It is not uncommon for some influential prisoners to get concessions or privileges from obliging officials. The privileges and favourable exemptions that V.K. Sasikala seems to enjoy in the Parappana Agrahara Central Prison in Bengaluru appear to confirm what one hears only in corruption folklore. Initially, it was rumoured she had a makeshift kitchen and been provided with an inmate as a cook; it was said she had a special visitors’ room with enough chairs for political confabulations. Now, dramatic footage has emerged showing her and her relative and fellow convict, J. Ilavarasi, entering by the prison’s main door, suggesting that she may be returning from a trip outside the prison’s precincts. It appears, in the video, that she has been exempted from wearing a convict’s uniform. These are not fanciful charges emerging from unreliable quarters. These are part of purported evidence submitted to investigators by former Deputy Inspector General (Prisons) D. Roopa, who blew the whistle on Sasikala’s special privileges weeks ago. Ms. Roopa has submitted the footage, presumably taken from a surveillance camera focussed on the prison’s entry point, to the Anti-Corruption Bureau, which wanted proof of her earlier charges about rampant corruption among prison officials. Ms. Roopa had been transferred out from the post after she made the sensational allegation that the Director General (Prisons) and other top officials had taken a ₹2-crore bribe to extend these privileges to Sasikala. The former DG (Prisons), H.N. Satyanarayana Rao, who rejected the charges as baseless, has since retired.
The Karnataka government has ordered an inquiry headed by Vinay Kumar, a retired bureaucrat, into irregularities in the prison, while the Anti-Corruption Bureau is examining the corruption charges. These investigations should not be mere formalities as prison corruption poses a great danger to society. It is not only influential politicians but also offenders jailed for serious charges, such as Abdul Karim Telgi, the kingpin of the stamp paper racket that rocked the country over a decade ago, who are the beneficiaries of a suborned system. Overcrowding, ill-treatment, lack of infrastructure and inadequate facilities are some of the problems that the country’s prison system has been facing for years. In recent years, newer vices have been added to the list of problems: availability of drugs, for instance, and access to mobile phones to prisoners to beat the communication protocol. Any inquiry into Ms. Roopa’s charges cannot be limited to the facilities that one or two prisoners may enjoy, but should comprehensively address all these issues. Failure to curb the illegal facilities allowed to some prisoners will ultimately lead to the loss of whatever deterrent value a jail term has. To paraphrase Shakespeare, one must not make “a scarecrow of the law” that is set up to scare away birds, but lets “custom make it their perch and not their terror”.
