“Where will I get the money to get my son (15-year-old Shashikant) out of jail? I want my son to somehow be out of jail. I fold my hands and ask you please get my son out of jail,” 35-year-old Kanta tells The Quint while this reporter sait with her in her one-room home in Pohalli village, Meerut, which was filled with people.
Shashikant is one of the many kids who was picked up by Meerut police during the Dalit protests of 2 April against the dilution of the SC/ST Act. Senior Meerut police officials told us that there are at least ten people in the adult prison who are claiming to be juveniles, and another seven who have been moved to juvenile homes.
He spent more than two months in an adult prison before being moved to the juvenile home on 7 June. His family says he was not involved in the protest but had only gone to their fields on the highway to take his uncle some food. The separation has not been easy on Kanta.
Five or six years ago, Kanta’s husband left her to fend for their five children by herself. “He left her and took sanyaas five years ago. She is very poor and is alone bringing her kids up,” says her neighbour Indra Singh, who is an uncle to Shashikant. She works as a daily labour to support her family everyday. When asked why Shashikant was not moved to a juvenile home earlier, his uncle Singh said:
The lawyer told us to let him stay in the adult jail and not move application to declare him a juvenile. He said if he moved to a juvenile facility he will stay in jail for another 2-4 months
He said that they were uneducated, so had no real choice but to accept his counsel. But days later, they changed their lawyer, who then helped move Shashikant to a juvenile home.
Twenty-five kilometres from Kanta’s home, another single mother from Saraikazi in Meerut is experiencing the same anguish.
Roshni is a single mother of three kids. She has polio and stitches leather balls for a living. Her husband died of liver failure four years ago.
However, on the evening of 2 April, she had to leave work and head out to find her son, 14-year-old Ajay. Little did she know that in all the violence brewing in the city, she would have to wait six days to finally know if her son was safe.
Unlike Shashikant, Ajay was moved to a juvenile home on 3 April. Every time the family met him, they say he cried incessantly.
Ajay cries a lot in jail. He keeps saying ‘Mummy get me out, Mummy get me out’.
Like Kanta, Roshni is confident her son had nothing to do with the protest. “I have an infection in my eye, so he had gone out to get me medicine,” she said. Remembering the evening of 2 April she said, “I looked everywhere, even in the hospital. As the situation turned violent, I was beginning to give up hope. I didn’t have any peace till I saw my son with my own two eyes.”
When Roshni met her son days later, Ajay said he did try to explain to the police that he was out for work, but they didn’t listen. Roshni says that initially, they had seen him and were going to let him go. But then they asked which community he belonged to. When he answered, that’s when they picked him up, she said.
Both Ajay and Shashikant were granted bail after spending 79 days in custody – but the fight is hardly over. They, and their mothers, still have a long legal battle ahead to prove their innocence.
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