The legal complex in the struggle to control police brutality in India

Abstract

The police dragged Rajeev Sharma, an electrician, from his bed in Meerut, India, in 2004 and took him to the local police station for what was called “routine questioning” in a burglary investigation (Lakshmi 2004). A day later he was dead. “Their routine questioning proved fatal,” his brother lamented. After his arrest, family members had rushed to the police station and briefly talked to Sharma, reporting that “his eyes were red, his mouth was bleeding and he could hardly walk. They had beaten him very badly.” After leaving, the family next heard that he had “committed suicide.” The killing provoked two days of rioting by local residents upset over widespread police abuses. The killing of Rajeev Sharma was part of a depressingly common pattern in India. Brutality, extortion, and corruption in the Indian police are “pervasive,” according to Arvind Verma, a former Indian police officer and the leading academic expert on the Indian police, permeating “every rank, from the constable to the chief of police in every police department in the country” (2004). Well more than a thousand people per year die in police custody, and many more are subjected to torture, rape, and other abuses. The vast majority of the victims are members of India’s poorest classes and marginalized groups (Verma 2005). While some abuses occur during the course of routine criminal investigations, others are political, targeting members of poor peoples’ movements in their struggles against local landlords and employers. But members of the middle and upper classes are not immune: although largely free of physical abuse, they are widely subjected to extortion in exchange for protection or as payment for carrying out investigations (Verma 2005).