The diary of a prisoner, by Kanhaiya Kumar

I don't know if I can verbally express the rich emotions, experiences and ideas about my time in custody, so I decided that I would put it all down for people in the form of a book. I want to liquidate myself and document the socioeconomic turmoil in the country today.

What we call jail today has expanded as a term. Our entire society has turned into a prison. Am I free today? I am not. I am a student, who is supposed to be studying and focussing on his research, but I am having instead to think of the constitution and the country.

The debate on - quote, unquote - nationalism that has been launched by the BJP and the RSS - which is mostly their ideology and propaganda has diluted the entire discourse. And the situation that has thereby been created for me now means I cannot walk freely, I cannot go wherever I want.

I would like to express a couple of thoughts about the prison system. I have experienced the negativity that is spread and believed about jail by people outside. Because I was kept separately, in isolation. Away from everyone. I did not experience being cramped in a ward with 200 or 300 people. One way to look at this is that it was a privilege and say "you had your own room". It was a jail within a jail - and if we look at it from a macro perspective - society is a prison, within which there was the jail and within that jail was my cell. This comes with its own pain. The pain of isolation. Another thing is the feeling of hatred and animosity that was created towards me. Someone who was taken into custody for committing murder did not face the same hatred as I did. A murderer would at best be asked why he committed murder, but otherwise it was a regular prison experience for him. But for me, there was a danger from all sides and all people. The sipahi would argue with me; the barber who would come to cut my hair would also bicker; so was the case with the man who would serve me my food or my jailer.

This is something that can shake any human being to the core. If you lay out and spread to people repeatedly that "this man is a traitor and an anti national", it sounds terrible, there is nothing positive about it. And for the first time in this country, instead of making enemies from outside, we are making enemies out of our own citizens. There are a few things about jail that upset you more than others. The most overpowering emotion is the feeling that "I am in prison". This belief is what really creates the impression and reality of being restricted and everything is born from this - everything relates to this. I can't do whatever I feel like doing; go wherever I want to go; eat whatever I want to eat.

Today, I'm out on bail, and I don't really care about eating specific things, because I know that as a free man I can eat whatever I want. But when I was in prison, there were so many things I would crave - if you put down roti in your diet then they give you roti for both meals, then I would crave rice. It's these little things. Yesterday, in the hostel, I was looking for a nail cutter and my time in prison came back to me - there I had to wait two days just to cut my nails because in jail, the nail cutter is a weapon. So, you cannot even freely cut your nails.

One understands the importance of the most modest things.

Another example is that my mother has come to the campus to visit me and I don't think I've managed to spend even two hours with her yet. But in jail, I would really wish that I could be given the opportunity to sit down with my mother and speak to her. I really missed the little things. 

(As told to Asmita Bakshi)