Maha records highest deaths in cop custody

Mateen Hafeez & Kartikeya I TNN

Mumbai: Maharashtra has achieved the dubious distinction of having the largest number of detainees dying in police custody over the past three years.

They were all picked up on suspicion of being involved in a crime and died during interrogation at the local police station. With 69 deaths since 2006, the state has recorded two more deaths than Uttar Pradesh, widely considered to have the worst record in terms of custodial deaths.

Incidentally, the police in Maharashtra has escaped blame in most cases by terming the deaths in custody as suicide or an outcome of natural causes. However, legal experts who have worked both with policemen and criminals find it hard to believe that so many otherwise hale and hearty men have chosen to “end their lives’’ or “die suddenly’’ only when they are in custody. “Mostly, inhuman beating resulted in the deaths,’’ said former IPS officer and advocate Y P Singh.

In fact, allegations of torture follow almost every custodial death. Section 176 of the Criminal Procedure Code was amended in 2005 to provide for a mandatory judicial inquiry whenever a person dies in police custody. In Mumbai, every case of custodial death is followed by an inquiry conducted by the relevant crime branch unit and the local police station has to send a preliminary report to the National Human Rights Commission.

However, despite all these safeguards the number of custodial deaths in the state has refused to come down. Moreover, most of the officers, in whose custody the detainees had died, have also got a clean chit after an inquiry. This is clear from the fact that in the recent past, policemen were hauled up in only two cases—one was in which Ghatkopar blast accused Khwaja Yunus died in the custody of crime branch in 2002 and the other one in which an accountant, Premnath Rao, died at N M Joshi police station in April 2006.

A report, “Torture in India 2009’’, prepared by an NGO called the Asian Centre for Human Rights (ACHR), stated that 1,184 people were killed in police custody in India between April 1, 2001 and March 31, 2009. Even in that report, Maharashtra topped the chart with 192 deaths. The figures also revealed that most of the people died within the first 48 hours of being taken into custody.

The Times of India, December 27, 2009