Bhutan: In the Shadow of Fear

Tek Nath Rijal
Enduring the torments at one after another prison, I was moved into Dradulmakhang prison, whose very name evoked fear. Known in Thimphu as detention centre, it was worse than the Rabuna jail. Apart from being disgusting, some of the dreaded criminals served their sentence here. The menacing presence of not only Bhutanese, but also notorious criminals from India and Bangladesh scared me to death. The prison reminded me of the stories told about Nazi Concentration Camps, during the World War II. The turreted stone-walled prison with iron-gate and barbed wires was surrounded by a few dark pines which stood like sentinels guarding the prison. In fact, the prison buildings and forts were built a century ago with the forceful labor and the contribution from the inmates.
I was stunned to find that the jail buildings in both Rabuna and Thimphu looked similar. In Rabuna jail, I was kept on the ground floor, but here my cell was in the first floor of a dilapidated building. Some obnoxious odor wafted through my cramped and damp cell causing constant nausea. The ceiling, like in Rabuna, was made of wood except there was an iron hook hanging menacingly in the centre. The difference between the two jails was that the Rabuna accommodated only political prisoners, while Dradulmakhang had pet criminals, too. These criminals were kept on the ground floor and I was kept alone on the first floor.
The criminals were allowed to make fire to warm their bodies in the winter, which was justified from a humanitarian angle. However, the hidden intention was to create problem for me through the dense smoke emanating from the fire. As if this was not enough, they were provided with heavily moist or wet wood or coal for making the fire. When the criminals were taken out on labor duty, prison officials threw chili powder in the fire. One can imagine the suffocation created by the fumes of burning chilies in a room without the ventilation. Actually, the walls as well as the floor were made of the wooden planks with gaps between the two planks, through which the rising smoke crept in my room.
Let me describe the structure of the detention centre. The area where I was kept was actually a big bathroom attached to a living room. When I was brought here, the room was allotted to six policemen, who were duty-bound to guard me. The bathroom was converted into a living room by erecting a five-foot wooden partition, though the height of the wall was seven feet. It was done on purpose, as I learnt later. Whenever I started eating my food, one of the guards or inmates from the ground floor would always come to use the latrine. The foul odor would make eating impossible.
The most disgusting part was that the toilet was without running water. This caused the stink unbearable with the foul smell emanating out of the heaps of human excreta that kept piling up each day. I was given only five liters of water per day for latrine, bathing and drinking, making it a precious commodity so that I could not afford that to flush. Thus, the room had an air of a garbage dumping site. The room buzzed with flies and mosquitoes. The old quilt-cover--laden with dust and infested with bedbugs--was not long enough to cover my body. I was neither able to ward off the biting cold nor fend off the mosquitoes. As a result, some part of the body was always exposed to the attack by mosquitoes. The toilet was flushed only when international humanitarian groups visited the prison. Once the visit was over, the prison authorities would resort back to the same inhuman practice.
In addition, I was not permitted to wash myself or my clothes for a long time. Living constantly in dirty environs was terrible. Bad smell emanated from my clothes and it obviously was extremely hazardous to my health. After a few months, on my repeated pleadings, I was provided with a small piece of detergent soap and water. After washing my clothes, as per the rule, I gave them to one of the guards to get them dry. However, I never got those clothes back. The guard told me the clothes had been blown away. I protested saying, “What would I wear now?” But he shrugged and left. After some time, this guard was transferred and a new one replaced him. When I inquired about my clothes, he feigned ignorance. Deliberately, I was not given the clothes for next six months and had to manage by wearing the battered quilt-cover and a stinking bed- sheet.
I was passing the lonely and torturous moments inside the detention center. One day, a constable came hurriedly and asked me if I was interested in smoking a bidi (a rolled tobacco leaf. I replied affirmatively. He whispered, “Come on! Tight this bidi.” Gesturing persuasively, he thrust on me a piece of bidi along with a matchbox and disappeared. I opened the matchbox and found out that it contained only a few match-sticks. I lighted the bidi and felt satisfied as I was smoking after a long time. To my amazement, there was something else inside the matchbox: a brand new razor blade. My whole body shivered at this. I could not believe that the officials would stoop so low because the prisoners are strictly denied access to such hazardous articles. It was difficult to guess why an item like a blade was left. Perhaps, the regime hoped that I would commit suicide in utter despair.
It was not the first time the regime had provoked me to commit suicide. It reminded me of a rope which was left in my room just a few days ago--it would have been a convenient appendage to the iron hook on the ceiling. The jail officials deliberately chose the time to keep the rope when I was attending hearings in the court. Incidentally, the judicial process took four years to begin. It began only when all the options to keep me detained illegally were exhausted, due to the ever-mounting international pressure. The most brazen effort to exhort me in committing suicide took place when a technician, on the pretext of repairing the electric wiring opened the wiring system and spent the whole day doing nothing. In the evening, he left the live electric wires exposed, went out of the room and did not come back. Thus, the wires remained dangerously exposed for a long time.
A similar incident occurred inside the jail. There was no provision for storage of drinking water in my room. Whenever I requested the guards to provide me drinking water, they tended to turn a deaf ear. But, whenever they supplied water to me, it was always brought in an empty beer bottle. This happened many times. It is strictly prohibited to provide the prisoner anything made up of glass, as they may hurt themselves or others. Clearly, they wanted me to make use of the bottle either to end my life or, in a fit of rage, to attack the guards so that in the name of self-defense they could justify my killing. In this way, they evolved different strategies to get rid of me and started provoking me towards committing suicide. For this purpose, first, they made me depressed through mind-control technique and then conditions conducive for me to commit suicide were created. Thanks to my immense inner strength, I could resist the regime’s relentless efforts to end my life. That is how I survived ten years of rigorous torture inside jail.
The regime left no stone unturned to entice me to commit suicide, but eventually failed. I was seized by a sudden pang of conscience in spite of all these provocations pushing me to the edge. Fortunately, I escaped such a fate. This was also due mainly to the lesson learnt from my mother, which would often come flooding back to my memory. There was a time when women committed suicide in my village after their husbands were forcefully taken to labor camps. When the breadwinners were missing for a long time, the women, out of helplessness and overburdened by having to nurture children, jumped into the river. I have a vivid recollection of my mother narrating those stories and counseling the neighbors not to commit such acts. Since childhood, she always told us that life, in due course, might create some moments, inflicting sorrow and pain on us, but at such times, we should never think of ending the life. Hence, it was my mother's teaching that helped me survive those days of extreme brutality.
(Excerpts of a book on 'Torture Killing Me Softly: Bhutan through the Eyes of Mind Control Victim)