A law alone isn't enough to make the State stop playing torturer  ...

It is der ayad, but exactly how durust ayad, we can't yet say. It's good that after 11 years of dithering the government has actually drafted the Prevention of Torture Bill, 2008. It's taken all this time since India signed the United Nations Convention against Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Punishment. The draft bill prescribes a maximum punishment of 10 years to police and other government servants responsible for causing grievous hurt or danger to the life, limb or health of any person. The proposed legislation is quite wide in its scope, covering torture on the grounds of race, religion, place of birth, residence, language, caste and community. Public servants torturing anybody for extracting information or extra-judicial confession will be punishable under the proposed legislation. Inflicting mental torture would also become punishable.

The draft meets internationally recognised standards of human rights and civilised jurisprudence, but requires really independent panels committed to investigating complaints with a great deal of rigour, as custodial torture situations rarely have independent eyewitnesses. Moreover, state agents are smart enough to tamper with procedure and record through skilful means, for instance by wrongly entering the date, time and place of arrest. Though independent central and state panels have been promised to go with the proposed law, the record of the national and state human rights commissions has been none too bright, as they remain piled with backlogs and nearly always ready to wash their hands of cases, most frequently on the grounds that the judiciary is already engaged with the matter. We wish things to come out right on this score, but what about the more ingenious and insidious ways of torture we keep on witnessing in India?

Torture in India often comes in the garb of 'the law following its course'. Ask young lovers who elope to marry, defying stifling social taboos of caste and religion. In a usual pattern across India, the enraged clan lodges a case of abduction, and the police then hound the couple. This in itself is torture enough, but many times the police recover the couple and hand them back to the clan. The girl is then either tortured by the clan to backtrack, or either the girl or the boy or both are murdered in the name of honour. The cases of honour killing are plain enough for a judicial reprisal against the members of the murdering family, but nothing happens to the police personnel who hand the couple over to them following 'perfect' legal procedure. And certainly no remedy is available if the girl backtracks before a magistrate—forced by the threat that lurks in the background. I know of an even more insidious case where the powerful lawyer father-in-law of a boy who had eloped got one of his shady clients to lodge a false case of dacoity against the boy in a place in the back of the beyond that he had never visited. When the colluding police did not find the falsely accused, they arrested his brother, who had no hand in the marriage/ elopement. Both the brother and, subsequently, the boy spent months in jail before the chief minister of the state was made to intervene by some activist.

It is also not just a class thing. It is more systemic. The system, or more precisely, the government of the day, inflicts such insidious torture even against high-profile human rights defenders or even non-activist people with a successful career who dare defy the system willingly or accidentally. Take for instance Dr Binayak Sen, the human rights defender from Chhattisgarh who has been charged with being a courier for the Naxalites on the so-called evidence of meeting an ailing Naxal prisoner several times, even though he met him each time as part of his job as a physician and a human rights activist, with proper official permission and under official supervision.Evidences and non-official witnesses are collapsing in the case, but the trial will take years and Sen has already spent nearly two year in jail as bail is not easy under special security laws. The NHRC shirks action on the ground that the case is sub judice. Even if Sen walks free at the end of it all, who would account for the long torture he underwent?

Madhu Trehan has now documented the similarly long torture inflicted by the government of the day on Shankar Sharma and Devina Mehra for being the financers of Tehelka, whose sting exposed corruption in the system. They were not even regular activists but went through an endless ordeal of false cases, police raids, interrogations and jail. Unless the officials who collude in such seemingly lawful torture of innocents in the name of duty are held accountable, any law would be inadequate.




http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20090302&fname=Column+Neelabh+%28F%29&sid=1

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