UP Govt move honours criminals by default

Vijay Upadhyay

Etah. With Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav announcing a monthly pension of Rs 500 to the detainees of Maintenance of India Security Act (MISA) and Defence India Rules (DIR) during the Emergency in 1975, the Etah prison administration is stuck with a strange problem.

Working head over heels, digging out the names of the actual political detainees out of the termite-infested lists of hundreds of prisoners who were imprisoned during the 1975-1977 period, the prison officials have come across the names of a number of detainees, whose names feature in the Etah jail's list of detainees under MISA and DIR, but they had also been charged under a number of heinous crimes including armed robbery, murders, kidnapping and possession of illegal weapons creating a dilemma before the jail officials, who are finding it difficult to categorise over 100 of these prisoners as mere "political detainees".

Talking to The Pioneer, Karey Singh, Jailor, Etah district jail said that as the political detainees of that period were to receive their first pension from the UP government on September 9, the prison administration had prepared a initial list of 180 detainees of MISA and DIR who had been imprisoned in the Etah jail during Emergency, which had been sent to the State Government, while more names were still being recovered from the jail records of 1975-1977, a large section of which, had been destroyed by termites.

He said that during the perusal of these records, it was found that a number of these so-called political prisoners had been charged under heinous crimes like murder and dacoity and later on, they were charged with MISA or DIR while they were in prison and now they are claiming that they should be included in the list of Emergency political detainees.

Citing some examples from a long list of criminals, he said that Virendra Kumar of Marhara in Etah had been charged with at least 15 charges of dacoity, murder, kidnapping and possession of illegal arms when he arrived in the prison on 27 July 1976, on 20 October 1977, he was charged with MISA and was released from the charge on 23 March 1977.

Similarly, Jagvir Singh of Marhara had arrived in the jail on 20 May, 1976 charged with a host of crimes including murder, dacoity and kidnappings and he was charged with MISA on 13 Oct. 1976 while he was in the jail.

Another detainee Prem Narayan Upadhyaya of Soron in Etah had arrived in jail in a murder case on 2 July 1975 and was charged with MISA and DIR on 9 Feb 1976 and he too, had been in jail during the period.

Initially, he said, the names of these detainees were left out from the list prepared by the jail administration and only the names of 103 detainees were sent to the government but later, the names of these left-out people were forwarded to the jail again by the district administration and in the second list, another 77 MISA detainees were listed as the emergency prisoners without any prejudice to their criminal background and the fact that they had already been in jail during that period.

According to Singh, there were over 80 detainees who had been charged with MISA, not for their political affinities but due to their crimes and had now been included in the list of MISA detainees, in a mad scramble to become the "modern freedom fighters" of post-emergency India after spending their lives in crime. A number of these people included in the list were already dead, he said, some even prosecuted for their crimes years back and now, they could be "rewarded" for their crimes as the jail administration was finding itself unable to differentiate between political and criminal detainees of MISA under the present circumstances.