Police are the face of the state to ordinary Indians. And that face is often one of raw terror. People encounter the state through the policeman at the street corner, the police station, the barricade or the interrogation room. As veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar once observed, the ordinary person’s first encounter with the police often begins with abuse and the danda. The constitution may promise people a range of rights, but those rights seem to melt away at the sight of a policeman.Paradoxically, the police invariably proclaim their motto in the language of service. For instance, Delhi Police declares, “Shanti, Seva, Nyaya” (peace, service, justice), while Maharashtra Police displays, “सद्रक्षणाय खलनिग्रहणाय”, a Sanskrit phrase difficult to decipher even for the well-educated. It means “For the protection of the good and restraint of the wicked.”“Seva, Suraksha, Nyaya” is also often invoked as a policing ideal. In practice, however, the police often represent the opposite to ordinary citizens; the language of service appears to apply chiefly to the small minority who are rich and powerful.Police brutalityHumiliation, physical manhandling of ordinary people are routine features of encounters with the police. Brutality is also not uncommon; it is invariably resorted to by the police to extract confessions and at times to implicate the innocent in their custody. The infamous Mumbai 7/11 train blasts case is a chilling illustration. On July 11, 2006, seven bombs exploded in Mumbai’s suburban trains, killing 189 people and injuring more than 800.Many Muslim youths were rounded up and allegedly tortured into confessing to a crime they had not committed. Thirteen men were prosecuted; 12 were convicted in 2015, five sentenced to death and seven to life imprisonment. In July 2025, the Bombay high court acquitted all 12, holding that the prosecution had failed to prove their guilt beyond reasonable doubt.Some had spent up to 19 years in prison. The court found serious flaws in the prosecution’s evidence, including the reliability of witnesses and confessions, which the defence alleged had been extracted through torture. One of the acquitted, Abdul Wahid Shaikh, has since published a book, Innocent Prisoner, a graphic account of the torture he says the police used to obtain confessions.Also read: ‘Still Finding Ways to Trouble Us’: Hours After Delhi Blast, Mumbai Police Visited Several Acquitted in Bombay Blast CaseA fictionalised account of police methods, Cops in a Quagmire, written by an IPS officer, Sunil Ramanand, and reviewed by me for The Wire, makes the same point more succinctly: everyone knows that custodial torture is illegal, yet it is treated as normal.Indian law does treat custodial torture as a serious violation of fundamental rights, particularly the right to life, dignity and personal liberty under Article 21. Yet, India still has no comprehensive standalone anti-torture law specifically criminalising torture by public officials. Protection instead rests on the constitution, ordinary criminal law, procedural safeguards and Supreme Court directives. These have proved woefully inadequate.In D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal (1997), the Supreme Court described custodial violence as one of the worst forms of abuse of public power and laid down detailed safeguards governing arrest and detention. The court made it clear that the state is constitutionally responsible for protecting people in its custody. The principle has been reaffirmed recently.In a July 2025 judgment involving a victim of custodial torture, the Supreme Court said that where state machinery violates Article 21, constitutional compensation can be awarded, and stressed the need for an effective and impartial investigation into custodial violence.Although there is no standalone offence of “custodial torture”, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) criminalises conduct that can constitute it, including voluntarily causing hurt or grievous hurt, the use of dangerous means, causing hurt to extort a confession and wrongful restraint or confinement. A police officer who beats a detainee to extract a confession is therefore not using a permissible investigative method; he is committing a criminal offence.The persistence of the problem is evident in the figures. NHRC data record 1,393 deaths in police custody in the ten years of the UPA rule from 2004–05 to 2013–14, compared with 1,515 in the following ten years, 2014–15 to 2023–24 – an average increase of nearly 9 per cent under the Modi years.The figures on reported torture are equally disturbing. In a 2016 Lok Sabha answer based on NHRC data, cases of police torture rose from 303 in 2013-14 to 431 in 2014-15 and 493 in 2015-16. The police custody deaths in those years stood at 140, 130 and 153, respectively. More recent figures show no significant improvement.The NHRC recorded 175 police custody deaths in 2021-22, 168 in 2022-23, and 160 in 2023-24. The Union Home Ministry reported 140 in 2024-25 and another 170 in the first 74 days of 2025-26. More troubling still, official figures are themselves inconsistent. The Status of Policing in India Report 2025 notes substantial discrepancies among NCRB, NHRC and civil society data and points to underreporting. Data manipulation has been a strategy of the current regime for perception management.India has signed the UN Convention Against Torture but has not ratified it, and parliament has never enacted a comprehensive anti-torture law. There is consequently no dedicated statutory regime defining custodial torture as a distinct offence or providing specialised procedures and safeguards for investigating it.Searching the sourceIt is important to understand that police brutality is not merely a problem of individual policemen; it is of the character of the police system, the state itself.In 1947, power changed hands. However, the new rulers, with an aura of mainstream freedom struggle spearheaded by the Congress party, decided to continue with the same colonial state apparatus. It was understandable, particularly in the context of the catastrophic partition. But the constitution, which was in the making then, was expected to transform that apparatus into a republican state.But the constitution itself adopted much of the last colonial constitution, viz., The Government of India Act, 1935, and validated the continuation of the state apparatus, with most of the statutes continuing unchanged. The Police Act, 1861, which was created after the 1857 rebellion to strengthen colonial control, still remains the institutional foundation of the post-colonial police. The police was the coercive force of the colonial state against people who were reasonably assumed to be against the alien state.It is not that police reforms were not attempted. They were attempted, at least from the 1970s, but they lacked the political will to surrender political control over the police. The Gore Committee (1971–73) under the noted sociologist M.S. Gore examined police training and identified wider structural deficiencies. It made 186 recommendations, 45 of them concerning police reform. But they received little attention. Following it, many commissions and committees have diagnosed substantially the same disease – political interference, weak professional autonomy, inadequate accountability and a colonial command structure.The National Police Commission reported on it in the late 1970s. Former police officer Julio Ribeiro, former IAS officer Kandala Padmanabhaiah and former chief justice of the Karnataka and Kerala high courts V.S. Malimath revisited the issue in the 1990s and 2000s. And in 2006, the Supreme Court in Prakash Singh converted many of these recommendations into binding directions. Yet the essential structure has endured. The paradox is that governments repeatedly profess the need for a professional, people-oriented police while resisting the very reforms that would make the police less politically pliable. Partisan policing is the consequence of a system that has repeatedly been diagnosed, judicially ordered to change, and politically preserved.The post-colonial police inherited much of the colonial ethos, methods and institutional assumptions, even as the constitution transformed the state into a republic and made the people sovereign. The crucial difference was in the political incentives of those who controlled it. The colonial rulers, with a long-term stake in preserving the empire, needed a stable, predictable and reasonably professional administration, not out of concern for the governed, but to ensure durable and effective control.Post-colonial political rulers, operating in a five year electoral cycle, had stronger incentive to deploy the administration and police for partisan ends, often in exchange of political patronage. Politicians, in turn, found allies in local criminals who mobilised support during elections and intimidated opponents. These criminals depended on political protection to shield them from the law. Over time these mutual interests produced the enduring political-bureaucrat-police-criminal nexus.Post-2014 ruleAs the BJP captured power at the centre in 2014, with Narendra Modi, who thrived on unscrupulous and autocratic methods in Gujarat for a dozen years, as the Prime Minister, the institutions collapsed like a pack of cards. Police as an institution are generally receptive to right-wing politics. Police is a hierarchical and authoritarian institution, socially drawn from the same majoritarian society. Its occupational culture prizes order, obedience and authority, while its dependence on political masters rewards conformity to those who control postings, promotions and protection.Hindu nationalism adds an ideological vocabulary in which dissent becomes disorder and minorities can be viewed through the lens of suspicion and security. Political patronage then converts cultural affinity into institutional behaviour. What emerges is a police institution unusually susceptible to a politics that celebrates authority, majoritarian nationalism and coercive order.The police under BJP rule has acquired a more dangerous political character. It has increasingly appeared not merely as an instrument of executive power but as a partisan force deployed in an intensely polarised political environment. The police played an instrumental role in every campaign of the right wing such as Ghar Wapsi, love jihad, cow criminals, bulldozer justice, and even during elections in favour of the BJP.Examples of police partisanship in favour of the BJP since 2014 are legion. During the 2020 anti-CAA agitation, BJP leader Kapil Mishra publicly threatened the police to clear protesters while standing beside a senior Delhi Police officer. The next day, communal violence erupted. The Delhi high court later questioned the failure to register FIRs against BJP leaders over inflammatory speeches. Still, the accused Muslim students are behind bars in their sixth year of incarceration.At JNU, on January 5, 2020, a masked mob attacked students and teachers for hours despite 23 PCR calls, while police delayed entering the campus. A subsequent police inquiry effectively cleared the force. In 2023, Delhi Police initially refused to register an FIR against then BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh after seven women wrestlers, including a minor, accused him of sexual harassment. FIRs were registered only after Supreme Court intervention, even as the protesting wrestlers were detained and manhandled.Also read: What Did Disgraced BJP MP Brij Bhushan Singh Say About Unnao Rape Survivor?And in Jahangirpuri, despite denying permission for a Ram Navami procession because of the previous year’s communal violence, police allowed roughly 1,000 participants from Hindu right-wing groups to proceed with saffron flags and slogans.Height of partisanshipThe recent succession of events in Delhi during and after the CJP’s Jantar Mantar protest further exposes the police’s partisan role in favour of the BJP. On July 20, when the protesters marched to parliament to press for the resignation of the Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, Delhi Police used excessive force on students. Independent examination of visual evidence by Amnesty International raised serious questions about it.Besides batons, and clubs driven with nails, the police used tear gas and pellet guns. The medical evidence recorded pellet injuries even as the police initially denied using pellet guns. A 19-year old Sahil Lochab, who suffered pellet injuries, including injuries to his eye. When his family approached the police to register an FIR, the police refused.It took Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, accompanied by scores of Congress leaders and followers demonstrating outside, to sit in on dharna at the Parliament Street Police Station for nearly seven hours before the police finally registered the case. That single episode should shame a constitutional democracy.Delhi Police’s use of facial-recognition technology at the Jantar Mantar protests raises serious constitutional questions. In K.S. Puttaswamy, the Supreme Court held that any invasion of privacy must satisfy three requirements: legality – there must be a law authorising it, a legitimate state aim, and proportionality. The police have not demonstrated a clear statutory basis for subjecting protesters to biometric surveillance, nor why such intrusive surveillance was necessary and proportionate.The constitutional objections are reinforced by the police’s own claims: it said its facial-recognition system identified 2,873 people with previous criminal records at the protest site and that action would be taken against them after verification. Yet an investigation found that at least 25 of those identified were actually in jail at the time of the Jantar Mantar protests.The case of a Dalit student protester, Nishu Azad’s father Sanjay Kumar offers another revealing contrast. During the CJP protest at Jantar Mantar, Kumar was assaulted in a confrontation with Swatantra Bharadwaj, a self-described Hindutva activist. Bharadwaj later boasted in a podcast that he had “cracked” Nishu’s father’s skull and had nevertheless escaped arrest, even invoking his political connections.Delhi Police, instead of acting against the accused who publicly confessed to the crime, tried to lessen the injury. It took renewed agitation outside the police station before the police promised action and arrested Bharadwaj. The police role in both commission and omission in favour of the BJP, in violation of every law is clearly evidenced.Two recent incidents of beating Muslim youths by police in Gujarat may also be noted here. The first is the Vejalpur, Ahmedabad, incident of May 2026. A Muslim man, identified as Mohammad Aziz Sheikh alias Rais Sheikh, was arrested along with others in a case relating to alleged cow slaughter. A viral video showed police personnel tying him to the bonnet of a police vehicle and beating him with sticks in full public view. The Minority Coordination Committee Gujarat subsequently issued a legal notice to senior state and police authorities, alleging extra-judicial punishment and demanding action against the officers.The second incident took place recently in Bhavnagar on September 5. A 20-year-old Muslim murder accused, Faizal alias Khatki Rafiq Lakhani, was taken for a crime-scene reconstruction, tied with ropes to the back of a police jeep and repeatedly beaten with batons in public. The striking feature is that a police inspector, D. P. Unadkat, reportedly defended the action as necessary to “set an example” and restore public confidence in the police. The Gujarat chapter of PUCL has issued a legal notice demanding action against the policemen.These incidents were not just violations of the law but a blatant display of impunity by the police. Police often behave as though they are above law. Very rarely, and at a huge cost to the public, are they brought to books, and still rarely punished.Making police accountablePolice reform will remain cosmetic unless policing is made strictly accountable to the law rather than to political power. Judiciary too has miserably failed in this so far. The Police Complaints Authorities mandated by the Supreme Court in Prakash Singh were intended to provide an independent forum for complaints of serious misconduct, including custodial violence, but their effectiveness has been weakened by poor implementation, inadequate powers and governmental control.The police cannot investigate allegation of abuse by themselves. Complaints of custodial violence, illegal detention, refusal to register FIRs and partisan policing should therefore go automatically to an independent authority comprising civil rights activists and retried judges equipped with adequate resources.Accountability must also extend upwards. Political interference in transfers, postings and investigations is one of the roots of partisan policing; the answer is not to free the police from democratic control, but to place that control within transparent, legally defined limits. The Prakash Singh safeguards – security of tenure, independent complaint authorities, separation of investigation from law and order, and institutional mechanisms insulating professional decisions from political pressure – is just one example.The issue is serious enough to critically design a control system on police that will make them genuinely protect the citizen from the excesses of both, the state as well as the rich and powerful.Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.