I am a living corpse, says Nisar Ahmad who released after 23 years

New Delhi: 23 years ago, Nisar-ud-din Ahmad was not even 20 when the police implicated him for train blasts in Kota, Hyderabad, Surat, Kanpur and Mumbai — on the first anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition.

And now after 23 years in jail, Nisar walked out from Jaipur jail but what you see now is a living corpse, says Nisar as his entire life got uprooted.

      “I have clocked 8,150 days of the prime of my life inside the jail. For me, life is over. What you are seeing is a living corpse.” 

Nisar was among three who walked free this month after the Supreme Court finally acquitted them of all charges.

Nisar, a second year pharmacy student then in Gulbarga, Karnataka remembers how men in khaki on flimsy charges arrested him by threatening him with ‘revolver’ and had made him to spend the next 23 years in jail.

Speaking to Indian Express, Nisar narrated his gut-wrenching story, “I was yet to be 20 years old when they threw me in jail. I am 43 today. My younger sister was 12 when I saw her last. Her daughter is 12 now. My niece was a year old. She is already married. My cousin was two years younger than me, she is now a grandmother. A generation has completely skipped from my life .

“Our father Noor-ud-din Ahmad left everything to fight a lonely battle to prove our innocence. He didn’t see any hope until he died in 2006. Now there is nothing left. Nobody can imagine what it means to a family whose two young sons are jailed.”

His older brother, Zaheer-ud-din Ahmad, who was working in Mumbai as a civil engineer too, was handed out life imprisonment but was released on bail on 9 May, 2008 by the Apex Court on health grounds as he was diagnosed with lung cancer in jail.

According to the report, the only evidence cop produced was their alleged custodial confessions.

The police invoked the provisions of the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) to make these admissible and fabricated them  in each of these blasts cases.

They approached Supreme Court and challenged the TADA Court’s order. The bench of Justice Fakkir Mohamed Ibrahim Kalifulla and Justice Uday Umesh Lalit felt that the confessions were without any “legal sanction and cannot be relied upon.”

As per the judgment, Nisar’s “role is neither referred to in the confessions.. nor is there any material other than the confession of (Nisar) himself on record. The conviction and sentence of (Nisar) is therefore completely unsustainable”.

Nisar said that he and others were framed adding that “I am thankful to Supreme Court to give my freedom back. But who will give my life back?”

The conviction of ten others, including one who is now 85, another is 79 and a third is a 74-year-old were upheld by SC. “They are going to die inside jail,” said Nisar.