New Delhi: In what appears to be yet another case of custodial torture in Tamil Nadu, relatives of a 40-year-old undertrial prisoner, Selvam alias Selvamurugan, on Thursday said that he died because of police torture.
Selvam, a resident of Kadampuliyur, Cuddalore, was booked by the Neyveli Township police on October 28 in a theft case and was later remanded at Virudhachalam sub-jail.
Although a jail official, Sasikumar, said Selvam, who had five pending cases against him, was admitted to Virudhachalam government hospital as he developed fits in his cell, Selvam’s wife Prabha said that he was brutally beaten up by police officials in jail.
Prabha has now petitioned the superintendent of police M. Sree Abhinav and has written that Selvam was a cashew farmer who had gone to Vadalur for some business but was arrested on false charges.
“I visited the Neyveli station on October 29 and was informed to go to a private lodge. The police told me they would drop the theft chargers if I gave them a 10-sovereign gold chain. When I refused, the police officials verbally abused me and my children, took our photographs and forced me to sign on a blank sheet,” her petition said, according to the New Indian Express.
The petition also says that Selvam looked weak and his throat was swollen when Prabha met Selvam on November 2 at Virudhachalam sub-jail. “He was unable to eat. Police are behind this. They killed my husband,” Prabha said in the petition.
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The New Indian Express said that sources informed it that a postmortem wasn’t conducted as relatives of the deceased refused to turn up at the hospital.
Tamil Nadu police has earned a notoriety for employing third-degree methods on prisoners. The Indian Express reported on such highhandedness by the Chennai police. “In Chennai city, it is a normalised practice for police sources to release photos of the accused in police custody with fractured arms and legs. “Slippery toilets” at the station would be cited as a reason for their fractures, the same would be reported to the magistrate during the remand process, a normalised extra-judicial punishment “to criminal elements,” the report said.
In July this year, the deaths of P Jeyaraj, 58, and his son Benicks, 38, in Tuticorin garnered national attention after they died two days after being released from police custody. Both of them ran a shop and were picked up by the police for allegedly keeping their store open past permitted hours during the coronavirus lockdown. Their family alleged that they had been brutally tortured, even as gruesome details of torture that emerged during the course of the investigation sparked widespread outrage. Five policemen were subsequently arrested on charges of murder.
A report prepared by the National Campaign Against Torture in India reported that more than 1700 people died in police custody in 2019 alone, amounting to five deaths a day. However, police officials responsible for such deaths are rarely held accountable. In Uttar Pradesh, the number of alleged fake encounters in which the police claimed to have killed in self-defence have only increased. The broad-daylight killing of gangster Vikas Dubey by the UP police in July this year was a stark example of such extra-judicial methods used by Indian police officials.