Forget Italian marines for a minute, can we do something for our jails?

Two Italian sailors killed two fishermen off the Kerala coast, got apprehended and in a few months, left for Italy. Nothing better than some good-old Italian bashing to recharge ‘Indian pride’ branded batteries. The Italian government agreed to send them back, cutting short the tournament of competitive patriotism.

But for these Italians, how else could the homegrown saffron Goths, constantly plotting the fall of an imagined Roman regime in New Delhi, rehearse another episode of their ‘Indian and proud’ drama? How else could certain khadi-clad centurions grab an opportunity to show off intense love for peninsular fishermen?

As the khadi and the saffron match each other’s love for fishermen, decibel for decibel, they also compete in actively plotting the destruction of life and livelihood of thousands of fishermen at Kudankulam, beating for beating, 144 for 144, arrest for arrest, tear for tear. Irony is not a very effective genre of public performance in the subcontinent. Maybe because there is just too much of it around us, making it plain and non-newsworthy.

Italy has not been alone among European states in irking the government at Delhi. In a less publicised series of events, Denmark did it too. Remember what Sanjeev Bhaskar famously asked – Is it ‘coz I am brown? Probably not. One of the prime accused of the almost-forgotten Purulia arms drop case of 1995 is a Danish citizen Niels Holck alias Kim Davy. Indian authorities wanted him extradited.

A Danish court said the conditions in jails run by the India government are inhuman. Between 2001 and 2010, 14,231 people died in police and prison custody in the land of ahimsa. Sadly, this is no foreign data but statistics from the National Human Rights Commission. Mumbaikar Arun Ferreira (Arun who?) closely avoided being added to that tally. If Jawaharlal Nehru had received from the British the same kind of prison treatment as Arun received from the Government of India, he would have discovered another ‘India’. His fatherly letters to his daughter would have sounded very different.

Actually, this is the ‘India’ whose power was transferred during the Partition. Denmark did not want to risk a rediscovery of this ‘India’. Incessantly claiming to be the world’s largest democracy did not help. The Danish court did not want Kim Davy to suddenly jump off from some height, hang himself unnoticed, meticulously commit suicide deceiving the prison and police-folk or die of ‘unexplained’ internal-bleeding. We would love to call this ‘racism’, that is, us minus some fourteen thousand.

Most of these 14,231 deaths were due to torture, typically occurring within two days of being taken into custody. You will probably never know the details — your ‘right to information’ has its limits. Unfortunately, the dead do speak — if not in words, then in numbers. The Government of India has no anti-torture law satisfying the United Nations Convention Against Torture guidelines. Denmark and Italy have such laws.

The honourable and reasonable Government of India also promised that Kim Davy would be housed in a ‘special jail’ so that Danish fears are laid to rest. Browns are second-class for a regime that can give an undertaking to produce a ‘first-class’ jail, when it wishes, for international PR purposes. No saffronwala will accuse any khadiwala for this preferential treatment. Third degree treatment is reserved for its own ‘nationality’. This predictable closing of ranks around this ‘India’ is deeply revealing about their sense of pride and patriotism.

Sometime ago, an opposite spectacle with much tear-shedding, pride-hurting and fire-eating took place. The daughter of a junior-level Indian embassy staff in New York was in police custody for less than 48 hours with others in the cell, due to a faulty investigation. The familiar parade of saffronwalas and khadiwalas came again, spouting pride, honour and concern. P Chidambaram (then home minister), SM Krishna (then foreign minister) and diplomats became vocal.

A lawyer was hired and it was declared that compensation was sought for distress in custody. This is rather rich coming from the nation of four custodial deaths per day. Add to it the hundreds of millions of days of torture, hopelessness, broken families, lost aspirations and insanity. Will our khadi and saffron patriots ask for such compensation? If one believes that the girl’s complaint has merit (and I do), then the whole exchequer of the Indian Union has to be emptied many times over to compensate those who have been brutalized by its police and criminal justice system.

Coming back to Italy, it’s alright to love or hate pizza. Let’s not talk about pride being hurt and loss of dignity of the justice system. If there was any pride and dignity at all, it should have been hurt at least 14,231 times in the past decade. One should have some shame.

The writer is a post-doctoral researcher at the Massachuetts Institute of Technology (twitter.com/gargac)inbox@dnaindia.net