Kobad Ghandy - Fractured Freedom - A Prison Memoir

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FORTHCOMING TITLE

Lotus Collection

Kobad Ghandy, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher.

First published in 2021

The Lotus Collection

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Photographs courtesy : Kobad Ghandy

Cover Design : Pallavi Agarwala

Layout Design : Bhagirath Kumar

Production : Lavinia Rao

eISBN: 978-81-949691-6-7

Typeset in ITC Galliard Std by Roli Books Pvt. Ltd

Printed at Saurabh Printers Pvt. Ltd., India

This book is dedicated to my late wife Anuradha, fondly called Anu, in whom I saw all that was good in society. Her commitment to truth and justice and her idealism could dispel the darkness of a benighted world. Anus courage of conviction, simplicity, straightforwardness, her intelligence and honesty, made her the ideal social activist.

Contents

Preface

17 September 2009. A day I shall never forget. It was four in the afternoon when I was standing at a bus stop below Bhikaji Cama Place in Delhi. I had gone to the bustling business district with a friend to purchase computer material. I was waiting at the bus stop for a few minutes when a SUV pulled up and about half a dozen toughs pounced on me, pushing me to the ground as I struggled to free myself. They seized everything on me, dragged me into their car and sped away.

Little did I know that this marked the beginning of a ten-year-long journey, as an undertrial, through seven jails in five states across the country. I was sixty-two years old and had come to Delhi from Mumbai for urgent medical attention, for a serious prostrate/urinary problem, as well as orthopaedic and hypertension issues.

The abduction was in fact an arrest. The charge? That I was a member of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), with the media widely propagating that I was supposedly one of its top leaders. This needs to be put in context, as, at that time, the Maoist sweep was being referred to as the Red Corridor, stretching from Nepal (the bulk of which was under Maoist control) and West Bengal (the famous Lalgarh movement) in the north and east, down to Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh (and two districts of Maharashtra), Andhra Pradesh/Telangana, Karnataka, and finally the tri-junction of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. It then, (though no longer) comprised a huge swathe of the country making the government nervous. Together with this, the entire Northeast and Kashmir were in ferment. At that time nearly half the country and the bulk of Nepal was being swept by upheaval and insurgencies.

What then is this dangerous party, of which merely being a member invites a life sentence, and even bail is not possible? The Maoist party belonged to that trend of communism which was initiated by the Naxalbari Uprising in 1967 in West Bengal. It distinguished itself from the parliamentary Left by its belief in armed agrarian revolution and adoption of the Chinese model. It was then called the Communist Party of India (MarxistLeninist), but by 1972 it had been decimated in its place of origin, West Bengal. Later, it revived in many parts of the country, particularly Andhra Pradesh and Bihar under the respective banners of the PWG (Peoples War Group) and the MCC (Maoist Communist Centre). Later, in 2004, these (together with some others) merged to form the CPI (Maoist). The then prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had defined this party as the single greatest threat to internal security, more so than the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalists. Though the party was only put on the banned list in June 2009, its separate constituents, PWG and MCC, had been banned much earlier, together with many of their purported front organizations. Besides which, various state governments had banned them at different times. About that time the government had unleashed the horrific Salwa Judum in Bastar where villages were burnt, houses destroyed, women raped and youth disappeared, which was finally disbanded under instructions from the Supreme Court.