Alexei Navalny’s death in a prison in freezing Siberia is a reminder of the means that Josef Stalin employed in dealing with his enemies, real or imagined. He had his party colleagues despatched to early, quick graves. There were the intellectuals he had no compunction in pushing to sad deaths. The poet Anna Akhmatova, among others, suffered when her husband died in a Stalinist prison.

In later times, the sufferings of men like Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn became part of Soviet history. Under Leonid Brezhnev, dissent was treated with disdain, and in harsh manner. In Navalny’s death one hears an echo of the past. He went back home after treatment in Germany for poisoning, knowing full well that the Putin government would not treat him well. And it did not.

There is little question that Navalny was a brave man who stood up, and remained standing, for his principles. Moved from prison to prison by the authorities, who hoped that he would be forgotten by the world, Navalny did not abandon the ideas he believed in. In court appearances, he was kept in a cage, which was a move to degrade him as a person. He became thinner by the day, but he held his head high. He is now dead, a martyr to the cause of free thought.

Navalny’s death is but one more instance of harsh politics ending the lives of those who would change conditions in their countries. Death in prison is, therefore, hardly a new phenomenon. In Egypt, President Mohammad Morsi, elected to office in the country’s first free vote, was overthrown by General Abdel Fatah al Sisi, his defence minister, and thrown into prison. Caged like an animal during court appearances, Morsi in the end collapsed and died.

Politicians Dying in Prison: a Brief HistoryIn Peru, Abimael Guzman, the leader of Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path guerrilla organisation, was captured during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori in 1992. Condemned to life imprisonment, he died in incarceration in 2021. To the end of his life, Guzman, a leftist intellectual, demonstrated his loyalty to the socialist cause and was never seen to be genuflecting before the Peruvian authorities in order to be able to go free.

A death in China in 1969 left people around the world shocked beyond measure. Liu Shaoqi, a veteran of the revolution which brought communism to China under Mao Zedong, was suspected by the latter to be a capitalist roader during the Cultural Revolution unleashed in the mid-1960s by the Red Guards on instructions from the Great Helmsman. Liu, who had served for a number of years as China’s President, was removed from office and carted off to prison. Nothing was heard of him until his death in jail. It was a sad end of a man who had made immense sacrifices for the cause of communism in China.

In British colonial India, Subhas Chandra Bose could well have perished in prison had his failing health not compelled the authorities to free him and place him under house arrest at his family home in Calcutta. He regained his health and slipped out of India to carry on the struggle for the country’s freedom overseas.

The reputed politician Lala Lajpat Rai did not die in prison, but that did not matter. During a political protest in Lahore in 1928, he was badly beaten on the head by the colonial police. A few days later, he was dead. Amir Abbas Hoveyda, Iran’s Prime Minister under the Shah, was taken to prison when the ayatollahs took power. He was murdered there.

Perhaps no tragedy can be greater than the misery caused to Bangladesh’s people when the four leaders who had formed the Mujibnagar government in 1971 and shaped strategy for the country’s liberation were assassinated in prison by renegade soldiers, those who had already murdered Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his family, in November 1975. Tajuddin Ahmad, the country’s first Prime Minister, was among the four men. He still had life left in him. At that point, a policeman called the killers back and had them bayonet one of the most brilliant of Bangladesh’s politicians to death.

One of the more miserable of deaths in prison was that of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Tried for murder in the regime of his erstwhile protégé Ziaul Haq, he was convicted and sentenced to death in a judgement that was as perverted as it was immoral. Zia, who had earlier publicly stated, ‘I will hang the bastard’, had no intention of letting Bhutto go free. No appeals for clemency from world leaders moved him. For months the deposed Prime Minister languished in a condemned cell. At an ungodly hour, long before dawn, he was led to the gallows and hanged in Rawalpindi. Before the sun rose, Bhutto’s corpse was buried in his village in Sindh.

In May 1981, Bobby Sands, a member of the Irish Republican Army, died after being on hunger strike for 66 days. In prison since being convicted for violent activities in Northern Ireland, the 27-year-old Sands was elected to the House of Commons in a by-election following the death of an MP. Demands were made on the Margaret Thatcher government for Sands to be released and allowed to take his place in parliament. The Prime Minister paid no heed. In the end, weakened from hunger, Sands died in prison.

Alexei Navalny’s death brings home to us the many perils which political prisoners are vulnerable to when they are placed under arrest, especially in countries where authoritarianism is the mode of governance. There are worries today about Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader kidnapped and flown to Turkey in the late 1990s. He has been in prison ever since. In Pakistan, there are fears that at a point, attempts could be made to murder the jailed Imran Khan.

Decades ago, there were the very legitimate fears that Ahmed Ben Bella, Algeria’s first President ousted and imprisoned by his Defence Minister Houari Boummedienne in 1965, might die in jail. He survived and emerged from prison years later. He died in 2012. Iraq’s Saddam Hussain was not so fortunate. Ousted from power by an Anglo-American invasion of his country in 2003, he was kept in prison and sentenced to death in a sham trial. He was hanged on Eid day.

A so-called abortive communist coup led to the rise of General Suharto in Indonesia in the mid-1960s. The pogrom following the events of September 1965 left anywhere between a million and two million Indonesians dead. The leader of the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), D.N. Aidit, was murdered by the army. Foreign Minister Subandrio was tried by the regime and sentenced to death. Twenty-nine years later, an ageing Subandrio was freed. He never spoke of the period between his incarceration and release from prison. He passed away in 2004.

Palestinian political prisoners have died in Israeli jails. Politicians registering dissent across wide regions of the globe have been hounded for decades. Mehdi Ben Barka, a dissident Moroccan politician, went missing in Paris in 1965. His fate has remained unknown. Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Congo, was captured by his enemies soon after his country gained freedom from Belgium. He was brutally done to death, his body dissolved in acid. Aung San Suu Kyi, in isolated detention in Myanmar, may never emerge alive from prison again.

Thus go the tales of political leaders dying in prison or spending long years in solitary confinement. Navalny’s death informs us that sophistication is yet a far cry in a good number of countries. Medievalism yet rules vast patches of the globe.
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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics and diplomacy