The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Russian novelist
Mid-November brought some distressing news – more than four persons per day were killed in police and judicial custody in India between 2001 and 2010. The exact number would be 14,231.
The New Delhi-based Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) in its report, Torture in India 2011, revealed that a large majority of these deaths were a direct consequence of torture in custody. These deaths reflect only a fraction of the problem with torture and custodial deaths in India as not all the cases of deaths in police and prison custody are reported to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). Further, the NHRC does not have jurisdiction over the armed forces and the NHRC also does not record statistics of torture not resulting into death.
This is where the tip of the iceberg lies. The numbers not only tell us that the situation might be worse, it also tells us how rotten we as a society are. It also tells us that in trying to fight insurgencies and crime, we have become a brutal and brutalised nation. No, there is nothing preachy about this. In fact, Friedrich Nietzche had warned about this long ago, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
The custodial death figures might perhaps make you argue that all torture is confined to areas where either security forces are fighting militants, or where crime rates are extremely high. But a closer look at the breakdown of the statistics tells us that such a contention would be far from the truth. The number of deaths in police custody recorded from conflict-afflicted states like Jammu and Kashmir and Manipur simply do not reflect the gravity of the situation. The NHRC registered only six deaths in police custody in J&K from 2001-02 to 2010-11, while only two cases were recorded from Manipur. Yes, you read that right. Only six in 10 years in J&K! Anyone who knows the truth would roll in laughter. Perhaps a laughter of sheer desperation.
Let’s steer away from hidden figures, and instead for a moment look at actual numbers. During 2001-2010, Maharashtra recorded the highest number of deaths in police custody with 250 deaths, followed by Uttar Pradesh (174). Though Maharashtra has a population of 112 million in comparison to 199 million of Uttar Pradesh, according to the 2011 census, the fact that 76 more persons were killed in police custody in Maharashtra shows that torture is more rampant in police custody in Maharashtra than Uttar Pradesh, a state with a higher incidence of criminality. What is even more shocking is that about 99.99 per cent of deaths in police custody can be ascribed to torture and occur within 48 hours of the victims being taken into custody.
Custodial rape remains one of the worst forms of torture perpetrated on women by law enforcement personnel and a number of custodial rape of women takes place at regular intervals. NHRC recorded 39 cases of rape from judicial and police custody from 2006 to February 28, 2010. A very human way to extract information, no?
But that is precisely what torture is about. It is meant either to extract information or a confession. There are civilised means of doing this, and that is why there is something called the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT), which requires the country to enable a legislation to be adopted to reflect the definition and punishment for torture. India is a signatory.
Yet, the country which never lets a chance go to extol the virtues of its centuries-old civilisation is yet to formulate an anti-torture law in compliance with the CAT. An extremely flawed Prevention of Torture Bill, 2010, is yet to be enacted as law. The fact that the CAT was passed by the UN Assembly in 1975 shows how much interest Indian lawmakers have taken in the subject. The Bill has shied away from defining "torture" precisely to make all its forms actionable under the law. While CAT has a wide definition, our Bill limits torture to grievous hurt that causes damage to life and limbs. There are many forms of torture that lie outside this definition.
The Bill also makes it difficult for those accused of torture to be tried. This is because complaints against acts of torture have to be made within six months, and the sanction of the appropriate government has to be sought before a court can entertain a complaint. Here is where the Indian government has placed convenient hurdles to those seeking justice.
There's more. There is no independent mechanism/ authority to investigate complaints of torture. The investigating agency in most cases of torture would be the police. So it becomes a case of the cat belling the cat. What makes all this talk a scary proposition is that the Bill could well become an Act. According to a survey, only one in four Indians is against all forms of torture. The rest either advocate it, or are blissfully ignorant of everything.
But be warned. It is not only militants or criminals alone who are tortured by our policemen; in fact, any one can be. You can gauge it yourself by the amount of faith that you have in the police. Ask yourself this question: would you like to leave yourself at the mercy of policemen? Or, would you like to have an anti-torture law of international standards?
