Fix accountability

The custodial death of Jeyaraj and Benicks Emmanuel in Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu on June 23 shocked the nation. The father-son duo were brutally tortured for the mere offence of having kept their shop open after the permissible time in the evening during the lockdown period. Night-long torture by a posse of policemen of Sathankulam police station left them almost lifeless with their clothes soaked in blood due to severe bleeding.

They were taken the following day to a hospital, followed by their relatives, where they were administered medicines and detained for about three hours for the bleeding to subside, after which a medical certificate was obtained. They were then produced before the judicial magistrate, who having seen them from a distance, remanded them to judicial custody. All this while, they were ringed by policemen to prevent any relative coming close, except to change their blood-soaked clothes frequently due to excessive bleeding.

The state-wide protests had still not subsided when another case of custodial death surfaced – that of Kumaresan, an autorickshaw driver who died on June 27 at the Tirunelveli Medical College. He had been detained in Veerakeralamputhur police station in Tirunelveli district on May 10 during which he was so brutally beaten that his lungs and kidneys were damaged.

Custodial deaths are not unique to Tamil Nadu where 76 persons died in custody in 2018. It is rampant across the country and the figures released by the National Human Rights Commission and the National Crime Records Bureau show no signs of abating. Between 2010 and 2015, as many 591 custodial deaths were recorded. In 2016, the death toll in police custody was 96, which shot up to 100 the following year. The figure for 2018 was 147.

Despite several directions by various courts to reduce the custodial deaths, no heed is paid and the figures continue to be appalling. The figures do not include several unreported cases as most victims fear further harassment and torture if they venture to squeal about the treatment meted out to them in the police station.

Another custodial death of Mahendran surfaced because of the furore generated by the torture-related death of Jeyaraj and Benkis. He was tortured on May 24 and died on June 13. His mother Vadivu had been warned that if she dared to ever complain, her other son Durai, who was under investigation in a murder case, would be arrested along with his wife on some trumped-up charges. She was forced to complete his burial without post-mortem – a must in all unnatural deaths.

Though cases are at times registered against policemen for custodial deaths, rarely are they convicted. Although 89 cases were registered against police personnel in 2018 for custodial deaths, not one was convicted. This is largely due to the fact that the witnesses are threatened at the time of hearing in the courts.

Policemen feel emboldened to torture their victims because they have the full backing of not just their comrades in khaki but also their superiors. With impunity, they go about beating, maiming or even killing people in custody. Only four Mumbai policemen were convicted between 2010 and 2016 for custodial deaths.

Though there were 97 custodial deaths in 2015, only 33 cases were registered against the policemen. Since investigations are done by their own colleagues, almost all of them go scot free. Nobody is accountable – neither the police station in-charge, nor his superiors, or anyone higher in the hierarchy right up to the DGP or the home minister.

Police reforms

Way back in 2006, the Supreme Court had directed all states to set up Police Complaints Authority (PCA) in the Prakash Singh Vs Union of India case on the subject of police reforms. Though they have been set up in most states to lodge complaints against recalcitrant policemen, their efficacy leaves much to be desired.

Sadly enough, it is often the junior functionaries who are taken to task for crime by policemen. Action is seldom taken against the SPs or higher-ranking officers. As supervisory officers, the responsibility devolves on them to ensure that police personnel under their command carry out regular checks and inspections of police stations and attend to the grievances of the citizens at the police stations. A series of cases of police high-handedness at Satankulam police station should have spurred the DySP and the SP to take action against them.

But they chose to ignore and thereby gave their consent to such atrocities in a subtle manner. Transfer or suspension is no punishment for policemen who are accused of serious charges of murder. With fading public memory, they are reinstated with all accruing benefits.

In such serious cases as happened in Satankulam police station, the states should exercise the powers of dismissal under Article 311 (2) of the Constitution as a formal enquiry would not be possible when the policemen threaten the witnesses and thereby sabotage the whole process for an impartial inquiry.

A lady head constable of Sathankulam police station who was brave enough to come out with the truth about the torture of the father-son duo on June 19 has felt threatened and thanks to the Madurai bench of Madras High Court, she has been provided the security. All efforts are said to have been made by the policemen of the station to destroy the evidence that could lead to their conviction.

In all custodial death cases, action should necessarily be taken against the doctors who issue fake certificates, the judicial magistrates who remand the arrested person to judicial custody without serious considerations and also the jail authorities who accept a person with serious ailments or injuries. The police-judiciary-medical officials nexus to harass and torture common citizens needs to be snapped lest they assume alarming proportion.

(The writer is retired Inspector General of Police, CRPF)