DNA Edit: Apex Court Order - Pulling back convicts from gallows shows systemic rot

In 1902, the chairman of the Second Police Commission believed quite candidly that the Indian “police force is far from efficient, it is defective in training and organisation, it is inadequately supervised” and had failed to win the confidence of the people.

Cut to 2019, more than seven decades after Independence, and the scenario runs a familiar course. In the absence of any concerted police reforms, the investigation remains as crude as it was in the colonial era. Often, third-degree methods are used to extract confessions, a patchwork case is built up hastily and then presented in a court of law.

When the time comes to present credible evidence, the case falls flat. By acquitting six persons on death row in Maharashtra, the Supreme Court has underlined once again that there is dire need of reforms in police investigation. It has also ordered the state government to conduct a departmental inquiry against the policemen, who allegedly ‘framed’ the accused.

There can be a no bigger indictment of any police force than in this case, which involved four deaths and a gang rape. The police investigation was shoddy to say the least. DNA and fingerprint evidence were at variance with the prosecution’s story. Even the semen and vaginal swab samples, though sent for testing, were not produced during the trial. The crucial tell-tale signs of the botched-up operation were that none of the convicted matched the description given by eye-witnesses.

While the apex court has done well by asking the state to deposit Rs five lakh each as compensation for those falsely convicted, the trauma for those charged can scarcely be compensated. But there is little point in blaming the police, who are doing a duty they are not trained to do.

The Police Act of 1861 still guides and governs India’s police system. Politicians across the board preach police reforms, but are not willing to give up their control of the force, because it is the police who do their bidding and dirty work in constituencies and elsewhere.

There have been at least half-a-dozen important commissions and committees on reform — the Gore Committee on Police Training, the National Police Commission, the Ribeiro Committee on Police Reforms, the Padmanabhaiah Committee on Police reforms, Prakash Singh vs Union of India and the Soli Sorabjee Committee — yet beyond lip service, nothing substantial has been undertaken.

The unanimous finding of most of these panels has been to separate the powers of criminal investigation from other functions of the force, which include VIP duty, law and order and traffic control, to mention only a few. Unless there are trained and specialised investigators working on a case, the results can be pretty much the same as was witnessed in the Maharashtra rape and murder case. Then there are also those cases where the accused are so big and influential that witnesses called in to give evidence are silenced and often turn hostile, leading to no convictions. India can ill afford to postpone police reforms any longer.