Mufti Abdul Qayyum was wrongly implicated in the Akshardham Temple attack case in 2002 and spent 11 years in jail for a crime he did not commit.
Irfan Ahmad and Md Zakaria Siddiqui in their paper “Democracy in Jail” in the Economic and Political Weekly Vol 52, Issue No 44, look at prison as an understudied subject in anthropology.
The paper looks at Qayyum’s prison memoir—”Gyarah Saal Salaakhon Ke Peeche (Eleven Years Behind Bars)”—to explore an alternative democracy that manifests in prisons. We reproduce parts of the paper here:
The Gujarat police “abducted” Qayyum on 17 August 2003.
He was taken to the crime branch and brought into the office of Dahyabhai Gobarji Vanzara, Director-General of Police, Gujarat. On Qayyum’s refusal to confess about his supposed involvement in the Akshardham case, Vanzara ordered a stump-wielding team to beat him.
Placed upside down with his feet and hands cuffed, at every stroke, Qayyum proclaimed:
“God is the greatest (Allāhu Akbar).”
According to the book, at every proclamation, Vanzara would utter vile abuse. He asked:
“See, we have [the] government! We have power. We have everything. What do you have? If God is with you, then recite Bismillāh [in the name of God] to show us that you can break these fetters and become free.”
The team continued to beat Qayyum until his clothes were soaked in blood. The flogging momentarily stopped only when he lost consciousness. Some of the methods deployed included: attaching electrodes to his genitals, inserting a stick up his anus, extracting his fingernails, and putting living rats inside his pyjamas with its bottoms sealed, Qayyum recounted. At this stage, the torture stopped only when out of “unbearable pain and terror,” Qayyum agreed to endorse the story the crime branch wanted him to.
Meanwhile, the women from Qayyum’s neighbourhood in Ahmedabad planned a protest rally against the illegal, secret arrest of Qayyum and others. Some of the women who participated in the rally were later arrested and first information reports were lodged against them.
If this episode is analysed in its entirety, two conceptions of democracy are at work here: the threats enacted by the officials of the crime branch and other authorities on the one hand, and fear-defying democracy embodied by protesting women on the other.
What galvanised the women, among other factors, was the feeling of vulnerability that their own loved ones could meet a similar fate as that of Qayyum and the others.
On the 40th and last day in police remand, Qayyum and the others were produced before the Chief Judicial Magistrate. A large number of Muslims had gathered inside and outside the court. While on that day too, policemen such as VD Vanar, the then Deputy Superintendent of Police (now retired) continued to issue threats of killing Qayyum in an encounter if he uttered a single word against them after entering jail, other authorities showed compassion. As Qayyum and others were taken to the police van, many cried, others raised their hands upward in prayer and yet others issued words of consolation.
Away from the van, Salman, a friend of Qayyum’s, wept and wailed uncontrollably. Seeing him weep, C J Goswami of the crime branch was on the verge of a breakdown. On knowing that Salman was a friend, they called him near the van and advised him perseverance.
Once in Sabarmati jail, Qayyum received help from Sanjiv Bhatt, an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer at the time of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.
For his refusal to toe the government line, Bhatt had been transferred to the prison department. As jail superintendent, in the course of his routine inspection, Bhatt asked: “Are you implicated in the Akshardham attack?” “Yes, but I am innocent,” replied Qayyum. Bhatt stated that he knew that. Expressing his helplessness about doing anything in the legal case, Bhatt assured him that he would not face any taklif (difficulty) in jail. When Qayyum and others informed Bhatt that they had been tortured to confess, he arranged for their medical examination and instructed that a medical report be prepared. He helped in getting counter-confessions dispatched to the special court (formed under the Prevention of Terrorism Act [POTA]) and human rights organisations. He also arranged a meeting between the accused and functionaries of the Akshardham temple for the former to explain their case.
Hindu prisoners treated Qayyum with respect for they too knew that he was innocent. Many of them approached him to make amulets. They shared their domestic and personal problems with him and he did whatever was possible to address them. In the month of fasting, Musa Patel, an Ahmedabad businessperson, used to send fruits and other edibles, which the Muslim prisoners shared with their Hindu fellow-prisoners.
While such “democratic sensibility as an ethos” worked inside jail, institutions entrusted to guard democracy subverted it outside through threats and coercion. Doctors were pressured to not record the torture meted out to Qayyum and his fellow prisoners. Lawyers were harassed too. In fact, Mushtaq Sayyid, a lawyer fighting Qayyum’s case, was himself framed under POTA.
So thorough was the terror that Qayyum’s neighbourhood, otherwise bristling with life until late at night, looked deserted even during the day for some time.
Not everyone succumbed to fear, however. Lawyers like K T S Tulsi, Amarendra Saran, Anis Suhrawardi, Irshad Ahmad, Khalid Shaikh, Ijaz Qureshi, and Kamini Jaiswal took up Qayyum’s case. For these lawyers, people like Qayyum were more than “clients.” When Qayyum met Saran after being freed, the latter told him that as a principle he never took up a case he regarded as non-genuine. Saran remarked:
“I have pleaded your case in this world, you plead mine before God.”
For authors Ahmad and Zakaria, “Democracy in Jail” has a double meaning: The disproportionate representation of minorities, Muslims, Adivasis and Dalits, in Indian jails means that India’s democracy itself is in jail. That our election-centric democracy creates socio-political structures which imprisons minorities and in the name of fighting crimes, terrorism or protecting the “nation,” democracy imprisons itself.
But the authors also point towards a second meaning: a different notion of democracy blooms amongst those jailed, individuals and communities outside jail, as well as some among jail officials. Imprisonment generates a shared vocabulary of injustice, pain, human finitude, and the acknowledgement of human finitude and vulnerability.
This story first appeared on epw.in