Moving from one prisoner to the next, case by case

He is the lawyer who represented Mohd Amir, "son of a khilona maker who was wrongfully imprisoned on terror charges for 14 years". Having secured the release of Amir, arrested at age 17 by Delhi police for alleged involvement in acts of terror, Narayan Das Pancholi has moved on.

He is now occupied with what happened to Amir's co-accused, Shakeel, who died after 12 years in custody, "an alleged suicide". Pancholi has visited Shakeel's parents, mindful of the fact that no compensation has been paid for the death in custody and that "his postmortem revealed poisoning".

Born and raised in the bustle of Matia Mahal in Delhi in the 1940s-50s, Pancholi is a self-confessed follower of communist M N Roy's philosophy of "radical humanism". When anyone so much as mentions someone locked away, Pancholi, at 68, isntantly recalls all prisoners he has helped free or is striving to free. That and dates, not just in his life but in the lives of those prisoners.

From a few feet away, he points out the room at Gandhi Peace Foundation from where "JP", Jayprakash Narayan, was picked up hours after Emergency had been declared in June 1975. His family was originally from Alwar. His education — "history honours at Ramjas" — and years at a transport company, where he found several poor colleagues weren't even paid the minimum wages, groomed him for battling for labour issues and eventually human rights.

He went through a variety of small jobs, some as attorney "managing some property" in his early years and others unconnected with law, till he found his calling.

He has spent a good deal of time visiting jails to meet prisoners. Pancholi recalls how Afzal Guru finally hired him and how he accompanied Guru's family to then President Abdul Kalam's. But "vested interests" keen on making Guru part of a larger political project, he says, tried to paint him as the usurper. Pancholi is reluctant to take names but describes how the "human rights movement is India is very weak now"; a large part of that weakness derives from "an NGO-isation that has infected it". He agrees that "a lot of NGOs have done a very good job. But the entire approach, with funding having created problems for NGOs, has taken away the original spirit of doing it... The politics of those ideas was very different from what we see now in not all but the majority of cases."

... contd.

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