Retaliation for accusation of rape puts spotlight on India jail deaths

MUMBAI, India — The men barged into Surendra Kumar’s home after a court hearing tied to his daughter’s accusation that a politician from the country’s most powerful party had raped her.

The four assailants beat him with sticks, guns and belts, leaving him unconscious, family members said.

In response to the April attack, Kumar filed a complaint with police in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, accusing the politician’s brother of being one of his assailants. Several hours later, Kumar was arrested on criminal intimidation charges and jailed.

After six days, police told Kumar’s relatives that he had died in custody. He was 45.

The case would soon explode into national headlines when a court accused state authorities of conspiring with the politician, state lawmaker Kuldeep Singh Sengar, to shield him from punishment and failing to protect the alleged rape victim and her family.

But Kumar’s was just one of a growing number of deaths of detainees in India, where roughly five people die every day in police and judicial custody, according to the Asian Center for Human Rights, a New Delhi advocacy organization.

The center reported recently that 1,674 Indians had died in custody in the 11 months ending in February, the vast majority while awaiting trial, according to statistics provided by India’s home affairs ministry in response to a request from Parliament.

India, a country of 1.3 billion people, has a relatively small prisoner population of about 400,000; the U.S. holds five times as many. But twothirds of Indians behind bars have never been convicted of a crime. Many are held for longer than their maximum sentences because their cases are delayed, they can’t afford or are denied bail, or they lack legal counsel.

While in jail, detainees are often kept in overflowing cells without adequate medical care and still face the threat of torture by police and other authorities, the center said.

India has repeatedly promised to ratify the U.N. torture convention, which it signed in 1997, but successive governments have failed to do so, fearing it would open the country up to greater international scrutiny.

Officers accused in custody deaths are rarely prosecuted and almost never punished.

In 2016, Human Rights Watch said that no police officers were convicted for a custody death between 2010 and 2015, a period in which there were some 600 deaths in police custody.

The police often characterize such deaths as suicides or due to natural causes.

Kumar’s case came to light only after his daughter threatened to set herself on fire outside the house of the chief minister of the state, a Hindu extremist preacher named Yogi Adityanath. She accused Sengar of raping her the year before, when she was 17 and had come to see him about a job.

Following the outcry, Sengar was arrested in April on charges of intimidation, kidnapping and child sexual abuse.