The Long Violent Arms of Law: Police Pride, Caste Prejudice & India’s Custodial Death Crisis

The security camera footage showed nothing. By choice (or way of mistake), crucial hours of B. Ajith Kumar's time in detention at a Sivaganga police station remain cloaked in darkness. What eventually made its way into the public attention is the unexplained loss of a young life, for the sole crime of being accused of theft, a 27-year-old temple security guard (who will never come home). He became one more custodial death in India, one more number in a continuum that erases names and stories. 

Illustration by The Geostrata

But statistics don't help to understand the human cost. Each number hides the story of a life extinguished, a family torn asunder, and a justice system that has learned to look away. Kumar's death in June 2025 is not an outlier; it is part of a more widespread norm, so habitual that it is taken up as customary by our institutions. Where some who are sworn to protection are instead affronting as harm, justice has also learned the art of turning the other cheek--but never out of neutrality; simply to ignore what is true.

From Guardians to Executioners: The Alchemy of Injustice That Turns Citizens into Corpses

Custodial deaths hold a distinct place of disgrace in the ranking of horrors that bedevil contemporary India. They are where the social contract is irretrievably breached - where the state stops safeguarding its citizens, and consumes them instead.

The statistics are mind-numbingly morbid: 2,152 deaths in judicial custody and 155 deaths in police custody in just one year (NHRC 2021-22 report).

Five deaths a day. Five families torn apart. Five to add to the mounting waste of justice threatening to bring down the pillars of the Indian democratic social contract. 

According to the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), there were an average of 92 custodial deaths in police custody in India every year from 2000 to 2022, and there were 75 in 2022 alone.

While reports of custodial deaths stubbornly persist as these figures would indicate, disciplinary action or prosecution against officials hardly exists, further corroding any remaining trust that custodians in custody may, and deserve to rely upon.

The process of moving from a living, breathing human being to a custodial death statistic is well-trodden. First comes the arrest, often without documentation, often of the individuals least capable of defending themselves. Then begins the interrogation - a polite term used in place of torture sessions that are often more violent than even the 10th century.

Electric shocks, waterboarding, suspension from the limbs, and sexual torture - all modified with colonial practices adapted by Indian police who act with the full knowledge of impunity and prejudice.

In the case of Ajith Kumar, we see this degeneracy elaborating before our eyes in brutally stark terms. Ajith Kumar was a poor young man who had worked as a security guard at the Badrakaliamman Temple in Thiruppuvanam and whose postmortem report told the story of his last hours. Kumar had thirty-five major and nine minor injuries on his body. Each injury could tell a story; an interrogation with a response that was violent; a confession gained not from a careful and painstaking investigation but from shattering someone's bones.

Officers were informing the public that Ajith Kumar died from an epileptic seizure - this was immediately questioned because it was impossible to believe. There was considerable public outcry, as well as political pressure, that made officials reconsider their claim. Additional findings, although stated under state cover, documented injuries that demonstrated serious violence as the cause of death.

The CBI's eventual involvement and the arrest of five policemen may seem like justice in action, but history suggests the opposite. Between 2001 and 2018, of the 1,727 recorded custodial deaths, only 26 policemen were convicted. The 1.5% conviction rate shows not just a failure of the justice system, but that it has acted in complicity with the violence. For the sake of family and victims of custodial death, good police officers, and society at large, we must be more aggressive against police brutality and policing in general.

CASTE: THE INVISIBLE HAND GUIDING THE BATON

The statistics are clear and damning: 69% of prisoners and 65% of undertrials are members of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, or Other Backwards Classes. For a country with around 70% SC, ST, or OBC, their over-representation in prisons might seem to match their proportion of the population until you observe the socio-economics involved.

The poor suffer different chances of arrest, and they also suffer a distinct process of justice. The wealthy can navigate the law from within their air-conditioned chambers, consulting with teams of lawyers. The poor's only interaction with justice is through police batons and prison bars.

Caste adds another level of structural inequality to this elaborate hierarchy of justice. A Dalit under investigation for theft faces not investigation but humiliation. An Adivasi brought before the courts for encroachment finds the law is reluctant to recognise their existence.

The 1980 Bhagalpur blindings live on in the collective memory as an extreme example of caste-based police brutality.

Thirty-one men, almost all lower-caste men, had their eyes stabbed with bicycle spokes and acid poured in the wounds. The police officers who did this believed that blinding criminals was a good tactic to stop them from committing crimes. The lack of real consequences for those responsible has allowed the memory of this brutality to last for generations. 

This caste-based targeting is not just an individual act of violence; it is the systematic discrimination against lower-caste individuals in the criminal justice system. The Supreme Court's judgment on October 3, 2024, that declared the caste-based segregation rules in the prisons manual to be unconstitutional was a long overdue recognition that practices like this should not exist in a constitutional democracy.

But what does formal desegregation mean when informal hierarchies continue to persist, when access to facilities, work-class assignments, and protection from violence continues to lie along caste lines drawn in invisible ink?

THE GENDER PARADOX: MASQUERADING MASCULINITY AS WEAPON AND LAW AS SHIELD

While men are the overwhelming majority of custodial death victims, gender operates in complex ways in the mechanics of police violence. The hypermasculinist culture of police work in India creates a context wherein violence can be a performance of domination, wherein broken bodies demonstrate power, and wherein mercy is weakness. This toxic masculinity does not simply permit the violence; it demands the proof of violence through which to belong to the brotherhood in khaki. 

The custodial tortures faced by male victims like Ajith Kumar frequently include enforced emasculation, both in the physical and psychological dimensions. The torture seeks not only a confession, but also aims to humiliate and strip the victim of his dignity and reduce him to a whimpering caricature of himself.

The 44 injury reports on Kumar's body were not simply bodily assaults; they were systematic denials of his personhood as an individual and an assertion that, confronted with the power of the state, individual identity evaporates.

Women face additional layers of marginalisation within the criminal justice system. Sexual assault is often used as a tool of interrogation, where acts of rape and molestation aim to break the spirit and force submission from the oppressed. The case of Soni Sori, an Adivasi teacher from Chhattisgarh, who suffered horrific torture, including the insertion of stones into her private parts while in police custody, has drawn public attention to this gendered violence.

However, her case is only the visible part of a much larger and largely hidden reality. For every widely known incident, countless others remain buried beneath layers of shame, repression, trauma, and societal stigma, rarely entering public discourse or receiving justice.

The aftermath of custodial deaths highlights another gender angle. Women bereaved of male family members as a result of police violence might have suffered grief, but they will no doubt be left devastated economically.

In patriarchal societies like India, where men are often the main earners, the custodial death of a male provider can cause entire families to fall from poverty to extreme hardship. The Tamil Nadu government’s compensation of ₹5 lakh and the offer of employment to Kumar’s family are both welcome and well-deserved. However, such measures cannot restore the lives lost—especially in Kumar’s case, where not only a life was taken but also a future stolen, affecting both him and those who depended on him.

PRISONS AS LABORATORIES OF DISCRIMINATION

Prisons in India are in some respects exaggerations of India's social prejudices, where the reduction of discrimination reaches its most serious and violent expression. The demographics tell of a story of selective justice: very high proportions from marginalised communities, high proportions of undertrials who can't afford bail.

The classic case of Hussainara Khatoon (1979), where thousands of prisoners sat in jail as undertrials in Bihar for longer than the maximum sentence for their alleged crime was handed down for sentencing, exposes this insanity.

Now, when we look at the same situation, we see that some things have changed, except for numbers--now they are clustered in larger numbers, now they are spread over many states, and have been rationalised as an acceptable cost of maintaining order. These forgotten prisoners, for the most part from the lower castes and including large numbers of minorities, are stuck in nowhere; from a legal standpoint, the presumption of innocence is but a concept taught in law schools and not practised for prisoners in jail cells.

In response to such systemic abuse, the Supreme Court has provided some institutional protections. In D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal (1997), the Court detailed 11 safeguards for detainees, including: police officers displaying ID cards during arrests, medical examinations being conducted within 48 hours of the arrest, bail memos being provided and acknowledged by the detainee, and the police's control room being operational to monitor arrests.

Though the Court was careful to identify these safeguards as required to prevent torture, for the most part, these safeguards do not have proper implementation and exist primarily as a symbolic effort to prevent torture. 

Later, in Prakash Singh v Union of India (2006), the Court ordered wide-ranging police reforms, such as: creating State Security Commissions, fixed tenures for senior police officers, a separation of the police powers of investigation and law and order, and an independent Police Complaints Authority.

In practice, however, the vast majority of states have not fully complied with these reform orders, allowing custodial abuses to continue. The difference in the Court's orders and the implementation of those orders continues a culture of impunity, which particularly affects marginalised caste groups within our criminal justice system.

Recently, judicial interventions, including the Supreme Court's nullification of caste-based prison segregation policies, have aimed to drag the prison system into a semblance of constitutional compliance. But court orders do not magically transform environments where violence has been institutionalised, and where hierarchies have hardened in place over the past decades, and where discrimination is not only not formalised, but also subjected to a thousand daily humiliations

REIMAGINING JUSTICE: FROM PUNISHMENT TO PREVENTION

Ending the cycle of custodial violence requires more than just punishment for individual police officers; it requires a re-imagination of the entire law enforcement and criminal justice system. Police reform should begin with recruitment that reflects diverse communities instead of serving caste interests and retaining caste control over police departments.

Police training should focus, in the first instance, on human rights and constitutional values, while rejecting abusive learning processes that instil fear.

To ensure accountability, we will need effective independent oversight with real powers (not just advisory committees). There should be citizen review boards that can investigate police complaints; recommend prosecution, encourage accountability, and make the police department accountable and responsible to the citizens who live in the neighbourhoods patrolled by police.

Legal aid must be provided from the time of arrest as part of practical legal rights, so detainees cannot be further isolated and abused.

There needs to be fundamental reform of the criminal justice system itself. Custodial death cases need to be put before special fast-track courts; there should be human rights prosecutors; and we need to ensure that witnesses are protected. Victim families should expect support that goes beyond accepting compensation; families should be rehabilitated while acknowledging the state’s engagement in custodial violence.

CONCLUSION

At this moment, someone, somewhere in India, is dying in custody. Their screams echo unheard past the concrete walls, their requests for mercy are continuously ignored, and their lives terminate in secret, beyond witness or acknowledgement. They join B. Ajith Kumar and thousands of others in the fraternity of blood, concerning the mode of their demise, were killed by those sworn to protect them, murdered by the state that should have saved them.

The issue of custodial death is societal, stretching beyond law enforcement; it also exposes the latent contradictions of democracy. A country that preaches equality yet practices discrimination, promises justice yet sows violence, and celebrates diversity yet punishes difference, cannot necessarily be labelled as truly democratic. Each custodial death diminishes the tenets of constitutional values, degrades the fragility of the rule of law, and silences innumerable families.

The injury of B. Ajith Kumar does not simply call for justice for a single man, rather it demands systematic change in the unjust system that enabled custodial deaths for his detractors. Until custodial deaths are eliminated, agents of violence are held accountable, and the most vulnerable are safeguarded rather than persecuted, India will have an incomplete democracy. The cries from behind bars are willing India to listen and act through justice, not silence. The questions remain: will India listen?

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BY SAUHARDI UNIYAL

CENTRE FOR POLITICS AND LAW

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com