New Delhi: In 1993, the cremation of ‘lawaris‘ (unclaimed) bodies of seven young men in the Rani Vallah village in Punjab’s Amritsar, did not raise many eyebrows. The men said to have been killed in police encounters were all shot in the head or chest.
Nearly 32 years later, a special court in Mohali earlier this month declared five retired Punjab Police personnel guilty of illegally detaining the seven men, torturing them, and killing them in staged encounters.
The seven men were suspects in a series of robberies in the villages near Rani Vallah. With Punjab going through a period of turbulent militancy then, the police personnel likely believed they could pass off the victims as terrorists, claiming seven militants died in armed encounters, the court said this month.
The 1993 cremation of the unclaimed bodies stayed under the radar till three years on, the Supreme Court, in a 1996 order, called for a Central Bureau of Investigation investigation (CBI). An FIR was filed in 1999, six years after the incident.
The special court verdict comes 32 years after the murders, during which five of the accused died, as did 36 of the 67 witnesses the CBI initially sought to produce in court. The recent verdict is what remains of the case now, but the judgments by trial courts usually face challenges in the high courts.
The accused police personnel are now between 61 and 83 years of age and retired. Bhupinderjit Singh, was deputy superintendent of police in 1993, later retiring as a superintendent of police. In 1993, Devinder Singh and Gulbarg Singh were both assistant sub-inspectors. They retired later as deputy superintendents of police. Suba Singh, at the time, was an inspector and remained so till he retired.
A lawyer familiar with the case confirmed the posts of the accused police personnel to ThePrint, adding that there had been no suspensions in the case.
Police brutality cases often have the same script in different settings. FIRs and serious probe only after courts intervene, inaction for years, and accused personnel going unpunished for long as judicial proceedings against them flit between the trial, high, and apex courts.
Even cases where convictions are secured take years, often offering little relief to the families of the victims of police brutality.
“The systemic imbalance in the power equation between officials who act under the colour of uniform and the ordinary and invariably marginalised sections is too obvious. It is such a serious offence by those in uniform, but is left to the most marginalised sections of the citizenry to prosecute,” senior advocate Nitya Ramakrishnan tells ThePrint.
“The system will not improve until the prosecution of the errant officers. Once in a while, you hear that somebody involved in an extrajudicial death is prosecuted and punished. But such cases are few and far between,” adds Ramakrishnan, who authored the book, In Custody: Law, Impunity and Prisoner Abuse in South Asia.
The reinstatements
While the 1993 case saw convictions, prosecutions in police brutality cases are not as common. Not a single police officer was convicted for the over 1,100 deaths in police custody between 2011 and 2022, according to the Status of Policing in India Report 2025. The report by the NGO Common Cause, jointly with the Lokniti Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, obtained the study data from the National Crime Records Bureau.
From 2010 to 2020, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) cites at least 17,146 deaths in judicial or police custody, coming to five custodial deaths a day on average. In most cases, the accused police personnel went unscathed.
Former Assistant Superintendent of Police Balveer Singh, accused of pulling out teeth and crushing testicles of suspects in his custody in the Ambasamudram division of Tamil Nadu, initially was placed in the vacancy reserve. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin finally suspended him in March 2023 after several MLAs took up the matter in the assembly.
Early in 2024, the TN government revoked his suspension, though he has four criminal cases pending against him. According to the court records, Balveer Singh has so far attended only 10 of the 24 court hearings in the cases against him. The trial in all four cases is at the stage where the court is framing the charges.
In the 2018 custodial death of 26-year-old S.R. Sreejith in Kerala’s Varapuzha, nine police personnel are currently facing trial before a court in Ernakulam. Suspended following the incident, all nine—despite the ongoing trial—were reinstated in December 2018.
Similarly, assistant police inspector Sachin Vaze and three police constables, allegedly behind the custodial death of 2002 Ghatkopar bomb blast accused Khawaja Yunus, were reinstated in 2020. The review committee that reinstated them cited a shortage of police personnel, adding that several had tested positive for COVID-19 and gone on leave.
Suspended in 2004, Vaze and the constables have, since then, been charged under IPC Section 302 (murder), among other provisions. Their murder trial is pending, but Vaze was dismissed from service a year after his reinstatement for his alleged involvement in the Antilia bomb scare case.
A wedding and an arrest
As parts of Delhi burned in the flames of communalism in 2020, the clip of a boy curled up on the ground, with some police personnel beating him up with their batons and ordering him to sing the national anthem/Vande Mataram, went viral. The boy was 23-year-old Faizan.
In a December 2020 petition before the Delhi High Court, his mother, Kismatun, sought a Special Investigation Team probe, alleging that the police thrashed Faizan, along with other young Muslim men, and illegally detained him at night, instead of getting him specialised medical treatment. He succumbed to his injuries on the intervening nights of 26 and 27 February 2020, two days after the police handed him over to his family.
For the next four years, the police failed to identify the personnel who assaulted Faizan, telling the court that the suspects wore riot gear, including helmets, which hid any identifiable markers, and that the CCTV system at the police station malfunctioned on the night of the incident.
In July 2024, Faizan’s family finally saw a ray of hope. The Delhi HC transferred the probe to the CBI, asserting that what the Delhi Police had done so far was “too little, too late”. The court noted that the accused were not only the “custodians of the law” but also belonged to the agency investigating them. It found the investigation “tardy, sketchy and conveniently sparing” of the suspects.
Currently, the CBI investigation is ongoing, apart from a departmental inquiry against two policemen, initiated months before the Delhi HC pronounced its judgment last year.
In a separate incident in July 2024, the police took 25-year-old Deva Pardhi into custody during the ‘haldi‘ rituals on the day of his wedding. They handcuffed Pardhi, along with his uncle, Gangaram Pardhi, and told the family they were facing interrogation in a theft case.
According to the family, the police took the men to an old police station that did not have CCTV cameras and tortured them for hours before taking Deva Pardhi to a hospital, which declared him dead. The news triggered protests, with Deva’s fiancé and aunt attempting self-immolation.
After the Madhya Pradesh HC rejected a petition for an independent probe, the Supreme Court transferred the case to the CBI, noting the zero arrests, despite the filing of an FIR under the culpable homicide sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati, representing the Madhya Pradesh government in the court, said that while two of the involved police personnel were shifted to the police lines, thereby removing them from regular field duties and assigning them to administrative tasks at the barracks, there had been no realistic or firm measures to bring the offenders to book.
The Supreme Court directed the CBI to arrest the police personnel responsible for the custodial death within a month, after which the CBI arrested a sub-inspector.
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‘Band of brothers’
Critics argue that one of the main reasons why victims’ families have to approach courts for investigations in most police brutality cases is that the investigating agencies and the officers often stick together and stand by each other. Advocate Payoshi Roy calls it a “strong band of brothers” tendency.
Even after an FIR and the case transfer to independent investigating agencies, the agencies make a blatant and deliberate effort to file a chargesheet for a much lesser offence to show that the accused officers were not actively involved in the murder, she tells ThePrint.
The police, she says, can exert a “grave amount of pressure” on victims’ families while a case is pending.
“Gangaram Pardhi (Deva Pardhi’s uncle) was beaten up by jail officials and threatened to withdraw a petition asking for an investigation against the accused police officers. That is the kind of bonhomie you see, where even the jail officials, otherwise disconnected from the police department, are willing to help,” she says.
Roy highlights the power difference between the victims’ families and the police personnel.
“This is what makes it so difficult for the family to pursue a case … matters take so long that the litigation itself becomes an endurance test … It is financially exhausting, and the power differential, such as the financial and social resources police officers have and that they can appeal every order, wears down the families, as well,” she adds.
The kick-starter for an independent probe, therefore, often proves to be an uphill task for the victims’ families.
As a solution, Ramakrishnan calls for a “self-generating mechanism” for probes in police brutality cases.
“In police brutality cases, the police normally pick up people in the context of a criminal case, so when it becomes a case of police brutality, and there is such evidence before the magistrate, there should be a self-generating mechanism against the police. It should not depend on the victims or the families to generate or start this mechanism,” she explains.
Ramakrishnan faults magistrates for not paying enough attention to the state of mind and body of suspects or detainees produced before them.
Magistrates should daily engage with prisoners from the time of their custody to their release, but they do not, she asserts, while acknowledging that they are “heavily overworked”. Taking that into account, she suggests the presence of “a team of young students at every court dealing with custodial justice”.
Roy suggests a separate department—not involved in regular police work—for investigations into custodial torture or death cases.
“This will perhaps reduce the interaction and the bonhomie between officers in that department and other police officers,” she says.
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A judicial labyrinth
Once a court directs an inquiry into police brutality cases, the cases often are embroiled in a complicated judicial labyrinth, flitting between the trial, high, and apex courts.
Take Agnelo Valdaris, for instance. Valdaris was aged 25 when train wheels crushed him at the Wadala Railway Station, Mumbai, in April 2014. Two days before his death, Valdaris and three others, including a minor boy, were taken into custody in a robbery case by the Wadala GRP or Government Railway Police. The police claimed that while taking Valdaris for medical treatment, he escaped and jumped in front of a train.
His father, Leonard Valdaris, however, felt something was amiss. In June 2014, he approached the Bombay High Court, claiming his son died in custody after he, along with his three companions, suffered police torture, sexual harassment, and assault. Leonard Valdaris pleaded for a CBI probe.
The Bombay High Court, in June 2014, transferred the probe to the CBI, noting “serious doubt” among the judges about the transparency and fairness of the probe by the local police. However, the CBI charge sheet, filed in December 2015, did not invoke Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code. The question mark over the invocation of murder charges has since seen the petitioners and the accused moving from the Bombay High Court to the Supreme Court and back to the high court.
Eight police personnel stand accused in the case. All were transferred but continued to hold jobs in the police while the case remained sub judice, a lawyer familiar with the case confirmed to ThePrint. The high court is still considering whether to charge them with murder amid a pending trial.
A case of a 2019 police encounter of four men suspected of raping and murdering a 26-year-old veterinary doctor in Hyderabad is currently pending in the Telangana High Court. The Supreme Court constituted an inquiry commission, headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice V.S. Sirpurkar, in this case. The committee submitted its report in January 2022, with findings that the accused were “deliberately fired upon with an intent to cause their death”, instead of them snatching police guns before being killed in an exchange of fire, as the police earlier submitted.
The commission stated that three police personnel should face a murder trial. Moreover, all ten should face a trial under IPC sections 302 r/w 34 (murder charge in cases where several act to further common intention), 201 r/w 302 (charged with both disappearance of evidence in a murder and the murder), and 34 (acts of several persons with common intention) since they partook in acts intending to kill the four men in their custody.
However, in May last year, the Telangana HC, responding to the petitions by the accused police personnel, stayed the Sirpurkar commission report.
Decades-long wait
In police brutality cases that do see convictions, the relief usually comes decades after the incident. While the trial court verdict in the 1993 case in the Rani Vallah village came 32 years later, the judgment, which awarded life imprisonment to 43 Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) personnel in the 1991 staged encounter in Pilibhit, Uttar Pradesh, came 25 years later in 2016.
On 12 July 1991, the police intercepted a bus bound for Pilibhit at Kachlapul Ghat, deboarded 11 Sikh men, and killed them in three separate fake encounters the next morning. Similar to other police brutality cases, the Pilibhit police initially filed a closure report in the case, and the Supreme Court had to step in, entrusting the probe to the CBI.
Initially, the trial court sentenced 47 police personnel to life imprisonment in 2016. However, in December 2022, the Allahabad High Court-Lucknow bench commuted the sentence to seven years of rigorous imprisonment. While the case was pending in the trial court, 10 of the 57 accused died, and four died during the hearing of their appeals in the Allahabad HC.
Roy points out that often, in these cases, the families of victims are from impoverished backgrounds and have to fight a protracted legal battle.
“The accused police officers can drag out the litigation, much easier and much more convenient for them to do. They can use the time litigation takes to threaten families or offer good money to get the families to withdraw the case,” she tells ThePrint.
However, with Supreme Court guidelines and laws for custodial deaths already in place, Roy calls for a greater push—both from the political executive and the judiciary—so that the deterrent value comes not only from the severity of punishment but also from the surety of the investigation and subsequent penalty.
“There is a culture of impunity, and there is an assurance that accused police officers have, but if there is greater political will to ensure impartial and fair investigations into custodial deaths and a greater judicial push to ensure fair trials, the time that the litigation takes will come down, increasing the efficacy of the mechanism. That, in itself, will go some way, if not the whole way, in changing the script,” she asserts.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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