Pages from prison

In Gilani’s case, it took seven months in the high-security Tihar jail — which he qualifies as one of the ‘‘worst prisons in India’’ — before charges against him were withdrawn at the behest of former Defence Minister George Fernandes.

And significantly, Gilani writes, that at the time of his arrest in June 2002, there were ‘‘at least’’ 30 other inmates in Tihar jail facing OS Act charges. Almost all the cases were moving at a painfully slow pace.

Besides the shocking description of the manner in which he was called a ‘‘traitor’’ and thrashed by the inmates on his arrival (he fainted at the end of it) and the account of the rampant corruption inside the jail, Gilani writes about incidents which hurt his sensibilities as a journalist.

Like the ‘‘horror’’ he experienced when one among the 60 men who had arrived at his house to search and arrest him decided to seal Dominique Lapierrer’s Freedom at Midnight also as a ‘‘contraband’’ item.

The jail authorities took weeks for vetting books which his wife, Aanisa, caried for him to read. They even ‘‘disallowed’’ Khushwant Singh’s biography and Nelson Mandela’s best-seller, A Long Walk to Freedom.

Gilani narrates how after a month in Tihar, he was permitted to subscribe to a daily newspaper, as per prison rules. His choice was The Indian Express and this is what Gilani says happened: ‘‘When I received my copy the very next day, I was surprised to see only the two sports pages. When I asked the convict where the rest of the paper was he simply said the Express has reduced its pages to just two, and there was little I could do about it. In fact, all the other pages were censored as Express had carried an investigative story on the petrol pump scam.’’

Besides being denied such basic rights, Gilani lists the rules which Tihar authorities had unofficially imposed on the hapless inmates. For example, inamtes were not allowed to drink tea in cups; sit on a chair; they were always made to walk in queues; stop whenever they saw any jail official aproaching and adress him as ‘‘sir’’ with folded hands. And so on.

‘‘Anyone breaking any of the above (rules), even by mistake,’’ Gilani writes, ‘‘would come in for drastic punishment. I once saw a prisoner thrashed at Deodhi (gate) because he had dared to drink water out of a cup… I also remember seeing an inmate punished for remaining seated on a bench outside the Deodhi when a doctor happened to pass by….’’

It is evident from his narrative that the OSA case against him was the handiwork of the Intelligence Bureau and that, in fact, the Special Branch of Delhi Police initially refused to book him on such flimsy evidence. The back-up plan, which he became privy to later, was to take him to Jammu, ‘‘plant’’ some RDX on him and then show it as a recovery.

Eventually, the crucial ‘‘recovery’’ made from his house was a 48-page booklet on deployment of forces in Kashmir, which was taken as a ‘‘secret sensitive document’’ by members of the raiding party and even the then Home Minister, L.K. Advani, was informed about what a major seizure it was.

It was this document that Gilani’s lawyers and friends later proved in court was availible in the public domain, thus forcing the Government to withdraw the OS Act case. ‘‘(But) my heart goes out to those poor souls who I saw rotting behind bars in Tihar. They were not so fortunate as to have their version presented to the public through the press,’’ writes Gilani.

His book also makes a strong case for what he calls ‘‘urgent course correction’’ in the handling of OS Act cases. Several such cases have been listed in the book. Gilani says, the tendency to book people in and around Delhi under the Act has assumed ‘‘menacing proportions’’.