Throughout a go to to the Workplace of the Commissioner of Police in Bengaluru in 2022, I seen a big portray hanging on the wall of a uniformed officer overpowering a raging bull. The symbolism was tough to overlook — policing was imagined because the act of subduing and overpowering. It’s exactly this institutional creativeness that underlies India’s custodial violence downside.
The current judgment within the custodial torture and killings of P. Jayaraj and P. Bennix has pressured the truth of custodial torture again into public discourse. In June 2020, the daddy and son, who ran a small cell phone store, have been taken into custody for preserving their retailer open previous COVID-19 curfew hours. What adopted, as recorded within the cost sheet, was extended torture: sexual violence, sustained beatings, and accidents so extreme that blood stained the partitions and bathroom of the police station. The 2 males have been made to scrub up the proof of their very own abuse. Each died inside days.
The brutality of the incident sparked widespread public outrage, resulting in the case being transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), India’s federal investigative company, fairly than the state police, whose personal officers stood accused. This distinction arguably is what made a conviction attainable in any respect. The CBI discovered the accidents inflicted to be “ample within the extraordinary course of nature to trigger loss of life.” Almost six years later, the district court docket went on to convict the 9 accused officers, sentencing them to loss of life underneath the “rarest of uncommon” doctrine.
The judgment has, for that reason, been extensively celebrated as a rupture in India’s entrenched tradition of police impunity. However to learn this case as a turning level is to misconceive what it reveals. If something, it exposes the boundaries of accountability in a system the place custodial violence stays systemic.
The info tells a stark story. In 2019 alone, the Nationwide Human Rights Fee recorded 1,723 custodial deaths, almost 5 each day. But between 2011 and 2022, not a single police officer was convicted throughout 1,107 recorded deaths in police custody, in keeping with the Nationwide Crime Data Bureau. The Jayaraj–Bennix case stands out not as a result of it alerts systemic change, however as a result of it deviates from a deeply entrenched sample of impunity.
Because of this, the talk on custodial torture in India can’t be diminished as to if the nation ought to ratify the United Nations Conference Towards Torture (UNCAT). Ratification is important, however it’s not ample. The issue shouldn’t be merely the absence of legislation. It’s the persistence of institutional practices, evidentiary obstacles, and social hierarchies that maintain torture regardless of the legislation.
India’s authorized framework embeds constitutional ensures underneath Article 21, which protects the appropriate to life and dignity, alongside procedural safeguards governing arrest and detention. But there stays no complete home laws that defines and criminalizes custodial violence in all its varieties. Even this hole, nonetheless, solely partially explains the issue. Authorized reform, in isolation, can’t deal with a system by which the very establishments tasked with imposing the legislation are additionally these most frequently implicated in its violation.
The problem lies not solely in what the legislation says, however in how custodial violence is produced and hid. Torture happens in closed settings, past public scrutiny, the place unbiased witnesses are hardly ever current and documentation is managed by state authorities. Investigations are often performed by the police themselves, even when their very own personnel stand accused. In such circumstances, requiring victims to satisfy typical requirements of proof successfully ensures impunity. With out evidentiary presumptions in circumstances of custodial damage or loss of life, unbiased investigative mechanisms, and necessary medical documentation at each stage of detention, authorized protections threat remaining largely symbolic.
A part of the issue additionally lies in how custodial torture itself is known. Public discourse in India tends to border it narrowly as brutality throughout interrogation, violence used to extract confessions or info. This restricted understanding obscures the truth that torture extends far past the interrogation room. It persists inside prisons, embedded in on a regular basis practices of self-discipline, management, and punishment.
Whereas a lot of the worldwide discourse on policing has centered on racialized types of management, the Indian context reveals how comparable logics function by means of caste, shaping who’s surveilled, criminalized, and subjected to custodial violence. A current ruling by the Supreme Court docket of India in Sukanya Shantha v. Union of India and Others introduced this into sharp focus. Putting down caste-based provisions in jail manuals that permitted segregation and differential labor allocation inside prisons, the Supreme Court docket uncovered how deeply caste constructions the expertise of incarceration.
It additionally examined the classification of “routine offenders,” a class rooted in colonial-era practices that disproportionately focused people from Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, communities traditionally stigmatized and criminalized underneath British rule. Though up to date authorized definitions of “routine offenders” don’t depend on caste, their continued use in jail administration has the impact of reproducing patterns of surveillance, criminalization and coercive labor alongside caste traces. Custodial violence, on this sense, shouldn’t be episodic however fairly structural, woven into the day by day structure of incarceration.
An intersectional lens additional reveals how this violence is erratically distributed. Information from the Nationwide Marketing campaign Towards Torture indicated that almost all of victims in documented custodial loss of life circumstances come from poor or marginalized communities. The Standing of Policing in India Report, 2025, equally discovered {that a} typical sufferer is somebody accused of a comparatively minor offense who belongs to a socially or economically weak group. Caste and sophistication form each who enters police custody and what they’re subjected to whereas in detention, whereas gender introduces further vulnerabilities that stay insufficiently addressed in custodial procedures. Custodial torture is subsequently disproportionately inflicted on these on the margins.
The scope of custodial energy additionally extends past typical websites resembling police stations and prisons. Border safety forces working alongside India’s frontiers train important management over migrants, asylum seekers, and border communities, with documented situations of torture and extrajudicial violence. That is corroborated by the World Torture Index, which flags India as a rustic the place torture by state forces, together with towards marginalized communities and people on the border, stays systemic and underaddressed. A authorized framework that focuses narrowly on formal detention settings dangers leaving a few of the most weak populations exterior its safety.
Even the worldwide framework typically invoked as an answer carries its personal ambiguities. The definition of torture underneath UNCAT, whereas expansive, excludes ache or struggling arising from “lawful sanctions.” In contexts like India, this exclusion turns into deeply problematic. What’s deemed “lawful” can itself be formed by discriminatory practices and institutional bias, notably inside judicial custody. With out confronting this ambiguity, the framework dangers legitimizing types of violence that should be acknowledged as torture.
Any significant response should subsequently transfer past formal compliance. Ratifying UNCAT would sign dedication, however with out institutional transformation, it dangers functioning as a performative act, enhancing worldwide legitimacy whereas leaving home realities largely unchanged. Efficient reform requires mechanisms that allow reporting, shield survivors, and guarantee accountability. It additionally requires consideration to restore: state-funded authorized help, interim aid, and complete reparations frameworks to deal with the long-term penalties of custodial abuse.
The deaths of Jayaraj and Bennix ought to have marked a turning level. That they’ve as an alternative come to signify an exception is an indictment in itself. Till custodial torture is acknowledged not as a deviation from the rule of legislation, however as one in every of its recurring manifestations, efforts at reform will stay partial and impunity will endure.
Lastly, the character of the punishment imposed on this case additionally raises tough questions. The loss of life penalty is being framed as a robust deterrent. But it displays a troubling paradox: responding to 1 type of excessive state violence with one other. Extra basically, the severity of punishment does little to deal with the structural circumstances that allow custodial torture within the first place. If something, it dangers creating perverse incentives the place the implications of publicity are so extreme that there’s higher motivation to suppress or erase proof of abuse. Deterrence alone can’t dismantle a system by which violence is routine, and accountability stays unsure.
