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INDIA HUMAN RIGHTS REPORT 2005 Bihar
Supreme Court’s judgement of 15 April
2002 upholding the death penalty awarded
to Veer Kunwar Paswan, Krishna Mochi,
Dharu Singh (alias Dharmendra Singh)
and Nanhe Lal Mochi by the TADA court
raised many questions. Justice M B Shah
raised the following questions on the
‘’quality of evidence’’ and disagreed with
the death sentence. However, he was in a
minority in the 2-1 verdict of April 15,
2002. As Judge Shah pointed out the
following questions:
(1) Satyendra Sharma, the informant in
the case, never deposed in court;
(2) Confessional statement of Bihari
Majhi, a Dalit labourer not even
named in the FIR, was the basis of
conviction. The statement, made
before a police inspector, was
denied by Majhi in court.
(3) Of its 10 pages, Majhi’s signature
appears only on five. In any case,
only an officer of the rank of at least
superintendent can record
admissible statements, even under
TADA provisions.
(4) Of the 34 prosecution witnesses,
none stated that any of the four men
took part in the murder or were
members of an extremist group. No
arms were recovered. 53
V. Prison conditions:
The Jehanabad’s Hell Hole
Prison conditions across Bihar remain
deplorable. The Jehanabad sub-jail was
declared as “unfit” by a team of PWD
(Buildings) engineers in 1984. But the
42
same old, dilapidated jail building has
been used to accommodate 648 prisoners
as against the declared capacity of 140. Of
the total 648 prisoners, over 300 were
believed to be activists of various warring
armed opposition groups like the PW,
MCC, CPI-ML (Liberation) and Ranvir
Sena. 54
The prisoners are huddled together
like goats and they hardly get any space
for a nap. As per the provisions of the jail
manual, prisoners are required to be
provided at least 7 x 8 sq ft of space but
in the Jehanabad jail, more than a dozen
inmates are forced to live together in that
much space.
There was neither ambulance nor any
other vehicle to carry the emergency
patients to hospitals. In the absence of an
exclusive ward for women, women
prisoners were being accommodated in a
dark and dingy cell. The juvenile
prisoners were forced to undergo the
trauma of living with hardened
criminals. 55
The Bhabhua district jail has a
sanctioned capacity of 85 prisoners but the
numbers of prisoners in this prison does
not come down below 650. By June 2004,
five prisoners including Jogari Mushahar,
an undertrial, died in Bhabhua district
jail. 56
The abuses against the prisoners are
widespread. On 9 January 2004, Chief
Minister Rabri Devi reportedly ordered a
probe by Central Bureau of Investigation57 into the rape of Najma Khatoon, a murder
convict. On 6 August 2003, 25-year-old