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Three developments over the last few days signalled how widespread and normalised has police torture become in a country that calls itself the “mother of democracy”. 

The imaginary of torture animating the Indian police can only be termed as unspeakably sadistic.

This June, in Sivaganga, Tamil Nadu, Ajith Kumar, a security guard working in a temple, was taken into police custody over a complaint of theft. His lifeless body bore innumerable marks of assault including injuries around the anus.

In Jammu and Kashmir, came the news report of the Supreme Court intervening in a case of a local policemen being tortured by his own colleagues in 2023 so brutally that he was left with mutilated genitalia.

The third story was from Mumbai and it unpacked the manner in which the 12 presumed “terrorists” apprehended by the Anti Terrorist Squad for carrying out the 2006 Mumbai train blasts, had been subjected to grave torture to extract confessions from them. The Bombay High Court cited this as one of the reasons why the case the ATS had built had, according to its reading, collapsed. Here again evidence of unimaginable violence emerged, including the prising apart of a person’s legs at an angle of 180 degrees.

Significant as this Bombay High Court judgement is (the Supreme Court has for the moment reserved its judgement on the matter), a Wire article very perceptively pointed out that the it did not identify the sadists in uniform who had carried out this torture, although it could well have (‘7/11 Judgment Fails to Hold Police Accountable For Custodial Torture, Lost Time of Those Acquitted’, July 23). The Wire article goes on to state a well-known reality: “India has had a poor track record on custodial torture and has compounded the issue by refusing to take responsibility for correcting police behavior…(It) has long evaded its responsibility and failed to ratify the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT).” 

This state of affairs could not have persisted if the Indian media had chosen to enter into that dark labyrinth where police, under the benign gaze of their political masters, perpetrate their monstrous acts in the name of delivering justice. Such a deliberately vicious modus operandi that has carried on in this country for decades without end would not have been possible if vigilant journalists had blown its cover. On the contrary, it would have pressured the Union government to have ratified the United Nations Conventions Against Torture, 1987, and legislate on banning the practice. Instead, according to the Global Torture Index 2025, this country figures in what is deemed as “the high risk category” (‘World Organization Against Torture flags India as “high risk” country for police torture: Some reflections’, The Leaflet, June 26, 2025). The Leaflet article carries the observation of Henri Tiphagne, executive director, People’s Watch, that although India has the largest number of human rights institutions in the world, it has not been able to bring a single police officer to trial for the crime of torture. 

There were times when the Indian media actually stirred themselves to do the right thing, and even compete amongst themselves to break such stories. One such moment was when the now defunct weekend magazine, the Calcutta-based Sunday, came out with a cover story on the Bhagalpur blindings in 1980, about how the local police in Bhagalpur, Bihar, had poured acid into the eyes of 33 undertrials. That report, filed by S.N.M. Abdi, egged then Indian Express editor, Arun Shourie, to dispatch post haste his young reporter, Arun Sinha, to investigate the matter and proceed to claim that it was his newspaper that had broken the story. Although that may not quite have been the whole truth, it indicated a refreshing appetite in the media of the day for investigative stories on issues of public concern.

And it worked.

The monstrous Bhagalpur blindings really did stir the national conscience. Time magazine reported on how “a heated 3½-hour session took place in parliament” with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announcing that her government had begun an investigation of the........

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