Human Rights Watch have just released a 124 page long report, “Broken System: Dysfunction, Abuse and Impunity in the Indian Police,” detailing abuses by India’s police. (There’s also a smaller, 12 page report for those of you who don’t have the time or the stomach to work through the longer version.) The report details, among other things, the deteriorating state of the Indian police, human rights violations, the lack of accountability, and, finally, HRW’s recommendations.
For a country that heralds itself as the world’s largest democracy, the picture painted by the HRW report isn’t pretty. In January 2009, “Officer Singh” told HRW: “This week, I was told to do an ‘encounter.’ I am looking for my target. I will eliminate him.” The “encounter” Officer Singh refers to is “the practice of taking into custody and extrajudicially executing an individual, then claiming that the victim died after initiating a shoot-out with police. Officer Singh says he wanted to be an honest cop. He says, “[n]o one is born corrupt. It’s a tailor-made system: if you’re not corrupt, you won’t survive.”
But the story doesn’t stop there. There’s also torture. One torture victim, an eighteen year old boy, says, “[a]fter they finished tea they pulled off my shirt and trousers. The constable kicked me, and then constables came and held my hands and legs. They drenched me with a bucket of cold water…For one and a half hours, I was beaten like this…. [On the third night] the SI [sub-inspector] and SO [station officer] pressed their feet against my thighs. I felt my veins, it felt like they would burst. They said, “We’ll make you impotent and you’ll be of no use.” The police, however, are unrepentant about their actions. A constable from Bangalore, for example, remarks, “We do use some extralegal methods. You might disagree, but we cannot do all work by the book. Then the police would be completely ineffective.”
These are only a few snippets from the report. India’s population, as most well know, features one of the world’s largest underclasses, which includes a pronounced north-south gap. The rich, and middle-class, can, then, if it comes down to it, bribe the police. But this isn’t an option for the socially, politically, and economically marginalized lower classes and untouchables. There’s obviously a lot of noise about India as an emerging economic (super)power. But there’s been substantially less attention paid to issues like police abuse, class warfare (in the literal, not Palin, sense), and violence against females.
