Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer

by Sunil Gupta

A black warrant is issued as soon as the inmate’s mercy petition is rejected and is literally the message of death – indicating the time and date of when the hanging will be executed.

Jailers in those days had a sordid reputation. We were considered highly corrupt. In fact, I would go so far as to say that in the public’s opinion, the staff in Tihar was as criminal as those who were locked up there.

The day before an execution prisoner goes through a harrowing experience of being weighed, measured for length of drop to assure breaking of the neck, the size of the neck, body measurements etc. When the trap springs he dangles at the end of rope. There are times when the neck has not been broken and the prisoner strangles to death. His eyes pop almost out of his head, his tongue swells and protrudes from his mouth, his neck may be broken and the rope many times takes large portion of skins and flesh from the side of the face that the noose is on. He urinates, he defecates and droppings fall to the floor while witnesses look on and at almost all executions one or more faint or have to be helped out of the witness room. The prisoner remains dangling from the end of the rope from 8 to 14 minutes before the Doctor, who has climbed up a small ladder and listen to his heartbeat with a stethoscope, pronounces him dead. A prison guard stands at the feet of the hanged person and holds the body steady, because during the first few minutes there is usually considerable struggling in an effort to breathe. – Warden Duffy of San Quention Prison Law Commission of India, 187th Report

This pain, this excruciating agony of impending death is called ‘death row phenomenon’. One Supreme Court judge even uses an Albert Camus reference from ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’, an essay written in 1957 to describe it: ...For the man condemned to death, on the other hand, the horror of his situation is served up to him at every moment for months on end. Torture by hope alternates only with the pangs of animal despair. His lawyer and his confessor, out of simple humanity, and his guards, to keep him docile, unanimously assure him that he will be reprieved. He believes them with all his heart, yet he cannot believe them at all. He hopes by day, despairs by night. And as the weeks pass his hope and despair increase proportionately, until they become equally insupportable. According to all accounts, the color of his skin changes: fear acts like an acid. “It’s nothing to know if you’re going to die,” one such man in the Fresnes prison said, “but not to know if you’re going to live is the real torture.” ...As a general rule, the man is destroyed by waiting for his execution long before he is actually killed. Two deaths are imposed, and the first one is worse than the second, though the culprit has killed but once.

Jis dhaj se koi maqtal mein gaya wo shaan salamat rehti hai, Ye jaan to aani jaani hai, is jaan ki to koi baat nahin. (The glory that one carries to the gallows survives; this life is transitory, it’s not of great importance) – Faiz Ahmed Faiz as quoted by Maqbool Butt

Apparently, when Tufail last spoke to Butt, he had this exchange which he later shared with us, ‘I believe you are quite a trained person in various activities. Have you ever thought of escaping?’ Butt apparently told him, ‘There’s no place to escape to. Because I don’t find the pride of Kashmiris in India or in Pakistan.’

Prisoners are peculiarly and doubly handicapped. For one thing, most prisoners belong to the weaker segment, in poverty, literacy, social status and the like. Secondly, the prison house is a walled-off world which is incommunicado for the human world, with the result that the bonded inmates are invisible, their voice inaudible, their injustice unheeded. – Justice Krishna Iyer, 1980

The judges conducting the probe thanked Batra who was then serving a death sentence (later commuted to a life sentence) for raising his voice against this atrocity, forcing the Supreme Court to state in 1979, ‘Prisoners are persons not animals, and to punish the deviant “guardians” of the prison system where they go berserk and defile the dignity of the human inmate.’

Prisoners’ rights in India and various judgements like the RD Upadhyay vs State of Andhra Pradesh order in 2006 say that all prisoners have the right to have legal representation and a fair trial. What do you do, however, if lawyers ignore this and choose a sense of patriotism over a matter of legal fairness?

‘With regret, I have to tell you that today is your hanging,’ the superintendent informed him. ‘I know, I figured.’ We sat down with him and asked if he wanted tea. As we sipped it slowly, Afzal spoke calmly about his case. He told us he was not a terrorist, and that he was not even a wanted person. All he wanted, he said, was to fight against corruption but ‘who listens in India?’ ‘This was never my fight. I never wanted or even intended to be a Kashmiri separatist. All that I did was to fight against corrupt politicians.’ And then he started singing a song from the 1960s movie Badal, ‘Apney liye jiye toh kya jiye, tu ji ae dil zamane ke liye.’ (What’s the point of a life lived for ourselves, my heart lives for others).

When Sinhari left in June 1988, he was succeeded by a Bengal cadre officer, H.P. Kumar. The prison system hierarchy is led by the title of DGP, his deputy is called additional inspector general (IG). The IG has two DIGs (Prisons) reporting to him/her, who have 18 SPs and then the DS of both grades, followed by ASP and warders.

We do not hate the person but the crime they commit and our job was to treat them as humanely as possible so they had a chance of reforming.

It’s been almost three years now since I retired as the law officer and do you know what I love about retirement the most? It’s the luxury of not being imprisoned by routine.