मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

He dines and I break my fast.
From this time onwards we had our two meals and had plenty of coconuts to eat
in addition to them. The quantity of daily ration had been reduced for strikers. Yet they
consumed it all and would not work. Why do you starve yourselves? Take as much food
from them as you can, grow fat and don't work. This was the mantra I gave them, and
they followed it to the letter. All forms of punishment by the jailor were exhausted in our
case. And we were hauled up before the Magistrate. Some got two months, some four,
and Nani Gopal was given one year's rigorous punishment. But the strike continued all
the same. At last the Government of India had to come out with a special notification on
the subject. It was about the new order of things affecting us as political prisoners in the
Silver Jail of the Andamans.
The New Order
What did the notification say? What was there in it so that our officers read it out
to us so grandiloquently? Well, the following were some important items in that
notification :—
(1) All the prisoners who were sentenced to a definite period of time, short of life-
sentence shall be sent back to their respective prisons in India, where the remission of
their sentences will be duly considered and followed,
(2) Prisoners on life-sentence shall be detained in this prison for a continuous period
of fourteen years, whereafter they will be set free for some labour of a light character.
This shall operate only in the case of those prisoners who give proof of good behaviour
during their period of incarceration.
(3) During the period of fourteen years, the prisoner shall be given decent food to
eat, and decent and decent clothes to wear. After five years, he shall be allowed to cook
his own food and given from twelve annas to a rupee per month as his pocket allowance.
The end of the third strike
From the concessions granted in the notification it is easy to realise that many of
them had conformed to the demands made by the strikers. Although the notification had
stated that the order was final, we knew what to think of them, for, in the opinion of the
political prisoners, nothing was a settled fact that could not be unsettled. However, we