumbai. In all probability, in order to establish a Bangladeshi connection to the blasts, Farzana’s husband was picked up and implicated in the case, and charged under the draconian Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime Act (MCOCA), 1999. At the time of his arrest, their daughter was 38 days old. She never saw her father out of prison after that, till his acquittal.

A life of struggle started for Farzana, something she had never envisaged before. On one hand, were frequent and frantic travels to Mumbai to attend to the legal requirements for the case, and then to the prison in remote Amaravati, where her husband was lodged, on the other hand was taking care of her infant daughter. While she managed all these, she had to give up on practicing homeopathy and the career that awaited her. She moved in with her parents and brothers, who were a bulwark of support and there, she tried to get on with these challenges which life, and the Indian legal system, had thrust on her.

However, life had further tribulations in waiting for her. In 2015, her husband was found guilty by the trial court in Mumbai and sentenced to life imprisonment together with seven other persons accused in the case, while five others were given the death sentence. In the same year, Farzana was suddenly struck with a rare autoimmune disease, SLE or Lupus disease. 

This difficult to treat disease attacks multiple organs – among them the kidneys – and slowly leads to kidney dysfunction, hypertension and finally kidney failure. With the legal and financial challenges they were facing, her family was not able to get her treated properly. As a person who has studied the molecular basis of autoimmune diseases, including SLE, for my entire professional career, when I met Farzana in 2017 I already knew that her disease was far advanced. Her kidneys were badly damaged and her eyes had been damaged too because of hypertension. Amongst all this, she was an epitome of poise and cheerfulness. 

Whenever my colleagues and I visited her family, their hospitality was impeccable. Farzana’s mother, or sometimes Farzana herself, would have prepared food for us. There would be a lot of discussions, about the status of the case of her husband, about the progress of the education of her daughter and about life in general. She had ensured that her daughter got a life as normal as possible: she was studying in a Catholic missionary school in Kolkata, taking classes in Bharatnatyam and karate together with her regular curriculum, like any other girl of her age. But unlike other girls of her age, she had only glimpsed her father once or twice, on the other side of prison bars.

The challenges with her husband’s legal case continued. The appeal against the sentence did not proceed in the high court. It was not possible for Farzana to travel to Maharashtra any more due to her deteriorating health. Meanwhile, we learnt how confessions had been extracted under police torture from her husband and the others convicted in the case and used as evidence against them under the infamous MCOCA, against all accepted jurisprudence. We also met her husband’s neighbour and business partner, who admitted that he had been forced to give evidence against him under threat of imprisonment and torture. Two applications of parole for her husband to visit his severely ailing wife and old mother were refused. Even the police report for the parole application sent back by the West Bengal Police, under Mamata Banerjee’s so-called “minority friendly” government, was highly detrimental to his case as it stated that the release of her husband under parole would give rise to “law and order problems in the area”, completely without any basis. 

This is what happens in India once someone is branded as a “terrorist”.

Farzana never met her husband again. As 2019 came to an end and the COVID-19 pandemic began, her condition deteriorated further. She needed to undergo dialysis thrice a week and frequent hospitalisations to remove fluids accumulating in her body. Finally, one early morning in April 2020, as the lockdown started, I got the information that Farzana had passed away, ending her life of struggle against the Indian legal system which had so casually taken away her young and promising life. She was just 35.

Farzana’s husband was released last week, acquitted in the 2006 Mumbai blasts case, after spending 19 years in prison branded as a terrorist. I learned that Farzana’s daughter had cleared the 12th boards examination this year with flying colours, and will appear for the medical and engineering joint entrance exams. But Farzana will not be there to see them. 

Farzana’s story is the story of hundreds of Muslim women of India, whose husbands or other family members have been arrested and imprisoned under charges of terrorism. For women such as Farzana, the process of getting justice is ultimately the punishment that snatches away their promising lives and careers and just leaves memories of the injustices that minority women face in India.

Partho Sarothi Ray is a scientist and democratic rights activist.

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