An Imprisoned Mind | Mental Health Challenges Among India's Political Prisoners

But, because I tried to extend your liberties,
Mine were curtailed.
Because I tried to rear the temple of freedom for you all,
I was thrown into the cell of a felon’s jail…
Because I tried to give voice to truth,
I was condemned to silence…
You may say this is not a public question.
But it is!

-Ernest Charles Jones

Books line the walls of the serene room up to its ceiling. At the top of the shelves, a couple of hand-drawn sketches rest. With a small but resolute smile, the professor looks down at us from the frames. The artist has done a remarkable job of capturing the kindness in his eyes. It is impossible to imagine what those eyes saw in the lifeless, egg-shaped cell in Nagpur Central Jail for nearly a decade. “Sitting in a broken wheelchair, unable to move even to drink a glass of water, he would listen to the Adivasi prisoners scream for hours, while they were mercilessly beaten in the cells beside his,” says AS Vasantha Kumari, Dr GN Saibaba’s partner.

As her hands vacantly flip through a book, quiet tears roll down her face, while recounting the last few months she spent with him. “There was hardly any time that we got to spend as a family,” she says. “After his release from prison, we were just rushing from one hospital to another, looking into the treatment of all his ailments. The three of us did not even get to go together anywhere.” Dr Saibaba—an assistant professor of English at Ram Lal Anand College, Delhi University, who was arrested near his home in Delhi on May 14, 2014 on charges of alleged Maoist links—had been released after more than eight and a half years in prison with 19 new ailments. His death on October 12, 2024, has been attributed to the severe medical negligence that he faced during his prolonged incarceration.

The blatant disregard for his condition began right from the day of his arrest. “He was abducted by the Maharashtra police and dragged away in his car, when he was returning from an evaluation centre to the warden quarters at Gwyer Hall, North Campus. In the process, his wheelchair was damaged and left arm was severely injured,” Vasantha says. “He was flown from Delhi to Nagpur within hours. On the airport, some officials came up to him and said, ‘You can return to your wife and daughter and continue with your job. You just need to stop your activism on Operation Greenhunt.’ They gave him a blank sheet of paper to sign, but he refused.” In the next 5-6 hours, he was taken around in a police van and not allowed to eat, drink or urinate. His medicines were also not administered to him. “The police treated him like a terror leader. For his production at the Gadchiroli trial court, they engaged an entire convoy of vehicles, complete with anti-mine equipment! Greyhound teams accompanied him as escort,” she says with a wry smile. “The media was already given a picture that a dreaded criminal was being produced in court. Doesn’t this count as mental harassment?”

Even though Saibaba mentioned his brutal manhandling before the Magistrate, he was remanded to police custody without a conversation. After being transported to Nagpur Central Jail, he was left in the Anda cell without any help for 3-4 days. “Since his wheelchair was broken, he could not move around the cell for water or food. There was no bed, so he could not get off his wheelchair to lie down. The commode in the cell was Indian style and no one was assigned to assist him,” says Vasantha. It was only after fellow prisoners protested and appealed to the jail authorities to let them assist him that he was able to attend to bare necessities.

During the course of his incarceration, Saibaba would encounter such humiliation repeatedly. When the COVID pandemic began in 2020, he was neither allowed contact with his family nor with his lawyers. It was when he sat on a hunger strike for 10 days that he could finally talk to them. Books and letters were forbidden to enter the jail in his mother tongue, Telugu. Even during the jaali mulaqat with Vasantha, they were initially ordered to speak either in English or Hindi. When Vasantha protested, she was eventually permitted to talk in Telugu but he was to respond only in the former two languages. In 2022, Saibaba sat on another hunger strike, to protest the installation of a CCTV camera inside his cell. The idea that prison authorities would be privy to his most vulnerable chores like using the washroom was outrageous for him.

While facing his own challenges, the distress of fellow prisoners also tormented him. He witnessed several inmates dying of COVID without any treatment. Their bodies would hurriedly be burnt, without a trace in any medical records. “Upon his release, Sai said that the way human spirit is crushed can be witnessed firsthand in a prison. He believed that jail is just a unit—a sample of the atrocities carried out against the marginalised in the society. Seeing the way Adivasi prisoners around him were treated made him feel helpless. It was as torturous for him as his own physical condition.”

In the context of Indian prisons, where the incarcerated are robbed of basic human dignity, conversations about mental health are a formidable challenge. “The system is simply not designed to acknowledge or address the emotional and mental toll of imprisonment,” says Sidhique Kappan, a journalist from Kerala, who was arrested on October 5, 2020 by the Uttar Pradesh Police on his way to Hathras, to cover the rape of a young Dalit woman by upper caste men, and her subsequent death. While the initial charges against Kappan were minor bailable offences, charges under sedition and the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act were eventually invoked—in which bail is immensely difficult to secure.

Post his arrest, Kappan was kept in both Mathura jail and Lucknow district jail for fourteen months each. “My incarceration during the pandemic was harsh beyond what an ordinary person could imagine,” says Kappan. “Both Mathura and Lucknow prisons were severely overcrowded, with inmates far exceeding their sanctioned capacity. Though both were in the same state and shared similar weather conditions, daily life inside them was relentlessly difficult.”  He explains that basic facilities in these jails were grossly inadequate. “In some wards, only two toilets were available for over 150 inmates. Even simple routines like bathing or using the restroom became daily struggles. The cells were crammed with prisoners, offering almost no personal space. Social distancing—crucial during COVID—was impossible.”

When asked about the medical provisions in these prisons, Kappan states that the facilities existed only in name. “Most illnesses—regardless of their severity—were treated with a few generic tablets, often without any proper diagnosis.” He recalls how no regular doctors were available on call in the jails. In such circumstances, the question of psychiatrists didn’t even arise. “Mental health care was completely absent. There were no counselling sessions, and no conversation at all about psychological well-being.” This acute dearth consequently meant that several prisoners were left to suffer in silence without any psychiatric evaluation or treatment. “I witnessed several inmates clearly suffering from mental illness. It was deeply disturbing. Many of them were disoriented, and some didn’t even know the charges under which they were being held. It was a glaring failure of both compassion and law,” says Kappan.

This dehumanisation defines the very structure of the prison. Describing the way in which the cells are built, he says, “The architecture was basic and punitive. Many cells had open top walls, allowing extreme heat in the summer and severe cold in the winter to pour in. There was no proper ventilation or insulation. Warm clothing wasn’t provided to all inmates during winter, and there was no escape from the heat in summer.” Drawing a resemblance between jail cells and military barracks, Kappan states, “The large halls and overcrowded cells were meant to hold as many people as possible, with no regard for dignity, privacy, or rehabilitation. The design reflected a purely custodial mindset.”

The impact of the prison architecture on the mental health of prisoners is also brought up by Gautam Navlakha, a septuagenarian human rights defender and journalist, who was arrested in the now infamous ‘Bhima Koregaon’ (BK 16) case—where 16 activists, lawyers and teachers were charged with incitement to riots at Koregaon Bhima in January 2018, following the “Elgar Parishad’ conclave that they participated in on December 31, 2017 at Pune. Initially with the Pune police, the case was transferred to the National Investigative Agency in January 2020. Navlakha—who had earlier been placed under house arrest briefly in 2018—was ordered to surrender to the NIA in April 2020 following this transfer, and was held in judicial custody at the Taloja Jail in Mumbai.

“Taloja was very special. It’s a modern jail, built in the 2000s,” says Navlakha. “What stood apart with Taloja was that it had beautiful surroundings—with a hill flanking the jail and greenery all around. But that was outside, from a distance,” he describes. “Inside, the cells were like cement blocks, where you didn’t have windows. You had open-grilled fronts, with a door that remained locked, until bandi opened. There is not a blade of grass, or greenery, anywhere inside.” Navlakha considers himself lucky for being placed in the ‘police barrack’ on the first floor in the circle, which housed police personnel, charged with various offenses. “Given my BK 16 connection, the prison authorities thought it wiser to place me among them. The good part about it was that from my grilled window, I could see the hill, the greenery and the sky. Otherwise, you could barely see the sky. You hardly got any sun and longed for it. And fresh air.” His eyes still seem to remember the deep yearning for these basic, almost banal necessities that are taken for granted by those of us who exist on the other side of the prison bars. “Your eyes craved to see something green—it was only when we were brought out of the ward that we saw the open expanse of green fields, trees and birds. So, on every occasion you could, you’d try to get out of the ward in order to at least breathe in some fresh air, walk more freely and enjoy the sun and the breeze.” Navlakha categorically states that there should be no confusion about the purpose of a jail, especially in a country where more than 75 percent of prisoners are undertrials. “It is to impose such conditions on the inmate quite deliberately and purposefully. There’s no other explanation as to why, despite being in the 21^st century, we should still be talking about horrible jail conditions and the plight of the inmates.”

Jenny Rowena, partner of another BK 16 undertrial prisoner Prof Hany Babu, shares Navlakha’s views on what incarceration robs from an individual. Babu, who is also lodged in Taloja Central jail, completed five years of incarceration as an undertrial this July. Through his interactions with Rowena, he has revealed how the environment for mental stability remains a distant dream in prison. “Being in a forced enclosed space that is deeply unhygienic, for years on end, can seriously affect a person’s ability to think. For an academic like Babu, the absence of silence and solitude pinches the most, owing to the overcrowded condition of the cells,” she says. “The lights are on 24x7 for surveillance, so darkness is never available. The television is always loud, so the noise doesn’t die down.” Rowena believes that though political prisoners like Babu do not have basic facilities like the internet to carry out any research and rely on outsiders for sources, they are still better off than regular prisoners. “They still have some outlets for themselves—Babu focuses on reading and writing, interrogating the prison structure and engaging in the legal affairs of fellow prisoners to help them out with their applications. But most other prisoners do not have this access.”

Like Kappan, Babu has also witnessed a lot of prisoners being incarcerated because they have mental health issues. “In another situation, they would have undergone evaluation; instead, they’re criminalised. Babu tells me about prisoners he has come across, who are not conscious of why they are in jail—they’re merely seen as bad people and are subjected to repeated assault. He is familiar with one such individual, who keeps writing the same thing over and over in a small notebook,” she says. “The problem is, how does one talk about mental health, when dire material needs such as money for bail or legal advocacy remain unmet? While there is a lack of counsellors on the inside, no one is interested in engaging with these issues on the outside.”

Hem Mishra, a co-accused in the alleged Maoist links-case with Prof Saibaba, concurs on this pertinent crisis in jail. Mishra, like Saibaba, was also abducted by plainclothes men in 2013 in Balharshah and assaulted repeatedly while being blindfolded. For three days, there was no trace of him as he was subjected to intense torture for a forced confession. During the ten years of his incarceration, Mishra was held in four jails across Maharashtra—Nagpur, Amaravati, Nasik and Kolhapur. “According to the prison manual, jails should have one doctor for 300 prisoners and one psychiatrist for 600 prisoners. Female doctors should be present for female prisoners. However, in Kolhapur Central Jail, where I served my final time, one doctor was present for 2200 to 2300 prisoners,” Mishra says. There was no trace of a psychiatrist on call. “They had a separate barrack at Kolhapur, where they housed prisoners with mental illnesses. There was no evaluation for keeping anyone there—it was done on face-value. A psychiatrist would visit sometimes, give some medication, and leave. These prisoners included a range of individuals—from those who were depressed to those who were facing addiction-related issues.”

Every jail that Mishra went to housed inmates in numbers that were nearly double its capacity. “A 3x6 feet patti—that’s all the space you get in a cell to carry out your prison time. Naturally, there are constant fights over areas to merely spread your legs and sleep every night.” For prisoners arrested under special laws like UAPA, even letters arrived after a lot of scrutiny, and almost ten days after they reached the jail. The facility of phone calls began only after COVID, but that, too, was not afforded to UAPA convicts. It was only after he sat on a hunger strike in 2020 that phone calls were made available to him. “In such circumstances, letters and newspapers were the only lifeline that kept me going.” For the most part of his jailed period, Mishra was always kept in the Anda cell in these prisons. “Anda cell is like a prison within prison. It is meant to hold prisoners if they misbehave for a few days, until they are allowed to go to the general ward again. But I remained in the Anda cell for nearly the entire time.”

It was the rapport with fellow prisoners that made life bearable for Mishra in jail. “Sometimes, they would come to play chess or carom across the bars. At other times, we would try to cook some things together. I would often find no time for myself in prison, because so many of the undertrials would want me to look at their casesheets or draft appeals for them!” Mishra laughs, as he recalls. During this period, Mishra came across a prisoner on death row, who had been convicted of a heinous murder. “I would see this man taking handful of sleeping pills each day to go to sleep. He was ostracised even by others in the cell for his crime. Somewhere, I felt that the way he was being treated was unjust. So, I started talking to him and offered to teach him how to read and write, to keep him engaged.” Initially, the individual took two months just to learn the letters of the alphabet. “However, once his interest piqued, he managed to learn how to read and write within six months.” Eventually, the prisoner was transferred to another jail, from where he wrote Mishra a letter all by himself. “It said that being literate had liberated him in a sense. Even though he was on death row, he finally felt like there was some meaning to his existence. By the time he had left the prison we shared, I observed that he had entirely stopped taking the sleeping pills.” It was instances like these that made Mishra feel a sense of purpose behind bars, which contributed to his own stability.

For Hany Babu, a new-found engagement with religion and embracing Islam brought him peace, says Rowena. “Though he comes from a Muslim family, Babu was never a believer. However, when he was arrested, without conscious knowledge, he turned towards religion. Learning Arabic and Urdu, reading these texts and being part of the Muslim community in jail have become crucial sources of mental sustenance for him inside.” Finding such means for long-term stability becomes crucial when you are suspended in a limbo with detention under UAPA. “Laws like UAPA are designed to torture people mentally. Without such a framework, it is impossible to keep citizens like Babu incarcerated for a prolonged period. But in cases like these, you can’t think of bail for ten to twenty years at a time. The worst part is that there is no legal remedy for this delay in bail.”

It is evident that the crisis in prisons—of health in general, and mental health in particular—is not merely a chance negligence; it is a constitutive element in the overall experience of incarceration. In a bid to remain sane in such circumstances, some seek solace in camaraderie, while others turn to religion. But when the instability starts to seep in, how does a prisoner come to terms with the grim realisation? “What I have done is I have learnt to acknowledge and make peace with the fact that at times my mind will behave like a separate entity,” says Umar Khalid, an activist who has been an undertrial at Tihar jail, New Delhi for nearly five years now. Khalid was arrested under UAPA in September 2020, for allegedly being a part of a conspiracy that led to the communal violence in Northeast Delhi in February that year. He was one of the most prominent young Muslim voices participating in the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act that were taking the country by storm in 2019-2020.

“Over the last couple of years, my mind feels likes a separate entity—something disconnected from the rest of me. It behaves as per its own whims and fancies. When it goes down, it goes really down somewhere for no rhyme or reason. And then, totally unannounced, the peace and calm returns—sometimes it lasts for just half an hour before you start sinking again; but at times, this peace lasts for days,” he says. “The point is to make the most of it while it lasts.” Khalid says that Tihar only has a one-hour visit by a psychiatrist once a week, in which he liberally gives prisoners anti-depressants and medicines to combat anxiety and induce sleep. “Due to the lack of professional help, you deal with the situation on your own. My idea is to simply let it be, let it go down. Feel whatever you are feeling in totality—sadness, emptiness, despair, frustration, anger. Let it take time to recover and acknowledge that recovery isn’t going to be quick. It will take its own time—more so because I am alone, away from the people who could have helped me recover quickly otherwise.”

Khalid believes that to remain sane in prison, it is important to identify certain patterns over time. “What are the things that trigger depression (after which it takes a life of its own)? It is vital that they are recognised. At the same time, I figure out activities to do and fill up the vast empty spaces of time with them.” In Khalid’s case, good literature is a definite mood lifter. “I also realised last year that cleaning my prison cell, just when I am really down, is very helpful. It distracts the mind, and the physical effort it requires lifts me up. At the end, a clean and de-cluttered space also improves your state of mind.”

In the absence of any reliable infrastructure, Khalid confronts the challenges of imprisonment through self-reliance. He concludes saying, “The point is to figure out what works for you. I don’t know if there is anything called self-therapy, but I guess that’s what one has to do to survive this maddeningly dark space with no exit.”

Apeksha Priyadarshini is Senior Assistant editor, Outlook. She writes on cinema, art, politics, gender & social justice

This story appeared in print as An Imprisoned Mind, in the latest World Mental Day Issue (October 11, 2025) of Outlook Magazine, titled I Have A Lot Left Inside, Part 2.