The imprisonment of former Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa at the Bangalore Central Prison since September 27 in connection with a corruption case and the high security surrounding the captivity has derailed a whole lot of regular prison activities, including visits by relatives of other inmates and visits by social volunteers for psychological counseling and other outreach activities.
“Usually our prison outreach activity is carried out twice or thrice a week but over the last week we were told by prison officials that these activities are temporarily suspended,” the representative of an institution involved in prison outreach said.
“The authorities are concerned that AIADMK party workers in the guise of visitors will try to penetrate the facility to catch a glimpse of Jayalalithaa. They are allowing only those who have been repeatedly visiting the prison,” a prison source said.
Barely 500 meter away from the prison entrance, ‘Parivartana’, a bakery selling products prepared by the inmates of the prison, wears a barren look with only a few police officials and media representatives buying tea from the stall.
Arvind (name changed), a jail inmate manning the the shop, claimed that regular customers like local residents and factory workers have stopped visiting the bakery due to a heavy police presence around it.
“We are losing an average of over 100 local customers per day. Police and journalists like only a few of our items but we have over 20 varieties of cakes and snacks that are going unsold,”he claimed.
Refuting reports of inconvenience to other inmates DIG (Prison) Jayasimha said the prison was maintaining routine protocol.
The former Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu has been housed in the administrative block at the prison complex away from the general population. Located on the first floor, the 10 X 10 cell is adjacent to the office of Divyashree, a woman jail superintendent from the Mysore central prison deputed to Bangalore since the conviction of Jayalalithaa.
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