Police baton charges on an African national during a protest over the death of Joan Joel Malu, a native of Congo, who was detained by police for allegedly possessing MDMA drug, in Bengaluru, Monday, Aug 2, 2021. As Bhajan Singh Bhinder et al note in their work, Demons Within: The Systematic Practice of Torture by Indian Police, this sub-culture incentivises the most brutal to rise to the top. Privately, a race begins to prove who is the ‘toughest’ guy around. This is a very clever stratagem of imposing immense peer pressure. Torture is treated as a necessary rite of passage to initiate new officers into ‘real and practical’ policing. This sub-culture consumes everybody, from constables to IPS officers. The reason is that torture has been accepted as a ‘macho’ or the expedient way of dealing with things, which cannot be dealt with by the legal and ‘effeminate’ way of policing. Many people find it paradoxical that police brutality continues be an integral part of policing in India, in spite of the fact that the Indian police has, in 41 years of the IP and 73 years of the IPS, been officered by highly educated people, selected through one of the toughest exams in the world. A wet towel placed on the body of the victim blocked the muzzle flame as well as trapped the un-burnt powder particles! One old-timer proudly told me he had invented a technique of masking powder marks on the dead body if they had to kill someone in a fake encounter. Many victims suffered permanent damage most of them could not muster the courage to approach doctors out of shame and spent their lives in mental agony. Kashmiri author Basharat Peer has narrated horrifying stories of this form of torture in his book Curfewed Night. Then two cops stood on the roller as it was rolled forward and backwards was excruciatingly painful but left no marks.Īlso read: Court Orders Investigation in 25-Year-Old ‘Custodial Death’ Case in KashmirĪ popular, filth-free technique involved giving low-voltage (approximately 80 volts DC, produced by a hand-cranked generator) shocks to the testicles of a man.
Cops loved the ‘roller treatment’ in which a smooth wooden roller was placed on the thighs of a prostrate victim.
We, the beginners, were gleefully ‘enlightened’ that this technique of unnatural joint movement would not leave any visible injury marks on his body even if he managed a medical examination later.īeating on the soles with sticks and suspending a man from a bar like an animal carcass being spit-roasted were derided as crude methods leaving tell-tale marks that could lead to trouble with the courts. On the floor was seated a screaming, half-naked man as two men were stretching his legs apart, while one man twisted his arms backwards and immobilised his back with his knees. That small, bare room in one of the police stations in Tarn Taran was dimly lit and was reeking of human excrement, urine and vomit. My first exposure to ‘real’ police torture came as a trainee officer on an attachment with Punjab police during militancy. However, the real face of police brutality often remains an arcane subject, their notions about police torture derived largely from what they have seen in films – only the victims knowing the truth. Most Indians are familiar with highhanded behaviour of the police in the form of the cops slapping people or, if they are pretending to manage law and order, beating them mercilessly with their sticks ( lathis).
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