Tihar Jail is a land of bakeries and carpentry shops, where inmates compete in music contests, take classes and perform intensive Buddhist meditation as part of their rehabilitation.
Tihar Jail is crammed with people awaiting trial who sleep on concrete floors, face daily threats from other prisoners and are shaken down for bribes from their poorly paid jailers, according to human rights lawyers and former inmates.
The two sides of India’s most famous jail emerged this week when a man accused in the notorious rape of a woman aboard a New Delhi bus was found dead in his cell. Jail authorities said Ram Singh, 33, hanged himself, but his family questioned how he could have done that with three cellmates sleeping beside him. A magistrate is investigating.
Just two days earlier, the jail’s director-general strutted the catwalk at a fashion show premiering the design creations of Tihar’s female inmates.
The genius of Tihar officials is that they are able “to violate human rights, and have a brilliant camouflage,” said Colin Gonsalves, a Supreme Court lawyer and the director of the Human Rights Law Network.
Tihar is a massive complex of nine separate jails in New Delhi that is one of the largest incarceration facilities in South Asia. Like many of India’s prisons, it long suffered from a reputation for badly mistreating prisoners.