NEW DELHI (AP) – For two and a half minutes, the popular Indian radio announcer described in detail what she said about the torture and murder of a father and son in police custody.
The father arrested for disobeying coronavirus blocking regulations by keeping his cell phone shop open in southern India after curfew, Suchitra Ramadurai claimed in a video posted on his Instagram. The man’s son went to see him at the police station and they were both beaten so much that they were still bleeding when they gave the impression before sentencing was handed down the next day.
Three days later, on June 23, they were dead.
“Please share this story, ” said Ramadurai to his followers. “We’re fighting the system.”
The video, which was watched 20 million times before police ordered Ramadurai to dismantle it, sparked an ordinary wave of public outrage over deaths with local opposition politicians marching through the streets, Bollywood stars expressing their condemnations and television stations holding hours of police debates. Brutality.
Even rarer, 10 police officers were arrested on the basis of a federal investigation and charged with murder.
The case came when global attention focused on police abuse following the death of George Floyd in custody in the United States. He renewed his calls in India to reform what human rights defenders have described as a culture of abuse and impunity within the country’s police system.
The reaction to the death of the father and son, if unprecedented, was far from the norm in India, where police “regularly use torture and forget about arrest procedures with little or no responsibility,” Jayshree Bajoria said of “Bound through Fraternity, “a 2016 report on deaths in custody in India.
“Often the total formula is complicit in protecting the police guilty of such abuses of doing some responsibility,” Bajoria said.
According to the New Delhi-based National Campaign against Torture, 125 other people died in police custody as a result of torture or other abuse in 2019.
In internal reports, police characterize these deaths for other reasons such as suicide, pre-existing illnesses or herbal motifs. However, in many cases documented through government-appointed human rights researchers and teams, the deaths were known as a result of torture.
The country’s National Human Rights Commission said in its 2017 annual report that violence in arrests was so widespread “that it is almost routine,” adding that many deaths have been reported in custody after numerous robberies or have not been reported at all.
India’s Ministry of the Interior, which is guilty of law and order, responded to requests for comment on the matter.
In India, suspected criminals are killed in what police and army officers call “meetings,” as last month when a suspect wanted in connection with the deaths of eight police officers was shot dead after police said they seized a gun while looking at activists. They were quick to question the point.
However, the death of father and son, this case has aroused little public anger.
Because the country’s obstructed judicial formula is slow to perform certain prosecutions and punishments, those killings are encouraged through politicians, held in popular Bollywood films, supported massively by the public and rewarded through state officials with off-duty promotions and bravery awards for the police involved. .
Last December, on a scale at the crime scene, police shot dead four men suspected of raping and killing a young woman whose body had been burned down. Hours after the shooting, about 2,000 others gathered at the venue to celebrate, handing out sweets and bathing police with flower petals.
The slowness of India’s judicial formula means that it takes years, if not decades, for cases to end. An accumulation of tens of millions of pending court instances has particularly eroded public confidence in the formula.
“It is this decline of religion in formula that has led many others in India to call for instant justice,” said sociologist Kalpana Kannabiran.
Indian courts and various human rights commissions have established detailed procedures to save him and punish such killings, but prosecutions are rare. Between 2001 and 2018, 26 police officers were convicted of deaths in custody.
“There are serious gaps in external accountability mechanisms and internal oversight,” said Maja Daruwala, director of New Delhi-based human rights organization Commonwealth.
“These instances reveal long-term structural weaknesses and fragility that are allowed to remain within the formula and end up several times with tragedies,” he said.
Despite repeated calls for police reform, activists say police education and education on human rights issues and appropriate investigative techniques are lacking. They also say that the police involved in abuse, regardless of their rank, will have to be prosecuted.
Activists also reiterated their demands on India to ratify the United Nations Convention against Torture and incorporate its provisions into the country’s national laws. India is one of the few countries to ratify the convention.
“India can only boast of the rule of law if those guilty of enforcing it are held accountable,” Bajoria said.