Daring to write
Begunah Qaidi by Abdul Wahid Sheikh is without doubt one of the most important books to be published in Urdu in the last decade in India and, given its subject, perhaps in any Indian language. Wahid spent nearly a decade in prison for his alleged role in the Mumbai serial train blasts of 2006, before being acquitted of all charges. The bulk of the book was written while he was still in prison and it was written in the face of the hostility of prison authorities. They tortured him for daring to write but he never gave up. A powerful work of prison literature, it is entitled to be ranked with Dostoevsky’ House of the Living Dead or Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of the Reading Gaol.
Wahid’s book is first and foremost a plaintive and heart breaking invocation of the Indian Constitution. He begins his memoir by quoting Article 20 of the Constitution, which states that ‘no person accused of an offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself.’ However, laws such as TADA, POTA and MCOCA subvert that principle by making ‘confessions’ made to the police admissible as evidence. As Wahid shows, for all of his 12 co-accused, their ‘confession’ itself became their conviction. Torture is practised as a veritable policy by the use of diverse techniques, such as electric shocks, injection of burning oil into the anus, waterboarding, and the plucking out of hair or nails. The confessions are forced out also through psychological abuse: by threatening rape on the women of their families, by shaming them in public, snatching away their burqas, and by incessantly abusing their Gods and Prophets. When one sees one’s family facing such humiliation, says Wahid, one submits to anything.
There is no dearth of black humour in Wahid’s book. The police is very careful not to injure prisoners where visible bruises might embarrass them before a judge, so they only beat them on the soles, palms or private parts. The belt they use to thrash has sardonic labels such as meri aawaz suno, bolne wala patta, andha qanun. When they forcibly record scripted confessions before a camera, to be sold to a TV channel, they insist that the prisoner appears relaxed and speaks with a sense of casual triumph. The only problem: the prisoner is supposed to do so while getting beaten up during breaks.
Written in lucid yet elegant prose, the book is astonishingly free of self pity. Wahid’s experience as a school master
serves him well as he puts together this chronicle of unbearable trauma with exceptional coherence. Indeed, the detail, the mastery of law, and the accuracy of description used by this book make this perhaps the first police procedural in the world which shows us state power in all its vulgar glory from below.
But the book’s most resplendent part is the triumph of the human spirit as it narrates the struggle and resistance mounted by Wahid and some of the other accused. This resistance was both emotional and techno-legal as they insisted, at each stage, on the law and procedure being followed. For instance, they would repeatedly tell their magistrates about being tortured, they kept logs of each visit to the police station, of each stage of the inquiry, of their activities, of visits by the police inside jail (totally illegal). They made fantastic use of the RTI to track the movement of police vehicles using their log book, to use the movement of DCPs (busy with the Prime Minister’s security on the day they were supposedly recording confessions), and to find out how many of the police witnesses were implicated in other cases and had appeared as police witnesses in which earlier cases. No wonder the government has moved to dilute the Right to Information Act. Wahid prescribes a behaviour-and-conduct tool kit to deal with every situation that an accused may face. What to do in case of house searches, in case of beatings (shout, shout and shout and keep twisting so that you get hurt in a body part that is visible to a judge), complain, keep a log book, keep newspaper cuttings, force the judge to take things on record, keep saying I am innocent during narco tests. The essence of Wahid’s primer is that if you complain and resist and appear as a troublemaker there are more chances of escaping than if you are submissive and compliant.
Wahid is now part of a collective called the Innocence Network, which fights for the rights of the other innocent accused all over the world. He lectures, talks and travels. In this book he lays bare not just his journey but also the entire apparatus of the state. In the process, he has given us an extraordinary story, a saga of crime and punishment, of a wilful extermination of innocence where massacres result not in justice but in the butchery of other souls. It is no less than an Indian Chernobyl which awaits its visual chroniclers. This is a book that deserves to be translated into every language.