Porous prisons

There is enough egg on the face of the nation’s police to make a good-sized omelette. The audacious manner in which the alleged killer of Phoolan Devi, Sher Singh Rana alias Pankaj, escaped from the nation’s most prestigious prison — the Capital’s Tihar jail — demonstrates the porosity of prisons in the country and the susceptibility of those who man them. Indeed, with the right plans, connections and daring, penetrating so-called maximum security detention systems appears to be a cakewalk.

Jailbreaks are now the stuff of legend and film scripts and we have a goodly stock of anecdotes about them, whether it was the useful box of spiked sweets that saw Charles Sobhraj through some 18 years ago, or the Burail jail tunnel through which four Babbar Khalsa militants made good their escape last month. And, as if to confirm the disturbing trend, news has just come in that murder suspect Amarjit Singh “Fauji”, a detainee of Patiala Central Jail, has disappeared without a trace when he was to be produced at a Ropar court on Wednesday. Just what is happening? Have our prison staff all sunk into a collective slumber? Is our jail administration in deep stupor? The NDA government has always prided itself on its emphasis on security for the common citizen, but is it so caught up in projecting its shining image that it has forgotten to mind the prison door?

What has made the situation even more disastrous is the political patronage that criminals have come to enjoy. In Uttar Pradesh, we had the amazing spectacle of former minister, Amarmani Tripathi — an accused in the Madhumani Shukla murder case — being allowed to throw a lavish party to celebrate the birthday of another accused in the same case, and all within the precincts of a Lucknow jail. Mulayam Singh Yadav sees nothing objectionable about such partying. When a state’s chief minister comes out in open support of an alleged criminal, why would his police take their jobs seriously? Indifferent policing then combines with amoral politics to create an apathy that results in the country’s criminal justice system being dangerously compromised.