Books
Deana Heath, Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India, Oxford University Press, 2020.
Through this work of critical colonial history, the author demonstrates the central role of torture in sustaining the colonial regime in India, and argues that extraordinary violence was inherent in the ordinary functioning of the colonial state. This book reveals the processes through which torture was facilitated, systematised and sanctioned by the colonial government, and the strategic use of Indian police officers, the lowest rung of the institutional hierarchy, as the primary perpetrators of torture. The colonial government did not attempt to eradicate torture, and allowed the burden of scaldalous incidents of torture to conveniently fall on “native” officers alone, thereby obscuring the complicty of the system.
Jinee Lokaneeta, The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence and Scientific Interrogation in India, The University of Michigan Press, 2020
The author relies on case studies as well as field work to study the use of scientific interrogation techniques in India. She argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines- scientific techniques such as lie detectors, brain scans and nacroanalysis, in India fails because the Indian policing system relies on confessions.
Joshua A. Aston, Torture Behind Bars: Role of the Police Force in India, Oxford University Press, 2020
Torture Behind Bars analyses the context of custodial crimes committed by the police in India. The author examines the role and accountability of the police force in India in the light of the reports of various national and international human rights committees, non-governmental organizations, and other independent reports. The book also throws light on multiple instances of custodial torture.
Santana Khanikar, State, Violence, and Legitimacy in India, Oxford University Press, 2018
The book addresses the question,- how do people respond to a state that is violent towards its own citizens, through insights offered by ethnographic explorations of everyday policing in Delhi and the anti-insurgency measures of the Indian army in Lakhipathar village in Assam. Battling the dominant understanding of the inverse connect between state legitimacy and use of violence, Khanikar argues that use of violence does not necessarily detract from the legitimacy of the modern territorial nation-state. Based on extensive research of two sites, the book develops a narrative of how two facets of state violence, one commonly understood to be for routine maintenance of law and order and the other to be of extraordinary need for maintaining unity and integrity of the nation-state, often produce comparable responses. The book delves into the debates surrounding state–citizen relationship in India, while critically engaging with dominant notions of state legitimacy and its relation with use of violence by the state.
Michelle D. Bonner, Guillermina Seri, et al., Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
This volume offers an analysis of police abuse and its implications for our understanding of democracy. The book draws our attention to how including the study of policing into our analyses strengthens our understanding of democracy, including the persistence of hybrid democracy and the decline of democracy. To this end, the book examines three key dimensions of democracy: citizenship, accountability, and socioeconomic (in)equality. Drawing from political theory, comparative politics, and political economy, the book explores cases from France, the US, India, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Brazil, and Canada, and reveals how integrating police abuse can contribute to a more robust study of democracy and government in general.
Rachel Wahl, Just Violence: Torture and Human Rights in the Eyes of the Police, Stanford University Press, 2017
This book reveals the moral perspective of perpetrators and how they respond to human rights efforts. Through sixty in-depth interviews with 33 law enforcers in North India, Rachel Wahl uncovers the beliefs that motivate officers who use and support torture, and how these beliefs shape their responses to international human rights norms. Although on the surface Indian officers' subversion of human rights may seem to be a case of "local culture" resisting global norms, officers see human rights as in keeping with their religious and cultural traditions—and view western countries as the primary human rights violators. However, the police do not condemn the United States for violations; on the contrary, for Indian police, Guantanamo Bay justifies torture in New Delhi.
Beatrice Jauregui, Provisional Authority: Police, Order and Security in India, University of Chicago Press, 2016
This book explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Jauregui’s ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, the book shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy.
Nitya Ramakrishnan, In Custody: Law, Impunity and Prisoner Abuse in South Asia, Sage Publications India, 2013
The author undertakes a study of the treatment of instances of custodial violence in six South Asian countries, those being India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, countries that were erstwhile colonies. The author does a thorough analysis of mechanisms that permit and perpetuate impunity alongside statutes and mechanisms of justice, using case studies and interviews to bolster her case.
Jinee Lokaneeta, Transnational Torture: Law Violence and State Power in the United States and India, NYU Press, 2011
The author uses about one hundred landmark Supreme Court cases on torture in India and the United States, memos and popular imagery of torture, to supplement her argument on the laws of interrogation and their ambivalence towards the use of excessive force. She argues that the use of torture techniques or excessively violence methods during interrogation in India as well as the United States are not novel and concludes that the infliction of excess violence is more central to democratic governance than is acknowledged in western jurisprudence.
Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2009
The author examines the development and application of multiple torture techniques He observes techniques and pattern of torture in democaracies and states with other forms of governance, such as dictatorships and observes that democracies set the international standard for torture. While torture in dictatorships was more indiscriminate, countries such as the United States, Britain, and France championed the use of techinques that are becoming increasingly common, i.e., torture techinques that do not leave behind marks and consequently, are hard to detect. The scrutiny by human rights activities and reporters would make it difficult for torture leaving behind scars to evade notice and consequences. Interrogators therefore started resorting to “clean” torture techniques such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. With time, the use of these methods became more widespread.
Elaine Scarry, The Body In Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press, 1987
In this book, Elaine Scarry explores the nature of physical suffering by relying on literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings. The book begins with the fact of pain’s inexpressibility. It is argued that not only is physical pain difficult to describe in words, it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme cases to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. The book analyses the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of warfare and torture, and she demonstrates how political regimes use the power of physical pain to attack and break down the sufferer's sense of self. Finally she turns to examples of artistic and cultural activity; actions achieved in the face of pain and difficulty.