In contemporary India, the history of political prisoners can be divided into two phases: 1977 and after. In January 1977, following Indira Gandhi's announcement of national elections, four political parties merged to form the Janata Party, a party that was committed to the release of political prisoners, especially since ‘the glue holding the Janata was the bitterness of having been locked up in Mrs Gandhi's prisons’ ( Jaffrelot and Anil 2020: 426). The party manifesto resolved to restore fundamental rights and remove press censorship. However, as Jaffrelot and Anil state, ‘The semblance of unity could not mask the contradictory pulls and pushes of its partisans’ (427). Consequently, as far as political prisoners were concerned, the real foot soldiers were civil rights activists who actively built pressure on the newly installed government in myriad ways, including drawing attention to prevailing jail conditions and instances of torture. With regard to the release of political prisoners, the then newly formed Delhi Committee of the People's Union for Civil Liberties and Democratic Rights (PUCLDR) urged the home minister against the denigration and criminalization of political viewpoints of others and demanded the release of all political prisoners, ‘including those belonging to the CPI(ML) (Naxalites), CPI(Marxist), the Naga and Mizo underground movement, members of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) of UP who rose in revolt against the former government’ (Ghose 1977: 822). The letter pre-empted the predictable political ‘retreats’—the insertion of bail conditions, demands for undertakings against violence and stigmatizing through criminal tags—that the government adopted while releasing political detainees.

Besides letters and litigation, public demonstrations were common. Recalling his participation in one such demonstration in Kolkata which inventively used songs and slogans, veteran commentator and Emergency detainee Sumanta Banerjee remembers that once the march reached Alipore Jail, the participants raised slogans and chants and demanded that the gates be opened, and that the jailed Naxalites be freed (personal communication). Such acts of popular pressure were able to override the government's procrastination towards releasing Naxalite prisoners, and those jailed were released, albeit in a delayed manner.