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My thread on Torture in India: Its International day in support of victims of Torture when news from Tamil Nadu today is the horrific sexual torture and custodial death of a father-son duo following a routine altercation with the police on the street. 1/10 https://thefederal.com/states/south/tamil-nadu/sexual-torture-inflicted-on-father-son-duo-before-death-in-tn-eyewitnesses/
India signed the UN Convention against Torture in 1997 but it still hasn't ratified it despite domestic and international pressure. A domestic bill against torture was revised by a select committee of Rajya Sabha that was again diluted in Law Comm version & still languishing 2/10
Read about the saga of the Torture bill that included the Supreme Court: Upen Baxi (2017) https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-great-betrayal-torture-bill-law-supreme-court-4976973/; My piece (2017) https://thewire.in/external-affairs/prevention-of-torture-bill-india-law-commission 3/10
Even in the absence of a domestic bill, there are constitutional & statutory safeguards against torture in India. Supreme Court has clearly stated that custodial torture is unacceptable in a democracy using art 21. There are statutory provisions also meant to prevent torture 4/10
Two of the biggest safeguards that are applicable here are the medical examinations and the role of the magistrates in ensuring that the persons have not been tortured in custody. yet one finds time & again that the magistrates and the doctors fail to fulfill this role. 5/10
Report by @amarjesani & I on prevention of torture in India found that btw 1984-2014 despite presence of laws & safeguards against torture, no evidence of decline in severity & frequency of torture in routine criminal cases, terror case & conflicts 6/10 https://www.academia.edu/32050831/India_Does_Torture_Prevention_Work_edited_by_Richard_Carver_and_Lisa_Handley_
Doctors & magistrates fail to challenge the torture either due to the pressure on them or because they actually agreed with the need to torture. Highlighted also by HRW's report Bound by Brotherhood:India’s Failure to End Killings in Police Custody 7/10 https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/12/19/bound-brotherhood/indias-failure-end-killings-police-custody
Observed in many terror related cases as narrated by SAR Geelani in Nitya Ramakrishnan's important book In Custody https://books.google.com/books/about/In_Custody.html?id=w5-HAwAAQBAJ Also great overview of laws and limits & explanation of torture as public secret in South Asia. Lack of prosecution & some compensation 8/10
In my book #Truthmachines, I argue: rather than focus only on police, attention on "scaffold of rule of law" created by active participation of magistrates & doctors in not just enabling torture but masking it with procedures meant to hide violence.9/10 https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/5425kc41s
I focus on terror cases to illustrate the role of police, magistrates and doctors in creating this scaffold, but as Tamil Nadu case shows, torture is not restricted to terror case or conflict areas, but routinely used and only becomes an issue if there is a custodial death.10/10
