An Analysis of Custodial Detention, Torture and Deaths in India

Abstract

Violence, especially by those persons in authority who have power to keep a person in custody is a great concern of society.  The incidence of custodial violence as well as other atrocities affect the law-and-order fabric, peace, tranquility and the life pattern of the mainstream population, repeated occurrence of heinous crime against those people who are in custody have wider impact in people’s mind.  The victim of these ‘violence’ are mainly ordinary men and women belonging to the socio-economy disadvantage strata of the society.  These who neither have will nor resources to oppose such inhuman treatment meted out to them in custody.  They have been deprived of their fundamental right i.e. right to life. The term ‘violence’ is the state or quality of being violent, excessive unrestrained or unjustified force, injury. The simple definition of violence is behaviour designed to inflict injury on a person or damage to property.  However, this definition conceals more than it reveals and explains.  In any human society, a physical strike or hurt is understood and accepted as the most obvious expression of violence but this is one of its several forms or faces. Thus, all acts which have anything to do, among others even child labour , bonded labour, practice of unsociability denying minimum wages, physical excesses such as torture, sexual offences i.e. rape or out raging women modesty, are the different form of violence.