'A sea of misery': Indian lawyer highlights plight of jailed women
US-born Sudha Bharadwaj, a committed lawyer of the poor, moved to India and renounced her US citizenship to support underprivileged communities in Chhattisgarh. The trade unionist was arrested in 2018 and accused of giving speeches that incited violence, charges she has denied. In her book ‘From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada', which she researched during her three years in detention, Bharadwaj shares the stories of the women she met.
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00:00 [ambient street noise]
00:14 We saw many, many cases of women who really needn't be there.
00:17 I mean, the cases were not so serious, you could have let them out.
00:21 Maybe they couldn't make the sureties, maybe they didn't have good enough lawyers.
00:26 Whatever the reason, one needs to be more liberal with bail.
00:30 And that should be the way out of the overcrowding.
00:33 [ambient street noise]
00:42 [indistinct conversation]
00:48 Most of them were, of course, poor.
00:50 A lot of them were uneducated. Some of them were completely illiterate.
00:54 They didn't know what was happening. They were abandoned by their families most of the time.
00:58 So I was really in a sea of misery.
01:01 So in that sense, I really, despite the initial, you know, sort of shock and indignity and all that,
01:08 I felt I was more privileged. I thought these stories really needed to come out.
01:14 [ambient street noise]
01:22 There are many times gender angles to it.
01:25 I mean, like again, I pointed out many cases where, even in cases where, let us say,
01:32 daughter-in-laws committed suicide and therefore, you know, the family would be brought in,
01:38 maybe on the complaint of the parents of the woman who had died.
01:43 Many a time, we would see that women were brought in and men were not.
01:49 [ambient street noise]
01:53 [BLANK_AUDIO]