Police brutality is unacceptable

Karnataka police have come under the scanner for human rights violations before

Justice Anand Narain Mulla of the Allahabad High Court had once famously remarked that “there is not a single lawless group in the whole of the country whose record of crime comes anywhere near the record of that organised unit which is known as the Indian Police Force.” Karnataka police seem to be living up to these words, if recent incidents of custodial torture, brutality during the initial phase of the lockdown and other misdemeanours, are any indication. The latest case is that of Roy D’Souza (50), a mentally-challenged epileptic patient who died in the ICU of a private hospital where he was admitted in a serious condition after he was allegedly tortured at the Virajpet police station in Kodagu. While the police, who claim that Roy had swung a knife and injured one of them, have the right of self-defence, it cannot be extended to condone torture. The post-mortem reportedly confirmed external injuries on D’Souza’s body and damage to internal organs.

This is not the first time that Karnataka police have come under the scanner for human rights violations. Indeed, it has a history of it. Way back in 1987, several senior police officers were arraigned in the Rasheed murder case where an advocate from Kerala was tortured and murdered, allegedly at the instance of the then Home Minister. Not much has changed since. Recently, a Dalit boy was hung upside down, tortured and made to drink the urine of another accused at Gonibeedu police station in Chikkamagaluru. Last month, the Sanjay Nagar police in Bengaluru detained a doctor for two days on charges of illegally selling Remdesivir, administered third-degree beatings and allegedly even extorted Rs 5.5 lakh from him. Though rights violations of varying degrees are common, most go unreported.

Installing CCTV cameras at police stations, as repeatedly directed by the Supreme Court, is necessary to act as a deterrent to custodial ill-treatment. But the bigger problem is the failure of the police top brass to discipline and sensitise the force at all levels, while the human rights commission appear to be in deep slumber. What further emboldens errant men in uniform is that they are reinstated in service after a brief suspension, with hardly any of them facing exemplary punishment. The state’s top police officer, Director General of Police Praveen Sood, should take the lead, initiate stringent action against those guilty in recent incidents and parallelly start a human rights sensitisation programme for his men and women at all levels and humanise the force.