India: 1,888 custodial deaths in 20 years, 26 cops found guilty

• Shubham
• 16 November, 2021

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By: Shubham Ghosh

REPORTS of 1,888 custodial deaths have surfaced from across India in the last 20 years while 893 cases have been registered against police personnel and 358 officials have been charge-sheeted, The Indian Express has quoted official data as showing.

However, only 26 policemen have been convicted in this period, according to data compiled by the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) annual Crime in India (CII) reports between 2001 and 2020.

The disappointing record assumed significance in the wake of the custodial death of a 22-year-old man named Altaf in Kasganj in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh last week. He was detained in connection to a case in which a minor girl from a Hindu family went missing.

Following the death of Altaf, five policemen were suspended from the Kotwali Police Station in Kasganj. They, however, claimed that the man had hanged himself using a water pipe in a toilet which was just a couple of feet above the ground.

Of the 26 police officials convicted, 11 were found guilty in 2006, including seven in UP and four in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

As per the official data, 76 custodial deaths took place in 2020 with Gujarat reporting the most number – 15. The other cases were reported from the states of MP, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Assam, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Telangana and Punjab.

The NCRB has been releasing data on policemen who have been arrested in connection to custodial deaths since 2017. In the past four years, 96 policemen have been arrested in connection with deaths in custody. The same data are not available for the years before that.

The NCRB’s data showed that since 2001, more than 1,180 custodial deaths have been reported in the “persons not on remand” category and 703 in the “persons in remand” category.

Out of the 893 cases registered against police personnel in connection to custodial deaths in the last two decades, 518 are related to those not on remand.