Political Prisoners or Ordinary Criminals? Defining the Category of ‘Political’ in the Hunger Strikes of Lahore Conspiracy Case Prisoners, 1929-1930

Abstract

This paper will explore how different penal, legal, and moral realities were constituted in the late colonial period around the perennial question of ‘what it meant to act politically’. To interrogate this question, I will focus on the Lahore Conspiracy Case prisoners, who went on a hunger strike to subvert the significative powers of the colonial juridical order that categorised them as ordinary criminals. These ‘political prisoners’ belonged to a subterranean revolutionary group called the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army. What is crucial to my argument is how the idea of being a political actor in this time was tied to two entirely different commonsensical approaches to the placement of violence/non-violence, moral perversity/ moral virtue, selfishness/selflessness, extraordinary/mundane in the domain of the political. These two discursive models, one that belonged to the colonial formation and the other to the anti-imperial forces, would make it easier to speak about the depoliticisation of violent political critique. The word ‘political prisoner’ does appear in a number of official documents, but the colonial state usually subsumed it within other wider categories to dilute any implications resulting from permitting it in official penological discourses. The shift away from legally recognising the political offender was to continually limit how the idea of politics was defined, modulated and authorised in this period. This resulted in the production of punitive categories, more vague than precise, that differed copiously from public understandings of moral and political action.