Annie Zaidi: A law to check torture

HI’ve been reading a novel from which I want to share a few lines: “… says it does not matter if you lie to …. They have no right to silence, even if they know speech will incriminate them; if they will not speak, then break their fingers, burn them with irons, hang them up by their wrists. It is legitimate, and indeed … goes further; it is blessed.”

Can you fill in the blanks? What and who are we talking about?
These lines are from Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, set in the sixteenth century. Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, is talking about ‘heretics’, people who have different ideas about what the Christian faith is all about. Such people were arrested, tortured, and — especially if they had no money or political influence — burnt in public. The public rarely protested.

I know. Not a cheery memory during the festive season. But I bring it up because it struck me that the writer could easily have been talking about modern India. Nationalism is our sworn faith, and the state can snatch up people who have different ideas about what loyalty to India means, or what development should be. And the public still doesn’t protest.

Consider the fact that the National Human Rights Commission has recorded 14,231 custodial deaths in India between 2001 and 2010. That’s about four people a day. Not just slapped around or hung up by their wrists. Dead.

According to the report released by the Asian Commission for Human Rights (ACHR), 99.99% of deaths in police custody occur within 48 hours of the suspect being arrested. We don’t know how many were tortured but died after leaving jail. We don’t know how many were maimed.

Once again, I must remind you of Soni Sori, the school teacher from Chhattisgarh who ran to Delhi, fearing for her life. She isn’t free yet, even though it has been established medically that she was brutally tortured by the police. But our problem is a lot bigger than Soni, a lot bigger than Chhattisgarh.

Actually, Maharashtra tops the list of police custody deaths in India. But the ACHR report admits that our data is far from complete. It mentions torture cases that were not officially recorded. Besides, even the NHRC is not allowed to investigate cases where the armed forces are involved, so states like Manipur and Jammu & Kashmir record very few custodial deaths.

There is provision for compensation, which might be useful to the victim’s family. But what’s money when we’re talking about your body being broken down slowly until it gives up on you. Or, if you survive, you may never work or love like a healthy creature. What’s a reasonable sum of money to make up for that?

Any reasonable human being would agree that there is no recompense. The only honest way of dealing with the horror of death by torture is to make efforts towards preventing it. If we cannot prevent an incident, then we must punish the police (or armed forces) personnel who are responsible.

Sadly, we have made no great efforts to stop institutionalised torture. India signed the United Nations Convention against Torture 14 years ago, but we still haven’t ratified it. Last year, the Lok Sabha passed a very wishy-washy Prevention of Torture Bill, which was later revised to comply with the UN convention. But the Home ministry objected. It still hasn’t been introduced in Parliament.

Now that everyone is talking about bringing in a new law that will make us less corrupt, we may as well also bring in a law that will make us less brutal society.  

Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)