Why Hany Babu Writes From Prison

The Wire

29-07-2025

July 28, 2025 marks the fifth year of Babu's arrest. In the past five years, he has written several times to his wife, daughter and other family members.
Hany Babu. In the background are excerpts from his letters. Photos: By arrangement.
The best way to harm an academic is to simply lock them out of their computer and deny them access to their years of research. This is exactly what had happened to Hany Babu M.T, a professor at the Delhi University, when the Pune police had first raided his house on September 10, 2019. Ten months later, on July 28, 2020, Babu was arrested, as one of the 16 persons implicated in the Elgar Parishad case.
July 28, 2025 marks the fifth year of Babu's arrest. In the past five years, he must have exchanged hundreds of letters with his wife, daughter and other family members. Babu's wife Jenny Rowena, also a professor at DU, and daughter Farzana are both Delhi-based, and letters have been their primary mode of staying in touch, alongside bimonthly court visits and phone calls.
Babu, who is lodged in Taloja Central jail, and is awaiting release on bail, reflects on some concerns in the letters he has exchanged with his family. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court allowed Babu to approach either the trial or the high court for bail.
'My academic writings and research were almost wiped clean when the Pune police came and took away my electronic devices,' he narrates in one such letter written to his family. The police took the passwords of all his emails, cloud (virtual storage) accounts, and shut him out from all his accounts, making all the data and research works inaccessible to him.
'I remember how difficult it was even to teach without access to all the notes and materials I had prepared,' Babu recalls the pre- arrest days in one of his letters to his family. The time between the raid and the arrest, he writes, were only spent in the apprehension of incarceration and it took him a long long time before he could get back to academic activities.
At Taloja, like most of his co-defendants in the Elgar Parishad case, Babu too has immersed himself in reading and writing. One of his articles on pre-trial detention, co-authored along with his co-defendant Surendra Gadling, was recently cited in one of the Bombay high court's orders.
'Quarantine'
Babu's arrest was in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. By then, the case had already been transferred to the National Investigations Agency (NIA). As soon as he was sent to jail, he was shunned in a solitary cell as a way to 'quarantine' a new prisoner before moving into a regular barrack. For the first few days, he wrote that he had no access to books, pen and papers. And days later, when pen and paper were made available to him, he said his happiness knew no bounds. 'Writing, in a place like prison, is the only outlet you have at times,' he shares in one of his letters.
For the first few days, his writings were all about his new experiences as an incarcerated person, the memories and, 'of course the letters', he says. During the pandemic, courts were the first ones to shut down and move to virtual mode. This also meant that the incarcerated persons were no longer being ferried to courts for regular hearings. Outside of the laborious jail visits, families would only meet their loved ones in court. The environment there would also be relatively relaxed.
But the outbreak of the coronavirus changed this in 2020. 'In those days, letters sent weekly were the only way of communication. And the replies to those letters would reach only after a month,' he writes.
'When you interact with an average prisoner...'
Although a teaching faculty in the English department of the Delhi University, Babu's interest in social justice has been evident through his writings. He spent a large part of his academic years studying the many ways in which the academic spaces kept Bahujan students away. In one of his letters, Babu recalls how he always had interest in law and human rights. And when he began his work for the defence committee set up for the release of his colleague G.N. Saibaba, his knowledge moved from the realm of books to the real. Babu was a part of the core team that was formed after Saibaba, a 90% disabled and wheelchair-bound academic, was arrested in 2014 under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). In March 2024, Saibaba was finally released from jail but within months, he died of the many complications he had developed due to prolonged incarceration.
Reflecting on his journey, first as a rights activist and now as an incarcerated person himself, Babu says that as a part of the defence committee, all his knowledge was 'bookish'.
'Of course, that knowledge helped, but prison experiences have given me lessons for a lifetime. Reading about looking at prisoners without being prejudiced by the crime that they are said to have committed is one thing, but when you interact with an average prisoner you understand how important it is to be able to look at people without being affected by their alleged crime,' he says in one of his letters.
Also read: How Long Is Too Long for an Undertrial Prisoner To Be Detained?
Prions, he says, have taught him to look at issues of law more from the perspective of those who are caught in its crosshairs.
'I have witnessed so many people getting acquitted after a long period of incarceration, sometimes after close to a decade or sometimes even more,' he writes. 'Hapless prisoners spending months or even years in prison even after being granted bail as they are unable to meet the bail conditions.'
Equality before law and political prisoners
He draws attention to the differential treatment meted to those belonging to the privileged class. Without naming, he refers to the 2020 case of TV anchor and editor Arnab Goswami's and how the prison staff had worked 'overtime' to ensure he was released the very same day as the Supreme Court's order. 'Sadly, such laws don't apply to everyone,' he writes in his letter.
In one of his writings, he delves deeper into his understanding of the term political prisoners, which has come to be associated, especially in the mainstream discourse, with those arrested for their left leaning politics.
'Sometimes, I feel all prisoners are political prisoners at some level. If you think of it, it is the society that labels certain acts as 'crime',' he writes. He adds that, 'many of the so-called crimes are, in a sense, statements against the inequalities, oppression and discrimination in the society.'
He talks of how often it is the 'powerless' who end up being on the 'wrong side of the law'. 'When you heard the stories of the police or even some lawyers behaving towards the prisoners, you would feel they are the bigger criminals, but they just happen to be on the side of the power,' in one of his letters, Babu writes.
He refers to American Marxist and feminist political activist Angela Davis's powerful correlation between black slavery and incarceration. 'According to Angela Davis', he writes, 'as long as slavery was in place, prisons in America hardly had black persons. I think the same would have been true of the Dalits in India, if untouchability were still practiced.' He further writes that as long as our society practices discrimination and marginalisation on the basis of caste and religion, 'we will have our prisons filled with Dalits, Adivasis, Backward Classes and Muslims'.
Prisons
Prisons, he writes in one of his communications to the family, 'doesn't treat the inmates as humans or individuals, let alone as being capable of reading or writing'. Even a simple act of accessing the prison library, he writes, is viewed as a 'security threat' and therefore, unnecessary.
Accessing reading material has been a struggle, he shares. 'But thanks to the collective effort of my co-defendants over the years, the prison administration has become more accommodative when it comes to books and reading materials, especially towards us,' he says. But for an average prisoner, the struggle still continues, according to him.
Over the years, the government has started calling prisons a 'correctional facility'. 'But hardly anything is being done to achieve those aims,' he writes. The several educational courses run inside prison are 'farcical', he writes, citing examples of the digital photography course that he enrolled himself for. 'The instructor kept assuring us that we will be given the certificate and needn't worry about anything else.' Teaching English to other incarcerated persons, Babu writes, has been 'more of a learning experience for me about my inadequacy as an adult educator'.
As an academic and a rights activist, Babu continues to write while in jail, but he also says that it comes from a place of complete awareness that 'one will be allowed to voice one's views only insofar as it is not too critical of the state.'
'But then, I don't know how much of that is not true of the 'free' world outside prison,' he thinks aloud.
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