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A November 2011 report by Organization for Minorities of India

Contents:
Introduction: India’s Climate of Impunity
1. Why Indian Citizens Fear the Police
2. 1975-2010: Origins of Police Torture
3. Methodology of Police Torture
4. For Fun and Profit: Torturing Known Innocents
Conclusion: Delhi Incentivizes Atrocities
Rank Structure of Indian Police
Map of Custodial Deaths by State, 2008-2011
Glossary
Citations

For our readers’ convenience, we have reprinted the introduction to “Demons Within” below. To read the entire report, please download a PDF copy.

Introduction: India’s Climate of Impunity

Impunity for police
On October 20, 2011, in a statement celebrating the Hindu festival of Diwali, the Vatican pled for Indians from Hindu and Christian communities to work together in promoting religious freedom. “Religious freedom is the answer to religiously motivated conflicts in many parts of the world,” was the Vatican’s message. “Amid the violence triggered by these conflicts, many desperately yearn for peaceful coexistence and integral human development.” [1]

This call for peace comes in an era of increased communal violence. Linking the Vatican statement to a rising tide of persecution of Christians that is sweeping across states such as Orissa and Kerala, an Agence France-Press wire article reported: “The conversion of Dalit or Untouchables to the Christian faith has sparked violence, with groups of extremist Hindus attacking Christians and their churches.” [2]

The most notable incident in recent years was the violence against Orissan Christians in December 2007 and August 2008. Members of the fanatical Hindu nationalist group Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) violently rioted against Christians in December when top VHP leader Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati accused low-caste Christians of colluding with Naxalite-Maoist insurgents. [3] Violence came to a head after Saraswati was assassinated in August 2008. Although the Naxalites immediately claimed responsibility, the VHP used the incident as an opportunity to stir up anger against local Christians. Mobs of VHP members began roaming Orissa, targeting Christians. The attacks that summer were severe.

Tallying the total damage, All India Christian Council reported that the violence produced “640 Christian houses burnt, 54,000 Christians homeless, 70 deaths and another 50 people missing and presumed dead (of these, 6 Protestant pastors and one Catholic priest killed), 18,000 Christians injured, 2 women (including a nun) gang-raped, at least 149 churches destroyed, and 13 Christian schools and colleges damaged.” [4]

The nun who was gang-raped was Sister Meena Lalita Barwa. On August 25, she was assaulted by “a mob of up to 50 men armed with sticks, axes, spades, crowbars, iron rods and sickles” while at a prayer hall. They dragged the nun into the streets. While chanting Hindu slogans and pouring kerosene on a priest they had also seized, the mob began to rape Sister Meena. She was then paraded half-naked past a group of 12 police officers, who “ignored her and talked in a ‘very friendly’ manner to her attackers.”[5]

This atrocity was a major motivation in the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s (USCIRF) decision to place India on its “Watch List” in 2009. A U.S. State Department entity, USCIRF reserves that list for countries which “require close monitoring due to the nature and extent of violations of religious freedom engaged in or tolerated by the governments.” In its 2011 report, the commission cited India’s culture of impunity for atrocity-perpetrating police, stating:

Following sectarian incidents and reprisals that started in December 2007 and continued into 2008, USCIRF placed India on its Watch List …. An inadequate police response failed to quell the violence, and central government intervention had little initial impact. Mass arrests following the Orissa violence did not translate into the actual filing of many cases, and the courts prosecuting the claims absolved a high percentage of cases for lack of evidence. [6]

As in the case of the passive officers in Orissa, most Indian police answer even atrocities performed in their presence with total impunity. Of course, this depends on who the offending parties are — the rape of a Christian nun may be permitted by attackers from the country’s Hindu super-majority, but would probably not be tolerated if committed by most minorities. Rather than making the slightest effort to restrain violent Hindu mobs, the police typically encourage and sometimes even join in deadly communalist riots against Indian minority communities.

In 1992, Hindu nationalist groups led by L.K. Advani (a former Deputy Prime Minister) incited a mob to attack the Babri Mosque, built in 1527 by the first Mughal emperor of India. Police were sent to ring the mosque and prevent its destruction, but as former Washington Post editor Steve Coll wrote: “The police were mainly Hindus and reluctant in this emotional, polarized climate to fire on their own, so they tended to restore order by standing in front of the Hindu mobs and shooting at the Muslim mobs.” [7] Facing such treatment, the Muslims protecting the Babri Mosque were overwhelmed. It was swarmed by fanatical Hindus, who tore it down stone by stone.

In the aftermath of such large-scale anti-minority violence, the police fail to bring any of the perpetrators to justice. (Of course, as we have just seen, the police oftentimes are the perpetrators.) Regarding this desecration and other bloody communal conflicts, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom reported:

Justice for the victims of large-scale communal violence in Orissa in 2007-2008, in Gujarat in 2002, and against Sikhs in 1984 remains slow and often ineffective. In some regions of India, law enforcement and judicial officials have proven unwilling or unable to seek redress consistently for victims of religiously-motivated violence or to challenge cultures of impunity in areas with a history of communal tensions, which in some cases has fostered a climate of impunity. [8]

Instigators of communal violence enjoy impunity especially because the police themselves are habitually guilty of committing far worse crimes. In 1993, Coll wrote: “Organized, state sponsored political murder is practiced regularly and on a significant scale in South Asia today not only in Sri Lanka but in the disputed Indian states of Punjab and Kashmir.” This has not changed. Indian law enforcement culture overall encourages and often demands that police officers systematically employ barbaric torture methods and extra-judicial killings.

India’s criminal police officers
U.S. founding father Thomas Jefferson argued, “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” Yet Indian police routinely violate the most basic reason for their existence — to protect people from undue harm. As India developed technologically and economically, all eyes turned auspiciously upon her. She has yet to learn from the rest of the world, though, that the brutal torture and killing of civilians is an improper function of law enforcement.

For instance, the commission of torture is not even a criminal act under Indian law. Nationally, there is no legal definition of torture or prohibition of its practice. Indian law actually protects police who practice torture, according to a 2010 publication of the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre, which stated:

Several provisions within the Indian Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) and various national security related laws provide immunity to these officials. Section 197 of the CrPC allows for all-encompassing immunity by providing that the Central or state government in question must grant sanction for the prosecution of any government official … alleged to have committed a criminal offence “while acting or purporting to act within the discharge of his official duty.” The Supreme Court has upheld this provision and has stated that even those who abuse their power are considered to be “acting or purporting to act” in their official position and thus enjoy immunity. [9]

India’s representatives to the United Nations signed the UN’s “Convention Against Torture And Other Cruel, Inhuman Or Degrading Treatment Or Punishment” on October 4, 1997. To be binding to India, however, the Indian legislature must convert the convention into Indian law by passing an identical bill. Fourteen years later, India still has not ratified the convention.

The tenets of the convention are not odious. Those who desire a civil and polite society, those who believe modern individuals are capable of voluntarily organizing together in peace and harmony and those who know inflicting severe mental or physical pain upon a person to coerce or abuse them is evil can all find perfect accord regarding the three primary requirements of the convention, as enumerated in Articles 2 through 4:

Article 2, Section 1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

Article 3, Section 1. No State Party shall expel, return (“refouler”) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

Article 4, Section 1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

Nor was the definition of “torture” contained within the convention unacceptable to any who understand that one of the greatest tragedies of torture is how it denies its sufferers the right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty. None can argue that the acts described below are especially atrocious when applied to suspects against whom the police do not even have enough evidence to file charges:

Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. [10]

In 2010, India’s lower house of parliament — Lok Sabha — passed “The Bill for the Prevention of Torture” to harmonize Indian law with the UN treaty. The bill went to the upper house — Rajya Sabha — where it remains. That the government has shown signs of approving the bill but not been in a hurry to do so reflects that maintaining a carefully crafted image is, as it always has been, the central Indian government’s primary concern. However, should the bill eventually pass, it will prove to lack any real force, as reported by the Network for Improved Policing in South Asia:

The definition of torture as provided in the Bill does not conform to the UNCAT. It will include only extremely serious injuries such as permanent loss of eye or ear, emasculation, bone fractures, or hurt which causes severe and debilitating pain for twenty days or more. In other words, it lays down a very high threshold for an act to qualify as “torture.”

The Bill even lays down a limitation period within which requires that a court can entertain a complaint only if it is made within six months of the date of the offence. As a general rule, criminal laws tend to prescribe no time limits whatsoever, let alone one as short as six months. [11]

Why is India so ambivalent about stamping out as repugnant a practice as torture? The short answer is that the Indian government is one of the most prolific source of state torture on Earth. While some nations debate whether it is acceptable to drip water on an enemy combatant’s face, Indian police casually break limbs, tear flesh and pulverize the bodies of the Indian people. World renowned author Arundhati Roy, a democratic voiced for truth in South Asia, warned in 2004: “In our police stations it’s everything: from people being forced to drink urine, to being stripped, humiliated, given electric shocks, burned with cigarette butts, having iron rods put up their anuses to being beaten and kicked to death.” [12] Thus, India’s police officers have become criminal police believe themselves to be completely outside the law.

From Delhi, the central government approves, directs and facilitates the destruction not just of the fundamental rights of its citizens, but of the citizens themselves. The Indian State is so committed to eliminating even the right to life of the Indian people that it indisputably qualifies as a “bandit gang writ large,” indistinguishable in function from the Mafia or any other organized crime syndicate. [13]

In a November 2011 interview conducted with the authors of this report, Gurinder Singh agreed with that evaluation, stating, “In the end, I can say that Punjab Police is a well armed, uniformed government gang of gundas (thugs).” He was disappeared from 1987 to 1988 by Indian police, who tortured him on multiple occasions, using tactics such as beatings, electrocution, rolling a heavy log over his thighs and forcing his legs into a 180 degree angle, among others.

When the police had their fill, having failed to charge him with anything, Gurinder was finally released. The only recourse he found was to flee India and take refuge in the U.S., where he became a citizen. Thanks to having escaped a nation of lawless police, Gurinder now lives peacefully in Northern California. His torturers remain at large.
India has not succeed in hiding its tolerance of atrocities from the U.S. State Department. Noting that nothing has changed in the past few years, the USCIRF wrote in its 2011 report:

Despite the 2009 election and the Congress Party’s electoral win, India’s democratic institutions, most notably state and central judiciaries and police, fall short in their capacity to uphold the rule of law. In some regions of India, these entities have proven unwilling or unable to seek redress consistently for victims of religiously-motivated violence or to challenge cultures of impunity in areas with a history of communal tensions, which in some cases has helped foster a climate of impunity. [14]

The very existence of India’s culture of impunity certainly guarantees its continued existence, since a flourishing culture of impunity means any investigation of systemic corruption or reform movement that originates from within the Indian government will fail before it begins. After all, what gang can ever be depended upon to investigate and punish its own wrongdoings? There can be little argument that India has become the kingdom about which Augustine of Hippo spoke, asking:

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. [15]

Torture, however, is such a deeply poisonous practice that its existence anywhere in the world brings to mind the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who remarked, “The civility of no race can be perfect whilst another race is degraded. It is a doctrine alike of the oldest and of the newest philosophy, that man is one, and that you cannot injure any member, without a sympathetic injury to all the members.” Continued tolerance by the international community of torture by India’s police will inevitably injure the entire human race and splinter the moral conscience of the world.

Although India should ratify the UN “Convention Against Torture,” seeking government answers to problems created exclusively by that government is not a reasonable solution. Effective change will only begin with individual action. A far more reliable deterrent against the use of torture will be the spread of information through individual initiative, for as Thomas Jefferson opined: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.” [16] To that end, we seek to inform the people of the loss of their discretion so that they, rather than tyrants, might control society.

Therefore, we present the evidence of Indian State sanctioned torture contained within this report. It is our hope that we can persuade all freedom loving individuals to refuse all association with India’s criminal police. We encourage every civilized nation — indeed, the entire free world — to deny any legitimacy to all members of a law enforcement culture which exists primarily to fleece, torture and kill the people.

1. “Vatican to Hindus, respect for religious freedom world.” Asia News. October 20, 2011.
2. “Vatican asks Hindus to fight anti-Christian propaganda.” Agence-France Presse. October 20, 2011.
3. Mishra, Sandeep. “Maoists claim they killed ‘fascist’ VHP leader in Orissa.” The Times of India. August 30, 2008.
4. “Orissa Anti-Christian attacks 2008.” All India Christian Council. August 27, 2008.
5. Page, Jeremy and Rhys Blakely. “Nun Meena Lalita Barwa tells of brutal rape by Hindu mob in India.” The Times (London). October 25, 2008.
6. USCIRF. “United States Commission on International Religious Freedom Annual Report 2011,” May 2011. 245.
7. Coll, Steve. On The Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia (New York: Crown, 1993). 188.
8. USCIRF. “Annual Report 2011.” 12.
9. “Impunity for Torture: More of the Same.” Human Rights Features. June 28, 2010.
10. United Nations. “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment Or Punishment.” New York, December 10, 1984.
11. Balakrishnan, Sumant and Devyani Srivastava. “Prevention of Torture Bill OR Impunity for Torturers Bill.” Network for Improved Policing in South Asia. August 2010.
12. Roy, Arundhati. “How Deep Shall We Dig?” Outlook India. May 6, 2004.
13. Rothbard, Murray N. The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 169.
14. USCIRF. “Annual Report 2011.” 244-245.
15. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. chapter 4.
16. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), President of the United States, on September 28, 1820.

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