NEW DELHI: Savinder Singh 30 an Indian businessman was undergoing what the Indian police call “tactical interrogation” last month when suddenly he jumped out of a sixth floor window of a police station.
That’s the police version.
His attorney and his two brothers tell a different story. The brothers who were arrested along with Singh after allegedly illegally possessing foreign currency were in the next room daring the Feb 28 interrogation they said in court. Singh was beaten nearly unconscious for several hours they said. Then just after midnight they heard him scream.
“It is simple” attorney K.K. Luthra said. “Probably he slipped out of their hands while they were hanging him outside the window to get a confession. Unconscious men do not jump out of sixth-floor windows.”
If the case before the Indian Supreme Court this week has a familiar ring it is hardly a coincidence. The suspected killing of Singh is the latest in a litany of cases of police torture abuse and rape accord that Amnesty International singled out in a blistering 195-page report released in London.
“Torturing suspects has become part of the polices daily routine throughout India where hundreds if not thousands of people have died from beatings in recent years and women are regularly raped in jail cells” the Amnesty International report said.
The report listed the names of 415 Indian men women and children who allegedly had been tortured killed or raped while in police custody since 1985 together with the details of their cases.
For example Archana Guha was arrested and tortured in 1974 and was paralyzed as result. Despite a prolonged court battle she has failed to bring the guilty policemen to justice the report said.
It alleged that many other victims had been suspended from ceilings in jail cells beaten unconscious given electric shocks crushed with heavy rollers and tabbed-all part of “tactical interrogations” to extract confessions.
“The rape of women by polices commonplace throughout the country particularly in areas of armed insurgency” the report said.
“Yet at the highest political level successive governments have flatly denied that torture takes place much less done anything to stop it.”
The Indian government said Tuesday that Amnesty International has launched an anti-India campaign” with the report’s release. K.V. Rajan India’s deputy high commissioner to Britain said Amnesty International had failed to give the Indian government time to reply to the charges.
Article extracted from this publication >> April 10, 1992
