Indian jails: Prisoners of the caste system

In December 2020, as the world grappled with unequal access to Covid-19 vaccines, another form of inequality was exposed inside India’s prisons.

- Ashish Bharadwaj

A journalist, Sukanya Shantha, reported how caste, outlawed by the Constitution, still dictated every aspect of prison life — who scrubbed floors and cleaned toilets, who ate first, and who slept in which barracks.

Upper-caste prisoners were given better-quality food while lower-caste prisoners received inferior meals. Members of de-notified tribes were branded “habitual offenders”, punished more harshly, and denied basic rights. Prison registers listed caste as a matter of record, and manuals sanctioned segregation and menial labor. The West Bengal prison manual specified that prisoners assigned sweeping duties should come from the “Mehtar, Harijan, Chandal, or similar castes”. These practices were rooted in the disgraceful Prisons Act of 1894 that treated caste not as a vanishing social relic but as an administrative category. As recorded in an 1861-62 report by the British administration on Lucknow Central Jail, only Brahmin inmates were allowed to bathe before their meals that were served in a segregated area, which others were not allowed to access. At that time, segregation was not pilloried as antithetical to reformation. It ended up fostering animosity.