Prison break: An “overgrown yuppie” tells the story of his unfortunate ordeal
Chetan Mahajan was unfairly arrested and spent a month in Bokaro Jail for fraud. His book demonstrates the plight of India’s three crore undertrials and exposes the rot in our criminal justice system, says Ajachi Chakrabarti.
His first book The Bad Boys of Bokaro Jail, an account of his time behind bars, has just been published by Penguin.
The “overgrown yuppie”, as the 43-year-old Mahajan describes himself at the start of his book, decided to jot down his experiences as a way to stave off boredom in jail. “I always fancied myself as a bit of a writer,” he says. “I had started one or two books till about 20-25 pages, didn’t go beyond; you know how it is. But then they lock you up, they take away your laptop and cellphone for a month. You’re surrounded by all sorts of interesting guys. So I thought I’d make something positive out of it. I suppose I’m an accidental author.”
Mahajan’s ordeal was in many ways accidental. In most cases, a gentle reassurance that despite a few teachers jumping ship to other institutes, the company would honour all its commitments should have been enough. But the citizens of Bokaro had little patience for another coaching institute threatening to go under. There had already been, Mahajan writes, “a couple of similar institutes... [that had] shut down in the past two years, and many of those customers lost all their money.” Although his first meeting went well, the office was overrun the next day, a Sunday, by angry parents demanding a full refund. Someone called the police, and Mahajan was taken into custody only because he was the most senior employee present on the scene. (“Someone needs to be hung,” he writes, “and I am conveniently available.”) Never in his 30 days of detention did he face a judge, due in part to the fact that he was arrested during the court’s winter break.
Even in the police station, says Mahajan, “I was confident that somehow things would work out. That was delusional, because I was thinking from a corporate perspective that I had zero legal liability. I was an employee, had joined two and a half months ago. I had not taken any cash or cheques from anybody in my name. I wasn’t on the board; I wasn’t a shareholder. I just assumed that on this basis, this whole
— Chetan Mahajan thing would be taken care of. So I was confident until the afternoon that I was put into the Jeep and actually taken to jail that they wouldn’t actually send me to jail.”
Once the realisation set in, of course, the first emotion was fear. “There was complete dread when I got into the Jeep,” he says. “Suddenly, the din was gone. There was nothing to distract me from the idea. I was petrified. I had no idea what to expect.” He had reason to be afraid. He was the accused in a Rs 2 crore scam; his name and face were on the front page of all the local newspapers, even dwarfing coverage of the Delhi gang rape. The message to his fellow inmates was loud and clear: here is a man of recently acquired wealth, which is ripe for being cajoled, extorted or beaten out of him.
Mahajan encountered all sorts of characters in his short stay, all of whom were living their personal hells, finding their own ways to cope. There’s Akhilesh, imprisoned for stealing cars, who turns to religion, driving his fellow inmates nuts by his constant praying and demands for silence. Then there’s Pappu Ansari, who dislikes rituals and believes in humanism over organised religion. There’s Anup, clearly an intelligent man, who has been driven to insanity. Then there’s Nageshwar, who has already spent seven years in the prison, a calm, reassuring presence in Mahajan’s life, but who is pushed to despair after every visit. Mahajan says he tried to be as non-judgemental as possible about each person’s guilt, forming his opinions of his fellow inmates only through their interaction with him.
He paints a fascinating picture of the prison economy, explaining how despite cash being officially banned, everything, from necessities like edible food to luxuries like mobile phones, comes at a steep price. “It’s a bad example,” he says, “but there are a few people who are unregulated capitalists. Everyone else is just getting by, waiting. I’d say that 80 to 90 percent are just decent, helpful people. But the people who have authority and therefore the ability to extract it are the people looking to make money. I hear they actually have a food court in Tihar Jail. How that economy works, I don’t know. And I don’t want to go back to jail to find out.”
To be fair, Mahajan often relied on these unregulated capitalists to get by, for better food, for better living conditions, for escaping manual labour, for a cellphone to talk to his wife. When the price was too steep or the prospect of being beholden to career criminals too scary, he benefitted from a sympathetic jail superintendent. He is fully conscious of the fact that he was fortunate to have both wealth—enough to pay the relatively small sums being demanded—and influ- ence, two things the average inmate doesn’t have.
Mahajan would eventually be released on 23 January once all the parents had been given full refunds and his case finally came before a magistrate. While in itself, his case wouldn’t come close to the worst excesses of India’s murky criminal justice system, it is symptomatic of the larger malaise of the tribulations of India’s three crore undertrials, who constitute three-fourths of all prisoners in India. If a member of our cocooned upper-middle class can languish in jail on extremely untenable grounds for a month without even facing a judge, what hope, after all, is there for an innocent tribal falsely accused of more serious crimes, of, god forbid, being a Naxalite?
“It’s heartbreaking,” Mahajan says, “especially because once you spend a month in jail, you realise that a lot of these guys are decent, competent people who you could employ. They’re fundamentally productive resources. All of them are so young. Give them some direction, give them some focus, give them some hope. They could be very good citizens. But it’s heartbreaking that this entire demographic dividend thing is actually a joke, because the rot in the system is so deep and all-pervasive. It’s everywhere.”