Elsewhere in the country, there is a demand that the Catholic church start the process to declare Jesuit Fr Stan Swamy a martyr and a saint, but in Parliament the government does not even want to acknowledge that the ailing 84-year-old activist died a prisoner of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).
Stan died on July 5, this year, ironically even as the Bombay High Court was hearing his lawyers on his petition for bail which had been serially denied him by the special court.
Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai told the Lok Sabha a few days ago the government’s National Crime Records Board, (NCRB), did not keep any data on how many people had died while in prison under UAPA.
Human rights groups have long demanded an end to this law which has been indiscriminately used to imprison critics of the state. Activists take little solace in Rai’s assurance that “Presently no amendments in the UAPA are under consideration.” Stringent provisions of this law make bail all but impossible for the accused to get bail, and many often spend years in jail awaiting trial.
The minister did admit that more than half of the 4,690 UAPA detained in the last three years, 2,501 or 53.3 % were under 30 years of age. Uttar Pradesh accounted for the highest number of 1,338 arrests. Manipur and Jammu-Kashmir followed with 943 and 750 arrests respectively.
Outside of UAPA, the situation is not very different in Indian jails, data released by the NCRB shows. And it is a no-brainer that the underprivileged, downtrodden, and marginalised end up in jail more often than others, and significantly higher than their percentage in the population. If it is Blacks and Hispanics in the US, in independent India, historically, it is the Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims.
The first is a victim of the ancient caste system which seemingly is more firmly entrenched and weaponised now than it may have been at the time of whoever ensconced it into the social fabric. The second are victims of a rapacious development thrust that robs them of their resources, livelihoods and even homes.
It is with the Muslims that we see the Constitutional guarantee of equality before the law blunted, neutralised, and often turned on its head. Most often than not, it is a systemic bigotry that accounts for the unusually large number of Muslims are in jail under laws invoked by the government at the centre, and in states.
The investigation process itself compounds this direct or inadvertent situation. From small time thefts to the sort of conspiracy spoken about in the Koregaon case, the police depends on plants, fabrication of ‘evidence’, and the use of third degree methods. The ‘human error’ is overwhelming.
By the time the trial ends, all too often, the man has been in jail longer than the sentence prescribed for the offence for which he was arrested. But that is a different argument.
Targeted hate has its impact. Some jail inmates are criminals and deserve to be there. Most others are victims of the system. As the academic Christophe Jefferlot and some others have analysed, in the Manmohan Singh’s second UPA government, Muslims represented 21 to 22.5 per cent of the “undertrials”, and 19 to 21 per cent under Narendra Modi’s NDA II first term from 2014 to 2019.
Law and order being a State subject, Muslims have been over-represented in jail in almost all States, barring Kashmir and the North East. And in the North East, Assam stands separate.
In Assam, Muslims, according to the 2011 census, are 34 per cent of the population but represent 43 to 47.5 per cent of the undertrials; in Gujarat, at 10 per cent of the population they have been about 25 to 27 per cent of the undertrials. In Karnataka, which is now enacting a law against conversions, Muslims are 13 per cent of the population but 19 to 22 per cent of the undertrials since 2018.
In Madhya Pradesh, where Muslims are 6.5 per cent in the population, but 12 to 15 per cent of the undertrials. In Maharashtra, Muslims are 11.5 per cent of the population, but their percentage among the undertrials peaked at 36.5 per cent in 2012, coming down to 30 per cent, in 2015.
In Uttar Pradesh, Muslims are 19 per cent of the population, and 26 to 29 per cent of the undertrials since 2012. This figure will surely go up with recent drives under anti-conversion laws featuring love jehad and the Covid restrictions. It will take a year or two for the NCRB to document this.
Rajasthan has 9 per cent Muslims in the population, but 18 to 23 per cent of the undertrials. In Tamil Nadu, Muslims are 6 per cent in the population, and 11 per cent of the undertrials. West Bengal has among the highest component of Muslims in the population at 27 per cent, and more than 36 per cent of the undertrials since 2017.
Kerala has Muslim political parties in power irrespective of whether the Marxist led or the Congress led fronts are in government. They are 26.5 per cent of the population and 28 to 30 per cent of the undertrials.
Bihar is the only major state where Muslims are “under-represented” among the undertrials prisoners. They are 17 per cent in the State’s population and 15 per cent in jail.
(John Dayal is an author, editor and activist who lives in New Delhi.)
