Stan Swamy: Victim of medical neglect?

Taloja prison inmate writes scathing letter accusing prison officials of ignoring his deteriorating condition

A pretrial detainee at the Taloja central prison in the outskirts of Mumbai, who spent close to a year with 84-year-old Jharkhand-based tribal rights activist Father Stan Swamy, says the Jesuit priest struggled for a long time before he finally died in July last year.

The prisoner, Iklakh Rahim Shaikh, arrested in March 2019, has written a 14-page scathing letter accusing the prison administration of ignoring Swamy’s deteriorating health conditions and denying him treatment even when he was rapidly slipping.

The letter, sent to The Wire through a co-prisoner also at Taloja jail, gives a vivid account of the hardship that prisoners are made to suffer. Shaikh’s name is mentioned with his consent, as he wants “the world to know what he and many like him have been subjected to inside jail”.

Shaikh writes that when Swamy was first brought to jail in October 2019, he was stable although elderly. “He eventually, however, developed heart and spinal complications soon after. He was in need of urgent medical care. But his plea was denied by the then superintendent Kaustubh Kurlekar and prison doctor Sunil Kale,” Shaikh writes in the letter.

Shaikh, who has spent close to 60 months in jail, says he has been lodged in an “Anda Cell”, an-egg shaped cellar, so called for its oblong shape. The cell lacks ventilation and only those considered “high-risk prisoners” are usually sent here. But several prison testimonies show that anyone defying the prison authorities is also shunted here as a matter of “punishment”.

Swamy was arrested on Oct. 8, 2019. The National Investigation Agency, handling the probe against him and 15 other human rights defenders from different parts of India, had not pressed for his physical custody. He was directly sent to judicial custody and a day later, on October 9, the NIA filed a voluminous charge sheet accusing him and others of operating as “Urban Naxals” and being active members of the banned CPI (Maoist) group.

After Swamy was taken to jail, he had requested for a sipper cup to drink water as his he was suffering from Parkinson’s disease which made it difficult for him to drink water. His request was overlooked and a month later, on Nov. 26, Swamy had to move the Bombay high court for something as basic as a sipper.

Shaikh says the condition that Swamy was forced to live in should “shake the very foundation of democracy”. “Father Stan Swamy continued to struggle even as the influential and moneyed were sent to private hospitals and given best available treatment,” he writes.

Swamy, even after repeated requests, was not administered a vaccine against COVID-19 infection. He eventually was infected and moved to a private hospital in Bandra, where he died. Senior advocate Mihir Desai, who represented him in court, accused the NIA and prison authorities of “apathy, negligence and lack of medical facilities”. His petition, along with the one filed by Swamy’s close friend Father Frazer Mascarenhas, former principal of St Xavier’s College and present Parish Priest of St. Peter’s Church, seeking clearance of Swamy’s name from NIA’s charges, is still pending before the Bombay high court.

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) too is looking into the allegations of human rights violations of Swamy that eventually led to his death.

Shaikh alleges that the jail staff has been extorting hefty amounts of money from prisoners even to make the most basic facilities available to them. “Our right to life, as guaranteed in the constitution, should remain intact even in jail. But that is not the case. Most basic facilities are also denied to us,” he alleges.

The National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) data released every year shows that close to 1,800 prisoners, mostly pretrial detainees, die while in jail. In 2020 alone, 1,887 prisoners died. In the absence of accountability, most of these deaths are termed as “natural deaths”.

Shaikh’s letter sheds light on what really gets termed as “natural”. Deaths of those denied adequate and timely medical care can’t be termed as natural, he says in his letter. The NCRB data gives vague reasons like diarrhea, schizophrenia, epilepsy, liver-related ailments and heart problems as causes of “natural” deaths. The Wire, in January 2020, had in a detailed report explained how most of these deaths are because of lack of adequate medical care.

Among the unnatural category, deaths by suicide are most common.

(Courtesy: The Wire)