Tihar jail’s cells with a difference

Chandra Shekhar, a dreaded member of Mumbai mafia don Arun Gawli’s gang, was caught with a phone in his pocket. Two phones were recovered from bushes outside the wards. A member of the search party said, “At last we have caught someone red-handed. The question is if we found three phones from just two wards, how many could be hidden in the whole jail?” Plenty, say inmates of Tihar.

The modus operandi is simple. Instruments and batteries are concealed inside ghee tins, shoes with false bottoms,thermos flasks or other food packets.

Once the phone is in, smuggling in wafer-thin SIM cards, is no problem.Police and prison officials say the first tip-off about inmates having access to cellular phones came from the Essar cellphone company in April 1996. The company was investigating an unpaid bill of Rs 1.96 lakh which a surreptitious subscriber had notched up in just 50 days. The telephone, with STD and ISD facility, had been booked in Kamala Nagar under the name of Satish Kumar.

An informal probe was ordered and persons whose numbers figured on the bill were contacted. Each of these persons had a relative or friend imprisoned in Tihar.

It was also revealed that the connections were being used by some notorious criminals. The list included Uttar Pradesh gangster Babloo Srivastava, his second-in-command Virendra Pant, Bihar gangster Changez Khan and a kidnapper called Jassa.

With the help of the Intelligence Bureau, the police discovered that not only was Babloo using the cellular to carry onextortion and kidnapping operations, he was regularly in touch with confidantes like Chhota Rajan and Chhota Shakeel on foreign shores.

Two months later, the telephone was seized by prison authorities. It now figures on a list with the Ministry of Home Affairs of four inmates against whom court cases are in progress as they were caught with cellular phones.

The list reveals that:

While the inmates themselves talk about the complicity of the jail staff for making the cellular network run, it was only in the case against Virendra Pant that three prison officials were actually suspended.

Senior officials in Tihar admit they are worried about the extent of mobile infiltration but claim that instead of being pulled up, the recovery of a cellular phone should be applauded by the authorities.

Deputy Inspector General (Prisons) Jayadev Sarangi says they were facing a “no-win”situation as cellular phones were becoming smaller in size and inmates were using more and more ingenious methods to smuggle them in. “We are facing the challenge of technology. Cellular phones do not show up in a metal detector and no technology has yet been discovered to detect the instruments. But we have intensified our search operations.”

According to police officials, the use of phones by inmates has reached alarming proportions. Earlier only “affluent” inmates like Charles Sobhraj (said to have been hiding his cellular either inside a thermos flask or a `false’ belly with a cloth tied around it), Chandraswami and Babloo Srivastava possessed them.

Police officials say further proof has come in from confessions of some recently-arrested criminals. The first was that of Gyan Prakash alias Giani, arrested in January 1997 for an extortion case. Giani gave the police a list of cellular numbers being used in Tihar. Giani said there were occasions when Babloo had a hotline from Tihar, as in the case ofthe kidnapping of hotelier Umesh Shroff. Babloo personally demanded a ransom of Rs 3.9 crore from Shroff’s family and gave instructions that the money be picked up through hawala channels by his “treasurer” Irfan Goga in Dubai.

The printouts of the use of phones showed that they were hardly free for a minute. Tihar’s inmates were also using them to fulfill their whims and fancies. Babloo Srivastava would regularly place orders at restaurants (Wimpy’s and a Chinese restaurant called Hong Chi were particularly popular with him) and then tell a henchman to deliver the food to him. Virendra Pant was active on the satta bazar and the betting circuit and would win or lose lakhs of rupees, all from his cell in Tihar.