Advertising
Supported by
Despite evidence of widespread police brutality, no primary popular motion has emerged. For many Indians, crime is the subject of maximum urgency.
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Sameer Yasir
NEW DELHI – A father and son were taken to a small police station in the town of Sathankulam in southern India in June after arguing with police. When friends and the circle of relatives went to the station, they heard screams coming from inside, which grew louder as night fell.
The next afternoon, the two men, Ponraj Jeyaraj, 58, and Beniks Jeyaraj, 31, stumbled out surrounded by agents and blood ran down their legs. Obviously, they had been tortured while in police custody, members of the city’s circle of relatives and lawyers said.
“Please find a way to get us bail,” Ponraj Jeyaraj pleaded with his sister, Jaya Joseph, as they took him to the hospital, he recalls. She said her brother’s last words were, “We won’t do it another day.”
The father and son died hours later, in addition to serious internal injuries, a few days later. Station police officers declined to comment, saying the case is now under federal investigation.
For decades, India has absorbed the consequences of police brutality, torture and extrajudicial executions. Every year, dozens of indigenous people die in what activists call “fake encounters” and many others, activists say, are tortured into police custody.
Many of these killings have been widely covered by the Indian media and some have triggered some movements and demonstrations. But they have rarely provoked protests calling for change.
Around the world, the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis in May sparked a backing eye to police abuse, racism and injustice, but not in India, where no primary grassroots motion has emerged to address police brutality. For many Indians, daily crime is the subject of maximum urgency and they face the police, even when there is sufficient evidence that they have abused their power. There are also fears of opposing the police.
At least 1,731 other people were killed in custody last year, according to an extensive report by the National Campaign Against Torture, an indigenous rights organization founded in New Delhi, the capital. Most of the victims, according to the report, were the same victims of old abuses: Muslims and lower caste Hindus.
Murders committed by the police here rarely lead to punishment. Occasionally, some officials are arrested, but convictions are rare.
Many indigenous people, exasperated by the sclerotic operation of an overloaded and corrupt police system, yearn for justice and welcome the expulsion of those they consider criminals.
“There are real public celebrations of police killings,” said Devika Prasad, head of police reform at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, a human rights organization. “Incredibly slow court proceedings and low conviction rates increase the fear that criminals will get away with it. That’s why a lot of these murders are fair.”
The use of torture is explicitly prohibited in India, but in police stations it happens all the time, activists said. There’s even an unusual underestimation for this: third-degree interrogation.
The first-degree question is a delicate question. The degree of moment is physical aggression, adding slap and punches with sticks.
And third-degree interrogation, according to human rights activists and several policemen who spoke on anonymity and claimed its use, comes to physical torture, as the Jeyarajes seem to have suffered in June.
Relatives, in addition to Ms. Joseph, Ponshekar Nadar, son-in-law of Ponraj Jeyaraj and two others who saw the bodies, said giant pieces of skin had been ripped from the man’s buttocks. They also claimed that hospital doctors had told them that both men had suffered serious internal injuries, most likely as a result of blunt objects embedded in the rectum.
Hospital doctors declined to comment, as did a district headquarters official overseeing The Sathankulam Police Station. Thiru J. K. Tripathy, the senior officer of the Tamil Nadu State Police, to which Sathankulam, also declined to comment.
Human rights teams say there is no conviction for the deaths of 500 other people who were allegedly tortured in police custody between 2005 and 2018.
In Uttar Pradesh state, known for his suspicious killings, magistrates have been investigating since March 2017. In all cases, the police were exonerated.
The killings, According to Prasad, accelerated under the leadership of Yogi Adityanath, a strident Hindu nationalist monk who is now the prime minister of the state. When taken in 2017, Adityanath bragged that his government would “eliminate” criminals.
The killings committed by the police in India take many forms. Some suspects are being beaten to death at police stations in the area, activists said. Others are killed during judicial detention while incarcerated in overcrowded prisons.
Others were killed amid riots or outbreaks of community violence, as happened in February in New Delhi, when police, responding to clashes between Hindus and Muslims, captured several Muslim men and severely struck them. One died two days later from internal injuries.
Then there are the cases where officials say they still did not have the pick to shoot the harmful suspects who attacked them or refused to surrender. These incidents are called encounters.
Last year, Hyderabad police shot dead four men in a meeting. The suspects had been charged with rape and murder, and police said that in a re-enactment of the crime, the suspects had attempted to capture their weapons. Few other people really believed this story, according to many interviews with citizens of Hyderabad at the time. But still, officials were celebrated as heroes and covered in rose petals.
Last month a dubious encounter took place, this time on a road near Kanpur, a complicated shopping town in Uttar Pradesh.
Police were transporting the criminal to an infamous criminal, Vikas Dubey, whom many Indian media had known as a gangster. Dubey’s gang recently shot and killed eight policemen, authorities said. Police said the car carrying him flipped over. Mr. Dubey fired along the road after what police described as a short fight.
What surprised reporters following the convoy with Mr. Dubey said they had been arrested a mile before the turn of the destination site, minutes before that happened. Journalists said police were already blocking the road.
The ordeal of Ponraj Jeyaraj and his son began on the night of June 18. They clashed with police officers circulating through the Sathankulam market, rebuking several investors for violating coronavirus regulations, adding the Jeyarajes, who had kept their store open. 10 minutes after the final time required. A few days earlier, members of the family circle said, the same police officers had tried to sneak In Beniks Jeyaraj to give them a loose phone from their tent, and when he refused, they left panting.
On 19 June, at approximately 7pm, four police officers at Sathankulam police station arrested the father and took him in a van. When his son ran to the police station, he was also arrested.
Several witnesses, in addition to a lawyer, Raja Ram; one of the Jeyarajes’ neighbors, Dev Singh Raja; and a rights activist, Yusuf, who like many Indians uses a single name, said that when the men were taken to hospital for a medical examination the next day, they lied and put on their pants stained with blood, leaving a thick, dark trail. Blood. Ponraj Jeyaraj asked for a lungi, a type of pareo. Her son also put on new clothes.
Paramedics seemed in shock, Ram said, as the Jeyarajes’ new garments blushed in blood within minutes. The father and son were then taken to the house of a magistrate, who saw them from afar and allowed the police to send them to prison.
On June 22, they were transferred to a hospital after complaining of chest pains. Ponraj Jeyaraj the first to die late at night. A few hours after more sleep, his son died.
After investors called a strike to protest the deaths, the Central Bureau of Investigation, a federal agency, intervened. Ten police officers were arrested and imprisoned, but one justice of the peace told prosecutors that none of the officers were cooperating and that they had tried to destroy evidence.
These days, Jeyaraj’s circle of relatives spends much of his time meeting with investigators and seeking to get the post-mortem report, a procedure that will likely take months.
“Doing justice in cases like that is a long struggle,” said Vinod Kumar, Son-in-law of Ponraj Jeyaraj. “Especially when you know the protector has a killer.
Advertising