EX-CON PREFERS JAIL TO LONELINESS OF FREEDOM
Pushkar Dutt Bhatt lives the way people in primitive times did in India. He has no electricity, tap water or washroom in his house. He cooks his food on firewood and bathes in the natural pool located two kilometres from his residence.
Bhatt, 54, lives in an abandoned and dilapidated house in a village called Bastadi, which the government of Uttarakhand state declared uninhabitable and uncultivable after flash floods in July 2016. And he lives all by himself as all the other villagers were relocated after the calamity.
The walls of Bhatt’s mud house have cracks large enough to accommodate large snakes and dangerous insects. The overgrowth in and around the destroyed village makes it look like a jungle where wild pigs, monkeys and other animals hide.
Bastadi, a picturesque village devastated by the floods, is located 50 kilometres from Pithoragarh, the nearest sizable town, in the foothills of Himalayas some 500 kilometres northeast of New Delhi. The floods claimed 21 lives and flattened almost all 30 houses, forcing the state government to find new homes for the affected residents in Singhali, a village a few kilometres away.
Bhatt has been living in the ghost village since August last year when he was released from prison after serving 18 years of a life sentence for the murder of his wife Pushpa Devi and their one-year-old son Kailash. Bhatt’s two other sons — Himanshu, now 22, and Kapil, 20 — have been brought up by relatives in other locations and have not seen or spoken to their father for several years.
“I saw Himanshu last in 2012 when I had come out on [temporary] parole,” Bhatt told me when I visited. “He stays with a relative in Nainital (a hill station 175km from Pithoragarh). Kapil stays with another relative and does not own a phone.”
He says his uncle who lives in Singhali has been his only contact in the last seven months. “It’s only wild pigs and monkeys that visit my already wrecked residence during the day and at nights to scare me. Nobody else comes to see me.”
In 2016 when the state government was helping other residents of Bastadi to relocate and get on with their lives, Bhatt was serving his sentence in an open jail at Sitarganj, about 150 kilometres from Pithoragarh. Because nobody from his family was around in Bastadi, the compensation of 300,000 rupees (about 145,000 baht) meant for the reconstruction of his house at a new location was never paid out and eventually reverted to the state.
Since then, he says, he has run from pillar to post to get the amount released. “I have met the MLA (member of the legislative assembly) and the MP for my area several times. In September last year, I also wrote to the district magistrate in Pithoragarh. But nothing has happened,” he says with regret.
Bhatt says with frustration that if the state is unable to rehabilitate him in another location, he should be allowed to either end his life or be sent back to jail. “The house I am staying in will come apart during the rains in July. Where will I go then?” he asks.
Bhatt sustains himself by cutting or collecting firewood from the forest for other villagers. “I buy rations (wheat flour, rice and vegetables) from the money the villagers pay me for the collection of firewood. I cook food once in a day and eat the same meal two or three times,” he says.
Bhatt was originally given an 18-year jail term for setting his wife and son on fire in October 1999. Three years later the term was increased to a life sentence. He was lodged in different jails at Almora, Haridwar and Sitarganj (Udham Singh Nagar, a district in the plains). He was in Sitarganj when the Uttarakhand government decided to write off his remaining jail term and release him on Aug 15, 2017, India’s Independence Day.
Bhatt has little to say about the crime he committed. He calls it an accident resulting from a fit of rage, and notes that none of his relatives or in-laws ever filed a case against him. “A villager of mine filed the case against me,” he says.
With a saffron robe tied around his head, black tilak (ash mark) on his forehead, flowing grey beard, saffron half-pants and rosary beads dangling around his neck, Bhatt looks like an ascetic. But scratch him a bit and the pain of living alone comes out.
“I wrote to the Pithoragarh district magistrate, the highest administrator in a district, in September last year,” he says. “When he failed to respond I appeared in a janata darbar (public hearing) before him, handed him the application again and asked him to send me back to jail if no compensation was possible.”
District Magistrate C Ravishankar was not available when his office was approached for a comment. His office is believed to have sent Bhatt’s application to a sub-divisional magistrate for further action.
Green People, a non-governmental organisation from Dehradun, the state capital of Uttarakhand, is now trying to provide some help to Bhatt. The NGO is best known for staging an annual swayamvara (groom selection) for a goat to promote goat-rearing as a traditional means of self-sustenance in Himalayan villages.
There are some who believe that the Uttarakhand could use the ruins of Bastadi to lure tourists to Pithoragarh, which is located near the India-Nepal border, and help the local economy.
India, after all, promotes many ghost towns and villages to increase tourist traffic. Famous attractions include Dhanushkodi (Tamil Nadu), Fatehpur Sikri (Uttar Pradesh), Lakhpat (Gujarat), Mandu (Madhya Pradesh), Ross Island (Andaman and Nicobar Islands), Vijay Nagara (Karnataka) and Kuldhara (Rajasthan). These communities were also destroyed during natural calamities in the past and their residents migrated to other places afterward.
“The house I am staying in will come apart during the rains in July. Where will I go then?” PUSHKAR DUTT BHATT