Our cover story this week endorsing the paramount need for free legal aid to the needy is highly relevant to the observation that the threat to human rights is highest in police stations. Over the years, India Legal has reported stories, penned editorials, run columns asserting the validity of this statement. It cannot be stated often enough. It will never cease to be a cliché or a horror to which any freedom-worshipping human being, anywhere in the world, should become inured.
Last week, the self-effacing, soft-spoken Chief Justice of India, NV Ramana, reiterated this concern at a function organised by the prestigious National Legal Services Authority (NALSA). It was a blunt, no-holds-barred statement from the highest legal authority sworn to uphold, enforce and interpret the nation’s most sacrosanct secular document gifted to us by our founding fathers.
He declared that the issues of human rights and dignity enunciated in the Constitution are “sacrosanct”. The threat to human rights and bodily integrity “are the highest in police stations,” he said. “Custodial torture and other police atrocities are problems that still prevail in our society. In spite of constitutional declarations and guarantees, the lack of effective legal representation at the police stations is a huge detriment to arrested or detained persons.” His remarks need to be quoted fully:
“The decisions taken in these early hours will later determine the ability of the accused to defend himself. Going by the recent reports even the privileged are not spared third-degree treatment,” he said. “To keep police excesses in check, dissemination of information about the constitutional right to legal aid and availability of free legal aid services is necessary. The installation of display boards and outdoor hoardings in every police station/prison is a step in this direction,” Ramana said. He urged NALSA to carry out nationwide sensitisation of police officers.
Free legal aid to the needy has its roots in the freedom movement. “Those days, the legal luminaries rendered pro bono services to freedom fighters, who were targeted by the colonial rulers. This spirit of service found reflection in the Constitution, with those very same legal luminaries serving as members of the Constituent Assembly.”
“If India wants to remain a society governed by the rule of law it is imperative for us to bridge the gap of accessibility to justice between the highly privileged and the most vulnerable. For all times to come, we must remember that the realities of socio-economic diversity which prevail in our nation, cannot ever be a reason for denial of rights,” Ramana intoned. “If as an institution, the judiciary wants to garner the faith of the citizens, we have to make everyone feel assured that we exist for them. For the longest time, the vulnerable population has lived outside the system of justice.”
Pointing out that “prevailing obstacles like lengthy, painstaking and expensive formal justice processes add to the woes of realising the goals of Access to Justice,” Ramana said: “As an institution, the toughest challenge before us is to break these barriers first.”
In tandem with the observations of the chief justice, former Inspector General of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) MP Nathanael wrote a passionate essay in The Indian Express: “Ending Police Brutality”. He said that prompt action against errant personnel is a must to stop custodial torture. The cardinal point I am seeking to make in this editorial is not that credible voices against human rights abuses in India are being raised for the first time. Such denunciations have come regularly from NGOs, international bodies, activists and political reformers. What I find noteworthy is that these fears and concerns along with radical suggestions for reform and preventive measures are still finding public expression in both mainstream and alternate media during a period when there are widespread apprehensions that all dissenting and critical voices considered hostile to the power structure and its version of the Indian state have been effectively gagged and silenced.
A good example of free expression which, even though it may have stopped kicking, is perhaps still partially alive, are the following two concluding paras from Nathanael’s piece, prominently displayed in The Indian Express:
“In a written reply in the Lok Sabha, the former Minister of State for Home Affairs G Kishan Reddy stated that 1,697 custodial deaths were registered between April 2019 and March 2020, of which 1,584 deaths were in judicial custody while the rest (113) were in police custody. Uttar Pradesh topped the list with 400 custodial deaths followed by Madhya Pradesh (143). This meant that about five custodial deaths took place every day in our country. But as on August 3, Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai stated in the Lok Sabha that 348 custodial deaths, and 1,189 cases of torture by police were reported across the country in the last three years.
“While several policemen do get convicted, there are good reasons to believe that many go scot free—by manipulating records, intimidating complainants, or political patronage. It’s up to senior officers to ensure that prompt actions are taken against policemen who resort to torture. When erring personnel are promptly punished the message goes out loud and clear to other rogue policemen that the law will catch up with them. In the case of custodial deaths, those guilty should be tried for murder.”
Nathanael issues dire warning: Police personnel who remain spectators when people in custody are being tortured are also complicit in the crime. Sub divisional police officers and superintendents of police should be held accountable from the impropriety committed by those under their supervision.
Across the oceans, in America, the black man, George Floyd, choked to death under the knee of a white policeman who had arrested him. Why has the killing of George Floyd struck such a profound chord in us? Maybe it was that phrase: “I can’t breathe,” wrote Ben Okri in The Guardian. Echoing the sentiments expressed by CJI Ramana and Nathanael, Okri observes: “There have been many times when black people have been gagged, strangled and choked by the police in the US, and even in Britain. The names of those who have died unjustly at the hands of the police are legion. And the police officers have mostly always gotten off entirely free. What happened to George Floyd isn’t new. “I can’t breathe” was uttered by another police victim, Eric Garner, less than a decade ago. But now there has been a crossover protest on a universal scale. This time is different. This time it is epochal. Language taps into primal fears.”
Derek Chauvin, the white Minneapolis police officer, was convicted of murdering Floyd after a trial seen as a pivotal test of police accountability in the United States. The jury deliberated less than 11 hours before finding him guilty. As Okri puts it, we need a new language to express the fundamental clarity of what happens when people are demonised, excluded, deprived, oppressed, and killed because they are poor, dispossessed, and part of what Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” Judges like Ramana and police officers like Nathanael are showing us the way.