Monoranjan Ghosh, a resident of Gopalpur village in South 24 Parganas District of West Bengal, was threatened by a money-extorting gang at least half a dozen times. Monoranjan was assaulted several times and had to be hospitalised once. His family and the entire village were threatened by the members of the gang. On each occasion, Monoranjan filed complaints at local police stations, but none of these complaints were investigated.
Finally, Monoranjan had to approach the local court to have his complaint registered. The court though ordered the police to register a crime and investigate the case. The local police, however, registered a case only against two people out of the nine who were named by Monoranjan in his complaint to the court who had threatened, assaulted and injured him. While in the hospital receiving treatment for his injuries, the officer in charge of Zinzira Bazar Investigation Centre, Police Inspector Rameswar Ojha, offered Monoranjan the most valuable piece of advice–settle the matter with the gang or else face the consequences.
The local police in India are, by and large, corrupt, although this reality is often disputed even by some human rights organisations and by the government of India. However, the experience of the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is that the majority of police officers in India–both high and low ranking–are corrupt. Although there is, indeed, a legal framework in India to punish corrupt public servants, the functioning of this mechanism, like the human rights commissions at both the national and state levels in India, is dependant upon police officers or equally corrupt officials.
Most police officers associate themselves with criminals in their locality as the police are often involved in the same crimes and/or in many cases seek to claim a share of the money collected by the criminals. The police assist the criminals by either refusing to take any action against them or, if under pressure, by registering cases but failing to properly investigate them.
The most common police tactic is to refuse to register a case against a person the police want to protect. In many cases, the police refuse to accept a complaint and even threaten the complainant if the person insists on registering a case. Strong-willed individuals who still wish to proceed with a complaint then usually mail a written complaint to the police station by registered mail so that they have a record to show that they have informed the police.
The police, to counter this move, have evolved a tactic in which they register such complaints, not as crimes, even if a complaint reveals a crime, but by entering the complaint in the General Diary maintained at the police station. This diary is just a book maintained at the police station that is used to record all errands that occur at the police station. At a later state, the police can record with the corresponding diary entry that they have investigated the complaint and have found no credible information to register a case.
To elude this police tactic, a complainant could approach the local court with a private complaint. However, the role of the lower courts in India is limited by law regarding the investigation of a case. The court though could either conduct an inquiry into the case by issuing a notice to the complainant and the alleged accused and recording their statements or the court could issue a notice to the police station asking the police to register a case and investigate the matter. Either way, the courts cannot investigate a crime: the police are responsible for this function.
The weakness of this approach though is the court can only ask the police to register the case and investigate it. Consequently, the police at this stage could register a case and without making a proper investigation could refer the case back to the court with a note that the complaint appears to be unsubstantiated with any supporting evidence from their inquiry. At this stage, the police are required by law to give a written notice to the complainant against which the complainant can file an objection in court within seven days.
However, in order to take the complainant by surprise, the police backdate the notice so that the complainant is often served with the notice after the expiry of the statutory period of seven days. Even if the complainant in a particular case gets the notice in time, the complainant can only request the court to hold an inquiry and record the statements of the people concerned, and then the court could again refer the matter back to the police. In practice, these procedures are never-ending circles of legal complexities in which no ordinary person with limited resources can ever succeed. In addition, the courts in India are plagued with years of delays to finally decide a case. Thus, even if a person resorts to approaching the court, by the time the court gives a final verdict, the complainant would have financially and emotionally exhausted all of their resources.
As evident from the case above where the victim Monoranjan filed complaints one after the other after each incident of assault and intimidation, four of those complaints ended up as General Diary entries and were allegedly never investigated. Even when Monoranjan filed a private complaint at the Chief Judicial Magistrates Court in Alipore, the police only registered a case against two people, though several others were also named by Monoranjan in his complaint. This practice, according to the AHRC, is a common tactic used by the police to help criminals that is often successful because, due to the absence of a witness protection mechanism, while one or two of the criminals are charged with the crime, their colleagues can pressure the complainant to either compromise or make a deal.
In these circumstances, even if a victim has made out specific and convincing allegations against a particular person, the chances of a case being properly registered and investigated is remote in India. In addition, if the complaint is against a law enforcement officer, there are no specific mechanisms to investigate the complaint. In most cases, the inquiry is limited to a departmental inquiry that is often biased.
One possible remedy to rectify this common scenario is for the government to take the initiative to address the problems faced by criminal justice dispensation mechanisms in India. The courts in India, for example, are considered to be a mechanism that, if given all of the necessary resources to function properly, would fight back against a failing government and those misusing power. However, because these measures and others have not been taken, police officers in India are commonly considered to be merely uniformed criminals who, at the pleasure of the government or political parties, carry out the wishes of those in power and do so through the expenditure of state funds. The police also play into this farcical attempt at upholding the rule of law since, by allowing themselves to be manipulated, they get an informal guarantee that they can continue with their corrupt practices.
In these circumstances, the only way to address these issues is by establishing specific procedures by which the autonomy of the local police is ensured, thereby eliminating political interference in local policing. There must also be mechanisms in place that can entertain complaints against police officers irrespective of their rank and that permit and encourage impartial inquiries into cases of atrocities committed by police officers to be conducted. There must also be a specific law that criminalises custodial torture and that initiates independent actions against those police officers who breach the law.
However, in India, the absence of such a legal framework has provided the police with complete impunity for their misdeeds. To correct this problem, the first step is for India to ratify the U.N. Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT). The prime minister of India has assured the country that India would ratify CAT. However, thus far, this pledge has apparently been given a very low priority by the government of India.
Unless India deals with these cardinal issues affecting the rule of law in the country, the ever deteriorating state of the criminal justice machinery will fall into deeper fathoms of an irrecoverable abyss resulting in a complete lawless state with democracy being an additional casualty of this process.
