There was nothing inevitable about activist-lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj’s landing in Yerawada jail. But her conscience and outrage about injustices faced by working people, especially among whom she lived and worked in Chhattisgarh, made her interested in other fights; she would envision ways of resisting and challenging the state’s control over the lives and labour of workers.
Shankar Guha Niyogi, one of India’s legendary union leaders who for the first time thought of a wider unity among factory workers and peasants in the ’40s, was a key mentor. Bharadwaj was arrested in 2018 under UAPA along with other activists and academics for allegedly inciting violence in Bhima Koregaon, Maharashtra. She was released on bail by a special NIA Court in 2021.
“The most difficult thing for me is being ‘exiled’ from Chhattisgarh— the arena of 35 years of work, other conditions are more or less standard to most bail orders,” says Bharadwaj to TMS. In her recently released book, Phansi Yard (Juggernaut), she sketches 76 prisoners or groups of prisoners she observed during her time in Yerawada jail.
Excerpts from a conversation on the book and her life:
In the book you talk of how early on, your grandmother asked you not to cause trouble. Clearly you didn’t take that seriously. Was your mother supportive of your choices? Yes, it is, indeed, paradoxical that for me, being a ‘good’ person i.e. being kind, helpful, hardworking or ready to give up personal comfort seemed to naturally lead to a life of joining a trade union and being part of the workers’ struggle to win their rights .... yet it somehow made me ‘bad’ in the eyes of the state! I am very much a follower by nature, not a leader. But the circumstances of Comrade Shankar Guha Niyogi’s assassination, the splits in our organisation, all pushed me into a situation of taking the lead. But I think not being a leader-type also helped, in the sense that my role was always to try to get people to work together even if they disagreed on some things. My mother was initially rather concerned that I had not thought my choices through. Closer to her death, when she saw how, despite all the arguments that economists like her made, the country was adopting neo-liberal policies of privatisation and contractualisation, she began to feel that perhaps my choice was right.
What did your IIT days have to do with renouncing your American citizenship? It was in IIT that I started associating with mess workers and participating in their cultural team. Though that was the polar opposite of what the standard IITian was doing, namely struggling in the cut-throat competition to get good placements and foreign scholarships. My association with workers increased when, along with a group of AIIMS and JNU students, I started working with construction workers and visiting textile mills in Delhi. My decision to give up American nationality came quite naturally when I decided I did not want to go abroad to study or pursue a career, but wanted to work with a union like Comrade Niyogi’s. Being a ‘foreigner’ would have been a handicap for me. So, it wasn’t such a big thing as it is made out to be.
PHOTO: KARIN SCHEIDEGGERNot too many people in today’s generation have heard of Shankar Guha Niyogi. What is his legacy today? Shankar Guha Niyogi believed that there were many sub-nationalities in our vast country, which is more like a subcontinent. A region like Chhattisgarh, rich in mineral resources, had the poorest of people. He believed that the task of the working class of Chhattisgarh was, in solidarity with the farmers, to strive for a democratic Chhattisgarh where the resources would be used to improve the quality of life of common people not just to generate corporate profits; where there would be a balance between agriculture and industry, between humankind and nature. The task of a trade union was not only to raise economic d e - mands but t o touch every aspect of a worker’s life—that is why the Union built schools and a hospital, carried out an effective antialcohol campaign with women at the forefront, and set up a cultural troupe that highlighted the role of Veer Narayan Singh, an Adivasi hero of 1857. A major issue that the Union took up was to creatively suggest a policy of semi-mechanisation as more appropriate in the iron ore mines, so that jobs could be saved and production of quality iron ore enhanced. When Indira Gandhi was assassinated, the Union gave shelter to many Sikh families of the area at its office in Dalli Rajhara. This was an amazing thing because some of the liquor contractors of the town were Sikhs and had threatened Niyogiji’s life more than once. There is so much to learn from him even today
I was struck by the title of the book. Why does a person jailed on charges of UAPA have to spend their time as you did, and Professor Shoma Sen still does, in the death row of a jail? No, there is nothing in the UAPA, which says that we needed to be in the Phansi Yard. In fact, in Byculla we were kept in barracks. It was the decision of the jail administration.
Is solidarity and trust possible in brutal conditions? You can’t survive the isolation and brutality of jail without having some friends. To share your worries, to eat together, to look after you when you are unwell, I was vakeel auntie for many prisoners who would seek advice or ask me to write applications for them. Even now some prisoners write or send messages through their family members requesting help. I try to discuss with their lawyers if they have one, or suggest a lawyer who will not charge them too much or cheat them.
In the book you have written about the law being casteist and patriarchal. The way the police get away with putting members of the Pardhi community or other persons from the denotified criminal tribes behind bars without any evidence, merely on suspicion, means that the judicial system shares the same caste prejudice as the police. The differential manner in which a court looks upon the violence of a woman against her husband, and that of a husband against his wife; the differential attitude towards infidelity of a wife and that of a husband ... this is quite clear from judgments and sentences. Only recently the Supreme Court came out with guidelines to correct stereotypical gender biased language used in judgments.
“Worse than the Emergency” is how many have described the current climate. What is different then and now? One of the organisations in which I am active, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties was formed during the emergency by Jayprakash Narayan. Many people who owe allegiance to the present dispensation—[the late] Arun Jaitley, Arun Shourie, Ravi Shankar Prasad etc. were very active in the PUCL then, in opposing Indira Gandhi’s dictatorship. Strikes and demonstrations were banned, the press was censored and many activists, both left wing and right wing, were thrown behind bars. The judiciary was also under a great deal of pressure. All this was done using the Emergency Provisions wh i c h e x i s t i n t h e Constitution. Today, the way opposition politicians are being targeted by enforcement agencies; the way the press is being hounded; the way the farmers were vilified and barricaded, when they peacefully protested at the Delhi borders is no less than an Emergency, though without any legal declaration. But what is different, and is worrying and frightening is the attack on minorities - the hate speech, mob lynchings, the legitimisation of discrimination. It is tearing the social fabric apart.
