The Ugly Face of Police in Communist Kerala

The Kerala Police brutalities stand exposed in all its ugliness. For a State extolled as ‘God’s own Country’, the assaults on people by police in their custody are not aberrations as State Chief Minister Pinayari Vijayan wants us to view them. The release of CCTV footage in early September showing Youth Congress leader V. S. Sujit being brutally assaulted by police personnel spilled the beans on their brutalities.

 The visuals are from the Kunnamkulam police station in Thrissur district, and they are almost two years old, but the police were unwilling to hand it over to the victim despite several pleas. He got it after a two-year battle invoking the Right to Information Act.  

Sujit, a mandalam president of the Youth Congress, was arrested on charges of obstructing the police in discharging their duties under the influence of alcohol. However, the medical examination showed that he hadn’t consumed alcohol. Once he was taken inside the police station, what followed was heart-rending brutalities perpetrated on a human body. Once this footage was released on TV channels and various social media platforms, the floodgates of similar ruthless police bestiality came tumbling out of many a police stations from across the State.

To bring home the ‘police raj’ in the State, enumerating a few incidents of violence the police subjected people to in their custody is called for.  On April 1 this year, a tribal youth was found dead inside Kalpetta police station in Wayanad district. He had gone missing with a minor girl on March 23. Police raided their hamlet, and both were taken into custody. By the next day, Gokul’s body was found in the station’s toilet. 

A pregnant woman who went to a police station in Ernakulam district, clutching her tiny twins with her chest, was slapped on the face by none other than the Station House Officer a couple of months back. She was denied even a glass of water when she felt dizzy.  She had gone there to enquire about the case filed against her husband, who had video graphed policemen manhandling two youths on the road near their house.     

A local leader of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), the youth wing of the ruling CPI(M), was tortured in a police station in Pathanamthittta district after his arrest, allegedly for exposing ‘secrets’ involving his own local party leaders. According to the parents of Joyal, the victim, their son died four months after he was tortured by the police.

Last month, a Dalit woman, who worked as a domestic help, was brought to a police station in the State Capital, accused of theft of a gold chain from the house she was working at. Despite claiming innocence, she was kept there for 20 hours and subjected to mental torture. When she asked for a glass of water, she was told to get it from the tap in the toilet. Ironically, the police recovered the jewellery from the house where she worked, but the police, to save face, concocted a story that the chain was found in a garbage pit.    

There is a case of police reportedly pulling out three teeth of a person who questioned the former for falsely implicating him in a case of alcoholism. In another incident, employees of a hotel in Thrissur district were assaulted at the police station over a dispute with a customer in the hotel. The hotel owner and his son, who went there to enquire about it, were dragged and slapped. The police allegedly took Rs. 5 lakhs to settle the case. 

A youth who was arrested on charges of ‘battery theft’ was thrashed in the police vehicle throughout the journey to the police station. These are just the tip of the iceberg.  More such cases of police cruelties poured out after the sensational CCTV footage was played out. Some newspapers spared a full page for a few days to accommodate those chilling stories.

Ironically, some of these barbaric incidents took place at the very police stations which are designated as Janamaithri (friends of the people), a community policing initiative launched in 2008 to foster a closer relationship between the police and the public. If the police personnel designated as ‘friends of the people’ are behaving like this, what would be the state of affairs inside other police stations?

Last week, the Kerala Assembly heard Roji John MLA, during the discussion of an adjournment motion on the atrocities by the police, quoting from a speech by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on March 31, 1977, in the Assembly when he was in Opposition. Vijayan had then narrated the beating at the hands of the police in the following words: “Two policemen beat me. Then three more came. Thus, five of them started beating me. They beat me black and blue. I fell many times. I could not even get up. They shoved me with their feet till they were tired.” 

The world came to know about the atrocities within the four walls of the police stations because the CCTVs captured them. What about those areas hidden from the eyes of the CCTVs where the law-enforcers test their muscle power? The recent direction by the Supreme Court to install functional CCTV cameras at all police stations to prevent human rights abuses and ensure accountability should be implemented in letter and spirit. 

The LDF government cannot wash its hands of its responsibility for the atrocities by the police personnel. With the Chief Minister holding the Home Ministry portfolio, the issue gets more urgent.  The Chief Minister kept mum on the issue for two weeks. And when he spoke, he showered praises on the police, portraying the police torture cases as ‘isolated incidents.’ 

The state police's belief that nothing will happen to them so long as they have godfathers in the higher echelons of power emboldens them to indulge in torture with impunity. If any action is taken against the erring personnel, it is not more than a transfer, sometimes to a more convenient place or close to their homes.  

Former DGP of Kerala, A. Hemachandran, in an article in Mathrubhumi wrote: “The police should be an instrument of safeguarding the dignity of the people.” Will the police under the Left Democratic Front government ever be able to become a force as visualised by the former DGP? It is an unlikely proposition. From a Chief Minister who termed ‘thrashing the people who showed black flags against him’ a life-saving act, it would be futile to expect justice.