Of late, we have been
witnessing two contrasting aspects of our police force. The first relates to
the father-son duo, Jayaraj and Bennicks, who were brutally tortured in police
custody by policemen in Tamil Nadu. The second to Vikas Dubey, a history
sheeter from Kanpur with more than 60 cases filed against him over many years. A
couple of days back, the Uttar Pradesh police raided his hideout in a village
but walked into a trap laid out by the goon. They lost eight policemen
including a DSP.
Let me make it clear,
although India’s state police forces have distinct identities, they share
common colonial heritage and character. Untrained in professional policing they
are no more than bullies in uniform. They kill the unarmed and the defenceless
but when faced with a challenge from goons, they turn into witless sitting
ducks.
The very word “police”
strikes terror in the hearts of common folks, unease among the less vulnerable
and anger among the civic minded. There is hardly any person in India who feels
reassured at their presence. I am not talking of the privileged few, who need
the police to protect them and their wealth from the masses. Professional
gangsters are the only community that holds the police in utter contempt.
The nexus between the
police and the powerful goes back to the British Raj times when this force was
raised mainly to subjugate the people of India. The local daroga or thanedar
also known as Station House Officer or SHO, behaved like a petty potentate.
Appearance of a cop in a village or a mohalla was, and still is, a matter of
shame and negative speculation – a bad omen.
After we became
independent, the political community quickly appropriated this instrument of
suppression and exploitation. All attempts at breaking this nexus and reforming
the police force have been stonewalled.
The result is there for
all to see.
The Jayaraj and
Bennicks custodial murder is but the latest episode in the blood drenched
history of police atrocities. Before that, there was the alleged murder of Kumaresan,
a thirty-year-old taxi driver. Now, sections of the media are baying for the
blood of Tamil Nadu Police, citing many other cases of custodial torture. But
the same media had kept quite so far, as they did in the case of Kumaresan and
many other similar police crimes. Only when it started becoming an
international issue did they wake up. The justice system became active. Four
cops have been arrested and charged with murder, among other things.
The list of victims of
custodial torture is long. According to a rights group report, cited by The
Hindu, more than 1700 people were killed in police and judicial custody in
2019. The torture methods included hammering iron nails in the body, applying
roller on legs and burning, beating the soles of the feet, stretching legs
apart in opposite directions, and hitting in private parts, giving electric
shock, pouring petrol or applying chilli powder on private parts, beating while
handcuffed, pricking body with needles, branding with a hot iron rod, beating
after stripping, urinating in mouth, inserting a hard blunt object into anus,
beating after hanging upside down with hands and legs tied, forcing to perform
oral sex, pressing finger nails with pliers, beating with iron rods after
victim is suspended between two tables with hands and legs tied, and kicking
the abdomen of a pregnant woman.
Of course, women of all
age groups frequently face sexual violence in police custody and outside too at
the hands of predators in uniform even if they are innocent children. A typical
case involves a police inspector, Anand Chandra Majhi in Odisha’s
tribal-dominated Sundargarh district. He was involved in the gang rape of a
13-year-old tribal girl over a period of two months.
Whether it is Tuticorin
or Sundargarh or anywhere else, one wonders how can a cop dare to resort to
such crimes? What assures him that he would get away with it all. The answers
are obvious. Most victims come from the vulnerable sections of the society.
They are poor and completely at the mercy of their tormentors in uniform. Legal
redress is beyond their reach. Most of them are ignorant of their rights, and
even those who are aware do not have the courage or means to assert their
rights.
And this is where the
culpability of our media stands out in stark relief. Reporting of an ordinary
person’s custodial torture has little attraction for them. Then there is the
powerful politician and police brass to cover up such police atrocities.
Most such cases are
reported by individuals, by recording the damning evidence on their smartphones
and uploading it on social media platforms. Earlier these intrepid souls had
exposed police violence in the Jamia Milia library, the kicking and killing of
unarmed citizens on the roadside forcing them to sing patriotic songs. They
told the world of the ganging up of the police and the local thugs against
unarmed and peaceful CAA protesters. Again, the police inaction during the
Palghar lynching was tellingly revealed by video clips.
A team of human rights
activists has accused the Uttar Pradesh Police of targeting Muslims in the
aftermath of protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that took
place in Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh. A civilian fact-finding team, which
includes prominent human rights activists like John Dayal, Kavita Krishnan and
Harsh Mander, has claimed to have proof that violence during the agitation was
incited by the state police and that the Muslims in the area were tortured.
How can an unjust act,
a brutal unlawful assault by the lawmen go unpunished in a liberal democracy
like India’s? We do have a Constitution that protects our rights, we have the
judicial system that is designed for redress of grievances. Yet, the
lawlessness of the lawmen keeps getting more and more brazen. Why?
The problem majorly
lies with the medieval mindset of our political classes across the ideological
spectrum. Middle class apathy only complicates this problem. Frankly, our
middle classes are the most decadent, self-centred and cowardly in the world. The
less said about the media, the better. They are the pits.
In a democracy, the
media and the middle class can play a powerful reformative role. This we saw in
the George Floyd case when people – cutting across ethnic divisions – protested
in the two Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. Unfortunately, the
Jayaraj Bennicks case failed to turn into a transformative moment for the
country.
In 2006, the Supreme
Court had observed in a landmark judgment that “the commitment, devotion and
accountability of the police has to be only to the rule of law” and that “the
supervision and control has to be such that it ensures that the police serves the
people without any regard, whatsoever, to the status and position of any person
while investigating a crime or taking preventive measures”. It is time for thorough
top-down reforms in the structure and training of our police force. The police
must become the servants and not masters of the people of India, that is
Bharat. They are working in an independent and not colonial India.
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