New Delhi: Former Tihar jail administrator and ex-law officer Sunil Gupta has challenged in Delhi High Court the provisions in the newly enacted criminal laws that allow prisoners to be kept in solitary confinement. Drawing on nearly four decades of experience at Tihar, Gupta has urged the court to implement the Supreme Court rulings and Law Commission recommendations aimed at abolishing the colonial-era punishment, historically used to torture freedom fighters. The public interest litigation (PIL) questions the constitutional validity of Sections 11 and 12 of the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), arguing that they “mechanically” import the draconian solitary confinement regime from the repealed Indian Penal Code while “ignoring decades of progressive jurisprudence labeling such isolation as barbaric and torturous.” Gupta, well-acquainted with prison conditions, has said he is filing the petition for the benefit of inmates. A bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela earlier this week tagged Gupta’s plea with two other PILs raising similar challenges and agreed to hear the matter next month. The PIL seeks a declaration that the relevant BNS provisions are invalid, asserting that they were introduced without considering the Supreme Court observations that solitary confinement, cellular segregation and similar practices are inhuman, irrational and violate the Constitution. “Solitary confinement, i.e., keeping a prisoner in a small cell with no meaningful human contact, is an assault on the human spirit and violates the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Fundamental Rights—Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution,” the petition states. Gupta’s plea further argues that a combined reading of BNS and the Prisons Act reveals a statutory gap that prison authorities exploit to impose illegal solitary confinement. Citing death row convicts, the PIL notes that until a trial court decision is confirmed by the high court—often taking years—a convict is technically a “prisoner subject to confirmation” rather than a “prisoner under sentence of death.” “However, prison regulations, including Rule 59 of the Delhi Prison Rules, are mechanically invoked to immediately segregate such prisoners upon the trial court’s verdict, constituting a fraud on the statute and an unconstitutional deprivation of liberty,” it claims. The petition also contends that solitary confinement reduces prisoners to a state of forced vegetativeness and deprives them of human contact, amounting to psychological torture. It argues that rigorous imprisonment is meant to involve hard labour, not isolation and imposing solitary confinement in addition to rigorous imprisonment—especially without a judicial order—amounts to a second punishment for the same offence. The PIL seeks a direction to the Centre and Delhi govt to “immediately cease the practice of solitary confinement in all prisons under their jurisdiction.” Additionally, the plea requests the court to strike down Chapter IX of the Delhi Prison Rules, 2018, to the extent it facilitates solitary confinement, and direct that no prisoner, including death row inmates, be segregated prior to the final exhaustion of judicial and executive remedies. It also advocates replacing the archaic practice with modern surveillance, such as 24/7 CCTV monitoring in high-security wards, allowing inmates to maintain human interaction while ensuring security.
