Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita are student activists who were arrested in May 2020 in relation to the communal violence in northeast Delhi in February that year. They are both members of Pinjra Tod, a women’s collective working for women’s rights, and doctoral students at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Kalita was arrested in four different first-information reports registered by the Delhi Police, and Narwal was also arrested in three of them. In each FIR, the duo were granted bail with orders that addressed the lack of evidence against them. On 17 June, they were finally released from Delhi’s Tihar Central Jail after securing bail in FIR 59 of 2020, in which they were accused with several other student activists under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.
The Delhi High Court granted them bail in FIR 59 on 15 June. In the judgment, the bench, comprising the judges Anup Bhambhani and Siddharth Mridul, held that the UAPA can only be invoked in exceptional circumstances. It further stated, “We are constrained to express that it seems, that in its anxiety to suppress dissent, in the mind of the State, the line between the constitutionally guaranteed right to protest and terrorist activity seems to be getting somewhat blurred. If this mindset gains traction, it would be a sad day for democracy.”
On 19 June, Nabeela Paniyath, a multimedia editor at The Caravan, spoke to Narwal and Kalita about their year in jail, their journey into activism and their hopes for the future.
Nabeela Paniyath: What was the experience of being incarcerated under the UAPA?
Devangana Kalita: In this regard, one is very thankful to the Delhi High Court. When you talk about what that experience has been, I think that high court order really sets out that experience of the conflation which this case made between the right to protest and terrorism. These kinds of repressive laws, which give extraordinary powers to the state, to the police, they have a long history. They have been happening since the colonial times to suppress dissent—through these forms of extraordinary laws where general principles of justice are kind of overturned.
For instance, usually the principle is that bail is the rule and jail is the exception. But under UAPA what happens is that bail itself becomes an exception, and under this rule, we have seen so many people lose so many years of their lives. The home ministry’s data from 2016 to 2019 tells us that the conviction rate under UAPA is only two percent and during the same period [from 2015] the number of UAPA cases [registered] have increased by 72 percent. We don't know in various jails in India how many such cases exist, how many years, and lives have been lost in these processes.
NP: What was your experience inside the prison? Could you tell us about the condition of your fellow prisoners?
Natasha Narwal: It was a very difficult experience. But what gave us strength was the kind of support we received from communities on the outside as well as inside. The kind of solidarity we formed, and the kind of love and support and care we received from all other inmates who were incarcerated under various charges. Also from the struggles in history, of so many women who have struggled against oppressive structures of caste, class, gender and oppression, and faced different kinds of repression. So many people have gone to prisons under such laws for raising their voices, for struggling for the rights of marginalised communities, for the attempts to make a more just society. Even those who have not gone to prison itself, but have faced custodial tortures, sexual violence. So drawing inspiration from all those struggles, I think that was something which we really held dear in our experience of this one year in jail.
One also realises that, of course, you theoretically know what incarceration is, what it means. But to live that reality every day, to see what it does to a person’s life—the whole system of putting people behind bars is almost like snatching away all their rights. Your very basic human rights are just snatched away, and you are rendered completely powerless, and helpless. You do not even have the right to raise your voice or demand anything. So, seemingly very small things, things we take for-granted become the biggest issues in our life. Having the ability to make a daily phone call to your family members for five minutes in jail is such a complicated and long process, to get access to that. Or to get access to adequate food, quantities of food, or your right to education, or your right to health. It just completely renders you almost like you're not even considered a human being anymore.
We were at least in that sense lucky that we had so much social support, the kind of families that we come from, the kind of political representation we could get. But so many people are languishing in jails without these kinds of support and they have absolutely no hope of escaping that system and don't even understand the whole system. What is being done to their lives; what are the charges; what are the cases; the papers they are made to sign every day, or put thumb impressions on, what does that even mean; what do the sections put on them even mean. In the women’s prison, there were small children also with so many women, they had nobody else to take care of them so they had to bring them inside. There are so many children who have never seen the outside world.
NP: How did prison life change your perspective on activism?
DK: It’s only been 48 hours or maybe not even that since we have been out, so it is a question that will take some time to register. Once you actually overcome the most difficult parts of prison life in the beginning and adjust somewhat, the struggles also continued inside. So many of the things Natasha mentioned earlier, just kind of struggling for those things, and even things like organising International Working Women’s Day inside jail, putting a play together with inmates there.
[After prison life,] you know what is this criminal justice system, what is the prison system, and how the prison system really needs desperate and urgent reforms. You know it is times of corona, it is a pandemic, [and yet] the courts aren't functioning, trials are still pending—and yes there has been welcome measures where people have been released from prisons and prisons are slightly less overcrowded—but the pandemic of arrests, as some people call it, still continues. These are some new questions which we must introduce into our struggles, think about in our struggles. Especially as women’s-rights activists, we have also struggled for many laws, within that framework [we must also start] to also think about what is prison. But there are also some complex questions I guess which will take us time.
NN: The fundamental right to protest or any collective action completely gets suspended [inside prison], so how do you struggle, and what forms does that take, is also a learning.
NP: During difficult times, what were the moments of hope you had, and did you ever feel hopeless toward the system?
DK: There were many moments of hopelessness, especially because of the uncertainty that surrounds when you get charged under such a stringent law. When the newspapers finally started coming to jail, and you read about the ten years, 15 years, which young Muslim men, Dalits or Adivasis, various people have lost under these stringent laws, you know that you have to mentally prepare for that kind of a stretch.
That uncertainty was very difficult, and I think one the things which really helped us was the fact that three of us were together—Natasha, I, Gulshifa [Fatima]—we stayed in the same barracks. So someday someone is crying, another day another is crying, but we were there to hold each other, to sing those songs that we have. People would be very intrigued about those songs, we would sing “Hum Dekhenge” [referring to the popular Urdu poem by the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz] in jail, and people would be like sing that song. It was also the communities and that kind of support structure that you build with other inmates, inmates who have themselves participated in those protests, and when they came, they gave you the strength to say don’t lose hope, we are with you.
NP: When you first got arrested, did you think that the battle was going to be this long?
NN: We felt that it was going to be longer. These laws are made for that very purpose, to keep people in jail for a very, very long time without even trials started let alone ending. People have lost many years of their lives under these laws, without getting any relief. In some sense, the battle is still going on because there are so many people behind bars who have been incarcerated for raising their voices, and till all of them are out, the battle will still continue and this freedom will be incomplete.
NP: You wrote letters from prison to members of Pinjra Tod, in which you mentioned reading sessions inside jail. Could you talk more about it?
NN: Unfortunately that was not a very constant practice we could do. It was only at some moments we could do that. Because in prison, your day is filled up with a lot of work, especially so many who do not have financial support from the family, they have to support themselves, and their children and their families outside from the mere wages they get inside. So, for most of the day, people stay very busy in their work. On some days, on some holidays or at some point in the night when the people would want to unwind, our friends had sent us some books and illustrations, [and we would have reading sessions of those].
This one reading session which we also mention about in our letter, a friend had sent us an illustrated book of Sultana’s Dream [a feminist story written by the Bengali writer and political activist Begum Rokeya, published in 1905]. There were also some barrack mates who were just beginning to write, so we thought that we should share this story with them. So we had a reading session about that, from that book, from the illustrations, sharing the historical struggles of women like Begum, Savitribai [Phule] and Fatima Sheikh [who were both educationists and anti-caste social reformers], and what struggles had been for women’s education against caste oppression. Everyone was very intrigued and interested in that. Some friends had also sent us a poster of Savitribai and Fatima Sheikh, so we have put that in our barracks. Sometimes people who would come to our barrack, would ask about them—that who are they, what poster is this—then one would end up sharing stories about them.
DK: There was one inmate who was very inspired it, and she was like, “Can I just look at this and draw this?” So on Savitribai’s birthday, she drew that, in a really beautiful way to put in the library. Then even during Women’s Day, we did a play together where these historical characters were there, and people felt really inspired to play those roles—[they would say] that “I played Savitribai”; “I played Jhalkaribai,” [a freedom fighter]; “I played the queen of Jhansi.” A lot of the people were a part of the play, so at night they would practice their lines and would sing the songs.
NN: From one barrack you would hear dialogues of Fatima Sheikh, from another barrack you would hear a dialogue delivered by Jhalkaribai. The nights would be filled by the echoes of those songs across barracks, which was so beautiful.
DK: On some nights those locks seemed a little less heavy.
NP: In your letters, you had mentioned prison is an extension of the oppression that exists in the outside world. Can you elaborate on the social background of people in prison? Do you think marginalised communities are more vulnerable to the system?
DK: It is generally jurisprudence that bail should be the rule, and jail is an exception. This so-called exceptional condition that people find themselves in jail—[they are] mostly people from the minority and marginalised communities, who cannot afford proper legal aid to actually be able to get out of jail. Most of these people have to depend on the government legal aid system which is painfully and tremendously slow. In fact, just to get access to the court websites inside the legal-aid room, when Natasha use to work in jail, you actually have to approach the Delhi High Court that “Please, at least in the legal aid room give access to the court website, and court orders so that inmates don't have to constantly just put their thumbs on papers that they don't know, but can print or have access to this information which other people can explain to them.”
So, it is definitely a system that incarcerates the most marginalised, the minority community, Muslims, Dalits, Adivasis, and this is also lived out in the figures of the National Crime Bureau itself. Also, the way it is imagined, things like education are supposed to be an important part of what the prison is supposed to be about. But in prison, it’s mostly like people are just supposed to slog, and the prison system runs on the labour of people who work inside, who cook the food, who clean the wards. They earn that money to survive inside the prison and also send out money to their families to their co-inmates in the men’s prison, and in wages which are very low.
NN: [They are] not even entitled to a minimum wage. So many women will be working throughout the day and would earn like maybe maximum Rs 3,000–4,000 a month.
DK: You cut vegetables for the whole prison for like 10–12 hours—earlier you used to get Rs 800 for the whole month and after a revision of wages you get around Rs 3,500. Cutting vegetables for 500 women in the prison.
NP: The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us the huge inequality that exists in the country. In your letters, you have written about how the suicide of Aishwarya Reddy, a second-year student of the Lady Shri Ram College, hit you hard. Do you think that the fight for equality is getting longer?
NN: The pandemic has really exposed the fault-lines in our society, be it the health infrastructure, or the food-ration system, or how just before our arrest we saw this huge exodus of migrant workers who were completely, suddenly deprived of all their livelihood. The struggles have, in the past two to three years, just been increasing and putting more and more people on the margins. This struggle for life and for basic livelihood has become so much more difficult and intensified in these times. When we were in prison, we would get all the news—and forget about protesting or raising your voice against government policies, but even [hospitals] who would just [alert people] about the lack of oxygen, there were cases being put on them. The system has become so much more fragile, not just to criticism, but—
DK: An expression of helplessness
NN: Yes, an expression of what is the reality today and the urge to suppress the truth which everyone knows. It has become so much more in these times that it has really increased the struggle for survival, and all other kinds of struggles today.
DK: And because you mentioned Aishwarya as well, over the past few years, there has been a long history of the struggle of the student movement with regards to access to education, from say Rohith [Vemula] to Aishwarya—how they have become dispensable in this system, and in this struggle for an education which is accessible, affordable, and available to all marginalised castes, and to women. Now with the pandemic, in which the universities are remaining closed, [it raises] the very question of how to access education for marginalised communities. This long struggle that started with Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh, the fact that even our colleagues in the university have not had access to libraries. And online classes—we know how many people can access online classes.
NN: In that way I think the suicide of Aishwarya really brought to the fore all these things very painfully, as to who can access education in these times and what that means for people who are from the marginalised community already. Access to education also becomes a means to escape certain forms of oppression, and build a life different from what you’ve lived. And those possibilities are also crushed due to the current policies of the government. Again, any kind of protest around any of these things gets criminalised. So [with] all these things combined together, the struggles have become much more difficult, but all the more important.
NP: How did your journey of activism begin?
NN: I think for me the kind of family background I came from, especially through my father, I got introduced to a lot of these things from childhood. He was a part of a lot of these struggles and during the Emergency he was put behind bars and he spent a lot of time in jail. I have grown up with those kinds of stories, and that kind of exposure, and an understanding of how this society is based on an unjust system.
I was participating in a lot of struggles which were happening around me at that time, but on my own, it was only when I came to Delhi to pursue higher education and I also got exposed to a lot of struggles which were happening in university itself for so many things—linked again to access to education and who can get education in this country, what is the fee structure like, who can get accommodation, what does that look like, what kind of education is possible for whom. And then, gradually, what kind of issues do women students face inside a university and how university itself is built around so many discriminatory forms which puts so many fetters and cages on the bodies of especially women students. So I think those kinds of lived experiences—and also the kind of education one was getting—through that, one was also understanding more and more about how different institutions of power function, and [how] to link both aspects.
What we were studying fed into our struggles and our struggles fed into our studying. Be it against high fees, right to accommodation for everyone, against hostel curfews, against sexual harassment within university. So one got involved with various kinds of issues as a student and one also realised that all these struggles are very intrinsically linked with other struggles which are going on in society. So even as a woman, as a student, your struggle is not just limited to the university but is linked to various others—for rights and against all kinds of oppression, be it of gender, caste, class.
DK: It’s been a long involvement over the last decade to slowly learn and better understand how structures of oppression operate in society—to also think about how the women’s movement and women’s liberation is so intricately connected to all the struggles that happen against structures of power such as caste, class, race, how everything is interconnected and how no one is free when others are not free. So in that sense, it is through various movements, and learning and participating in them that this journey continued. To understand how these cages operate in so many ways, how you are implicated in them and how you also together try to fight them. And what can this breaking of cages look like even when you are put in a very visceral physical cage.
NP: Do you think your arrest and imprisonment and that of other student activists was an attempt is to crush dissent among students?
DK: Yes, it’s definitely an attempt to suppress the voices of students because the student movement had been quite strong over the last many years as well. But also in the CAA-NRC movement, it is very specifically to crush the voices of the dissent that came out of the Muslim community by Muslim women, and by the whole community itself. If you look at the nature of the arrests, it is overwhelmingly clear which community is being targeted in the repression that followed this movement. It is almost as if you’re not allowed to raise your voice—this community is not allowed to raise their voice. And if you protest, this is what [is going to happen]. It is like, how dare you protest? This has happened for many years under various governments, which under this government has intensified in an absolutely morbid form.
NP: You have been incredibly strong through this long, hard battle. How do you maintain your strength and conviction?
NN: If we were strong, it was not a matter of individual courage and strength. What made us strong was the collective struggle throughout history of so many people, of so many women, or other people from so many various marginalised backgrounds, and against various forms of oppression, which gave us this strength. There would be various nights of hopelessness, of breaking of strength and courage. But that is the one thing that really gave us our strength back—that we were not alone in this battle, that so many people before us and so many are still fighting this and we are not alone. In some ways, we have not yet met those people, but just to know their struggles gave us the strength, and the sense of collectiveness and connection with them.
DK: So no matter how many locks and walls and doors they put to enclose us, there was still that sense of connectedness with various struggles throughout history—and struggles which are contemporarily happening. I think one of our most anticipating moments in prison was when the newspapers would come and they would report about the struggles which are currently happening on the Delhi borders.
NN: So we would also draw all our courage, our strength, our hopes from all those struggles.
This interview has been edited and condensed.