‘I saw brutality, but also solidarity,’ says Sudha Bharadwaj, author of From Phansi Yard, of her days in prison

Sudha Bharadwaj, an IITian, chose to work with the poor in Chhattisgarh. Arrested in 2018, for allegedly inciting violence in Bhima-Koregaon, she was imprisoned for two years and wrote a book about her fellow prisoners. She saw brutality and misery, but also remarkable friendships and solidarity, which gave her hope. She believes dissent is an integral part of democratic systems, but these spaces are shrinking due to concentration of power.

Sudha Bharadwaj, an IITian, turned her back on American citizenship and chose to work instead with the faceless multitudes of Dalli Rajhara and Bhilai. A well-known trade unionist, she has concentrated her energies for the uplift of the poor in Chhattisgarh, and taken brave positions against concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. In 2018, Bharadwaj was arrested for allegedly inciting violence in Bhima-Koregaon. She was imprisoned for a year and three months at Pune’s Yerawada jail, and for another year at Mumbai’s Byculla jail. She was released in 2021. In jail, she lived amid women, and decided to write about the life of fellow prisoners in her book, From Phansi Yard.

Excerpts from an interview:

Well, I don’t have any credit for the first two; I was one-year-old and 11-year-old respectively when I returned from the U.S. and the U.K.! The first decision was of my parents, and the second of my mother, Professor Krishna Bharadwaj. I gave up my American citizenship when I became a major, around the age of 23, and that was my choice. My mother, who parented me since the age of 4, was a socialist, and despite her academic erudition, the epitome of simplicity and modesty. My childhood was spent on the JNU campus where students were socially aware, surrounded by my mother’s brilliant colleagues who were grappling with issues of poverty, discrimination and people-centric development. My own experience with the mess workers of IIT Kanpur where I studied, and later on in the ‘labour camps’ set up during the Asiad and the textile mills of Delhi, helped me make up my mind that I wanted to work among the working class.

Yes, the transition from being a single child of a single feminist mother, brought up in an academic environment, in an urban and materially comfortable household and shifting to the small mining town of Dalli Rajhara or the working class bastis of Jamul in the Bhilai Industrial Area was quite a sea change. But my complete immersion in the union’s work, the warm acceptance of comrade Shankar Guha Niyogi, the doctors of Shaheed Hospital and the karyakartas of the Chhattisgarh Mines Shamik Sangh and later the Bhilai unions, made that transition less bumpy. There were some material discomforts and a long period of trying to find my feet as a woman activist but they hardly counted in the hurly-burly of the Bhilai movement of contract workers.

Comrade Niyogi, and the leaders of the unions he organised, were, and continue to be, some of the most upright leaders of the working class movement. They are always organising the most exploited of the industrial working class — the contract workers — and face attacks by goons, long jail sentences and innumerable court cases. Corruption can only be indulged in by those who are ‘close’ to the management, which we never were.

The question of being “let down” is a more complex one. Taking the right decisions in a movement — knowing when to press on, when to negotiate; coping with mass dismissals from work — these are difficult to handle. As democratic organisations, we always tried to take difficult decisions by consulting workers in the widest possible way.

The Directive Principles of State Policy (Part IV) of the Constitution state that policy should ensure that “the economic system does not result in the concentration of wealth and means of production to the common detriment”, that it should be “securing and protecting a social order in which justice, social, economic and political shall inform all institutions of national life”, and be aimed at minimising “inequalities in income” and eliminating “inequalities in status, facilities and opportunities.” If that is a recipe for revolution, then our Constitution is indeed revolutionary!