Torture kills thousands in Indian police custody

More than four people a day died while in the custody of the Indian authorities over the past 10 years, the Asian Center for Human Rights alleges in a new report on torture.

More than 14,000 suspects died while being held in police or judicial custody between 2001 and 2010, the human rights watchdog said in a press release.

This includes 1,504 deaths in police custody and 12,727 deaths in judicial custody from 2001-2002 to 2009-2010 as per the cases submitted to the
National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the agency said.

ACHR alleged that “a large majority of these deaths are a direct consequence of torture in custody,” according to the release. It also claimed that these deaths reflect only a fraction of the problem with torture and custodial deaths in India as not all the cases of deaths in police and prison custody are reported to the NHRC. Moreover, the NHRC does not have jurisdiction over the armed forces and the NHRC also does not record statistics of torture not resulting into death, the watchdog said.

India’s failure to pass a law prohibiting these types of abuses last year “demonstrates India’s lack of political will to stamp out torture,” the statement said.

The report comes amid calls from Jammu & Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah and others to repeal or relax the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which allows the military unusual powers to search homes and detain suspects in areas where it is in place, such as Kashmir and Manipur. The law protects soldiers from civilian prosecutions, and critics say it has encouraged human rights violations such as the so-called “disappearing” of alleged undesirables and extrajudicial executions staged as gun battles.