Prison Diaries Reveal A Sordid Tale Of Torture And Humiliation

On Jun 9, 2002, Iftikhar Gilani’s house was raided from 4:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., after which he was arrested, charged under the Official Securities Act and sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment. After over 18 years as a special correspondent and investigative journalist, Sahil Maqbool was arrested as a spy, imprisoned 300 km from Kashmir and subjected to third-degree torture for 15 days. Anjum Zamarud Habib, a founding member of the Hurriyat Conference, was implicated under POTA, and spent five years in Delhi’s Tihar Jail, reports a national daily. With these three names, the report says that the writer has not even skimmed the surface of the hundreds of falsely implicated political prisoners who have been charged and imprisoned for years in jail, facing constant torture and humiliation. But all three of them have one thing in common. They’ve each documented their experience in the form of diaries. At the Jaipur Literature Festival’s evening session titled ‘Prison Diaries’, Iftikhar Gilani, Anjum Zamarud Habib and Sahil Maqbool opened up about the implications and consequences they faced both during and after their sentence, and this particular malaise that plagues the country.