Is the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) underplaying the number of custodial deaths in the country?

A report titled "Torture in India 2008: A State of Denial", released by the Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR) on Wednesday, highlighted that four persons were dying every day in jail or police custody.

In all, the figure obtained by ACHR from NHRC using the RTI route showed that in all 7,468 persons have died in the last four years, between 2002 and 2007. The ACHR attributes a large number of these deaths to torture but NHRC attributes these to "death by natural causes".

Aruna Sharma, joint secretary at the NHRC, points out that investigations conducted largely by their own staff have led them to attribute only 164 of the 1,422 deaths that occurred in police custody as being due to "unnatural causes". Similarly, 10,285 deaths in jails occurred due to natural causes and only 155 occurred due to "unnatural causes", she pointed out.

By "unnatural causes" she meant death by torture or negligence as a result of medical treatment.

ACHR director Suhas Chakma pointed out that the "lack of disaggregated data was a key problem in dealing with information collated by NHRC.

NHRC puts death caused by old age and as a result of torture in the same category of custodial death."

Suicide is another common cause of death which needed to be placed under a different category, he maintained.

ACHR has filed seven writ petitions in the Delhi high Court against the NHRC for letting Assam Rifles personnel off the hook in torture cases in Manipur. Chakma feels the NHRC accepted the Assam Rifles’ version that no torture took place against civilians in each of these cases.

Again the ACHR filed an RTI request and obtained relevant documents in all these cases, which showed that those who were tortured had suffered injuries and had gone in for medical treatment even as the Assam Rifles officials had forced them to submit sworn affidavits that they had not been tortured.

The NHRC’s own investigation had brought to light that these people were "not tortured" and so these cases had been closed.

Chakma pointed out that during the last four years, the ACHR had filed 300 cases of human rights abuse with the National Human Rights Commission.

"The NHRC asks the concerned authorities to reply to these charges but the majority of cases do not result in prosecution."

The ACHR lamented that only four police personnel were convicted in 2004.

http://www.asianage.com/archive/htmlfiles//India/NHRC%20%20NGO%20differ%20over%20custody%20death%20figures.html

---