Mumbai: “Now that the Indian state has exhausted every trick in the book to torture us, they have left our bodies to boil here,” a Kashmiri prisoner told his daughter in late June, during his weekly phone call from Delhi’s Tihar Jail Number 8.
The Kashmiri man has spent several summers in India’s prisons. But this year, he told his daughter, no previous experience compared to the ordeal of living in an overcrowded prison through the summer heat.
The national capital experienced an unprecedented heatwave this summer, with temperatures soaring up to 52° Celsius on some days in May. The extreme weather is believed to have claimed over 70 lives, with thousands falling ill from heatstroke and landing in hospitals.
But for prisoners, especially jailed Kashmiris facing prolonged incarceration for their political convictions, these conditions became extensions of the state’s brutal treatment of them.
The Kashmiri prisoner quoted above is one of eight men lodged together in one of the barracks in Jail Number 8 of Tihar. The prisoners sent multiple petitions to both the prison authorities and the courts seeking permission to buy air coolers during the summer. All these applications were turned down. Making matters worse, the prison authorities, he says, have placed bright high-voltage bulbs in the barrack. “These bulbs are not allowed to be turned off at any time, not even in the afternoon. With so many people packed together in one small room, with so little ventilation and the burning bulbs all across the room, the heat stays trapped inside,” the prisoner told his daughter, who spoke to The Wire.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
