Police stuff
A matter of degree, third degree
But even public support, even ‘social sanction’, does not justify blinding and torture. Even of prisoners
DILIP D’SOUZA
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Posted online: Thursday, March 24, 2005 at 0000 hours IST
It must be a sign of something — a snail-paced judiciary, a profound lack of faith in our justice system, something. When a police officer is arrested because he is suspected of murdering a suspect in a bomb-blast case, people turn out in their hundreds to protest. They say, how can you arrest this honest officer for doing his duty? They say, if you do this, which officer will ever take the risk of going after hardcore — always hardcore — terrorists and gangsters? They say, fine, he killed the man, but the man was a terrorist and he deserved to die. Some other officers say, as if this must certainly clinch the issue, the public is with us.
But here’s something to think about: the dead man was a suspect, that’s all. Setting off a bomb is a horrifying crime all right, but a man arrested on suspicion of being involved in a horrifying crime, even great suspicion, remains a suspect, that’s all. Until he is tried and convicted, however slow and tortuous that process might be, that’s all he is. The tortuous ways of the judiciary, however frustrating we find them, do not mutate him from suspect to terrorist.
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All of which, after all, applies just as much to the officer himself. For until his own trial and conviction, he remains no more than a suspect as well.
Folks familiar with recent happenings in Bombay will know that this is about the senior police inspector Praful Bhosale. Bhosale was arrested and accused of the torture and death in custody of a man named Khwaja Yunus. Who was Yunus? He was charged with the Ghatkopar bomb-blasts of December 2002. While in police custody, he died; the police claimed that happened as he tried to escape.
But here’s something more to think about: what happens to suspects in the custody of the Indian police is widely known and very simple. They are beaten to extract information. The police themselves hardly treat this as a secret. In this very case, one of Bhosale’s police supporters asked the press “sarcastically” whether it was likely that a suspect would offer information if he was plied with biryani and sweets. Implication: of course he was beaten. That’s what we have to do.
Not that it is left to implication, either. A few years ago, a sub-inspector in rural Maharashtra told me of two men he had arrested as suspects in a few burglaries in the area. With an airy wave of his hand, he said that all he had to do was use some “degree vagairah” — his breathtakingly casual reference to “third degree” — on them. When he did that, they confessed.
No, they didn’t die, they merely confessed. But others — plenty of others — have indeed died after such “vagairah” treatment.
There are many valid reasons for this cavalier attitude towards torture, starting with the way our justice mechanism works. (After all, that’s something the police themselves are intimately familiar with). None of them justify torture. Yet the police will themselves also tell you that perfectly ordinary people pressure them to use that “degree vagairah” on people suspected of a crime. It’s true, the public is with them.
Over two decades ago, policemen in Bhagalpur in Bihar poked bicycle spokes into the eyes of ten undertrial prisoners, then poured acid into those destroyed sockets. If it’s hard to read that, it was just as hard for me to write it. Repugnant it might be, but the public of Bhagalpur, fed up with crime and slow justice, was “with” the police. In their hundreds, they too turned out to show support for the poking and pouring policemen of their town. They asked the same rhetorical questions that Bhosale’s supporters ask today. Bihar’s then-CM, Jagannath Mishra, refused to take action against the cops. What they had done, he claimed, had “social sanction.” To this day, none of them have been punished.
But even public support, even “social sanction”, does not justify blinding and torture. Even of prisoners.
So, in the end, the answers to the questions that Bhosale’s supporters raise are simple. Though they really have nothing to do with either Bhosale or Yunus.
Policemen who torture suspects are in no sense “doing their duty”. Yet plenty of officers do indeed take the risk of standing up to terrorists and gangsters — they see that, rather than the torture of suspects, as their duty — and will continue to do so. The dead man Yunus did not deserve to die, any more than you or Bhosale or I deserve to die, any more than Bhagalpur undertrials deserved to have bike spokes thrust into their eyes.
And if “the public is with us” means that the public approves of torturing crime suspects, sometimes blinding them, sometimes killing them — if this is really what it means, one thing seems clear to me. There is no way we can ever stop terrorism. It too is, and will remain, with us.
Posted by Mahesh
at 10:21 PM EST
