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On 23 May 2021, a Dalit man in Karnataka’s Chikkamagaluru district complained of three policemen forcing him to drink urine. The Karnataka Police were forced to order a “departmental inquiry” by the man’s disturbing account of a soul-crushing encounter.
Just over a week later, a Muslim man in Delhi’s Fatehpur Beri was mercilessly thrashed by three policemen merely for calling the police helpline to stop a scuffle in his neighbourhood. His injuries were so severe that he needed spinal surgery to survive, and he’s still recovering.
Despite various judgments of the Supreme Court, directions given by high courts, and recommendations of the Law Commission and state committees, policing continues to remain an oppressive institution for marginalised groups.
Since 1966, when the first Working Group on Police Reforms was set up by the central government, multiple voluminous documents have spelt out ways to reform the police. The notable ones are the reports of the National Police Commission (1977), Ribeiro Committee (1998), Padmanabhaiah Committee (2000), Malimath Committee (2000), and the Expert Committee (2006).
The reports, therefore, whitewashed “radical changes” with recommendations that could fit within the existing dominant sociopolitical structure – “more internal vigilance”, “increase funding”, and “promotions and transfers”. These recommendations look at reforming the police as more of an administrative issue instead of foregrounding the sociological factors of violent policing.
This culture of police reforms became the biggest critique of the entire police reforms discourse. These committees are formed by the government and their recommendations are not binding. Therefore, the entire process becomes a spectacle to curb the clamour for justice that ensues after instances of police violence.
The spectacle of police reforms discourse, being just that, a spectacle, has failed to deter the police from abusive behaviour. The “ornamental reforms” have neglected the interplay between the police officer, the institution of policing, criminal laws governing investigation, government and the judiciary, that allow police violence to proliferate with impunity.
Most instances of custodial torture never make it to national news. Out of those who do, many become victims of the police’s “media strategy” which uses terms such as “departmental inquiry”, “suspension”, “transfer”, and “pending inquiry”, to put up a facade of accountability. For the public, this facade is conflated with justice, and the cases are soon forgotten.
The police departments always portray instances of custodial torture as “alleged acts of individual officers”, completely refusing to take any accountability for the institutional practices and ideology that motivated such officers to commit such acts in the first place.
Even the National Human Rights Commission, which was conceived as an “independent watchdog” to check custodial torture, lacks teeth.
The very design of the NHRC is synonymous with that of the reforms committee: to hijack the discourse on state violence to ensure the perpetuity of oppressive dominant sociopolitical system.
Both the quantitative data and the individual narratives reveal that the police reforms discourse has failed to prevent the exposure of marginalised communities to police violence.
The culture of “violence” is embedded in the police’s idea of discipline and control as the policing in India is seen as an extension of what sociologist David Scott called “colonial governmentality”. The policing in India is directly controlled by the government and thus, used to operationalise the government’s ideology on the streets through force and incapacitation.
In 2018, the Commonwealth Human Rights Commission published a report to gauge perceptions of policing among the Muslim population of India. The study’s respondents unanimously expressed that the police targets and victimises Muslims, resulting in ‘kafkaesque’ feelings within the Muslim community – cycles of fear, intimidation, and the constant threat of being detained, abused and possibly incarcerated.
We could not find any nationwide study of such a scale to gauge the policing perceptions of Dalits, Adivasis, Bahujans, and sexual minorities. This shows the degree to which the narratives of these communities have been stifled.
The discourse on police violence needs what Sociologist and Professor Amna A Akbar called the “radical reimagination of law". Such discourse can only be meaningful when it decentres dominant castes, and privileges the narratives of the marginalised and the oppressed communities in the reforms process.
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