This landmark ruling can be traced back to the hard work of Shantha, an award winning journalist with 15 years of experience in human-rights and law, who came out with an in-depth report,’From Segregation to Labour, Manu’s Caste Law Governs the Indian Prison System’, in December 2020 in TheWire about how manual scavenging is assigned to the inmates coming from backward castes.
During her reporting trips to prisons across eight states, Shantha said she realised the hostile conditions of prisoners who were discriminated against on the basis of their castes.
While she started out with prison manuals of just 11 states, people started trusting her and came out to share their testimonies and give her access to prison manuals from more states.
Two months after her story got published, in February 2021, the Jodhpur bench of the Rajasthan High Court decided to do away with all the discriminatory laws in the prison rules of the state.
“I realised that this story definitely has the capacity to bring in change. But I couldn’t go to different high courts, so I decided to file a petition,” Shantha told ThePrint.
She then filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court with the help of her lawyer Disha Wadekar to draw its attention to the caste-based discrimination in prisons.
After four years of juggling between prisons and court, the top court ordered all states and Union Territories “to revise their Prison Manuals/Rules in accordance with this judgement within a period of three months”.
“The food that he [prisoner] eats, the clothes that he wears, the labour that he does, the space that he can actually access to sleep or to stay, all of it is written in the prison manual, but this manual is not accessible to prisoners. They don’t want the prisoner to know their rights,” Shantha told ThePrint, adding that during her reporting she was made aware about the hostile conditions that the prisoners of Dalit, Adivasi and OBC caste backgrounds lived in.
“In this case, the change is waiting to happen. It was like a low hanging fruit. These are unconstitutional rules that are existing in our prison manual and it needs to go. So, we just thought somewhere if there is something that can be done, I would want to push myself into an uncomfortable situation and just make it happen,” she noted.
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The petition
In one of the letters that she received during her work, a Muslim prisoner narrated how a Dalit prisoner was made to clean his toilet by putting his hand into the toilet inside his solitary confinement, on a daily basis.
“Muslims are treated badly but not so badly when it comes to the understanding of caste. So, they thought that a Dalit man could actually do it (cleaning of toilets),” said Shantha, explaining that she later submitted his testimony to the court along with many other similar stories.
The petition filed by Shatha brought into daylight the prevalence of caste-based discrimination in jails across India that was encouraged by their prison manuals. Many prison manuals that she had access to during her reporting, laid down that prison work should be allotted on the basis of caste, with cooking reserved for dominant castes and sweeping for specific castes, Shantha said.
Moreover, the plea, that challenged provisions in state prison manuals alleging they violate Articles 14, 15, 17 (right to equality), 21 (right to freedom), and 23 (right against exploitation) of the Constitution, noted that Kerala Prison Rules mention a distinction between “habitual offenders” and re-convicted individuals, calling for those regularly committing offences like robbery, housebreaking, or theft to be classified and separated from other convicts.
“This petition is filed in public interest under Article 32 (right to constitutional remedies) of the Constitution to bring to the attention of this court the continued existence and enforcement of rules and practices under various state prison manuals that are manifestly grounded in and reinforce caste-based discrimination,” the plea reads.
In January, the SC had sought responses from the Centre and 11 states, including Uttar Pradesh, in connection with the plea.
Shantha said that during the process she found out about the segregation of prisoners on the basis of caste. For instance, she said, in Tamil Nadu, there were prisons where prisoners were assigned barracks according to their caste.
Last year, said Shantha, a group of anti-caste activists belonging to the Dalit caste, who were staging a dharna by stripping themselves over a caste reservation issue, were arrested and jailed for a month in Chhattisgarh. “They were made to sweep the floors and clean the toilets. These were educated activists protesting for their rights,” she highlighted.
Shantha said that the general understanding about prisons is that when “bad people” are in prisons, the people outside remain safe. But who are the people in prison, she questioned.
“Out of the total prison population at any given point in time, National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data says that by the end of the year, 4.5 to 5 lakh people remain in prison while the capacity of prisons is less than 3 lakhs. 70 percent of those prisoners belong to the Adivasi and Bahujan community,” she noted.
“Out of those castes, only marginalised communities end up in prison. And out of those who are going to prison, 80 percent of prisoners are extremely poor people and at the bottom of the caste hierarchy. And if you look at the conviction rate, even 20 percent are not convicted.”
‘A long journey’
After the verdict, Shantha said that now the case will be called ‘Discrimination in prisons’.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court banned caste-based discrimination regarding the division of manual labour, segregation of barracks and bias against prisoners of denotified tribes and “habitual offenders”.
It further ruled that caste-based discrimination in prisons violates Article 15 of the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth.
“The right to live with dignity extends even to the incarcerated. Not providing dignity to prisoners is a relic of the colonisers and pre-colonial mechanisms, where oppressive systems were designed to dehumanise and degrade those under the control of the state,” three-judge bench presided by Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud said.
“They are to be treated humanely and without cruelty. Police officers and prison officials cannot take any disproportionate measures against prisoners. The prison system must be considerate of the physical and mental health of prisoners.”
The SC bench further directed that the “caste” column and any references to the caste of jailed undertrials or convicted prisoners’ registers inside the jails be “deleted”.
It also asked the District Legal Services Authorities and the Board of Visitors formed under the Model Prison Manual, 2016 to jointly conduct regular inspections to identify whether caste-based discrimination or similar discriminatory practices, as highlighted in this judgement, are still taking place inside prisons and a status report be submitted to it.
Shantha spoke about the perils of the caste system on people at large in the society.
“You can be anybody but inside you are a Dalit. Caste system destroys equality before law and protection of law,” she elaborated, adding that there is a need for regular monitoring.
In an ideal situation, the journalist hailing from Mangalore said, that “the SC shouldn’t have to say that caste practices are unconstitutional in 2024 but still, it is a long journey”.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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