Prosecution of erring policemen is rare in India

The death of father-son duo P. Jeyaraj (58) and Bennis (32) due to police torture in Tamil Nadu on June 23 has resulted in unprecedented outrage at police brutality in the country. What happened to both of them is a familiar story in almost all the states in the country. The police in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and the capital Delhi are specially known for their ruthlessness and torture in custody leading to death and loss of limb for life.

And once again the discussion in the media is centered round reports of police commissions and police reforms. What is more important is to try the guilty policemen without wasting time and award them maximum punishment. That alone will send the right message to the inhuman police force in many parts of the country.

We have excellent laws enshrined in our statute books to protect the life and liberty of our citizens. But what happens on the ground is in total violation of the statutes. In spite of the various laws and the existence of human rights institutions and civil rights organizations, the ordinary citizen has all along been living under the mercy of the local police. COVID-19 has, in fact, aggravated the situation with the police exercising undue powers.

The Indian police is known for illegally detaining people and keeping them in police custody and torturing them for days together without making any record whatsoever. In many cases of custody deaths, the police simply call the relatives of the victim and hand over the body after threatening them of dire consequences if they dared to complain. In many cases, not even a post-mortem examination is performed on the body as required under law in cases of suspicious deaths. When the police kill there can be no “suspicion.” The poor meekly accept the bodies of the victims of police brutality and consider it their fate.

Very often the detained people are tortured at police stations in the night invariably by the police officers who are drunk.They go out of control and inflict incurable and fatal injuries. In the morning when they discover that their victims are on the verge of death, the police destroy all evidence of torture, make up a cock and bull story and produce them before a magistrate who is too willing to go by the wishes of the police. They will be remanded to judicial custody and sent to the local jail where also the writ of the police runs. In the case of Jeyaraj and Bennix, the police said their injuries and bleeding from the rectum were caused when they rolled themselves on the road resisting arrest!

Jeyaraj and Bennix died within two days of their detention. Their case came to light only because they were traders and the local trading community collectively took up the matter and agitated for justice for the victims and went on a state-wide strike.

Following reports of the incident in the media, a Division Bench of the Tamil Nadu High Court comprising Justices P.N. Prakash and B. Pugalendhi suo motu took quick and decisive steps to bring the criminal cops to book. The police were so sure of getting away with the murder they even intimidated the High Court-appointed judicial magistrate to enquire into the incident.

Now that the Crime Branch Crime Investigation Department of the Tamil Nadu Police has arrested five policemen on murder charges and is investigating the murders, we can hope that justice will be delivered. The criminal justice system in India is so slow and inefficient that it takes decades before any case is concluded.

However, it remains to be seen whether the investigations and trial will lead to conviction of the policemen. India, in fact, has a very poor record of conviction of policemen accused of various crimes even when trials are ordered and monitored by the High Courts and even the Supreme Court.

Take the case of the infamous Bhagalpur Blindings of 1979-80. The police in Bhagalpur, Bihar, in the name of controlling crime, blinded 32 young people by pouring acid into their eyes. The inhuman activity was carried out in different police stations in Bhagalpur district under a very divine name, ‘Operation Gangajal’!

Following a petition filed by a lawyer Gopi Krishnan Prasad, the Supreme Court of India inquired into the blindings and ordered treatment and rehabilitation of the victims. A high level inquiry held by the Bihar government confirmed the police brutality. Apart from suspending a dozen policemen, no other action has been taken against anyone in the matter.

The Superintendent of Police of Bhagalpur at the time of the brutal incident, Vishnu Dayal Ram who “had no knowledge” of the blindings grew in the profession and retired as the Director General of Police, Jharkhand. He is now a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Unable to do any work and earn a decent living, 14 of the victims died in penury. For years after they were discharged from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, a few of them lived on the streets of Delhi, begging. The surviving victims have not even got their meager pension of Rs.750 a month for nearly a year.

In the Hashimpura (Meerut) massacre of 42 Muslim youths by the men of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC), it took the courts 31 years to convict the guilty policemen. The massacre took place in May 1987, but the 19 policemen accused of the crime did not surrender until 2000. Even then only 16 of them surrendered.

In 2015 the Delhi sessions court which tried the case acquitted the accused policemen for want of evidence. However, the Delhi High Court set aside the sessions court order and convicted the accused and sentenced them to life imprisonment in 2018.

In the 1984 massacre of the Sikhs, which has been belatedly described as genocide by the Delhi High Court, several policemen were guilty of connivance in the killings. However, not even one policeman was found guilty and punished for the crime. In fact, several police officers who watched the massacre without lifting a hand were rewarded with lucrative assignments instead of being dismissed from service for dereliction of duty. Even a handful of dismissals would have helped reform the police.

In 1980 while covering police and crime for the Indian Express, I had occasion to write about the torture in custody of a 24-year-old scheduled caste boy Madan Lal. He was detained by the Central District police and kept under illegal detention for over two weeks and tortured. On a cold winter night, the police had tied him to a cot and a room heater was kept under his feet. By the morning both his feet were severely burnt and he was even unable to stand.

Without even giving him any medical aid, the police produced him before a magistrate who routinely remanded him to judicial custody. The Tihar jail authorities admitted him to LNJP hospital where I met him and wrote his story in the Indian Express. Justice Rajinder Sachar of the Delhi High Court, on the basis of the news report, ordered an inquiry. Cases were registered against three policemen. The case went on for years and ultimately the policemen were acquitted for lack of evidence. While illegal detention and torture are normal practice in almost every state in India, prosecution of erring policemen is a very rare phenomenon.