Mumbai: After denying Kashmiri prisoners any relief from Delhi’s oppressive heat this summer, the Tihar prison administration has now imposed a new restriction, barring them from their rightful weekly phone calls with family members. This latest unwritten diktat, specifically targeting incarcerated Kashmiris, defies favourable court orders secured by many of these prisoners since their arrests.
Families of the prisoners, interviewed by The Wire, report that while there is no official written order, the prisoners were verbally informed by the prison authorities about the abrupt denial of phone call service. For over a week, the families have been unable to make their regular weekly calls.
Phone calls are the only way that the Kashmiri prisoners manage to stay connected with their families, who live in parts of Kashmir over 1,000 kilometres away from the nation’s capital. Travelling this long a distance is neither economically nor logistically feasible for most, especially for young children some of whom have both parents facing incarceration.
‘Court application to speak to families’
Almost all of these Kashmiri prisoners lodged in Tihar are facing trial in the National Investigations Agency court in Delhi, primarily for their political convictions. The prisoners who managed to make their last call to their families before the restrictions were imposed informed them that the prison authorities have instructed them to file a fresh application before the court if they wish to speak to their families.
This restriction is not just bizarre but also a clear violation of the court order.
For instance, Asiya Andrabi, a separatist leader, has been lodged in Tihar since 2018. Andrabi was allowed phone calls with her sons and other family members through a court order issued on July 13, 2023. The order does not specify any timeline and hence remains applicable until it is revoked by the same court or a higher judiciary. Interestingly, neither the NIA nor the prison authorities have filed any application before the court but have simply asked Andrabi and many others like her to move the court if they want to stay in touch with their families.
In fact, the July 2023 order is only reiteration of an order earlier passed by the same court in 2022. A fresh order was issued when the prison authorities began causing impediments and would not allow Kashmiri prisoners to speak to their families regularly. In the order from July 2023, the NIA special judge Shailendra Malik stated, “…[T]he jail superintendent should sympathetically consider providing such phone call facilities to accused persons on a daily basis.”
Andrabi’s younger son Ahmed, who has been in touch with his mother only through phone calls since her arrest in 2018, shared that the family is in the process of challenging the arbitrary restrictions imposed by the jail authorities on his mother. “Since they had tried denying her permission in the past too, we had to move court and secure an order, which clearly allowed her a five-minute call with the family on a daily basis. But the jail administration has come up with a baseless restriction once again. All this is done to simply harass my mother and many other Kashmiri prisoners lodged at Tihar,” Ahmed said.
Also read: ‘A Solitary Fan’: For Kashmiri Prisoners in Overcrowded Tihar, Delhi’s Summer Was Brutal Torture
Most undertrials
Prolonged incarceration has a debilitating impact on both those who are in jail and their families outside. Most prisoners’ families that The Wire spoke to shared that the trial in the cases is yet to commence, and the Kashmiri prisoners have been in jail for almost a decade.
Jail mulakat (visits) or phone calls are every prisoner’s right. While most prisoners and their families prefer meeting in person, those living far away resort to audio and video calls. During the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, phone calls became more common as physical visits were barred. Prison authorities pass orders from time to time over the time and kind of phone calls that can be allowed to prisoners.
Chapter 8 of the Delhi Prison Manual states that, “Every prisoner shall be allowed reasonable facilities for seeing or communicating with, his family members, relatives, friends and legal advisers for the preparation of an appeal or for procuring bail or for arranging the management of his property and family affairs”. So this sudden restriction is both a violation of the prison rules as well as the court order.
In the absence of any clear communication from the prison authorities, one can only speculate on the reasons why the Kashmiri prisoners are subjected to additional hardship in prison. Unlike the generally subdued prisoners, the incarcerated Kashmiris have been vocal about their rights and have been challenging the prison authorities whenever they are troubled.
The Wire tried to contact the Superintendent of Jail no. 6, where Andrabi and other Kashmiri female prisoners are lodged. The operator informed The Wire that the superintendent of the prison, Neeraja R. Kumar was on leave until August 5 and that officials in charge have refused to speak. The Wire has also sent emails to both the Director General of Prisons and the Public Relations Officer, asking under what grounds the prisons have come up with these restrictive orders. The Wire has not received any response so far and the story will be updated if and when the prison authorities respond.
‘Left our bodies to boil here’
Earlier this month, several Kashmiri prisoners, through their relatives, contacted The Wire to provide a detailed account of their lives in Tihar jail during the summer. They spoke of how the prison authorities allegedly denied them any cooling equipment in the simmering Delhi heat when the temperature soared up to 50° Celsius. Many of them fell seriously ill, developing blisters on their bodies and were unable to move around. Desperate, most of them would place wet clothes on their forehead to cool their bodies down.
“Now that the Indian state has exhausted every trick in the book to torture us, they have left our bodies to boil,” one of the Kashmiri prisoners had told his daughter in late June, during his weekly phone call from Delhi’s Tihar Jail Number 8.
Some even claimed that they were denied proper ventilation and that the prison authorities had placed fans that only blew hot air, making it impossible to cope with the heat. Relatives of a few prisoners feel that this collective act of speaking up against the prison authorities’ excesses could have led to the new restriction, with the denial of phone calls being used as a form of punishment. “This fresh diktat is seemingly because we have spoken and written about the awful circumstances that prisoners are experiencing,” said Musab, son of another Kashmiri prisoner Nahida Nasreen.
In some Kashmiri prisoners’ cases, the phone calls had got fewer and irregular for over two months and were then abruptly stopped. Their families had initially been perplexed over why this was the case. Having compared notes with others in a similar predicament, they have now surmised that this could be highhandedness from the authorities.
