Nearly 550,000 of us are “in” today. I have used the word “us” advisedly. I could have said “like us” but “us” is more like it. I am borrowing the phrase from the remarkable Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand, who said of the victims of the Christchurch massacre and their kin: “They are us”. She did not say “They are just like us” or “They are one of us”. She said, “They are us”. If we think of prisoners as “us”, it would be good for them, but even more so for us, because we could be them. You and I could be reading this where no one would want to be. Nearly 425,000 of these “us” are not convicts. That is to say, they have not yet been found guilty and sentenced to prison terms. They are undertrials and many or most of them are likely to be completely innocent of any crime, or at least innocent of an intent to commit crime. Sheer misfortune has brought these undertrial prisoners to the clink, leaving them and their families shattered, their plans and aspirations in a confused jumble of shock, disbelief, fear, agony and worst of all, utter and miserable uncertainty.

There is no telling when their cases will be heard, finalised, setting them free if innocent, or sentenced if not. Imagine when completely fit, being forced to be in hospital, restrained there, with “real” patients, many of them suffering from incurable and infective conditions. And with no idea of when, if ever, one will be “discharged”. Unbearable thought! But that is how it is for undertrials.

Any offence committed, wantonly or unwittingly, that is cognisable can invite arrest without warrant, and lead to the start of investigations by the police without the orders of a magistrate. These cognisable offences can be non-bailable — ranging from heinous crimes such as murder, kidnapping, theft, dowry deaths to some others that enter a very grey zone of interpretation such as sedition and defamation. And then, there are offences that are outside the world of the Criminal Procedure Code and the Indian Penal Code (IPC), residing in various statutes. A glance at the words invoking these crimes can make one say in smug home-based judgment: “Serves the wretched man right”. But we should remember that at the time of arrest what we are seeing or talking of is not a crime but a suspicion of crime, an imputation or accusation, very likely to be correct, but also likely to be not. And we should remember too that these suspicions or accusations can be the result of malice, vendetta and plain tendentious prejudice.

Bailable cognisable offences of which we can most unwittingly be guilty of include finding oneself in an “unlawful” assembly or “committing affray”. That — affray — is an interesting word of which the IPC says: “When two or more persons, by fighting in a public place, disturb the public peace, they are said to commit an affray.”

On any normal day, one may witness affrays and even get involved in one.

The simple fact is that we live on the rim of situations that can make any of us one of the 550,000 of us who are “in”. A thin door moving on a very slender hinge separates the “outs” from the “ins”.

Since the possibility of arrest — deserved and undeserved — is and will remain an all-time given, the very least one may aspire to is the speedy completion of trials and the institution of humane conditions in all jails. I am aware of the fact — who is not? — that prisoners include hardened criminals who are a menace to society and a threat to fellow prisoners and require to be kept under the tightest surveillance. But that ugly truth is no reason for prisons to respond to the barbarity of a few with brutality in general.

Which is why I brought my palms together in admiration of the Madurai bench of the Madras high court which on January 2 directed the state to amend its prison rules so as to accord with the Model Prison Manual of 2016 and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also known as the Nelson Mandela Rules. Passing orders on a public interest litigation, justices R Mahadevan and Sathya Narayana Prasad directed the government to create a prisoners’ rights handbook and distribute copies of it to all inmates. Their lordships also directed the state to ensure an effective functioning of the visitorial system and constitute a board of visitors, including non-official visitors, for all prisons. Other directions included preventing overcrowding, ensuring the availability of drinking water, hygienic food and medical attention. And most significantly, a grievance redressal mechanism.

The Madurai order quoted Mandela as saying: “No one truly knows a nation unless one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.”

I must admit I had not heard of the Nelson Mandela Rules until I read reports of this order. It is an amazing document. Its opening rule says: “All prisoners shall be treated with the respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings. No prisoner shall be subject to, and prisoners shall be protected from torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment for which no circumstances whatever will be invoked as a justification.”

Answering Question No. 3257 in the Rajya Sabha posed by KC Ramamurthy, the Union minister of state for home Kishan Reddy said on March 24 last year that his ministry had circulated the Nelson Mandela Rules to all states and Union Territories so as to ensure that they are followed. Now that the Madras high court has made the matter a judicial imprimatur, the Union and state governments have an opportunity to make the Nelson Mandela Rules an Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav finale. And thereby make India known as a model in prison administration.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a former administrator

The views expressed are personal