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But while Batra and Jaggi were to be feared, Prem Shankar Shukla was in another league altogether. In fact, Shukla was so brazen that he once went to a police station that was handling a fraud case against him, dressed as a DIG. He told them he wanted to inspect the files. Seeing he was a senior official, they readily agreed and gave him full access. Before they knew what was happening, Shukla disappeared with his own case file!
However, today things are different where we have very good talent amongst us. Educated women are joining the team every day and from totally illiterate staff, we have gone on to have PhDs, BTechs and MTechs.
when Kiran Bedi was in charge of Tihar in the early ’90s, she came up with the controversial idea of having condom vending machines in jail.
According to the Ministry of Home Affairs, the National Human Rights Commission has recorded 1,674 custodial deaths across the country in 2017–2018.
Because of first hand experience I can say with confidence that even if a healthy person goes to DDUH for a few hours, they will fall sick.
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.’
I think about Afzal a lot and must have heard that song on YouTube endlessly. I know that anyone who refers to him is called an ‘anti-national’ but I think he was a good man who wanted to work with the NGO, People’s Union of Civil Liberties. All he wanted was to serve humanity and for his people to live peacefully.
Top industrialist, Lalit Mohan Thapar had been brought to Tihar because the Enforcement Directorate (ED) had found that his companies were involved in foreign exchange violations. He was the owner of several top notch companies including Crompton Greaves and lived in Delhi’s most posh area of Amrita Shergill Marg. The dingy cell and the amenities that came with it were obviously not going to go down very well with Thapar. On the very first day that Thapar was jailed, I got a call from Inspector General P.V. Sinhari at 4 am. His instruction was clear – I was to release Thapar immediately.
A 2015 report of the National Crime Records Bureau found that Tihar was overcrowded by 226 per cent, with some prisoners sleeping in sitting position because there was simply no room for them to stretch and lie down.
It was as if there was a jail within Tihar and Jassa was the jailer.
When it came to R.K. Sharma, jail rules were either flaunted or totally ignored. His family did not have to seek a formal appointment for a mulaqat and throughout his time behind bars, influential Haryana police officers continued to visit Sharma. His wife would drop in to meet the boss Ajay Aggarwal frequently and then meet her husband in the deputy superintendent’s room. It was as if murdering a woman was a petty crime.
Jail rules are not universal. While the rich and powerful have satellite and mobile phones, the poor have to live with lack of medication and clean water. Soft mattresses for the privileged, but lack of sleeping space for others. No utensils for regular inmates, while cooking meals is the norm for some.
Starting 2006, the superintendent, deputy superintendent and many others in Tihar became a part of the ‘Sharma payroll’. So much so that it was Manu who was considered the superintendent of Jail number
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.
