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Police are the face of the state to ordinary Indians. And that face is often one of raw terror. People encounter the state through the policeman at the street corner, the police station, the barricade or the interrogation room. As veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar once observed, the ordinary person’s first encounter with the police often begins with abuse and the danda. The constitution may promise people a range of rights, but those rights seem to melt away at the sight of a policeman.

Paradoxically, the police invariably proclaim their motto in the language of service. For instance, Delhi Police declares, “Shanti, Seva, Nyaya” (peace, service, justice), while Maharashtra Police displays, “सद्रक्षणाय खलनिग्रहणाय”, a Sanskrit phrase difficult to decipher even for the well-educated. It means “For the protection of the good and restraint of the wicked.”

“Seva, Suraksha, Nyaya” is also often invoked as a policing ideal. In practice, however, the police often represent the opposite to ordinary citizens; the language of service appears to apply chiefly to the small minority who are rich and powerful.

Humiliation, physical manhandling of ordinary people are routine features of encounters with the police. Brutality is also not uncommon; it is invariably resorted to by the police to extract confessions and at times to implicate the innocent in their custody. The infamous Mumbai 7/11 train blasts case is a chilling illustration. On July 11, 2006, seven bombs exploded in Mumbai’s suburban trains, killing 189 people and injuring more than 800.

Many Muslim youths were rounded up and allegedly tortured into confessing to a crime they had not committed. Thirteen men were prosecuted; 12 were convicted in 2015, five sentenced to death and seven to life imprisonment. In July 2025, the Bombay high court acquitted all 12, holding that the prosecution had failed to prove their guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Some had spent up to 19 years in prison. The court found serious flaws in the prosecution’s evidence, including the reliability of witnesses and confessions, which the defence alleged had been extracted through torture. One of the acquitted, Abdul Wahid Shaikh, has since published a book, Innocent Prisoner, a graphic account of the torture he says the police used to obtain confessions.

Also read: ‘Still Finding Ways to Trouble Us’: Hours After Delhi Blast, Mumbai Police Visited Several Acquitted in Bombay Blast Case

A fictionalised account of police methods, Cops in a Quagmire, written by an IPS officer, Sunil Ramanand, and reviewed by me for The Wire, makes the same point more succinctly: everyone knows that custodial torture is illegal, yet it is treated as normal.

Indian law does treat custodial torture as a serious violation of fundamental rights, particularly the right to life, dignity and personal liberty under Article 21. Yet, India still has no comprehensive standalone anti-torture law specifically criminalising torture by public officials. Protection instead rests on the constitution, ordinary criminal law, procedural safeguards and Supreme Court directives. These have proved woefully inadequate.

In D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal (1997), the Supreme Court described custodial violence as one of the worst forms of abuse of public power and laid down detailed safeguards governing arrest and detention. The court made it clear that the state is constitutionally responsible for protecting people in its custody. The principle has been reaffirmed recently.

In a July 2025 judgment involving a victim of custodial torture, the Supreme Court said that where state machinery violates Article 21, constitutional compensation can be awarded, and stressed the need for an effective and impartial investigation into custodial violence.

Although there is no standalone offence of “custodial torture”, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) criminalises conduct that can constitute it, including voluntarily causing hurt or grievous hurt, the use of dangerous means, causing hurt to extort a confession and wrongful restraint or confinement. A police officer who beats a detainee to extract a confession is therefore not using a permissible investigative method; he is committing a criminal offence.

The persistence of the problem is evident in the figures. NHRC data record 1,393 deaths in police custody in the ten years........

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