The Sahitya Akademi met in Delhi under its president Sunil Gangopadhyay and approved the Sahitya Akademi translation Prize 2008. In the Urdu category Tihar Kay Shab-o-Roz, translation of Iftikhar Gilani's memoir My Days in Prison, was selected for the Shahitya Award.
Iftikhar Gilani, Delhi bureau chief of the Jammu-based daily Kashmir Times, was arrested on June 9, 2002, after a raid by Income Tax officers at his home. He was booked under Sections 3 (spying) and 9 (attempt to abet the commission of offence) of the Official Secrets Act (OSA), read with Section 120-B of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) relating to sedition. The charge was that he had leaked sensitive information about the Indian army to Pakistan. Charges were also brought against him alleging that he had circulated pornographic material.
The charges under the OSA were based on a document found as a text file in Gilani's personal computer. The file, titled `Forces' and running into five pages, contained information about the strength of the troops and paramilitary forces deployed in the operational area of the Northern Command in Jammu and Kashmir. The opinion of the Directorate-General of Military Intelligence (DGMI) was sought and it said on June 14 that the "information ... is prejudicial to the security of the country and has serious ramifications on our operational plans in J&K".
The data were several years old and were part of a publication titled "Denial of Freedom and Human Rights (A Review of Indian Repression in Kashmir)". It was written by Dr. Nazir Kamal and published by the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad, in January 1996.
The paper was available in the libraries of the Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses, the School of International Studies, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Centre for Policy Research and the Indian Council of World Affairs. Gilani's friends and counsel failed to locate a copy, until after his arrest it was obtained from Dr. Shireen M. Mazari, Director-General of the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad.
The DGMI in December 2002 wrote to the Delhi Police that its earlier opinion had over-estimated the sensitivity of the documents. These were easily available in the form of a published booklet, and the DGMI now thought these were of negligible security value.
Simultaneously the Home Ministry forwarded the previous opinion of the DGMI to the Delhi Police and told the court that the government considered the revised opinion irrelevant and untenable. The court noticed the contradiction in the two reports. In January the prosecution quietly filed an application in the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate's court stating that the Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi had decided, in the "public interest", to drop the case against Gilani.
My Days in Prison is a gripping book. It is a first-person account. Gilani, writing like a trained journalist in his crisp, workmanlike English, presents it as a lived experience. The story is about what it actually meant for Gilani: the indignities of a prison system that retains almost nothing of Kiran Bedi's well-meaning reforms. It is a depressing account of unnecessary, unprovoked beatings, harassment, pettiness, dishonesty and, occasionally, organized violence. Some excerpts from the chapter Life in Tihar:
As soon as I entered I heard murmurs from around the desk of the jail official checking the names of the incoming prisoners.
'He has come,' one official said to another. The man went inside. He soon returned and asked me to follow him. He led me to a room adjacent to the jail superintendent's office, called the `under trial office'.
One Assistant Superintendent Kishan was sitting on a chair behind a table. Ten to twelve others were in the room. Some seemed to be jail staff, while others appeared to be inmates. Assistant Superintendent Kishan asked my name. Before I had finished saying it, a Nepali staffer slapped me. It was the signal for a free-for-all. I was kicked from behind, blows rained on my back and someone grabbed my hair and banged my head against the table. Blood started oozing from my mouth. My nose and ears started bleeding too. Accompanying these blows were the choicest abuses.
`Saala, gaddar, Pakistani agent,' they were screaming. `People like you should not be allowed to live. Traitors should be hanged straight away.'"
That was Gilani's initiation in the ways of the Tihar jail, beaten until he fainted. And when he regained consciousness, he was made to clean the jail toilet with his shirt and then wear the soiled shirt for three days.
This book is an important read because the law that made Gilani's imprisonment possible, on such flimsy evidence, still exists. Gilani does not write on self-pity nor on long emotional exposition of his days in prison. He puts his personal ordeal into a wider perspective, aware that he was not alone in his suffering. The last chapter, The Law and its Misuse, is on the OS Act 1923 and its relevant provisions under the Indian Penal Code, a less used legislation, with no safeguard against its misuse.
Gilani's charge sheet consisted of 225 pages, attached photocopy of his telephone diary to show his close connections with the Pakistan High Commission, attached e-mail to the deputy executive editor of the Nation on the arrangement of his, editor's, stay in Agra during the upcoming visit of President Pervez Musharraf as proof of Gilani's Pakistani connection. Details of the bank accounts of Gilani and his wife and other financial transactions were also attached to uphold the amount in the charge sheet when the search in his home found only 3450 rupees.
Gilani calls OSA 1923 "draconian", an expression meaning "excessively harsh" or "severe". Actually, it is worse than that in the way it makes concessions to the prosecution, reducing its burden to prove charges in court, leaving enough loopholes for dishonest officials to pitch completely innocent citizens in jail. The language, as so many have repeatedly pointed out, is wide enough to leave room for frame-ups.
Gilani ends his book with a hope: All conscientious citizens of the country are waiting for this course correction by the government.
In the foreword, Siddharth Vardarajan labels Gilani's story as 'arbitrariness of power' and 'a chronicle of sheer viciousness of Indian state,' a glaring shortfall in the fourth estate towards elimination of injustice; the legal and administrative power of the government's national security apparatus to frame an innocent citizen.
And 'gentle modest man…He has told his story here with the honesty and integrity that are the hallmark of his craft as a journalist.'

Farida Shaikh is a critic and member of The Reading Circle.