By: Vishnupriya Bhandaram
There are too many minorities locked up in the prisons of India, considering their percentage share in India’s total population.
Muslims are even more disproportionately represented than Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs).
Irfan Ahmad and Md Zakaria Siddiqui analysed data from Prison Statistics India, 1998 – 2014 in their paper, “Democracy in Jail” in the Economic and Political Weekly.
In comparison to their percentage in the total population, Adivasis, Christians, Dalits, Muslims, and Sikhs are all well over-represented in Indian prisons.
Comparing Percentage in Total Population with Percentage in Prison Population During 2001 and 2011
In the graph below, the red-line passing through value 1 helps us locate over-representation. Muslims, SCs and STs show ratios higher than value 1 from 1998 to 2014.
The ratio for Hindus has been constantly below 1, implying that even though their percentage share in the population of India is large, their percentage share in prisons is low.
Ratio of Share in Jail Population to General Population for Social and Religious Groups, 1998 to 2014
The Crucial Question: Have imprisoned minorities been established as criminals?
7 out of every 10 prison inmates are undertrials, or non-convicts*. This means that they are not serving a sentence in jail, but are under-trial or in detention.
In most states, the share of non-convicts is high across social and religious communities (including the majority community).
The situation of Muslims is even grimmer: 3/4th of Muslim inmates are non-convicts — undertrial or detenue.
In Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, more than 80% of Muslim prisoners are non-convicts.
Sources: For the UK, Ministry of Justice (2016); for the US, Carson (2015: 15); for Canada, Statistics Canada (2015); for Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics (2015); for France, World Prison Brief (2016) and Larrive (2015); for The Netherlands, Linckens and Loof (2015: 38).
Sources: For the UK, Ministry of Justice (2016); for the US, Carson (2015: 15); for Canada, Statistics Canada (2015); for Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics (2015); for France, World Prison Brief (2016) and Larrive (2015); for The Netherlands, Linckens and Loof (2015: 38).
The ratio of India’s numbers in prison vis-à-vis the total population is far smaller than many countries, notably the US, which has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
Yet, a disproportionate representation of minorities in jail is common to democracies, Western and Indian.
How do we understand this problem?
Often, the plight of minorities is explained by referring to their “backwardness”.
The “backwardness” of Adivasis and Dalits is rarely attributed to their culture or religion, but to economic, socio-political and governmental variables.
In contrast, the “backwardness” of Muslims is often traced to their religious-cultural outlook.
Irfan Ahmad and Md Zakaria Siddiqui argue that such an explanation is flawed and instead look at structural-political factors as the problem. Attributing incarceration of minorities to their religion or culture overlooks that even Hindus are over-represented in states in which they are the minority.
The disproportion in prisons, across the world, instead hints that election-centric, number-dominated, security-driven democracies are unfriendly to minorities.
This story first appeared on ewp.in