Anda Prison Cell

Freedom of mind is what keeps you going when you are chained and put in prison. A first-person account

- G N Saibaba

OUT of ten years under the draconian jaws of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), I was in a prison within a prison called Anda Cell of Nagpur Central Prison for more than eight-and-half years. That made me taste another kind of unfreedom-slavery, bonded labour, brutality and the anti-human nature of the state.

Freedom for a few is no freedom. This has been my understanding since my school days.

Human nature ordains that one cannot live without freedom. I wonder how other beings perceive unfreedom; we know that indeed animals loathe fenced enclosures, birds hate cages and domesticated pets scorn the air-conditioned heavens. I do know that we humans have a colourful way of imaging the freedom we seek for ourselves, carried from aeons ago, beyond the Magna Carta (1215) that curtailed arbitrary ruling power to say 'rule of law' and 'equality for all'.

But, as always, the pertinent question still looms large in India: Can there be freedom where caste works as the basic principle of governing a society? And social fascism that is the foundation of our social structure. Here, a thousand constitutions enshrining all the best rights in the known human society can never work.

Freedom, liberty and fraternity remain the ideals of Western democracy that never attracted the imagination of our caste-divided society. We have been accustomed to living in a prison-house of castes-oppressor and oppressed imprisoned in the same house for centuries.