How Barkha Dutt’s Journalist Mum Prabha Met a Convicted Murderer in Jail

From Billa & Ranga, to Afzal Guru and Charles Shobhraj - Indian journalists have spoken to death row convicts way before Leslee Udwin

Long before Leslee Udwin and India’s Daughter was deemed unfit for Indian sensibilities by the government, Indian journalists were allowed to interview convicts on death row by the Supreme Court.

It was Barkha Dutt’s mother, the late Prabha Dutt, who moved the court to gain access to Billa and Ranga, who kidnapped, tortured and killed school children Geeta and Sanjay Chopra in 1978. Prabha Dutt, one of India’s first high-profile women journalists, was then Chief Reporter of the Hindustan Times.

In July 1981, the Court ruled that

“Rule 549(4) of the jail manual provides that every prisoner under a sentence of death shall be allowed interviews and other communications with relatives, friends and legal advisers. Journalists or newspapermen are not expressly referred to in Clause (4) but that does not mean that they can always and without good reasons be denied the opportunity to interview a condemned prisoner. There is no reason why newspapermen, who could be termed as friends of the society, be denied permission.”

Only Billa agreed to be interviewed by Prabha Dutt and a handful of other journalists. Like Mukesh Singh, even Billa and Ranga were inmates at Tihar Jail at the time. So, the access granted to Leslee Udwin clearly has precedent.

“The Home Ministry got involved this time because the journalist was a foriegner,” a senior Tihar Jail official told The Telegraph.

There have been other instances too of journalists finding ways around prison rules. ‘Bikini-killer’ Charles Shobraj, convicted of killing foreign tourists gave interviews through his lawyer in the 1980s.

And in 2011, a Kashmiri journalist pretended to be a relative to gain access to Afzal Guru in solitary confinement.