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Shyam
epitomised everything that can take a country like ours forward:
he was hard-working, honest, good at his work, enterprising. At
19, he was running his own lathe in the busy Pahar Ganj area of
Delhi, doing job work for appreciative clients. In a good month,
he was earning more than 20,000, a substantial part of which he
sent to his mother back home. With sheer sincerity, he had managed
to overcome decades of exploitation in feudal Bihar.
All this changed for him one night. Going home by auto-rickshaw,
he gave a lift to two bystanders. At the next check-post, they
were found to be wanted criminals and arrested. Although the
rickshaw-driver tried to tell the police that Shyam was not one of
them, they charged him along with them. From a routine ride home
to police custody to life in jail.
I met Shyam inside Tihar Jail, serving a two-year sentence. Along
with him were countless others who had been falsely implicated by
business rivals, or charged because of vendetta, gender or caste
bias. That’s when you’re not counting the ones picked up by
the police to complete their quota of ‘cases solved’. Like the
way they picked up Rajesh from his home in a Delhi slum on a
Diwali night, along with his friends. The police were under
pressure to ‘show results’ in solving a murder in the area.
After five years in prison, while the case was on, he was
acquitted.
If there is one thing common among all these prisoners, it is that
they all belong to a vulnerable, powerless class. For a majority
of our population, police is another word for terror and
extortion. It is doubtful if any of these uniformed employees of
the government have any idea that they have been installed there
to protect the lives and property of all citizens: they all seem
to think that they have been delegated powers by the political
class to extort and pillage.
What kind of a system of criminal investigation and justice do we
have that lets the police do what they want?
Thanks to the prevailing pattern of criminal law administration,
almost every case begins and ends at the Investigating police
officer (IO) level. It is the IO who collects the ‘evidence’,
whether true or not, and gets witnesses to depose. The IO uses
these powers to the fullest, usually for his own benefit. Pay up
and you may not even get charged.
The overcrowding of the lower courts helps him in this enterprise.
On an average working day of six hours, a court hears 40 to 80
cases. One can imagine the kind of attention a judge can give to
each case. Despite jam-packing the cases, it can take six months
before a charge-sheet is prepared and the first hearing scheduled.
Then cases are heard at three-month frequencies. At the court, the
court will often not even look at the accused: cases will be
decided by lawyers and with written depositions (all in English!).
Each IO has a stock of mercenary witnesses. The judges, who see
the same witnesses appearing for several cases frequently, just
ignore the scandalous proceedings. Usually, the one who has
‘fixed’ the cops will go scot free, and the one who has not
paid will be put behind bars.
Lawyers misuse their powers as much as the police. The litigation
procedures are antediluvian, making a litigant totally dependent
on a lawyer. All the under-trials I spoke to complained of being
fleeced and treated shoddily by lawyers. Ironically, the poorer
you are, the more you end up paying. It is common to hear of
families selling off their only source of security: a room in a
city or land back in the village, just to bribe the IO or pay the
lawyer. But it’s not only the poor who are at the mercy of
lawyers: access to lawyers and the legal system is often used as a
tool of harassment to settle business or personal scores.
Once inside the prison, another arm of the law begins its round of
exploitation and harassment. Prisoners have to regularly bribe the
prison staff to avoid routine beating. Bribes have to be given
even for basic rights awarded by courts and prison manuals, like
meetings with family members or access to legal aid.
But while attempts have been made to reform the prisons, the
police station continues to function in a medieval vacuum. Even in
the affluent capital of liberalised India, there is only one way
they know of solving crime: beating up suspects. No forensics. No
fingerprinting. No sniffer dogs. No computer-aided online tools.
No DNA testing. Usually it is a construction worker or a slum-
dweller or a domestic worker who is at the receiving end of a
specially recycled piece of tyre. Everyone I spoke to in Tihar was
beaten up mercilessly in the police-station. For an under-trial,
it is a relief to be sent to a jail rather than be kept in police
custody. The only time these medieval techniques are not used is
when the victim seems to be somewhat ‘connected’.
The police is not only ill-equipped to handle criminal
investigation, its officers are frequently found to be indulging
in all sorts of misdeeds themselves: rape, murder and other
misdemeanours (after the Jhajjhar incident, one can add hacking
Dalits to death inside the police-station premises to their long
list of achievements).
If this is the condition in the bigger thanas in the
media-obsessed capital and adjoining regions of Gurgaon and Noida,
what of the lesser stations, the chowkis and others hidden
from public gaze? While most of us have probably never had to face
the brutality of the law, have you never wondered why your maid or
driver or any of those without access to “contacts” are
frightened by the mere mention of the word ‘police’? What has
been the collective experience of generations of our poor with the
law? For the most part, it is abstract and inaccessible, except
when its local arm morphs into a feared bludgeon.
The question really is: why are we tolerating this rot? Is the
government so bankrupt that it cannot professionalise the police
or increase the capacity of the lower courts? Or regulate the
working of lawyers? Shouldn’t some of the huge focus on
disinvestment and reforms in other sectors at least spill over to
this one area that affects everybody as much or perhaps even more
than public health? Why isn’t there the will to simplify legal
procedures and make the legal system more accessible?
Perhaps it’s because the political ruling class would rather
have things the way they are. The police is the most important
weapon of harassment that it has (it has others, like personal
income tax), and professionalising it would mean losing not only
the weapon but also the freedom to lead a life above the law. Just
think of how many more of our MPs and MLAs would be in jail if the
law were to be applied to them!
It is time our government was made accountable for providing an
efficient and simple legal system, where common sense prevails
over legalese. Who is going to be responsible for the five years
spent by an undertrial like Rajesh in jail, charged with a non-bailable
offence, and then found ‘not guilty’? And what of Mamta, who
has spent the last 12 years in jail for killing the husband who
battered her everyday, and let her father-in-law rape her over and
over? How come the law never punished her father-in-law and her
husband even though she went to the courageous extent of
complaining to the police? Who is to blame for her taking the law
into her own hands when the police did not take any action on her
complaints?
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