Poor, young and illiterate: Why most Indian prisoners fight long lonely battles for justice.

Source – indiatoday.in

In 1996, when a Delhi Police team bundled him into a car in Kathmandu, Nepal, Mohammad Ali Bhat was just 25. Bhat, who hailed from Kashmir, was working as a shawl trader in the Nepalese capital. From there, he was taken to Delhi, made an accused in the Lajpat Nagar blast case, and later taken to Rajasthan and named as an accused in the Samlethi blast case. This ensured that he spent years in jails in Delhi and Rajasthan.

On July 22 this year, the Rajasthan High Court declared Bhat to be innocent. Found “not guilty” at 48, Bhat has lost 23 prime years of his life to prison due to India’s lethargic justice delivery system.

In another case, a lower court in Delhi in 2010 concluded that Mohammad Maqbool Shah was innocent. By then, he had languished in jail for 14 years. Like Bhat, Shah too was arrested in 1996 as an accused in the Lajpat Nagar blast case.

He was arrested as a teenager, spent 14 years in jail, and at the age of 29, was told that he was actually innocent. When he returned home in Kashmir, he found out that his father and sister were dead.

“If this justice was delivered at the right time, my career would not have been ruined. My home is destroyed. My father and my sister are dead,” he was quoted as saying by NDTV.

In 2017, police in Bijnor, Uttar Pradesh, found that for 10 years, they had imprisoned a man for a murder he never committed. The murder was committed by his brother who was at large. The cops arrested Bala Singh, even though his mother, a daily-wage labourer, pleaded that the police were mistaking Bala for her other son. When he was set free, he told reporters he had only one wish: the official who arrested him should be punished.

HOW COMMON IS THIS?

What’s common in the stories of Bhat, Shah and Singh is that they were all arrested by police; accused of crime(s); and languished in jails for years before they were judged innocent.

But are these exceptions?

Statistics on Indian prisons reveal that 68 per cent of prisoners in India are those who have not been convicted by any court for a crime. Many among them have to wait for years before the trial court even begins hearing their cases.

Analysis of the latest reports of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) shows that jails in India are mostly flooded with young men and women who are illiterate or semi-literate and come from socio-economically weaker sections of society. More than 65 per cent of undertrial prisoners belong to the SC, ST and OBC categories. Most of them are too poor to even afford the bail fee.