Police Brutality

As the well-deserved excitement over the worldwide success of Slumdog Millionaire fades at last, it may be time to address an issue peripherally raised by the movie that has been entirely ignored amidst all the hoopla. The film opens with and features horrifying scenes of police brutality, with the cops torturing Jamal, including with electric shocks, to get him to confess to cheating in the quiz show. How come there wasn't a huge public uproar over this? Not only is there no outrage, we all seem to take such scenes for granted: the general view appears to be that this sort of thing probably happens all the time.

Well, it shouldn't. No civilized democracy conducts or condones torture, whether of its citizens or others. The police may have fallen into the pattern of routinely continuing practices left over from colonial days, when police were instruments of repression, but that's no excuse today. Mistreating any member of the public is in fact against the law in democratic India, and any policeman who behaves as the cops in the movie did are liable to seven years' rigorous imprisonment. But, as the screenwriters assumed, it seems to happen anyway, and unless society rises up in anger against this kind of police behavior, it may well continue.

Torture is wrong. It's morally unacceptable, legally unjustifiable, and practically ineffective. It shouldn't be allowed to happen anywhere in India. And if and where it does, it has nothing to do with the kind of India our leaders are trying to build in the 21st century.

It's time for every thinking Indian to stand up and raise our voices against the practice. Torture must stop. And the next time a movie shows an Indian policeman resorting to torture, I hope it also shows him being tried and sentenced for it. That may be the only way to bring about the shift in attitudes we need to ensure that torture has no place in our society -- or on our screens.

This blog was originally posted on Indipepal.com.

Comments

[jaysan]

I personally feel that the Indian Congress Party, under whose banner Shashi Tharoor is campaigning for election, is part of the problem and not part of the solution. The Congress Partymen want to be all things to all people. They will from one side fiddle like Nero to let problems metastasize and deteriorate until they become dire threats to public security and law and order, then from the other side they will despatch security forces ill-equipped to deal with stark situations not of their making, and then when abuses inevitably result, then from yet another side the same Congress Partymen will distance themselves from those whom they'd sent out in their own name. Success has a hundred fathers, but failure is an orphan. Certainly the Congress Party's track record in selectively claiming credit while evading debacles is a testament to that.

With these qualities, the Congress Party has become the oldest and longest-surviving kleptocracy in the entire underdeveloped world. Indeed, it is because of them that India has remained underdeveloped for so long. They claim to be both the slayer and the slain, depending on which will get them more votes at the ballot-box.

[mdantu]

Indians are generally known to be tolerant in nature. But the tolerance has taken a completely wrong turn. It is almost as if people have given up on hope. Police brutality is taken for granted because the torturers take it for granted that they will not be challenged. It crossed the point where they lost even the sense of guilt. The acceptance of brutality has given them nod to act above the law.
Its not just about police brutality, the root cause for 'taking for granted' exists in every corrupted facet of Indian society. Corrupted people have stopped to think about consequences even for a moment before commiting crime. The basic principle that 'there are consequences for misbehavior and disobeying the law' is almost not present. We need good examples for our society to embrace that principle again. But the contrary is happening. The wrongdoers have shown examples to the soceity that if anybody that messes with them are going to face their wrath. So the common man is playing safe and try to avoid the arena where he is exposed to the danger. And this is becoming cyclical over generations.
People should work this inside out. Stop condoning any lawbreaker within their family and friends. The family and friends should not condone the misdeeds of their neighbours, local administrators of the village/town/city and so on. Show the legal offenders that tolerance is only for those who are within the legal and moral boundaries.

[hpobserver]

Sir, I sincerely hope you are the next MP from Trivandrum. And when you are, I hope you will do more than blogging about issues like this.
An educated, highly capable parliamentarian like you should push not only for stricter laws to protect citizens' rights, but more importantly for better training, or should we say re-training of the police force to come out of the 'British Raj' mentality and to see their profession as being primarily in the service of the public, to protect them, not to intimidate them into keeping order. They should also be trained in advanced, humane, scientific interrogation methods.

[NoToGOP08]

The first step toward this dialog is doing away with the notion that Indians are nonviolent peace loving people.

The violence on every level whether domestic violence, in religious riots or treatment of prisoners is absolutely horrifying.

[SColbert]

well written as always. keep up the good work shashi.