A significant proportion of Indian police personnel have justified the summary executions of dangerous criminals, the custodial torture of suspects and the intimidation of local populations to enforce order, according to a survey by three prominent local non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
In their report entitled Status of Policing in India 2025: Police Torture and (Un)Accountability, which was released in New Delhi last week, Lokniti, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and Common Cause jointly disclosed that 22 per cent of 8,276 senior, mid-ranking and junior police personnel endorsed shooting dead “serious offenders” rather than putting them on trial.
Carried out across 82 diverse locations in 17 of 36 Indian states and federally administered territories, the survey revealed that 30 per cent of police officers defended coercive methods as a “smart” and necessary way to ensure confessions that were “vital for conviction”. Some 41 per cent of policemen also defended beating up family members of suspects as a pressure tactic to “persuade” those arrested to confess.
“Law enforcement agencies justified harsh custodial interrogation for crimes,” said the report, which included the views of doctors, lawyers and judges who interacted closely with police and those in their custody.
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Their 218-page report enumerated 12 types of physical, sexual and psychological torture police employed on suspects, including beatings with lathis or bamboo sticks, administering electric shocks and cigarette burns and rubbing chilli and black pepper into body cavities.
The majority of the police’s torture victims, according to the report, came from India’s most marginalised communities including low-caste and illiterate Dalits, Muslims, tribal communities, women, children, and the poor.
Some 20 per cent of police interviewees said it was vital to perpetuate a “culture of fear” among the general public to maintain orderliness.
Almost half the police respondents believed that mob violence was justified to either “a great, or some extent” in cases of sexual harassment, child-lifting, petty theft and cow slaughter, which is banned in most Indian states.
Retired high court chief justice and human rights activist S Muralidhar, who spoke at the report’s release, criticised the government-appointed National Human Rights Commission for remaining silent over such large-scale police atrocities, despite numerous supreme court directives for reform.
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He said “police encounters”, a long-standing euphemism for “extra-judicial killings”, in which law officers frequently shoot suspects dead under suspicious circumstances and reportedly in self-defence, had been “sanitised” and “normalised” by the government.
Public health expert Amar Jesani questioned the role of medical professionals in enabling police torture, claiming that autopsy reports were often manipulated to cover up police custodial deaths. He also said that the NGOs’ survey may well have underestimated the extent of police tortures.
